Spewing Land

Leviticus 18 lists a range of sexual relationships that are forbidden for the people of God. They were dangerous for the Israelites because they gave the spiritual powers of evil access to their community.

The thing that struck me reading this passage is the reason that God gives for forbidding these practices.

Do not defile yourselves in any of these ways, because this is how the nations that I am going to drive out before you became defiled. The land was defiled; so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out the people living in it (Lev 18:24-25).

Sexual immorality harms families, but God reminds here that it also defiles the land. When the land is really defiled it will vomit the people out of it.

These days we have forgotten the link between morality and the productivity of the land, but it has not gone away. Immorality eventually affects the productivity of the land. If the people of a nation embrace evil, the land will eventually vomit them out. The land will be plagued with invasive weeds and destructive pests that will prevent grass and crops from growing.

More at Land and Spirit.

Land and Spirit

Each place on earth comes under spiritual influence. We see the earth divided up by rivers, seas, and mountain barriers. It is further divided by the boundaries of nations and states. If we looked from the spiritual realms, we would see it divided by spiritual influence. The key to interpreting what happens in the world is to understand the distribution of spiritual authority.

The spiritual forces of evil work through the political and economic powers that control the world. Their authority works in parallel to the authority of political powers and the owners of land.

The owners of land have authority over their land. If the owner of a tract of land is being influenced by a spiritual power, it will have some control over what happens on their land.

Political powers have much greater authority than those who control land. If they are able to be manipulated by the spiritual powers, these spiritual powers will have a much stronger influence over events in the territory.

When we enter a place, we should be careful to discern what spiritual authority is at work. If we submit to the owner’s authority, we can make ourselves vulnerable to the spirits with control of that place. If we enter a shopping mall, we do not need to submit to the owners of the mall. However, when we take employment, we are submitting to the owners and opening ourselves to their spiritual influence.

Every earthly authority with significant scope can have evils spirits trying to control it. We should be careful about how we submit.

More at Spiritual Realms

Jesus & Economic Life (9) Land

Jesus challenged those who had accumulated land to give it away. When he challenged a man who inquired about eternal life, the man claimed to have kept all the commandments since he was a boy.

Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.” At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great wealth (Matt 8:21-23).

This man’s wealth would mostly be land. He would have had to collaborate with the Romans to have accumulated so much. He claimed to have kept the commandments since he was a boy (Matt 8:20). Jesus explained that the was wrong. He had honoured the Ten Commandments, but he had ignored God’s instructions for economic life. He was not entitled to accumulate land. To be righteous, he needed to sell his land and give it away. This would fulfil the land laws of Leviticus 25.

Economic Life (15) Land and Capital

Christians who dislike Leviticus miss out on one of the most important economic principles in the scriptures.

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.

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. 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 then go back to their property…. Houses in villages without walls around them are to be considered as belonging to the open country. They can be redeemed, and they are to be returned in the Jubilee (Lev 25:23-28,31).

When Israel entered the Promised Land, land was the main form of capital. The land was divided up evenly between tribes and family groupings, so that every family had a piece of land. God organised the situation so that capital was evenly distributed. This is an important principle. God wants to see capital evenly distributed. In the Micah’s vision of the kingdom, every man has his own vine and his own fig tree (Mic 4:4). This is the same principle.

In an agricultural society, land was the main form of capital (in an economic sense). Distributing the land evenly ensure that every family had access to capital. It was distributed evenly, so that every family had an equal opportunity.

In reality, some people use their capital productively and do well. Others misuse their capital and get into financial difficulty. If a family gets into serious financial trouble, they might not need to sell their land to settle their debts. However the land could not be sold in perpetuity, because it belongs to God. All that could be sold was the crops that would be produced between the present day and the next jubilee. The jubilee occurred every fifty years.
If an debtor family has sold their land to a creditor to settle their debts, three things could happen.

1. A relative or neighbour to come to the aid of the debtor family and buy back the land from the creditor to whom it had been sold. The redeemer will pay the full price that paid by the purchase. This was a sacrifice as the relative or neighbour would receive very little. They might get some crops while they were getting the debtor family prepared to look after it again, but they will never own the land they have bought. This was essentially a gift from one person to another. It is generous giving at its best. The only benefit he gets is the benefit of living in a strong community.
   
   The Good Samaritan helped a man who was in a hole, perhaps due to his stupidity, by going places he should not have gone alone. The parable extended the scope of who is our neighbour to everyone that we encounter. It does not limit the scope of assistance to caring for sick people. The Torah teaches that being a Good Samaritan means recovering the property of a neighbour who has been forced into selling it to pay debt.

