This is the final installment in a 5-part series on the spirit of the sabbath. Through this journey we press beyond the shallow ideas of sabbath that are commonly taught today, and go deeper to discover the real meaning and power that we’ve been missing.
Catch up on parts 1-4:
5 - The Gift of Returning
By now we understand that sabbath rest was not merely a day off each week for God's people. It was also a seven-year cycle that infused their entire way of life. But there's still more to it. God also decreed an even more extraordinary sabbath occasion, once every fifty years. This was called "The Year of Jubilee."
Leviticus 25:8-10
8 “‘Count off seven Sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven Sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years. 9 Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land. 10 Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan.
The Year of Jubilee was a nationwide celebration of restoration and reunion. It was a time when all that had been disordered or misplaced over the previous 49 years was put back the way it ought to be. It was a time when the wayward would return home. God was not content with simply setting his people free from bondage. He also wanted them to return to where they were meant to be, and to who they were meant to be.
When Joshua first led the Israelites into Canaan, he distributed the land amongst the twelve tribes. Within those tribal regions, each clan established their own land holding, and then each family. The land, to them, was not just an asset like we might view it today. It was a physical representation of God's promise kept to them. And it was a constant reminder of their identity in God.
The winds and waves of life would often throw this divine arrangement into disarray. God-given lands would be parceled out and leased to other families or to foreigners. People would wander away or be taken away from their homes, their families, their proper way of life. We know that it sometimes led people into servitude. So the Sabbath rhythm was established to mend the nation and bring the people back to their rightful place.
Our identity is perhaps the most intense and consequential battlefield in our lives. We are made in the image of God, but we spend our lives contending with the pressures of our turbulent world, the wounds we accrue along the way, and our own flawed vision of who we think we’re supposed to be. Over time, the image of God in us is obscured and buried beneath layers of projecting, preserving and posturing. No wonder we are tired--it is exhausting to hold up these patchwork images of ourselves. A person who does not know who they are will never be at peace.
