Leviticus 25, these are the words of God. And Yahweh spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, speak to the children of Israel and say to them, when you come into the land which I give you, then the land shall keep a sabbath yahweh. Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather its fruit. But in the seventh year, there shall be a sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a sabbath yahweh. You shall neither sow your field nor prune your vineyard. What grows of its own accord of your harvest you shall not reap, nor gather the grapes of your untended vine, for it is a year of rest for the land. And the Sabbath produce of the land shall be food for you, for you, your male and female servants, your hired men, and the stranger who dwells with you. for your livestock and the beasts that are in your land. All its produce shall be for food. And you shall count seven Sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years. And the time of the seven Sabbaths of years shall be to you 49 years. Then you shall cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the 10th day of the seventh month On the day of atonement, you shall make the trumpet a sound throughout all your land. And you shall consecrate the 50th year and proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you. And each of you shall return to his possession. And each of you shall return to his family. That 50th year shall be a jubilee to you. In it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of its own accord, nor gather the grapes of your untended vine. For it is the Jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You shall eat its produce from the field. In this year of Jubilee, each of you shall return to his possession. And if you sell anything to your neighbor, or buy from your neighbor's hand, you shall not oppress one another. According to the number of years after the Jubilee, you shall buy from your neighbor. And according to the number of years of crops, he shall sell to you. According to the multitude of years, you shall increase its price. And according to the fewer number of years, you shall diminish its price. For he sells to you according to the number of the years of the crops. Therefore, you shall not oppress one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am Yahweh your God. So you shall observe my statutes and keep my judgments and perform them, and you will dwell in the land in safety. Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and dwell there in safety. And if you say, what shall we eat in the seventh year, since we shall not sow nor gather in our produce? Then I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, and it will bring forth produce enough for three years. And you shall sow in the eighth year, and eat old produce until the ninth year. Until its produce comes in, you shall eat of the old harvest. The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the land of your possession, you shall grant redemption of the land. If one of your brethren becomes poor and has sold some of his possession, and if his redeeming relative comes to redeem it, then he may redeem what his brother sold. Or if the man has none to redeem it, but he himself becomes able to redeem it, then let him count the years since its sale and restore the remainder to the man to whom he sold it, that he may return to his possession. But if he is not able to have it restored to himself, then what was sold shall remain in the hand of him who bought it until the year of Jubilee. And in the Jubilee, it shall be released, and he shall return it, he shall return to his possession. If a man sells a house in a walled city, then he may redeem it within a whole year after it is sold. Within a full year, he may redeem it, but If it is not redeemed within the space of a full year, then the house in the walled city shall belong permanently to him who bought it throughout his generations. It shall not be released in the Jubilee. However, the houses of villages, which have no wall around them, shall be counted as the fields of the country. They may be redeemed, and they shall be released in the Jubilee. Nevertheless, the cities of the Levites and the houses in the cities of their possession, the Levites may redeem at any time. And if a man purchases a house from the Levites, then the house that was sold in the city of his possession shall be released in the Jubilee. For the houses in the cities of the Levites are their possession among the children of Israel. But the field of the common land of their cities may not be sold, for it is their perpetual possession. If one of your brothers becomes poor and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him like a stranger or a sojourner that he may live with you. Take no usury or interest from him, but fear your God that your brother may live with you. You shall not lend him your money for usury, nor lend him your food at profit. I am Yahweh your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God. And if one of your brethren who dwells by you becomes poor and sells himself to you, you shall not compel him to serve as a slave, as a hired servant and a sojourner. He shall be with you and shall serve you until the year of Jubilee. And then he shall depart from you, he and his