Here, then, we have the special feature of the Lord's land. He would have it to enjoy a sabbatic year, and in that year there was to be the evidence of the rich profusion with which He would bless those who held as tenants under Him. Happy, highly privileged tenantry! What an honor to hold immediately under Jehovah! No rent! no taxes! no burdens! Well might it be said, "Happy is the people that is in such a case; yea, happy is the nation whose God is Jehovah." We know, alas! that Israel failed to take full possession of that wealthy land of which Jehovah made them a present. He had given it _all_; He had given it _forever_. They took but _a part_, and that _for a time_. Still, there it is. The property is there, though the tenants are ejected for the present. "The land shall not be sold _forever_: for _the land is Mine_; for ye are strangers and sojourners _with Me_." What does this mean, but that Canaan belongs specially to Jehovah, and that He will hold it through the tribes of Israel? True, "the earth is the Lord's," but that is quite another thing. It is plain that He has been pleased, for His own unsearchable purposes, to take special possession of the land of Canaan, and to submit that land to a peculiar line of treatment, to mark it off from all other lands, by calling it His own, and to distinguish it by judgments and ordinances and periodical solemnities, the mere contemplation of which enlightens the understanding and affects the heart. Where, throughout all the earth, do we read of a land enjoying a year of unbroken repose--a year of richest abundance? The rationalist may ask, How can these things be? the skeptic may doubt if they could be; but faith finds a satisfying answer from the lips of Jehovah--"And if ye shall say, What shall we eat the seventh year? behold, we shall not sow, nor gather in our increase: then I will command My blessing upon you in the sixth year, and it shall bring forth fruit for three years. And ye shall sow the eighth year, and eat yet of old fruit until the ninth year; until her fruits come in ye shall eat of the old store." (Ver. 20-22.) Nature might say, What shall we do for _our sowing_? God's answer is, "I will command _My blessing_." God's "blessing" is better far than man's "sowing." He was not going to let them starve in His sabbatic year. They were to feed upon the fruits of His blessing, while they celebrated His year of rest--a year which pointed forward to that eternal Sabbath that remains for the people of God.
"And thou shalt number seven Sabbaths of years unto thee, seven times seven years; and the space of the seven Sabbaths of years shall be unto thee forty and nine years. Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the jubilee to sound on the tenth day of the seventh month; in the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout all your land." (Ver. 8, 9.) It is peculiarly interesting to note the various methods in which the millennial rest was held up to view in the Jewish economy. Every seventh day was a sabbatic day; every seventh year was a sabbatic year; and every seven times seven years there was a jubilee. Each and all of these typical solemnities held up to the vision of faith the blessed prospect of a time when labor and sorrow should cease; when "the sweat of the brow" would no longer be needed to satisfy the cravings of hunger; but when a millennial earth enriched by the copious showers of divine grace, and fertilized by the bright beams of the Sun of righteousness, should pour its abundance into the storehouse and wine-press of the people of God. Happy time! happy people! How blessed to be assured that these things are not the pencilings of imagination or the flights of fancy, but the substantial verities of divine revelation, to be enjoyed by faith, which is "the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."
Of all the Jewish solemnities the jubilee would seem to have been the most soul-stirring and enrapturing. It stood immediately connected with the great day of atonement. It was when the blood of the victim was shed that the emancipating sound of the jubilee trump was heard through the hills and valleys of the land of Canaan. That longed-for note was designed to wake up the nation from the very centre of its moral being--to stir the deepest depths of the soul, and to send a shining river of divine and ineffable joy through the length and breadth of the land. "In the day of atonement shall ye make the trumpet sound throughout _all_ your land." Not a corner was to remain unvisited by "the joyful sound." The aspect of the jubilee was as wide as the aspect of the atonement on which the jubilee was based.