Sabbath pt3

What many people fail to realize is that in the Jewish law, Sabbath does not just refer to a 7 day work week, but to a 7 year period, and a 7x7 year period. [Leviticus]These Sabbath years were literally to be a Sabbath that lasts for an entire year! That’s 365 days of no work, which is pretty intense!

Every 7 years the whole nation would not work. This brings into question who will provide for them. The truth of the matter is that even though they work hard, their hard work does not cause the fields to produce food – God does. It is God who provides our daily bread, and the Sabbath is a visual reminder of that fact.

There is also another part to Sabbath that this goes to point out. Its not about getting rich, its not about moving up the totem pole of important people in the world. Taking a year off every few years kinda puts a damper on that idea. This idea of a Sabbath year is shouting at the Israelites, that their mindset should be different than the people around them. They’re the people who rely on God to provide, and not themselves. God has them do live this out by taking 1 out of 7 years and (in all reality) wasting them. And that’s not the crazy part.

Every 49 years there was supposed to be a year unlike any other! It was a Year of Jubilee! Check this out. In the year of Jubilee, all debts are canceled. All land that was sold in order to make ends meet was returned to its family, and all indentured slaves (people who enslaved themselves to pay of bills) were released from their bondage. So literally, everything goes back to zero.

Now of course this meant that most likely a field sold 5 years before the Jubilee was worth much less than it would have been worth 35 years prior, but still the point is still the same. All debt was to be forgiven, all land returned, and all slaves freed at the end of the 50 period; regardless of their value. How subversive, how radical, how completely different to the way we think business should be done.

Wealth in the ancient world – and today at some level – comes from what one owns. Some people are endowed with large tracts of land, and others have nothing. Some people are born into affluence, others are born into poverty, and the difference between the two is growing everyday. This happens because the rich have the ability to leverage their possessions into getting more, and the poor – continually struggling to make ends meet – are stuck spinning their wheels in an attempt to just keep their heads above water.

The Year of Jubilee was a time when God commanded the rich to give back to the poor. All debts were canceled. All land sold to help a family survive, was returned, and all slaves were freed! It is God's way of helping the rich and the poor not become too divide. Its like the master plan in Fight Club, just minus the blowing up of the buildings. God is leveling the playing field.

This is powerful. Linked to Sabbath is the reminder that the rich shouldn't be so concerned with getting rich, that they leave their friends behind who don't have as much wealth as they do. Perhaps God is calling us to do the same.

What do you think?

Sabbath pt2

Life is a struggle, one that takes everything we have in order to succeed. Only the richest of the rich don’t need to worry about the future. There is only 24 hours a day and we usually find ourselves working far too many of those hours just to make ends meet. This has been going on for centuries and is nothing new.

I don’t need to know you to know that you work hard. I know that you often lay in bed wondering how the bills will all be paid, how you’re going to be able to save up for college, or how you’re going to get the noose of debt off your neck. We’re all in the same boat!

It is for this reason that when people come up against the idea of taking a Sabbath they freak out. “We’re barely making ends meet by working 7 days a week, you’re asking me to cut 1 day off and still expect ends to meet?” A farmer who works more in a busy season than in a slow season could ask, “Am I expected to take that 7th day off? How can I be expected to get all the work done?”

Yeah, this is what God is asking his people.

The question we must ask ourselves is what should we rely upon? Should we trust in our own hard work? Or should we trust in God to provide for us? This is what it means for a person to take a Sabbath. God is asking his people to trust that he will provide for them if they take 1/7th of their productive time away.

Now, there is no promise that life will be easier. God never promises that if you honor the Sabbath you’ll have more than if you don’t. God is simply asking his people to trust in him.

So I guess the issue with Sabbath is:
 What do you trust in to provide for you?
 Do you trust that God can provide for you?
 Do you think you can do better in 7 days than God can in 6?

Sabbath pt 1

I’d like to do a 3-part series on the concept behind Sabbath. First, I’d like to talk about what is Sabbath? (what is Yahweh saying to us here?) Next, I’d like to look into what we’re saying by following Sabbath. Finally, I’d like to look into the practice of Sabbath years and the Year of Jubilee.

So…what is Sabbath? Well, as it is spelled out in Exodus 20, we see that it is an edict for Israel to not work on the 7th day of the week. Sabbath also came to include the many feast days and celebrations that Yahweh’s people observed, the annual Sabbath practice of letting the land lie still every 7 years, and the year of Jubilee celebrated every 49 years.

Yahweh says to practice Sabbath because on the 7th day of creation He rested. Interesting! What I think is saying is that a day of rest has been programmed into the very DNA of creation. OR that we’re not meant to work, work, work. This means that at the very core of what it means to be a human being cannot be found in our work.

The Sabbath is a once a week reminder that our value is found in the fact that Yahweh created us and that He needs no other reason than that to love us. The problem is that it is so easy to forget this. Perhaps we should say it this way: Sabbath reminds us that we are human beings not human doings.

This is foreign to our mindsets. We live in a world where we are judged by our production: “How much money do I make?” – “What is your GPA?” – “How fast can you run, how high can you jump, or how well can you put this ball through that hoop?” We spend so much time focusing on these things. They become the way that we view ourselves. We see ourselves as less important than somebody who makes a ton of money. We constantly compare ourselves to the person who has a perfect 4.0 GPA. We wish we were like the star athlete. We think this because we are constantly judging ourselves by how well we produce. We have been tricked into seeing ourselves as human doings.

Perhaps a way that you can help yourself overcome this obsession with production is to take a Sabbath. Take a day and don’t produce anything – just relax and reclaim your identity as a human being.