children with him. He shall return to his own family. He shall return to the possession of his fathers. For they are my servants whom I brought out to the land of Egypt. They shall not be sold as slaves. You shall not rule over him with rigor, but you shall fear your God. And as for your male and female slaves whom you may have from the nations that are around you, from them you may buy male and female slaves. Moreover, you may buy the children of the strangers who dwell among you and their families who are with you, which they beget in your land, and they shall become your property. And you may take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them as a possession. They shall be your permanent slaves. But regarding your brethren, the children of Israel, you shall not rule over one another with rigor. Now, if a sojourner or stranger close to you becomes rich, and one of your brethren who dwells by him becomes poor and sells himself to the stranger or sojourner close to you, or to a member of the stranger's family, after he is sold, he may be redeemed again. One of his brothers may redeem him, or his uncle, or his uncle's son may redeem him, or anyone who is near of kin to him in his family may redeem him. Or if he is able, he may redeem himself. Thus he shall reckon with him who bought him. The price of his release shall be according to the number of years from the year that he was sold to him until the year of the jubilee. It shall be according to the time of a hired servant for him. If there are still many years remaining, according to them he shall repay the price of his redemption from the money with which he was bought. And if there remain but a few years until the year of jubilee, then he shall reckon with him and according to his years he shall repay him the price of his redemption. He shall be with him as a yearly hired servant, and he shall not rule with rigor over him in your sight. And if he is not redeemed in these years, then he shall be released in the year of Jubilee, he and his children with him. For the children of Israel are servants to me, they are my servants. Whom I brought out of the land of Egypt, I am Yahweh, your God. Amen. This ends this reading of God's inspired and inerrant word. I feel compelled to put this passage in its context in the book of Leviticus as a whole, since we have several more with us who have not ordinarily been with us, and praise God for that. It's no trouble at all, and it's good for all of us. At the end of the book of Exodus, there was a tabernacle, but the glory of the Lord had filled it, and Exodus closes with the big problem that Moses was not able to enter the tabernacle. It works as a tent of God's dwelling, a tabernacle, but if Moses can't enter and the priest can't enter, then it doesn't really function very well, in that case, as a tent of meeting. which is what God had called it. And so the book of Leviticus, actually in the Hebrew, its name is, And He Cried Out. Actually, I think it's just He Cried Out. I don't think they put the conjunction on there. But that's from the first line of the book of Leviticus. Yahweh cried out or called out to Moses from the midst of the tabernacle. And the first several chapters, then, of the book of Leviticus are the Lord instructing sacrifices by which his people may draw near. Bless God. The ascension, showing God's people that he intends for them not only to draw near to the tent on earth, but that it is his long-term plan for his people to be in his very presence, as it were, to ascend to him. The tribute, which is the literal word for the grain offering, indicating to his people that he gives them the right thing to bring, so that they know that they're welcome, because they've not just been welcomed to ascend, but he has put into their hand the thing to bring, which is a token that he is theirs and they are his. And then the peace, and that third offering was the one from which even the ordinary worshiper could eat the roasted leg. There were the fat parts that were reserved only for the Lord. There are parts that are reserved for the priest who offers it. But the Lord and the worshiper then eat as it were. Of course, God does not eat, but the fat ascends on top of the ascension offering and the worshiper eats. God sharing a plate, as it were, with his people. And then in order to come to such offerings as that, it was necessary to have sin offerings and trespass offerings. Because even though God has given us to approach him, we're still sinners in this life. And how can we approach him with a guilty conscience? And so even for unintentional sins, even for sins that we committed not knowing that they were sins, but discovered later that they were sins. There are all these marvelous provisions in the sin offering and the trespass offering, even as we prayed this morning to have our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience by the blood of Jesus, there was application of blood in the sin and trespass offerings, and we heard recently as well the need to bring restitution. If our sin that we are guilty before God is something we've done against a man, then we not only bring the sin and trespass offering, but we make sure we have reconciled properly by the appointed restitution. And then there were In chapter 8, for the