Leviticus; The Law of Holiness and Grace

The Lands Sabbath

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Lesson: 66

Track: 66

Dictation Name: RR172AJ66

Date: Early 70s

Blessed are the undefiled in the way who walk in the Law of the Lord. Order my steps in Thy Word and let not iniquity have dominion over me. Blessed are they that keep His testimonies and that seek Him with the whole heart. With our whole heart have we sought Thee, let us not wander oh Lord from Thy commandments.

Let us pray.

Oh Lord our God we thank Thee that in Thy grace and mercy, Thou hast given us Thy Word, Thou hast spoken unto us through prophets of old and through Jesus Christ and His apostles. Make us joyful in Thy Word and strong in faith and obedience, that we might serve Thee, bring all things into captivity to our Lord Jesus Christ and that we might rejoice in the abundance of Thy blessings. Grant us this we beseech Thee, in Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture this morning is Leviticus 25:1-7 and our subject, “The Lands Sabbath.” “The Lands Sabbath,” Leviticus 25:1-7:

“1 And the Lord spake unto Moses in Mount Sinai, saying,

2 Speak unto the children of Israel, and say unto them, When ye come into the land which I give you, then shall the land keep a sabbath unto the Lord.

3 Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof;

4 But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.

5 That which groweth of its own accord of thy harvest thou shalt not reap, neither gather the grapes of thy vine undressed: for it is a year of rest unto the Lord.

6 And the Sabbath of the land shall be meat for you; for thee, and for thy servant, and for thy maid, and for thy hired servant, and for thy stranger that sojourneth with thee,

7 And for thy cattle, and for the beast that are in thy land, shall all the increase thereof be meat.”

We come now to one of the Bible’s most important chapters. The Sabbath year has a great many aspects. In Deuteronomy 15:1-6, the cancellation of debts among the covenant people is cited as one of the requirements of the Sabbath Year. In this text, we have a sabbath for the land and from the normal routines of work. The land, God tells us, must rest one year in seven, and it is a sabbath for the Lord. There can be no harvest for sale. Only that which grows of itself can be used for food. There is to be no sowing and no pruning, and there is to be a sabbath for the land and from the normal routines of work for a year.

In this chapter, Leviticus 25, the Jubilee chapter, we see the sharp difference, the very clear line between the good society as scripture sets it forth and the good society of Humanists. The Bible sees society in terms of atonement, restitution and forgiveness. Men receive a new status before God by Christ’s atonement. They become a new creation by His regenerating power. They apply restitution and they live in terms of those things which mark the atonement: restitution and forgiveness in their human relations.

However, Humanism has a radically different view of society. Instead of seeing it based on the atonement, on restitution and then the forgiveness of sins, Humanism does two things: either it discounts sin and says sin is no problem, or else it sees it as an endless burden. Now saying that sin is no big deal does not do away with the fact of guilt. A society which sweeps sin under the carpet, as it were, is governed and haunted. And this is a sociological fact. The burden of sin is a reality.

But people everywhere want simplistic answers. They believe things can be solved quickly and easily by gimmick. Recently in reading Terry L. Jones’ book Lee’s Tigers: the Louisiana Infantry and the Army of Northern Virginia, I came across this interesting sentence, and then I realized that this was the sentiment not only of the Louisiana troops but of other troops from other states, both North and South. This is what Jones writes. “Every Louisiana soldier was obsessed with the same goal in 1861. To meet the Yankee invaders in combat and end the war swiftly in one glorious textbook battle.” This is a common trait of men apart from Christ; a simplistic answer. Both North and South were going to end the war in just a matter of weeks. The initial draft or volunteers, rather, enlisted for a very short term because they were convinced it would be over quickly. All they had to do was to face the enemy and the enemy would wilt. The Romantics, whether they called themselves social scientists, reformers or statesmen, believe in such simplistic solutions. The problem of sin is going to be eliminated by some very easy answer. And it doesn’t work that way and the result is that they create greater problems by refusing to face up to the fact of sin, by assuming by saying, ‘let’s forget about it, let’s forgive it,’ guilt will disappear without atonement.

