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Daily Devotion | Leviticus 25:1–17 | 2026 March 24
Title: Daily Devotion | Leviticus 25:1–17 | 2026 March 24
Scripture: Leviticus 25:1–17 (ESV, reference only)
Date: 2026 March 24
Speaker: Rev. John Chen
Transcribed, translated & edited by: Joseph Wang (Yufan)
Dear brothers and sisters, peace be with you all. We thank God for His grace that we have come to a new day to study the daily spiritual food together.
The passage we are studying today is Leviticus chapter 25, verses 1 through 17. Let us pray.
God, we thank You. We thank You that You are willing to treat us with such grace and mercy. Lord, You have set the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee before us. Have mercy on us, so that in the ordinances of this Sabbath year we may come to understand and know You more deeply. May You be with us. In Christ’s name, Amen.
Alright, thanks be to the Lord. We come now to Leviticus chapter 25.
Chapter 25 is a bit longer today. There are many statutes and ordinances here. We will first look at two of them: the Sabbath year and the Year of Jubilee. For us Christians, actually, we are not very familiar with these. As far as I know, some Christians, even after believing for several years, still do not know that there are regulations in the Bible concerning the Sabbath year and the Jubilee, because probably when people preach, they usually do not speak about the Sabbath year and the Jubilee.
So we thank the Lord that today we have come to this passage, and we will look carefully at what God’s meaning is in it. First, let us talk about the Sabbath year. What is the Sabbath year? It is this: the LORD spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and said, Speak to the people of Israel: when you come into the land that I give you, the land shall keep a Sabbath to the LORD. For six years you shall sow and gather its produce, but in the seventh year there shall be a solemn rest for the land. Then you shall not sow your field, and you shall not prune your vineyard. What grows of itself from what is left you shall not reap, and from the unpruned vines you shall not gather grapes. That is to say, you are not to do these things.
Then the land shall enjoy a holy Sabbath. What, then, is to be done with the produce that comes out of the land in the Sabbath year? It is to be food for you, for your male servant, your female servant, your hired worker, and the sojourner who lives with you. That is, this may be eaten. It is not that it is passed on to outsiders in the sense of being alienated from you. You may eat it, but this food must be shared. You and your male servant, female servant, and hired worker may all eat it. It does not belong only to you.
During the six years, when you reap, you have already been told not to reap the corners of your field completely, right? You are not to reap the field bare. Then in the Sabbath year you must not do that kind of thing either. And as for the food gathered in those six years, of course you could manage that yourself, right? You could reap however much you wanted and sell however much you wanted. That property was under your own control. But the produce of the Sabbath year could not be handled by you alone. You needed to share it. It all had to be distributed for others to eat. And the produce was also to be food for your cattle and for the beasts in the field. That is, in that year, if livestock or wild animals came into your field to eat, you had to let them eat. You could not drive them away. If wild beasts came, you could not chase them off. You had to let them eat.
Alright, that is roughly what the regulation says. Then what is the meaning of this regulation? This is something we need to think about again and again. In fact, when we spoke earlier about the regulation of the Sabbath day, we also mentioned the meaning of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath day everything is to stop; you are not to do anything.
Actually, in the statutes and ordinances God gave to Israel, arrangements like the Sabbath day, the Sabbath year, and the Jubilee are full of wisdom. Why is that? Because through commanding people to rest by force, God is telling Israel this: everything you have is actually from Me; it is not something you gained by your own labor. Therefore, for a period of time, you must stop—one day—and enjoy the rest that comes from Me. This is one of the meanings of the Sabbath day. We have said before that the Sabbath has many meanings, but this is at least one of them: you must stop and acknowledge that everything you have is what I have given you.
On that day, the Israelites were to read Scripture, pray, draw near to God, and praise God, thereby showing that they were God’s people and that they would keep God’s statutes and ordinances.
Then when it comes to the Sabbath year, it is simply an enlargement of this into a whole year. That is the Sabbath year. After laboring for six years, you are to rest for one year. During that year, you still do the things that are done on the Sabbath day: reading Scripture, praying, seeking God, and not laboring for your livelihood.