consecration of the priest. And finally, in chapter 9, the priests start and fulfill their service. And the end of chapter 9 brings a resolution to the problem with which chapter 1 began. Because Aaron blesses the people from the altar. And then Aaron and Moses go in the tabernacle and don't die. And they come out, and having been inside the tabernacle, in the presence of the living God and the holy place, which is this hybrid of Eden and Heaven, in God's marvelous design, Moses and Aaron come out, and Aaron pronounces the first great Aaronic benediction upon the people of God, communicating to them that which we would later have recorded in Numbers 6. Aaron, excuse me, lifting his hands and blessing the people, God will bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you, be gracious to you, lift up his face upon you and give you peace. Now that we have just had in the beginning of chapter 24 from last week, which focused especially upon the lampstand, which shines from the direction of the veil, from the direction of the Ark of the Covenant. where God is known as making his presence to be enthroned upon the cherubim, to the table upon which you've got the seven lamps on the lampstand and the twelve loaves of bread representing the people of Israel, so you have the shining of God's favor and the sharing of God's fellowship, and that is at the heart of Israel's life with their God in chapter 24, verses 1 through 9. Sadly, however, upon the conclusion of the renouncement of that blessing, in the end of chapter 9, at the beginning of chapter 10, 40% of the current Aaronic priesthood, there was just Aaron and four of his sons, so five Aaronic priests at the time, but two of his sons, 40% of the current priesthood, they add to the worship of God. They offer something that God has not prescribed. And God treats that as not regarding him as holy when we draw near to him. It's a dreadful thing to consider. Many of us, perhaps most of us, some of you children perhaps not, and you can be grateful for that. But many of us grew up in churches where we thought as long as it wasn't sinful, we could do it in worship. And we brought God many things that He had not commanded. Well, we didn't realize how greatly offensive this is to God. Not only because it doesn't treat Him as holy, thinking we can come to Him the way we design. We don't need His particular design, and that doesn't treat Him as holy. But because, as we've learned throughout all of the book of Leviticus, all of these things pointed forward to Christ, and to come with a way that we have decided instead of God has instructed, is actually to come apart from the Lord Jesus. And especially so now, much more so now, that Jesus himself leads the worship of his congregations on earth from his seat in the glory of heaven. And so the fire of the Lord, which had consumed the sacrifice, now consumes Nadab and Abihu. And there's a big crisis, because you have not only the sin that they have committed in the tabernacle, but dead bodies in the tabernacle. And in the context of Leviticus 10, then you have Moses giving immediate instruction, don't take your hat off, Don't tear your clothes. Don't grieve. You've just been consecrated. You have to stay here in the tabernacle. We'll have your uncles who are the nearest of kin come and carry out the dead bodies by the tunic, which reminds us again how this was a judgmental fire. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in reverse, right? Well, their clothes don't get singed either, but the guys who throw them in, they get wiped out. Well, Nadab and Abihu are ashes in the middle of their clothes. Their uncle's carrying them out. But God says now, or God through Moses says now, the reason he's doing this is to preserve the lives of the priesthood so that they can teach Israel to distinguish between holy and unholy, Holy and common, that's what unholy means, and clean and unclean. So chapters 11 through 15, you have distinguishing between the clean and unclean. And chapters 17 through 22, you have distinguishing between the holy and the common. And right in the middle, bridging those two things together that chapter 10 and verse 11 taught us to expect, controlling the next 12 chapters of the book of Leviticus, you have the day of atonement in chapter 16. Well, after he's finished with the holy and the common, in chapter 22, he then gives them their annual calendar, which is based on the weekly Sabbath, but then there are these three high feasts during which they all have to gather, and there's really seven feasts, seven components as a whole in chapter 23, but some of those components belong to one another of the three great feasts. Giving Israel then, under the administration that is under Moses, this annual rhythm to the life of the people of God. If you've got three high feasts a year, you can tell just like some of us were children and we grew up with man-made high feasts that punctuated every year. And so our spiritual life or the rhythm of our life every year, like within a year, would do something like this, right? You'd have those high points. Now the believers' spiritual life under the gospel always less than six days or less from a Lord's Day. No higher feast can improve upon it. Jesus is in glory. We're not looking forward anymore. We're