Freud, in writing on Dostoevsky and parricide, did see that men turned the burden of guilt into a burden of debt. One scholar who is not a psychologist but writes on money, Thomas Wiseman, The Money Motive, has written that in the mental economy (which is his term), the guilty impose upon themselves all kinds of self-degradation and humiliation as means of atonement. And he says, “Without such self-imposed retribution, the unexpiated guilt becomes unbearable.” And he goes on to say, people try to make atonement for their sins by going into debt, that this is a common means of atonement. So that we can say a culture that is debt-ridden as ours is, national debt and personal debt to the point of impossibility, and yet at the same time running up more debts through credit card purchases and the like is a guilt-ridden society.

It is an interesting fact that in one of the most dramatic cases of Satanism, Gilles de Rais, who’d begun his life as a right-hand man of Joan of Arc, and then became one of the leading Satanists of history. He was a sadist, a sodomite, and a man who sacrificed countless small boys in his evil rites. But the significant fact is the more he plunged into evil, the more he also plunged into debt and he started out as one of the wealthiest men of that century. He sinned and then he would punish himself by incurring impossible debts. [0: 11:39.9]

And yet amazingly, today debt has its defenders as the way of progress. Just a week or so ago, one of us, Gary Moes in reading The International Herald Tribune for September 26-27, 1987, gave me an article by John R. McArthur entitled, Debt, Let us not Forget, Built America. The gist of the article was how marvelous debt is in progress. Our international debts and loans today are a means of false atonement and they will bring judgment upon all the nations.

Now believers in karma take sin much more seriously. They believe that sin and the burden of sin is so great that there is no atonement and no grace and no forgiveness for it; that a man must work out the payment through endless reincarnations until after millions of years, finally, he pays the price for his sin. So life for those who believe in karma is a painful cycle of continual punishment and continuing hopelessness. Life for them becomes a living death. All the evils of their supposedly previous incarnations add to the present one to produce a life of inescapable guilt and misery. It is interesting that Mahatma Gandhi, who believed himself to be so holy, hoped that he had been so good in this life that he would never again be reborn.

Now the premise, the starting point of the Sabbath year of this chapter is the atonement. Men can then rest in the Lord because they have atonement and the Sabbath Year began not on the New Year, but on the Day of Atonement. So it was not in terms of the normal calendar. By the atonement, men are free and therefore they can celebrate a year of sabbath—a release. By God’s Law we find continuing renewal for the earth and ourselves in the Sabbath Year.

Now, the Sabbath year means something very important. If you cannot incur a debt for more than six years, this means that you have to live in terms of foresight, in terms of providence and work, because you’re going to have to accumulate enough to live without an income on the seventh year. But this is not as impossible as it may seem at first glance. Consider the amount of interest most people pay in a single year—in one year. Most people will think only of the interest they pay on their house, which is most of the payment. Most people today are paying 10-, 11- hundred dollars who’ve gone into housing in the last year. Ten, eleven hundred dollars a month! This is particularly true in the cities.

But that’s not the only interest they pay because the people who have business are also in debt, 10-, 20-, 30-year loans, mortgages on their place of business, on the goods they buy. And if it’s a 90-daynote for the cars they have purchased and put in the showroom, or the yardage or anything else, they pay a high rate of interest for that short-term loan. So everything you buy today in the store has a substantial interest charge. And that’s not all. A very high percentage of all the taxes we pay go to service debt—national debt, state debt, county debt, city debt. In fact, eliminate all of these and have that as income and it would be easy for a man to live two, three years on what he is now paying out in interest! The direct and indirect interest we pay out annual would in itself keep us for the seventh year easily.

Now do you see what God’s Law would produce in the way of a society? Not a debt-ridden one, one which would require foresight and planning. You would not be able to survive if you decided suddenly if all interest disappeared, both personal and business interests, and national debts and you had all that money, you would have to exercise foresight and say, ‘This belongs to God in terms of His law for me to use and to live in the Sabbath year.’