Then in the later parts of Scripture, we basically cannot find the Israelites keeping the ordinance of the Sabbath year anymore, and as for the Jubilee, that is even more so.
Why can we no longer find this ordinance? What is so difficult about it? In fact, brothers and sisters, what is hardest for people is rest. When you are laboring and working, and then out of seven days you must stop for one day, the truth is that a person cannot stop. Although when God created man, He intended that if man rested one day out of seven, man would be more comfortable, yet you know that man likes to work without sleep and without rest, with the aim of obtaining the wealth, power, status, and reputation of this world. This is what the people of the world do.
So after the Israelites entered the land of Canaan, God required them to keep the Sabbath day. Out of every seven days they had to set apart one day to keep the Sabbath. Now it is the Lord’s Day. And you find that it is difficult to keep the Lord’s Day, right? Someone says, “I’ve kept it, haven’t I? I attended a gathering for one or two hours in the morning, and that should count.” But if you are to keep a whole day of worship, you find that it is very difficult. You have many things, and you find they keep wrapping themselves around you, right? You have to take your children out to play; your children have homework; there are tutoring classes; you yourself have your own plans; you want to go out and have some fun; you want to relax. Now, I am not saying these things are entirely unreasonable. But I must tell you that on the Sabbath, they are unreasonable.
They are unreasonable. Why? Because on the Sabbath you are to keep the Sabbath. If the sun is shining brightly outside and you feel that you need to go traveling, or go out and have fun, these things need to be set aside. On this day, you are to come and worship God. So you find that it is very hard to stop.
Of course, there are even more serious cases. You still want to go meet clients, do business, buy and sell. That is an even clearer case of being unable to stop. But what is interesting is that in the statutes and ordinances God gave to Israel, He not only established the Sabbath day, He also established many feasts, right? The feasts of Israel seem to be many. And then all of a sudden, here comes the Sabbath year and the Jubilee year. In that whole year you cannot do these things. You must obey God’s statutes and ordinances. You must study well, right? And then you must disperse all these things. So for the Israelites, this was a very difficult matter.
And so later on, indeed, you rarely see this. At least as far as I remember, I do not remember seeing again anywhere in the Bible that they were keeping the Sabbath year. Keeping the Passover, yes—going year by year to keep the feasts, that is there. But the Sabbath year is not there. Of course, one issue is that perhaps they could no longer calculate which year was the Sabbath year, right? It should have been counted from the first year after entering Canaan, right? And then how exactly was it to be calculated? Perhaps they could not calculate it clearly, and so they simply stopped observing it.
But what is the main point? The main point is that everyone had already lost the very concept of the Sabbath year. We human beings do not want rest. We always want to keep doing, keep taking, keep obtaining all the things that our labor has earned, yet we never think that all these things are actually God’s gifts. We should, in this way, give thanks to God.
At the same time, what the Sabbath year points to is that rest in heaven. So God wanted Israel to stop. In every seven years, they were to stop for one whole year. For what purpose? To think about the things of the kingdom of heaven. He wanted them to know that what they were hoping for was that real and true rest.
In that rest, in fact, is our hope. There we may lay down all the toil of earth, and in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ enjoy the presence of God. This is what the Sabbath year points to.
Alright, next we need to look at the Jubilee. This ordinance is even more unfamiliar to everyone. It refers to seven sevens of years, and then on the tenth day of the seventh month of the forty-ninth year there is the loud sound of the trumpet on the Day of Atonement. Then the fiftieth year—from this Day of Atonement to the next Day of Atonement—what is to happen in that year? It is to be made a holy year, proclaimed to all the inhabitants as liberty. This year shall be a Jubilee for you, and each person shall return to his own property.
What does that mean? It means that when the Israelites entered Canaan, was not the land divided among them? Right? Each person had a piece of land, distributed according to clans and families. Fine. But over the long course of history, you know that some people may have been better at managing things, while others may have been lazier, or may have had sickness in their bodies, or whatever the case may be. And then there would be the matter of land consolidation. This, throughout all the dynasties in China as well, has never been absent, right?
