Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The Lord said to Moses at Mount Sinai, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When you enter the land I am going to give you, the land itself must observe a sabbath to the Lord. For six years sow your fields, and for six years prune your vineyards and gather their crops. But in the seventh year the land is to have a year of sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord. Do not sow your fields or prune your vineyards.

• Leviticus 25:1-4

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

• Genesis 1:28

For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.

• Romans 8:19

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

• 1 Timothy 6:10

“The twenty-fifth chapter of Leviticus is the great classic on the rights of the land. The establishment of men’s rights on the earth is limited by the rights of the earth itself. If you keep taking from the land, never giving it any rest, in time it will stop giving to you. We talk about the rights of the land, and make it mean our right to grab as much from it as we can. In God’s sight the land has rights just as human beings have, and many of the theories which are being advanced today go back to God’s original prescription for the land. When God ordained ‘a sabbath of solemn rest for the land’, it was a reiteration of the instructions given to Adam in the Garden of Eden—‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it’ (Genesis 1:28). Man was intended to replenish the earth by looking after it, being its lord not its tyrant; sin has made man its tyrant (cf. Romans 8:19). The rights of the land will probably only be fully realized in the Millennium, because in this dispensation men ignore obedience to God’s laws.”

• Oswald Chambers, Daily Thoughts for Disciples (May 18, from Biblical Ethics)

Being a farmer is a tough life.  You can work extremely hard and have a beautiful crop that is almost ready to harvest, and then a storm wipes out the entire crop.

You can have a year where the Spring rains seem to never stop.  You cannot prepare the ground for planting on time.  When you plant, a flood comes through and washes your seed into the neighbor’s field.  Then a pop-up storm hits just as you have cut the hay, but you have not baled it yet.

And in all of that, God is telling the people of Israel that once every seven years, they should not plant or harvest anything.  Give the land a rest.

But with two of those other seven years having either no crop or planting something that makes less money for the family, just to get a crop in the ground.  Could we afford to skip a year?

These days in America’s wheat belt, you can get atop a hill and see a checkerboard of crops in the fields and one prevalent crop is sunflowers.  The sunflowers put nitrogen back into the soil naturally.  Soybeans can do the same thing.  But it is almost like cheating God.  We are still making a crop.  We are still selling that crop.  And we are not taking a step in faith that not growing a crop for the Sabbath year will garner us a bountiful crop in the other six.

On one hand, we show our greed by planting a crop that makes some money and nourishes the soil.  But on the other hand, we miss out on seeing God at work as he protects us by His Love and Mercy.

And if I was blessed by God to have the adequate land to do farming, I would struggle with this also.

While God wishes for us to be bold in praising Him and confessing our faith in God, we must be bold in our actions, relying upon God rather than the latest trends that the world dreams up.  This goes far beyond farmland.

Christians must be bold.  To believe in Jesus Christ is to not just intellectually believe, but to trust in God and His promises.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.