looking upward and participating. Morals. So you have the annual calendar, which is still Sabbath based, even within those high feasts. you would have him refer to as an eighth day that was a Sabbath. There were high Sabbaths, sort of, well, not sort of, which some of you probably remember with reference to when Jesus died, that the Sabbath that was following his death was a high Sabbath, not an ordinary weekly Sabbath. So he establishes that rhythm, and then he gave us chapter 24, where we've already considered In verses one through nine, the lampstand and the table, so the shining of God's favor on the lampstand and the sharing of God's fellowship in the table, and the seven and the 12, the bringing of God and his people together at the heart of the life of Israel. That's what they were to get in all of those feasts. That is still what you are to get in the Lord Jesus Christ, weekly, in the Lord's day. The shining of God's face upon you, the share in Jesus Christ, the sharing of God's fellowship with you in Jesus Christ. Jesus, your tabernacle, Jesus, your priest, Jesus, your sacrifice, in Jesus Christ, all of it. And then last week's portion, in verse 10 through 23 of chapter 24, and the blaspheming half-Israelite, which as we heard again this morning in God's good providence to us, no such thing as a half-Israelite. He was still considered holy. He still had to bear the name of his Redeemer as holy, and he had to be executed for blaspheming God's name. And one of the themes that came out then of the second half of chapter 24 was the holiness of God's people. They had God's name upon them, and they had God's name upon their lips. And they were to bear his name as holy in the life of the society. And each one was to bear God's name as fully in how he spoke. And when a man blasphemed, it would defile not only his mouth, but the society that heard him. And they would be guilty if they tolerated him. the blasphemy, but not only the people and the society, but also we saw in the second half of chapter 24 a concern for the holiness of the land. This was God's land that was also not to be polluted by blasphemy. Well, that brings us to chapter 25 now, and you have the connection both with chapter 24, because two big sections of this chapter are really the holiness of the land, it belongs to God. Israelites all have their particular part of the land allotted to them by the Lord who retains the right to it. And since he retains the permanent right to it, even if they sell their temporary right, it has to revert back to them in the year of jubilee, which, incidentally, is one of the reasons why property tax is so theologically offensive. You know, when we owned First Juan and then in God's providence to us a second house in Iowa, I had to pay property tax. And I would tell my children when I was writing the checks, I'm writing our annual rent check to the government because no one owns land as long as there's property tax, right? If you don't pay your annual rent to the government, they come and get you. But praise God, he is the great landlord, capital L, to whom all things ultimately belonged. And then within Israel in particular, he allotted to each family its land. And that could not be denied to them. So we're gonna see that in holy property. We just preached most of the second point. But then also holy poverty. that all of the children of Israel were his slaves and his sojourners. That yes, they were coming into the land and it was his land. But did you notice in there how he bookends that section saying, you know, you are sojourning with me. You are strangers with me in the land section. But then in the holy poverty section, he says early on, They are my slaves in verse 42. And then he concludes it in verse 45. The children of Israel are slaves to me. They are my slaves whom I brought out of the land of Egypt. I am Yahweh, your God. There's an unhelpful variance of translation. Throughout the chapter, the word servant and the word slave are translating the same Hebrew word. And if we would have just left that in our English translation, we could see that everyone is a slave one way or another, but a slave of God is a liberated slave. We are not liberated from slavery to Him, we are liberated from all our other slaveries into slavery to him and bless God not only that but adopted even as he referred to Israel corporately as his firstborn son when he was talking to Pharaoh but now we know that we are redeemed in the only begotten and brought into this slavery where we can rejoice to call ourselves slaves of Christ but we also know that we are sons of God in Jesus Christ. So having laid out all of that, the chapter breaks down fairly simply, fairly easily into three sections. First, holy liberty in verses 1 through 22. Second, holy property in verses 23 through 34. And third, holy poverty. in verses 35 through 55. And we won't be able, as I'm sure you have already deduced, to take every single verse and make all of the necessary connections and applications. But first, holy liberty. Notice that the land Sabbath is a Sabbath for Yahweh. Speak to the children of Israel. Oh, sorry. We need, first of all, to deal with verse one. because this is referring either, when it says you always spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai