“Sow your land for six years and gather its produce. But during the seventh year you are to let it rest and leave it uncultivated, so that the poor among your people may eat from it and the wild animals may consume what they leave. Do the same with your vineyard and your olive Grove. Do your work for six days but rest on the seventh day so that your ox and your donkey may rest, and the son of your female slave as well as the resident alien may be refreshed.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things we ask God for are blessings. We all want to be blessed by God. We want our nation to be blessed by Him. At a recent community prayer event a member of my church sang a beautiful rendition of “God Bless America.” We want to enjoy His abundance. And, our God is a blessing God, so that’s a good and right thing for us to ask for. But the thing we don’t understand as well both at all and in terms of its implications is that God’s blessings are always directional. God is always thinking about and aiming for the other. We see a pretty good example of this character on display here in a couple of laws that don’t seem to have anything to do with this. Let’s talk about another reason for Sabbath.

We’ve talked before about the Sabbath and why God commanded the people to take some time off each week. It was ultimately about trusting Him. It was about the people learning that He not only could, but would provide for them if and as they let Him. The Sabbath gave them the chance to put that trust into practice.

In the bigger picture, though, all of this was an outworking of their worship of God. Worshiping God consists of three things. If you don’t have all three of these in place, you’re not really worshiping. When we worship God, we are acknowledging, celebrating, and participating in His character. Too much of what we call worship stops with just the first two of those aspects. Without that third one, though, our worship is incomplete at best. At worst, it is direct toward a different god who we are calling by His name. If God really is who we say He is, then the only rational response is to participate in His character through our thoughts, words, and actions in the various circumstances we find ourselves facing in a given moment. Anything less than that and what we are really saying is that either God isn’t really all those things we said He is, or else we don’t actually believe He’s all those things we said He is. Worship must lead to action.

What we see in these couple of laws, what we see is God’s inviting (commanding, really, but there’s always an invitational aspect to God’s commands because we have the choice whether or not to follow them) the people into an exercise of worship. The first command here is looking forward toward a practice that will be fleshed out later in more detail in the Israelites’ first worship sourcebook which we call Leviticus. This is the practice of taking a Sabbath year.

Once every seven years, the Israelites were to let their fields lie fallow. They were not to sow any seeds. They were to let whatever was going to grow naturally happen and leave it alone. But this didn’t mean that no one was going to do anything with it at all. Instead, whatever grew up naturally in that seventh year was to be for the poor in their community to come and harvest for themselves. They were to be given the opportunity to gain the dignity of providing for themselves that year. The practice of gleaning was available to them every year, but this went above and beyond that. This was a chance for them to not only have an abundance relative to what they normally had, but also to be able to sell their extras to earn money and possibly even buy land for themselves. Combine this practice with the practice of setting free anyone who was serving as a slave (which was really what we think of as an indentured servant), and you have the makings for quite a social welfare system that was unlike anything that existed anywhere else in the world at the time.

The uncultivated land was also to be for the wild animals to be able to eat from. In other words, they were to let their land become a blessing for everyone but themselves. This didn’t mean they were going to have to go without, though, because as God would later promise, if they would take up this command and follow it carefully, then in the sixth years He would make their fields doubly productive. They would have bumper crops that would allow them to put plenty away to get themselves through the Sabbath years when they came around.

As it turns out, farmers would much later come to understand that resting fields like this is a good and wise land management practice so that you don’t burn out all the nutrients in a particular field. The fields nearest my house were allowed to lie fallow this past winter instead of being planted with winter wheat as is normally the case. The Israelites surely didn’t understand this. But they were given the opportunity to understand something we forget: God is the great provider who can and will provide for His people when they are willing to trust in Him and demonstrate that trust by doing what He says.

The other law here looks back to the Sabbath commands they had already been given. Here, though, God adds yet another layer of reasoning behind this command. They were to take a day off once a week not just for themselves to rest, but for their animals to be able to rest. Animals were not to be worked until they died. They were to be treated with care and compassion as creatures made by God. They were also to take a Sabbath so the son of their female servants (who would have been considered an extra hired hand on the farm) and the resident aliens (i.e., the legal immigrants who are the backbone of the agricultural industry in this country) could rest as well. No one, not even the people who sat on the very bottom of the social ladder were to be worked every day without a break. Everyone was to be given some time to rest and recuperate; to worship and rejoice in the God who provided for their needs.

In both of these cases, the people were able to take these times of rest because God promised to bless them with abundance. In both of these cases, though, these blessings were not intended to be only for them. They were directional just like all of God’s other blessings are. The people were going to receive God’s blessing of abundance so that they could extend those blessings to the people and even to the animals in the world around them. God’s blessings were not merely to flow to them, but through them. They were not to be capacitors, but conduits of blessing. They were to be like power lines, bringing power from the station to the places where it needs to go.

The same thing applies today. The apostle Paul talks about how God provides generously for us so that we can share with others. Jesus never kept any of the blessings from God He enjoyed to Himself. He was constantly extending those blessings to the people around Him. He calls and expects us to do the same. Followers of Jesus should be the first to give from what is theirs for the sake of someone else. In fact, followers of Jesus typically are willing to do this. Religious people (and especially Christians) are statistically the most generous people and it’s really not very close. The idea of building social welfare into a particular society is a Christian one. This is because we understand (when we are thinking rightly) that God’s blessings are never merely for us. They are for us to extend to others so that more people can taste and see that the Lord is good. Let us be a blessing people just like God intends for us to be.