2. If no one redeems the land sold by a person in debt and he returns to prosperity again, he can buy his family property back at any time. The price will be set at the value of the crops that will be received between the sale day and the jubilee. He does not have to repay the full amount, because the buyer has received crops from the land.

3. If there is no redeemer and the person in trouble never recovers sufficiently to buy it back, the buyer can hold the land until the jubilee. This will affect the price paid for the land. The buyer is not really buying the land. He cannot because it belongs to God. He is actually buying the harvests that will occur between the purchase date and the jubilee. If he pays more than that is worth, he might be reluctant to return the land when the Jubilee comes. The benefit the buyer gets is the confidence that comes from being part of a strong community.

There were no penalties attached to this instruction, so it could not be enforced. It does not justify compulsory land re-distribution as some have claimed. This was a voluntary instruction to ensure that wealth and capital did not become too unevenly distributed. If one generation got into trouble and lost their capital, the next generation would get it back, and have a fresh start.

The prophets spoke against those who accumulated land and houses.

Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land (Is 5:8).

These people were breaching God’s principle that all capital land should be evenly distributed. They would not have been able to do this, if they understood and applied the principle of the Jubilee.

This was not an individualistic concept of property. Land was assigned to the family group. It is held in trust for the benefit of future generations of the family. Losing the land was a failure of trust that cursed later generations. God protected the family line be providing a way to remedy a mistake that could affect future generations.

The classical economists like Adam Smith were concerned about economic rent. They saw it as a problem, because the aristocratic families whose ancestors had fought on the winning side in ancient battles controlled large blocks of land. They collected rent from their tenants with no need to give anything in return. The classical economists wanted to tax economic rent away. If God owns the land, the basis for economic rent disappears.

This instruction and the jubilee ensured that capital continued to be equally distributed, but this it only works in an agricultural society. In the modern world, most capital is plant machinery and equipment and other assets. Jesus put a twist on the jubilee laws that ensure that these will be relatively equally distributed too, but that is a topic for another post in another series.

Israel (8) - Return to the Land

God decides the times and boundaries of nations.

From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands (Acts 17:26).

God determines the rise and fall of nations in two ways, but he prefers the second method. The first method is suboptimal.

1. Geopolitical Events
God can manipulate evil kings and nations to achieve his purposes.
Cyrus the Emperor of Persia is an example. This wicked Emperor destroyed the Babylonians opening up the way for the Jewish people to return home from exile in Babylon.
Cyrus was not God’s first choice for the task. If the rulers of Babylon had listened to Daniel, they would have sent the exiles back to Israel after seventy years of exile, but they grew proud and became corrupt, so God raised Cyrus to get the job done.

2. The Holy Spirit
He works to change people’s hearts and leads them in God’s ways.
God called Terah to leave Ur (which is in modern Iraq) but he stopped in Haran (Gen 11:31). His son Abraham followed the leading of the Holy Spirit and moved to the land of Canaan.
The early church changed the heart of the Roman Empire by obeying the Spirit.

The modern state of Israel was created using the first method.

God intended to return the Jews to Israel in the second way, but the Zionist movement rushed ahead, before he could complete his plans. During the First World War, Britain invaded Palestine to secure the Suez Canal, access to the Indian Empire and control of Persian oil. British control opened the way for more Jews to return to the land, but this was not God’s plan. The motives of Britain were no motivated better than those if Cyrus, but it opened up a path that led to the creation of the state of Israel (there is very little merit in being a Cyrus.)

There are many prophecies in the Old Testament about a return to the land, but most speak a return in faith to peace and blessing. We have not seen this miracle yet. Ezekiel 38:8 describes God’s second best for Israel’s return.

In the latter years you will come into the land that is restored by the sword, whose inhabitants have been gathered from many nations to the mountains of Israel which had been a continual waste.

This is not a return in blessing, but a “return by the sword”. Ezekiel prophesies a return by secular men and women using political and military power. The emergence of the Israeli state was the work of a well-organised nationalism, not a miraculous act of God. God allowed it and will use it to accomplish his purposes, but it was not a return under the covenant as promised in Deuteronomy.

God allowed some Jewish people to return to the land of Palestine, but that does not mean that the land of Palestine now belongs to Jewish people. It does not mean that the current Israeli state is his plan for the redemption for his chosen people.