saying, the Hebrew verb there can be translated as had spoken. So referring back to the book of the covenant, remember that portion that Moses was given first trip up Sinai and he was to write it down and then there was that covenanting ceremony on the mountain. Either this is saying that all of this was given at that time or, It is saying that this portion, this immediate portion at the beginning was given at that time and the rest is now an exposition or further exposition or application. Or it may even be saying that God called Moses back up the mountain at this point. to give him further instruction, and how greatly then that would underline the content of this chapter, if having opened the tabernacle and made the way, God actually brings Moses back up the mountain for this. Either way, verse one is strongly calling our attention to the teaching in chapter 25. Now notice that this is a Sabbath, the land Sabbath, is a Sabbath Yahweh. When you come in to the land which I gave you, and so we have to presume and believe that the Lord is going to keep his promise and bring them into the land, or they would have had to presume that, then the land shall keep a Sabbath Yahweh. In the seventh year, there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath, the Yahweh. Now the land doesn't delight in the Lord. The land does not have fellowship with the Lord. That's a way of describing for the people a rhythm that the Lord was going to give them in their lives by way of the land. It was an agrarian society. They were closely tied to the land. And so if for a whole year, God would get you off of planting and reaping and harvesting. And you're in agrarian society, you've got a lot of time that year. And bless God at the end of this passage, if you say, how are we gonna do that? God says, I'm going to actually make your land produce triple the sixth year. Now, I used to have a congregation of farmers. I don't really have one now, but I can imagine just, hopefully not too much, but at least in their flesh, If you're getting triple yields one year, you know, the dollar signs are just going off in your eyes, although everybody else is getting triple yields that year, too. So, you know, the market economy there. But for Israel, as the triple yield is coming in in the sixth year, what they're to see is that they don't exist for the land. They don't exist for their labor. Yes, all of that's good, and God gives it to them. They glorify him in doing that work. But they exist for their God, who wants their life broken up into these sevens of years, so that Even the course of their life. We did this, remember, with the calendar year for the Israelite. For the Israelite's entire life, then, he would give them what we call a sabbatical. And it's not a sabbatical so much so that you can get your project on your house done or write a bunch of extra books if you're a pastor. Apparently, that's what pastors do on their sabbaticals. If you're going to put in all that kind of labor, just pastor the people. Forget the books. the people are saying, but everyone's life was supposed to have this rhythm in which there was a year in which you could really focus on worship of God. Yes, God might give you rest. He might allow you to recuperate from illness or injury. He might enable you to do more work on other things. Those things weren't wrong. Those things aren't proscribed or prohibited here in the Sabbath year like they are in the fourth commandment. But still, it was especially for the worship of God and fellowship with God. Some of you may do similarly in your life, whether it's every seven years or once a year. You might have a family retreat week or something like that. One of the things our family has done is every five years and not theonomic enough to try and pull every letter like that. But every five years in our family, we stop reading other books together, which I guess you would have to have started reading books together. But we read the whole Bible on the machine plan together. out loud as a family once every five years. But God wanted their lives to have this rhythm. And now not only that every seven years they would do this, but every seven sevens of years, and all our math students or those who just paid attention well to the reading know that's 49 years. Every 49th year in the seventh month, Sabbath month, Remember, that was the holy month where the first day of the month every year would be the day that you blow the trumpet and that would remind you that the Day of Atonement is coming on the 10th and that the Feast of Tabernacles is coming on the 15th. Maybe, you know, I've never been an ancient Jewish kid, but maybe the kid's his favorite feast because you get to do the thing in the tents and the booths. But once every 49 years, on the 10th day of the Sabbath month, the Day of Atonement, they would blow trumpets. And what that meant was that in five months, the trumpet year was coming. Now, some of the time when you see trumpet here, it's shofar, it's ransorn. And sometimes, when you see the word trumpet, it is yobelay. And you can hear it. And that's just another word for trumpet. It's like saying trumpet or yobel. And jubilee is just, in English, putting it directly into English, the other Hebrew word for trumpet. It'd be trumpet year. Now, I don't