In theory, suppose I have one field and you have one field, right? Then everyone goes and cultivates it properly. In theory, there should be no problem. But you know that many things can happen within fifty years, right? For example, a person may become sick, or the family may have no descendants, and then the land has to be sold. Selling land is a very normal kind of action. If you read Chinese history books, you will also discover that the transfer of land and the annexation of land have always been major reasons for dynastic change.
And that is still the better situation. The more terrible situation is when there are family problems, and beyond that there is outright seizing—clever manipulation and violent plundering, right? A piece of land must be assigned to me. People use power and violence to seize land. This is even more common as a phenomenon.
Then what about among the Israelites? Such things may also have happened among them, though perhaps not so obviously. But in the law one rule was laid down: in the fiftieth year, you must return every property to its owner, each one to his family inheritance. As for the matter of having no descendants, in ancient times, when people usually had many children, that probably would not have been very common. Today the government may compel people to have only one son or one daughter, but in ancient times that did not exist. Generally people had seven or eight children. That was common. And the biggest problem for people at that time was that the land was not enough; there was not enough to divide. So perhaps the second son would be driven away and only the eldest legitimate son would inherit. Things like that—this was a big problem.
But no matter what, at the fiftieth year the land had to return to its own inheritance, each one to his own family. And in that year likewise, the land was not to be sown or reaped. In the Jubilee year, whatever came from the field by itself was to be left so. Then verse 13 says that in the Jubilee each of you shall return to his property. And if you sell anything to your neighbor, or buy from your neighbor, you shall not wrong one another. You shall not wrong one another. What does that mean? It means that you are to buy from your neighbor according to the number of years after the Jubilee, and he is to sell to you according to the number of years for crops. If the years are many, then you shall increase the price accordingly; if the years are few, then you shall reduce the price accordingly, because he is selling to you according to the number of harvests. You shall not wrong one another.
So what does this mean? It means that I calculate according to the fiftieth year. Suppose this land now has forty-five years of use remaining before the Jubilee. Then I can buy this right of use. But if the period has already run down to twenty-five years, then I can only pay you the price for twenty-five years. If there are only ten years left, then I can only pay you for ten years. The price of the same piece of land is not the same. Why is the price different? Because the closer it is to the Jubilee, I know that when the Jubilee comes I must return it to you. I cannot permanently purchase it. It is not something that can be sold away forever.
Someone may say, “When the Jubilee comes, I do not want it back. Since you have money, just give me a little more money.” No, that is not allowed. I say, the rule is like this. The rule is like this. And so you pay according to that rule. After he takes the money—say it is for five years—then when the Jubilee comes, you return the land to him.
Then when the Jubilee comes, you return the land to him. This was an ordinance among the Israelites. So brothers and sisters, pay attention here. Of course, there are more ordinances afterward, for example about lending money and things like that, and we will talk about those tomorrow.
But in summary, with respect to the buying and selling of fields, this was actually restricted among the Israelites. You can see that clearly. What does that mean? It means that land annexation and land expansion were forbidden by God in the law. Each person could only possess his own land. You were not allowed to annex another person’s land, and even less were you allowed to seize another person’s land by force. If you seized it, or if you forcibly bought it, then at the fiftieth year you had to return it to the other person. This is the regulation of the Jubilee.
But in the later Scriptures, likewise, we almost no longer see any record concerning the Jubilee.
This year was to be a year of joy and gladness. In this year, each person had his own inheritance restored to him. Everyone again possessed his own inheritance. It was like starting over. It was equal to reshuffling everything once every fifty years. During those fifty years, no matter whether what you gained was obtained through clever scheming, through forceful seizure, or through the money you earned—none of that mattered at that point. You still had to return it to the other person. You were not allowed to keep doing that.
You only had the right of use for fifty years. Now in China, the right to use a house is seventy years. As for what will happen after seventy years, that still is not clear. But among the Israelites, it was only fifty years. That is, with respect to the ownership of the land, at the end of those fifty years, whoever that land originally belonged to, it had to be returned to him. You were not allowed to occupy it permanently.
