A Theology of Things

In Leviticus 25 God gave His people a specific way to care for a specific area of land. He told them to let the land and animals rest every seven years. God was teaching His people that the land was for their use but not their abuse. They were to respect the land, to be responsible with the land, and to care for the land under God’s direction.

We live in a time when people are elevating environmentalism to the status of a religion and worshiping Mother Earth. Such thinking is paganism. If we follow what the Bible teaches about our relationship to the environment, we will not deify nature or consider the environment of greater value than humans. However, we will take care of God’s creation. We will not allow greed to push us to exploit the land without considering things like replenishment and sustainability. In fact, replenishment and sustainability could be considered modern ways to implement God’s ancient command to give the land rest. God tells His people to care for creation, so we protect it.

God Tells His People to Give to the Poor, So We Give

Verses 1-34 address taking care of the land, and verses 35-55 address taking care of poor people. God’s directions to His people about taking care of the poor were very practical, since they were about to become farmers in Canaan. In such a subsistence, agrarian economy it was easy for people to become poor. Furthermore, becoming poor was not just tied to a job loss or a salary reduction. It came about by crops having too little rain or the death of an ox or a few goats. When tragedies like that happened to people a few years in a row, they would lose the ability to support themselves. That meant having no food. In Canaan virtually all the Israelites were poor farmers by our standards. So when God said in verse 35, “If your brother becomes destitute,” He was referring to desperate, life-threatening poverty.

What did God tell His people to do when people lost the ability to support themselves? In verses 35-38 God said to “support him . . . so that he can continue to live among you. Do not profit or take interest from him . . . or sell him your food for profit.” Then God addressed the situation of people selling themselves into servitude in order to live. In that context, the only assets people owned were their animals and their land. If they had sold both and still could not buy food, the only thing left to do was to hire themselves out for support. God told His people to take such a person in, allow him to work, and give him food. Verse 39 says, “If your brother among you becomes destitute and sells himself to you, you must not force him to do slave labor. Let him stay with you as a hired hand or temporary resident; he may work for you until the Year of Jubilee.” So this was not slavery; it was a way to allow poor people to work for food until they could be released in the Jubilee year, when their debts would be forgiven and their land would be returned to them.

Verses 44-46 address the servitude of non-Israelites. Rather than limit comments to these three verses, the list below consists of 12 facts about slavery in the Bible. The list, which includes a reference to Leviticus 25, is an attempt to put Leviticus 25 in the context of what the entire Bible says about the issue of slavery.

Applying biblical texts about slavery to a contemporary context can be complicated. The slavery mentioned in the Bible is not the same as the phenomenon of slavery in the antebellum southern United States. The context of the slavery mentioned in the Old Testament was the ancient Near East, and the context of the slavery mentioned in the New Testament was the Roman Empire. The institution of slavery was different in each of those contexts, and different in turn from any contemporary context. However, the list above supplies clear principles that we can apply in any context. We should also remember that we are no better than the people who enslaved persons in different periods in history. The impulse to grab power and subjugate people is part of our fallen nature. Also, racism supports slavery, and followers of Jesus should be active in aggressively fighting racism as a virulent evil.

We can clearly see love and compassion in God’s words about relating to the poor. God told the people who had enough resources to share with the people who did not have enough. God calls His people to be generous to the poor. Some followers of Jesus minister to the poor regularly and in extraordinary ways. Are you one of those who help the poor? God tells His people to give to the poor, so we give.

God Owns Everything, and He Allows Us to Manage It

In verse 23 God said, “The land is not to be permanently sold because it is Mine, and you are only foreigners and temporary residents on My land.” “It is Mine.” When the Israelites conquered Canaan, they were taking possession of a land that did not belong to them. It belonged to God. That fact had significant consequences regarding the way the Israelites treated the land. They could sell land only according to God’s rules since He was the owner. Furthermore, when they sold land they were not really selling it. They were subleasing it, since they were not the owners in the first place—they were just leasing.

The land belonged to God. The people also belonged to God. In verse 55 God said, “For the Israelites are My slaves.” The land belonged to God and the people belonged to God. Psalm 24:1 says everything belongs to God: “The earth and everything in it, the world and its inhabitants, belong to the Lord.” We do not even own ourselves. Followers of Jesus belong to God. First Corinthians 6 says, “You are not your own, for you were bought at a price” (vv. 19-20).

If God owns everything and we own nothing, what do we do with the stuff we have? How do we relate to it? The stuff is not ours; it belongs to God. He allows us to use it for a while, and He tells us to use it for His glory. We drive the car He gives us for His glory, we eat the food He gives us for His glory, we spend the money He gives us for His glory, and we live in the house He gives us for His glory. He owns the houses; we just live in them, just like God owned Canaan and the Israelites were to live there for His glory.

