Quaint.  That’s probably how many of us today no doubt characterize much of Old Testament Levitical law.  Dictionary.com defines “quaint” as meaning, “strange, peculiar, or unusual in an interesting, pleasing, or amusing way.”  I think the ancient Israelites also began to consider those old laws as quaint—and that was a fatal mistake.

One of the laws laid down by God through Moses was that farmed land was to be given one day of rest per week and one year of rest after every six—for three apparent reasons: so that the people would recognize that God, not their hands or plows, was the real provider of their food; so that the poor, livestock, and wild animals could have access to whatever the land produced without tilling; and so that the land would continue to be fruitful.

The LORD said to Moses on Mount Sinai,  “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you enter the land I am going to give you, the land itself must observe a sabbath to the LORD.  For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops.  But in the seventh year the land is to have a sabbath of rest, a sabbath to the LORD. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards.  Do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the grapes of your untended vines. The land is to have a year of rest.  Whatever the land yields during the sabbath year will be food for you—for yourself, your manservant and maidservant, and the hired worker and temporary resident who live among you,  as well as for your livestock and the wild animals in your land. Whatever the land produces may be eaten” (Leviticus 25:1-7).

But the people soon forgot this law—no doubt thinking they had a right to use their land any way they pleased.  God, however, didn’t forget.  The result we find in 2 Chronicles 36:20-21: “Those who escaped from the sword [the king of the Chaldeans] carried away to Babylon, where they became servants to him and his sons until the rule of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the LORD by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had enjoyed her Sabbaths. As long as she lay desolate she kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years.”

Death, desolation, and seventy years of captivity were God’s punishment and discipline for Israel’s rejecting the law of Moses and for personal rebellion against the Word of God. While in this age of grace it appears that God does not deal so immediately and severely with us for our rebellion and ignorance of His commands, we are learning that pressing His creation beyond its capacity to remain fruitful does result in degradation of the land.  By our making the land artificially fruitful through the application of manmade chemicals, we seem to be escaping the sword of judgment.  In the end, however, I believe our refusal to give ourselves, our animals, and our land its needed Sabbath rest will result in judgment.

In the time of this “land use” sin by the nation of Israel, they were warned to repent and change their ways by the prophet Jeremiah—a fact referred to by the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn who also warned us that we must change our ways.  Might Solzhenitsyn have been our ignored prophet?

“The end of the world, so often foretold by the prophets only to be postponed, has ceased to be the particular property of mystics and confronts us as sober reality, scientifically, technically, and psychologically warranted.  It is no longer just the danger of a nuclear world war—we have grown used to that and can take it in our stride.  But the calculations of the ecologists show us that we are caught in a trap: either we change our ways and abandon our greedy pursuit of progress, or else in the 21st century, whatever the pace of man’s development, we will perish as a result of a total exhaustion, barrenness, and pollution of the planet.” [from Solzhenitsyn's essay "Repentance and Self-Limitation in the Life of Nations."]

See you outdoors!

Dean