The Sabbath year laws are basic to the laws of holiness. They require the cancellation of debts and freedom for slaves, who are really bondservants, and a rest for the land. What the trees or the vines bore or the gardens in the Sabbath year were to be food for all so that the poor would as, as in gleaning, be allowed to harvest the fields. According to Exodus 23:9-12,

“9 Also thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

10 And six years thou shalt sow thy land, and shalt gather in the fruits thereof:

11 But the seventh year thou shalt let it rest and lie still; that the poor of thy people may eat: and what they leave the beasts of the field shall eat. In like manner thou shalt deal with thy vineyard, and with thy olive yard.

12 Six days thou shalt do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest, and the son of thy handmaid, and the stranger, may be refreshed.”

It is clear from all of this that the sabbath rest must be used to bring the covenant people together in a concern one for another as well as in a trust in the Lord. So in the Sabbath year, you were even more to be close to the widow and orphan, the stranger, the needy. It was a time of fellowship and as we shall see in a later study, it was a time of family reunions, to bring the family together; so that the Sabbath year besides being a rest was also a time of strengthening fellowship with neighbors and of strengthening of the family.

Now it is interesting that this law, according to verse 1 was given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai at the same time as the Ten Commandments, so that it was very basic and essentially related to the Ten Commandments. It is not an afterthought of God. It is basic to His Law. So it is not a later addition, but an essential part of the Law.

Now as Moses gives us the revelation of God, it comes to its culmination in this chapter. Meyrick, more than a century ago, set forth the meaning of this law as he saw it in these words. “The principle is, as before, that as the land is God’s land—not man’s—so the Israelites were the slaves of God, not of men and that if the position in which God placed them was allowed to be interfered with for a time, it was to be recovered every seventh, or at furthest, every fiftieth year.” W.B. Riley, some years ago said of God, “He not only rules the realm, He owns it.” And he added, “In this Sabbath year, God also emphasized dependence upon His providences.”

According to Deuteronomy 31:9-13, a very important aspect of the Sabbath year was education in the meaning of God’s Law. It was a time not only for family reunions, closer ties with strangers, but also for a deeper study of God’s Word.

According to II Chronicles 36:21, the Babylonian captivity was ordained by God as necessary so that the land might enjoy the sabbaths denied to it by Israel’s apostasy. Seventy years of sabbaths were kept during that captivity, a year for every skipped year. This tells us very clearly; God’s Law is not to be trifled with. Rest for the land means its renewal and the renewal of God’s people.

Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God, we thank Thee for this, Thy Word. Thou hast ordained rest for men and nations and for the land. But the wicked are like the restless sea which cannot rest, which is troubled and storm-ridden, and so too today are men and nations because of the burden of sin. Oh Lord our God, grant that we with our lives grounded on the atonement, may know Thy rest, may establish Thy rest in every sphere of life and thought and may in Thy service bring all things into captivity to Christ. In His name we pray. Amen.

Are there any questions now about our lesson?

Yes

[Audience] I’ve always often seen it said that indentured servitude in America was for varying lengths of time, often seven years and I’ve often wondered why seven years (that’s the figure I most often see) if the biblical requirement on freeing servants was after the sixth year?

[Rushdoony] I really don’t know the answer to that, but, uh, I’m guessing when I say this, supposing a man in London decided to get to America by making himself an indentured servant, and that’s how they got there. So he would sign up. It might be because the ship’s passage was not every day, but every so often. After signing up, and they would have only so many for a passage, he might wait three-, four months. Then on being taken aboard as one of the indentured servants, the voyage could take weeks and months. So half a year would easily be gone when he got there. It might also be at that time because most of the voyages were during the good weather, another six months before there could be much work done, so a year would be lost. And perhaps this was the reason why they made it seven years from the time of signing up.

Are there any other questions or comments?

Let me add that indentured service was also used as a means of paying off for crime subsequently. It later degenerated into the chain gangs, but that was its origin. You paid, you made restitution by working.

If there are no further questions or comments, let us bow our heads in prayer.

Oh Lord our God, we thank Thee that Thou hast ordained rest for the land and for the peoples thereof, for the nations thereof. And Thou hast summoned us to be the people of Thy Sabbath, the people of rest. Give us grace in all the vicissitudes of life to rest in Thee, to know Thy peace, and to become instruments of Thy peace and of Thy Sabbath rest. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.