In our portion of Leviticus 25 today, the Lord provides instructions for how to handle territory in the promised land. He will be assigning land portions to each tribe (cities to the Levites, since they are to be priests and not farmers) and no one is to permanently sell any land out of his family line. If a man encounters hardship and is forced to sell some land, then his nearest relative is to buy it back.
"The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you reside in My land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land." (Leviticus 25:23-24) The Lord is giving the Israelites the use of the promised land, but in actuality it belongs to Him. Everything belongs to Him and He could say to each of us about anything we own or use in this life: "It is Mine. You reside in My land as foreigners and strangers." We wouldn't even exist if it were not His will. We wouldn't have breath in our lungs right now if it were not His will. If we can cultivate the attitude in our minds that we are just temporarily using the things of this world then I think there would be less temptation for us to feel selfish or stingy. I think it would also help us be better stewards of the things the Lord has blessed us with. The money in our bank accounts? It's the Lord's. The house we live in? It's the Lord's. The car we drive, the clothes on our backs, the job we go to---these are all the Lord's and He has graciously blessed us with the use of them.
"If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property, their nearest relative is to come and redeem what they have sold." (Leviticus 25:25) A person might fall upon hard times and need to sell some land to pay off debts and keep a roof over his family's head and food on the table. If this should happen, when the man's nearest relative (the Hebrew "goel", his "kinsman redeemer") is to come and purchase the land back for the family. When we reach the book of Ruth we'll see this process in action. The book of Ruth, which revolves around the duties of the kinsman redeemer, is not only a love story between a man and a woman but is also a love story between Christ and the church.
If a man has no relative who can buy back the land, but if he saves enough money over the years to buy back the land himself, the person he sold it to is not to refuse to sell it back to him. But even if he never acquires enough money to buy the land, it reverts back to him in the Year of Jubilee. "If, however, there is no one to redeem it for them but later on they prosper and acquire sufficient means to redeem it themselves, they are to determine the value for the years since they sold it and refund the balance to the one to whom they sold it; they can then go back to their own property. But if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can go back to their own property." (Leviticus 25:26-28) In the Year of Jubilee, which takes place every fifty years, the land reverts back to its original owner whether he can pay to redeem it or not. The Lord declares the debt paid and the land redeemed.
The Lord Jesus Christ, our Kinsman Redeemer, bought back for us what we had sold. We had sold ourselves out to sin. We all, like sheep, strayed from the Lord our shepherd and went our own way, as the prophet Isaiah put it (Isaiah 53:6a) but God laid on Christ the iniquity of us all (Isaiah 53:6b). Because of Christ we are set free from our debt of sin and have been redeemed (bought back) and have been restored to a right relationship with our God and have become His children. "So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith." (Galatians 3:26) "See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called the children of God!" (1 John 3:1a) "I will be their God and they will be My children." (Revelation 21:7) Our redemption is the work of the Lord, the Kinsman Redeemer, who purchased our souls back from the dead. In this same way the redemption of land here in Leviticus 25 was the work of the kinsman redeemer. The original owner of the land owed a debt he could not pay, but someone came alongside him and said, "I will pay. I will buy it back for you." The Lord Jesus Christ, when He gave His life on the cross, was saying, "I will pay. I will buy you back from sin and death."
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