know if they just went around saying it's trumpet year. You can imagine, you know, a believing Israelite dad or mom would have a trumpet for each of the kids and, you know, let them blow those things all year long as they had a second year in a row of Lamb Sabbath. which if you're counting and remembering, you would have to have now four years' worth of produce in that six year for that to work. But bless God, it would work. It's like keeping the Lord's Day. So many people say, well, I can't keep the Lord's Day. My business would never survive. Oh, really? God is not able to make your business survive the obedience to his law? Yeah, how unbelieving and arrogant. And yet we know that that's a difficult thing. It's a hard thing for our hearts. And this was so difficult that we actually don't have any evidence that Israel ever did this. In fact, next, next Lord's Day, Lord, really in chapter 26, we'll see in verses 34 and 35. And then again, in verse 43, that he's going to tell them they're going to get exiled for failing to keep the land status. and that they will be kept out of his land long enough for the land to get all of its Sabbaths back. And yet, here is God's invitation to being liberated, liberated from our sin. There's liberation from the purse here, isn't there? the hardness of the work and the land refusing to produce its yield. And now he says, it's going to superproduce so that you can have fellowship with me. So that once-in-a-generation climax and the extra produce. In the second place, the holy property, verses 23 through 34. Notice that the allotments must be kept not so much out of respect for the man or the clan to whom that part of land has been assigned, but out of respect for Yahweh. This is why Naboth in 1 Kings 21, you remember Ahab wanted Naboth to sell him permanently his vineyard for a garden. And Ahab actually says Yahweh forbids me to do it. I'm not poor. I don't need the money. This is assigned to me by the Lord and all the land is the Lord's. And if the Lord has assigned this land to my family, I actually don't have the prerogative to sell it to you, King. for which he was thanked by Mrs. Ahab, or maybe he should have been called Mr. Jezebel, the way things went, arranging for his decease. And then Ahab got his garden anyway. And it's dreadful, although you meditate some time on 1 Kings 21, at the end of that chapter, Ahab repents and God actually responds to his repentance, bless God. But holy property, this explains in the last part of that section, we will go verse by verse through the section, those houses in walled cities that weren't particularly allotments from God, You had a year to redeem them, and if you didn't redeem them, that was done. It was transferred. But those houses that were tied to land, not to walled city, that was allotted by God and could not be ultimately lost. It would have to revert in the year of Jubilee. And it reminds us, doesn't it, that ultimately all property Even ours, even yours, is rented from the Lord. He will not take property from this world with you, and he will appoint to you an inheritance in the new heavens and the new earth. But he himself is our great inheritance, and that inheritance can't be lost. We sing that in Psalm 16. He is our inheritance, the portion of our cup. The lines have fallen to us in pleasant places. You can imagine when the allotments were being put out, and you knew the part with the woods and the stream and the hill, and you're like, please, Lord, make the lines full. Just give that part to me. Well, bless God, the Bible as a whole teaches us that the lines that have been assigned to us enclose, you know, it's almost blasphemous to say, they indicate to us that God himself, is our inheritance. And so holy liberty, holy property, and holy poverty. If one of your brethren who dwells by you, if one of your brethren becomes poor, and falls into poverty among you, then you shall help him. It was an opportunity to be a helper to your brother. It might have come by his crops catching fire. It might have come by burglary, robbery. It might have come by his own laziness and folly. But it was an opportunity for you to love your brother, and you weren't permitted to lend to someone who needed it to live at interest. Which is, by the way, how Jews got to be so rich in Europe. The Roman Catholic Church for centuries did not recognize the difference between a loan that was given for a man to be able to sustain himself and his family, and a loan that was capital for investing or building something or big purchase or something like that. So what they did is they forbade Christians to lend at interest, but Jews were permitted to lend to foreigners at interest. So Jews came in and They became the money lenders and there's actually a lot of history behind that. It's not just personal prejudice, although God forgive us and help us with that portion of it that comes from the sin of our heart. No, these are loans of subsistence because it's the privilege of the brother who's lending to his brother to be a means by which he's enabled to live among them. And he has to treat him with dignity. Significant implications there for the diaconate, which we covered when we were going through the diaconate class. Poverty is an opportunity for the brother's charity. But it's also