People who rent an apartment or a house know what it’s like to live in a place that belongs to someone else. Living in someone else’s space is different from owning our own place. We can feel the owner or the landlord looking over our shoulder. The first two houses we lived in were parsonages; we lived in them, but they were owned by the church. Our older son turned two years old in our first parsonage. We have vivid memories of our heroic efforts to protect the parsonage from our two year old. At one point, my wife was pregnant with our second son and she had morning sickness regularly. During that time, in one week, our two year old did four memorable things. He took my wife’s lipstick and painted her purse with it. He found the Crisco and covered his entire body with it. He learned that he was able to reach the container of baby powder, and one day during his nap time he walked around his room squeezing that bottle, squirting baby powder into the air in big clouds. Every surface in the room was covered in a layer of white powder. The fourth memorable thing he did was to find a permanent black magic marker and draw on the kitchen cabinets. People who like abstract art might say that he produced a significant body of work all over the kitchen cabinets and walls—cabinets and walls that did not belong to us. So we scrubbed and scrubbed. One area never really came clean, but I kept scrubbing, and as I scrubbed I started thinking about difficult conversations with the parsonage committee and confrontations in deacons’ meetings. All sorts of apocalyptic scenarios were going through my mind, none of which actually came to pass. If they had been our cabinets and walls, I would have thought about the incident differently. I was panicking about the possibility of harming that parsonage because I had the responsibility to take care of it for the owners, and what they thought was important to me.

Just like the church owned that parsonage and allowed me to live in it, God owns everything we have and allows us to use it. Do we work hard to use it in a way that pleases Him? What we want and what other people think are probably too important to us, and what God thinks is probably not important enough. All of us who follow Jesus should be asking constantly, “This thing God allows me to have—am I using it for His glory? Am I caring for it in a way that pleases Him?” For the Israelites, God was their land Lord. He is ours too. He owns everything, and He allows us to manage it.

God Will One Day Give Us Eternal Possessions

We have no evidence that Israel ever observed the Sabbath years or the Jubilee years. In fact, the subsequent history of Israel and some statements in the Old Testament (e.g., 2 Chron 36:21) suggest that during most or all of Israel’s history they neglected God’s commands in Leviticus 25. If they had obeyed God, He would have blessed them, their economy would have functioned smoothly, the poor would have been cared for, and the land would have been fertile. However, they disobeyed, so God judged them and sent them off the land into exile.

Just as the people of Israel lived in Canaan, we too live in a fallen land, a land where our enjoyment of God’s blessings is affected by sin. However, the Bible says we are headed for a land where no sin is found, a land where “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will no longer exist; grief, crying, and pain will exist no longer” (Rev 21:4). God has a future without suffering in store for His redeemed people. Just as God kept His promise to give His people the land of Canaan, He will keep His promise to give us a land in heaven. In John 14:2-3 Jesus said,

In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if not, I would have told you. I am going away to prepare a place for you. If I go away and prepare a place for you, I will come back and receive you to Myself, so that where I am you may be also.

Jesus has prepared a place for us. He is in that place, so it is without sin. The book of Revelation contains glorious descriptions of heaven. Such glory is in the future for all followers of Jesus. We will gather in heaven to sing praise to the One who “rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son He loves”(Col 1:13). The hymn “Victory in Jesus” refers to our home in heaven.

I heard about a mansion He has built for me in glory,

And I heard about the streets of gold beyond the crystal sea,

About the angels singing, and the old redemption story,

And some sweet day I’ll sing up there the song of victory. (Bartlett)

We are going to that land in heaven. The land of Canaan was subject to drought, famine, and invasion by enemies. As for our home in heaven, 1 Peter 1:4 says our inheritance is “imperishable, uncorrupted, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.”

God promised Abraham He would give the land to his descendants. But Abraham never possessed the promised land. He was a nomadic shepherd. Just before his wife Sarah died, he bought a plot of land so he could have a place to bury her. When she died, Abraham buried her there, and when he died he was buried next to her. That burial plot was the only land Abraham ever owned. In the end, Tolstoy was right. How much land does a man need? We need about six feet. Hebrews 11 says about Abraham living in Canaan,

By faith he stayed as a foreigner in the land of promise, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, coheirs of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God. (vv. 9-10)

We are looking forward to that city too. God will one day give us eternal possessions, and that changes everything about our theology of things.

Reflect and Discuss