Leviticus 25:1-7--The Sabbath Year

Leviticus 25:1-7
English Standard Version

The Sabbath Year
25 The Lord spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai, saying, 2 “Speak to the people of Israel and say to them, When you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the Lord. 3 For six years you shall sow your field, and for six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its fruits, 4 but in the seventh year there shall be a Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath to the Lord. You shall not sow your field or prune your vineyard. 5 You shall not reap what grows of itself in your harvest, or gather the grapes of your undressed vine. It shall be a year of solemn rest for the land. 6 The Sabbath of the land shall provide food for you, for yourself and for your male and female slaves and for your hired worker and the sojourner who lives with you, 7 and for your cattle and for the wild animals that are in your land: all its yield shall be for food.

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This is the command (among other issues) that is going to eventually send the people, specifically the southern kingdom of Judah, into Exile again as prisoners of the Babylonians for God cites their breaking of this commandment as the reason that they will be in exile for 70 years since they had failed to let the land rest during their 490 years since they had entered the Promised Land and therefore the land needed to lay fallow for 70 years.

We know that this makes agricultural sense.  We have different techniques now to make sure that we don't take all the nutrients out of the soil such as rotating crops, adding fertilizer and nutrients and plowing crops under, but we still occasionally let a field "rest," though the farmers often have multiple fields and rotate through which field is resting.so that they don't rest all their fields at the same time now and have no crop (people today don't seem to like to save the surplus from the previous six years and trust God to provide for them in this way in the Sabbath year as that doesn't make sense to them).  I'm almost certain if we would continue to follow this model in faith that our harvests would be even more fruitful than using all of the modern techniques that we can think of because that's the way God works--obedience typically leads to blessing.

Something like this doesn't make any sense to the ungodly as it seems like lost income/profits, but God was teaching His people to trust in Him and His provision instead of themselves and their provision.  When the people became proud in their provision for themselves and acted like they did not need God, then God would use the other nations or drought, famine, or pestilence to remind His people that their only hope was to cry out to Him as everything we have comes from Him and He is the one who makes it rain on the just and the unjust.  The people would not starve during the seventh year because there was more than enough that had been saved by the people in the years of gathering and there was more than enough offered as part of the sacrificial system to take care of the Levites and priests.  God knew what He was doing even though it didn't make any sense to the ungodly, but the fact that the people never trusted God in this way says something about them (and probably us), for as soon as they entered the land they were supposed to start obeying this command and observing the Sabbath year and 490 years later the land had failed to have rested any of the 70 years of Sabbath rest that were required and this is why their exile in Babylon lasted 70 years as revealed to the prophet Jeremiah and discovered by the prophet Daniel in the book of Jeremiah (see Daniel 9:2 and Jeremiah 25:12).