a reminder of the Lord's liberty, because there was a series of things. If even taking the loan, you weren't able to sustain yourself at a pace where you could repay the loan, then you might sell yourself to your brother. And your brother especially knows that he's commanded not to lord it over you as a slave. He hires you, you work for him, he tells you what to do, you've lost some freedom that way, but he treats you with dignity, he doesn't domineer over you, and he views himself as renting your time. Because the Jubilee is coming, and you are going to be released in that year of Jubilee. But if borrowing didn't work, and if you don't have a brother who's able to buy you, and there's a rich foreigner who's also a neighbor, you could then... You could then sell yourself to your neighbor. But one of the things that the neighbor had to know was that as soon as the redemption price was produced, he had to let you go. God, in what we read, legislates that redemption always be permitted, so that as soon as your brother can buy you out, as soon as your friend, as soon as your uncle, maybe you yourself somehow were able to buy yourself back out, He had to let you. He had to let you go. And if no one was able to raise the money then at the year of Jubilee, you had to be let go. You could not permanently be someone else's slave because you were God's slave. he had set limits to how much and how long you could end up indentured or enslaved to another. And then he especially gives the room for and We don't have time here, but if you got all the way down that slide of poverty, in which God is using poverty even as a context to say that people are mine, they belong to me, you are God's, you belong to him, every one of you. If you got all the way down to where you are enslaved to a form, who is required to, but honestly speaking, could be less expected to obey the rules concerning your dignity, then one may come along who is your kinsman, who is able to pay the price to redeem you. And that's where we get the translation of this word that appears in this chapter. And you see it appear again. Many of you probably caught it already, didn't you, in the Book of Ruth. And this is where we get the language, the idea of the kinsman redeemer, the one who is able and comes and buys us out of the lowest slavery. So this wonderful, forward-looking to the Lord Jesus. And so bless God, he would give once a lifetime, twice, if in God's providence you had it, you know, between when you were like five and 20 or so, you'd probably end up with two trumpet years. in which what was proclaimed especially is liberty. In fact, that's where the inscription on the original liberty belt came from, was from this chapter, proclaiming the year of Lord's favor, which God again picks up in Isaiah 61. The day of atonement would come annually until Christ came. The year of Jubilee would come every 50 years until Christ came. But just like the sacrifice had to be offered over and over again because it could not accomplish what Christ accomplished, so also liberty would be trumpeted over and over again until Jesus came. And when Isaiah talks about proclaiming the year of God's favor, it's not talking about the every 50 year Jubilee. It's looking forward to the coming of Christ so that when he reads that passage in the synagogue in Luke chapter four, he says, that year is this year. It's trumpeting year. I'm here. And two years later, he would die on the cross and rise again from the dead. And that is the liberty where we belong to God. We have an inheritance that can't be lost, and we cannot be enslaved to anybody else in a way that breaks by Him. So we possess God and He possesses us. That's the great teaching of this chapter in Jesus Christ, which He comes and He comes to you and He comes to me. John 8, 36, He says, If the Son has set you free, you are free indeed. And oh, that those who heard Him would have said, praise God, you are the king, you are the anointed, you are the son, set us free. We have been looking forward to this by the very rhythm of our lives and the rhythm of our society. But instead they said, we have never been slaves to anybody. Oh, let us see that slavery to self and slavery to sin are the worst kind of slavery. But if the son has set you free, You are free indeed, he proclaims to you. You have God as your inheritance. And God takes you and owns you, not just as a slave, but as his child. Amen, let's pray. Our gracious God and our Heavenly Father, how we thank you for this wonderful book of Leviticus. We do pray, Lord, for its recovery in your churches, where it is little read and preached and even less understood. But Lord, just now we pray for your Spirit supplying it to our hearts. that we might live this life of having the shining of your favor upon us and the sharing of your fellowship with us in the Lord Jesus, in whom and with whom you have seated us even in glory. Lord, truly, I has not seen or ear heard, nor the heart of man could ever devise, which you prepared for us in the Lord of glory, your Son, in whom you have redeemed us. But grant that by your Spirit's powerful working, you would give us faith that our eyes would see and our ears would hear and our hearts would understand, and we might rest and rejoice in you. Grant it, we ask, in Jesus' name.