Now in actual operation, this was in fact a very difficult matter. We know that later we no longer see the regulation of the Jubilee, because the Jubilee was an even more complicated system. It was more complicated than the Sabbath year. The first issue was the matter of calculating the time. I already mentioned that. Later it disappeared, perhaps because people could no longer calculate clearly which year it was, or perhaps because some people deliberately chose not to calculate which year it was. In any case, this year was supposed to be a day, or rather a season, of release and freedom, yet people found it very hard to accept.
And where was the difficulty? The main difficulty was that those who had power and who possessed more land were unwilling to return it. Right? They would say, “Why should I return it to you? This is what I earned.” Right? “And then when the fiftieth year comes, I have to give it back to you?” In theory, when you bought it, you should have bought it more cheaply, right? Because there was not much time left. Since it was close to the fiftieth year, you were supposed to return it to the other person. But in actual circumstances, what happened? The rich simply no longer returned things to the poor, and the poor had no strength to demand them back from the rich. So society kept remaining in this unbalanced state.
If we really return to the institution of the Jubilee, you will discover that social wealth would once again be leveled out in a certain sense, right? Because land was the greatest wealth of the ancient world. When land returned to its original owner, one result followed: the redistribution of society’s wealth. You no longer possessed that land. Whether you used the land to build a factory, or to build a villa, or whatever you built on it—none of that would belong to you anymore. Whatever you built would become mine.
If you built a house on my property, on my land, then after fifty years that house would be mine, because the Jubilee had come. So in economic terms, the Jubilee was a very unique institution. It was, in a sense, a resetting of rich and poor, a return to the original state.
Then politically speaking, it obviously required that the powerful could no longer oppress the poor. The interests of the poor had to be protected. So you can imagine why, in Israel’s history, you can no longer find the Jubilee. Because no one was willing anymore to practice this ordinance. The rules are made by the strong, and the strong were unwilling to keep the Jubilee, so the Jubilee simply disappeared.
But why did God establish the Jubilee? Because God wanted Israel to know that they were to love one another. They were not to use earthly wealth as the occasion for clever grasping and violent taking. This is exactly one of the reasons for the ordinances of the Jubilee and the Sabbath year. So the Sabbath year and the Jubilee, in the form of law, were a kind of compulsory requirement laid on this nation.
They required this nation to carry out a redistribution of property that conformed to God’s heart, and to care for the weak. It was done in the form of law. Of course, we know that this legal form did not finally produce its intended effect. Although God repeatedly required them to obey His statutes and ordinances, they still refused to listen. Why? Because the evil in the human heart always wants to keep expanding its own territory. And after enough time passes—fifty years, right?—the whole nation can no longer tell whose land originally belonged to whom.
In fact, it should have been possible to know, because there ought to have been title deeds, right? But the powerful, intentionally, would erase these deeds. And once you can no longer tell clearly, then they can permanently occupy the land.
So through this matter of returning land in the Jubilee, God wanted to tell the Israelites this: in the final analysis, “you shall fear your God, for I am the LORD your God.” The land belongs to God. In the end, the land is God’s. It is not yours, and it is not the possession of those powerful men. That is what God wanted to express.
And that means that for the Israelites, they were to depend wholly on God in finances, in economics, and in matters of power. And this, precisely, was God’s purpose in bringing them into the land of Canaan. In Canaan, they were to live out the image of a completely different nation. They were to love one another. They were not to wrong one another. And through the institution of the Jubilee, they were to care for the needs of others and bring forth a civilization marked by mutual love.
This was the purpose God intended to accomplish through these compulsory legal institutions of the Sabbath year and the Jubilee: that they would live in a way different from everyone else. Other nations practiced land annexation, land expansion, and the strong overpowering the weak. The nobles and the powerful oppressed the common people. But here, God used law to stipulate that you were not allowed to oppress another person for fifty years and then still keep what was his. When the appointed time came, you had to return it.
So from the perspective of the Jubilee institution, it points even more to the civilization of the kingdom of heaven. In heaven there will not be such things. That is what God was pointing to.
So later, why does the book of Revelation speak of a “thousand years”? In that thousand-year Jubilee, it seems as though everyone is equal. But in fact, regarding this millennium, we know—when we studied Revelation, we already explained this passage—that there is not some literal thousand-year earthly Jubilee. Rather, it refers to this gospel age, this “thousand-year Jubilee,” in which God’s people may receive the gospel, understand the gospel, and enter into that beautiful heavenly kingdom.
So I think that as we study these ordinances of the Sabbath year and the Jubilee today, they enable us to think more deeply about God’s attributes. God’s requirement for us is that we should rest. He does not want us to keep fixing our eyes and our attention on earthly labor. Rather, He wants us truly to turn our gaze toward Him, to keep this Sabbath rest, and to let God’s name be glorified in us.
When a nation actually keeps the Sabbath year, the Gentiles will look at that nation and say, “Why do these people keep the Sabbath year?” Because they depend on God’s provision. They obey God’s will. They care for the poor according to God’s command. This becomes a very good sign, telling people that what they rely on is not their own labor.
And then when the Jubilee comes, all property is redistributed and returns to its original state, causing each person to sense fairness and justice. Why? Because they come from the same forefather. Originally they were brothers. The twelve tribes originally came from twelve brothers. They were to learn to love one another, not to bully one another, and to share with others what they themselves had received.
So what this institution points to is a civilization of mutual love. It comes from heaven. It requires this nation not to imitate this world any longer. In this world, people hate one another, and the strong bully the weak. But here, each person is simply to receive what God has given him, and then to help others and to show kindness to others.
So the institution of the Jubilee reminds us once again that everything we have comes from God. The Jubilee tells us that we must depend on God. What we hope for is not an earthly kingdom, but that eternal heavenly home.
Of course, in practical execution, the Jubilee was never really carried out later on, and there would have been many practical problems in the actual administration of it. For example, after land had been divided, if a clan had many people and many sons and daughters, then how would the land be divided? This would involve many practical operational difficulties if one were to restore the institution of the Jubilee.
But I think the point is not that we must literally restore the Jubilee system. The point is that Israel never really understood why God established the Jubilee. Perhaps the land that belonged to you could no longer be found, because there had been war, and others had taken it away, and no one knew whose it originally was. But the spirit of the matter still remained.
That is, you are to care for what belongs to others. You are to know that what you possess belongs to God. You need to know how, in such a position, you ought to glorify God. That is the purpose you should fulfill. And this too is what the Jubilee points to.
May God lead us, through ordinances like the Sabbath year and the Jubilee, to understand His mind more deeply. Let us not covet earthly enjoyment for ourselves, but set our eyes on that new heaven and new earth. Let us no longer heap up treasure for ourselves in this present life, but long for that eternal heavenly home.
Alright, our sharing today will stop simply here. Thank you, everyone.
透过安息年和禧年，神对以色列人有两个要求：守安息来敬拜神，和彼此相爱。但以色列人几乎没有遵守过。基督徒常常不守安息，把特定的时间专门留出来敬拜神，也不停下手头的工作，是因为我们对神的供应和应许还不够有信心。我们也需要操练彼此相爱，存怜悯的心。 Through the Sabbatical Year and the Year of Jubilee, God had two requirements for the Israelites: observe the Sabbath to worship God, and love one another. Yet the Israelites ha… Read more
透过安息年和禧年，神对以色列人有两个要求：守安息来敬拜神，和彼此相爱。但以色列人几乎没有遵守过。基督徒常常不守安息，把特定的时间专门留出来敬拜神，也不停下手头的工作，是因为我们对神的供应和应许还不够有信心。我们也需要操练彼此相爱，存怜悯的心。
Through the Sabbatical Year and the Year of Jubilee, God had two requirements for the Israelites: observe the Sabbath to worship God, and love one another. Yet the Israelites hardly ever obeyed them. Christians often fail to keep the Sabbath—setting aside specific time to worship God and ceasing from their work—because we lack faith in God’s provision and promises, and instead focus our pursuits on earthly rather than heavenly treasures. We also need to practice loving one another, cultivating a heart of compassion.
I have read the Bible and listened to the Daily Devotion.
很好。