Grafted In
The land, moreover, shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are but aliens and sojourners with Me. Leviticus 25:23
Aliens and Sojourners – All of God’s children are adopted. It doesn’t make any difference if you are Jew or Gentile. All of God’s children become His because He adopts them. That was just as true for Abraham and Moses and those who left Egypt as it is for us today. We are all grafted in. The only difference is that some of us were grafted in before others. But from God’s perspective, we (Jew and Gentile) depend on His gracious act in order to be included in His Kingdom.
The terms for alien and sojourners are gerim and toshavim. Literally, you are outsiders and temporary visitors. Why? Because the land belongs to God. The whole earth belongs to God, so our status as residents on the earth depends entirely on Him. It will always belong to Him. At no time will we ever be owners. We are the servants of the King, not the employees in management training. We don’t hold stock options on heaven – or on earth. We don’t get shares. We can’t negotiate terms of purchase – or even terms of lease. We are here only because we were invited.
Sometimes it’s important to be reminded about ownership. God owns it all. We simply manage it for Him for the time being. Ethnic background, spiritual condition, theological declaration or creedal beliefs don’t change anything. We are stewards of His possessions.
This has profound implications for my life. I will be held accountable for my treatment of God’s property. And the standards of my accountability are not determined by me. Perhaps we need to read the Beatitudes again, but this time with an eye toward God’s measurements of proper stewardship. Maybe it would do us well to go through our lists of possessions and ask if they meet God’s stewardship standards. Maybe what’s on the list needs to change too.
Gerim and toshavim are invited into the Kingdom, but they come on the King’s terms. Perhaps we need to read the Bible as if it were a conditional temporary occupation agreement. Yeshua has a lot to say about that kind of contract in His parables. I wonder if we aren’t guilty of thinking that we own what God loans.
Topical Index: ownership, aliens, sojourners, gerim, toshavim, Leviticus 25:23
Shalom,
Skip … no disagreement on your commentary … while our stewardship role remains in place.
Leviticus: 20,22 Ye shall therefore keep all My statutes, and all Mine ordinances, and do them, that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, vomit you not out. 20,23 And ye shall not walk in the customs of the nation, which I am casting out before you; for they did all these things, and therefore I abhorred them. 20,24 But I have said unto you: ‘Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land flowing with milk and honey.’ I am the LORD your God, who have set you apart from the peoples.
Clearly Israel’s place in the land is contingent upon some degree of compliance and The Lord’s mercy.
But perhaps some additional discussion around the land is in order … discussion as to when a stewardship role may end and ownership may come into being?
Genesis: 17,8 And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land of thy sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.’
Genesis: 48,4 and said unto me: Behold, I will make thee fruitful, and multiply thee, and I will make of thee a company of peoples; and will give this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession.
OK … so we see declarations/promises about an “everlasting possession” and we see declarations about “temporary possession”!
I think it is important to point out that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob (sojourners/tent dwellers) were personally promised “the land of possession” (And their seed and of course the strangers that are grafted in). …. As such the temporal land allocation is but a shadow of the possession to come. It can not be otherwise … for the land itself is “temporary”!
When we however are made “incorruptible” and all things are created “a new” … I do not think that we can rule out possession as a permanent share in Mashiach’s Glory! The we are talking about the grand Yovel/Jubilee …. talk about a restoration! 🙂
Ah Skip, what a great article and thoughts.
We are all God’s children, but not all of us will spend eternity with him; some will spend eternity separatedfrom Him. The whole land (earth) belongs to him for he made it.
You make the statement that “we simply manage it (the land or earth) for Him for the time being.” He really does not need any managers for the earth was doing quite well under His managementship prior to humans being made: especially prior to our mixing of various chemicals and trying to destroy what has been so graciously provided for us.
We can only be good “stewards of His possessions.”
“Stewardship” is so key here. Yes, another affirmation and amen! (“An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so.”-lol! ) We are not “owners” -we are steward’s of the King. “The earth is the LORD’s and the fulness thereof- the world and they who dwell therein.” It “all” belongs to Him and we are part of the “all!”.
Concerning stewardship, (which is where I come from, a “big-dot deal”),- what are we doing (today) with what YHWH has entrusted unto us? How are we blessing others with what YHWH (the Giver) has given unto us? Are we practicing generosity and compassion toward others? Has G-d been good to us? Are we living our lives with “the open hand?”, receiving- in order to give unto others?
How am I using what G-d has given unto me to be a blessing to someone in need?
I really do like the plan our pastor has for our local church. He call’s us to be an “inside-out” church. It is not about “kingdom-gathering”, but rather “kingdom-giving.” How may we give ourselves away to our local community and to the world? He will actually announce “I need two hundred of you to go and support this church over here.” There are no resources “off-base.” Church members/ staff members – all are fair game for the great “giveaway!”
When we (finally) come to the realization- “He owns it all”- the telescopic and the microscopic, what a difference it makes in our approach to living.
“How may I serve you?”
Great site Skip! – what a truly wonderful “suplise” to find it .
As an environmental risk analyst, I have been running a blog called Think Hebrew ( http://thinkhebrew.blogspot.com) for years . As a production ecologist, I also blog regularly on conservation and economy ( ecomia.blogspot.com ) but the hebrew one is my current favourite . (Love any keen correspondents to join in )
I found you looking for the Hebrew word for “ownership “. ( Google) I am writing a paper for ISCAST Australia in October titled ” Scarcity or Abundance “- and I was looking for a few more clues from the OT on the subject of ownership, which is my theme. I already had Elijah speaking well on the subject. Great fellowship over the words gentlemen !
Comments so far on this subject highlight an ongoing but critical failure of the Christian church to fully own ownership imperatives and let them balance the popular preoccupation with stewardship .
Part of the problem is the infiltration of sub scriptural and sub scientific ideas into believers thinking– the dominant Christian heresies ( Schaeffer) which surround us with their noise every day make us less effective in drawing people towards the wonder of God’s work in the world.
Good word Skip.
What does Shmita, the Sabbatical year, have to do with Mt. Sinai? מה עניין שמיטה אצל הר סיני
This question was famously asked by one of the oldest midrashim, Sifra (Behar 1) and it has been pondered over for centuries. The question arises from the way the portion about the Sabbatical year is introduced in the Torah: “YHVH spoke to Moshe in Mount Sinai saying: Speak to Israel’s children and say unto them: When you come to the land which I give you, the land will rest, a shabbat for YHVH…In the seventh year, it will be the Sabbath of sabbaths for the land, a Sabbath for YHVH.” (Lev. 25:2-4) If all the commandments were given at Sinai, the midrash wonders, why is Mt. Sinai only mentioned here?
And the answer that we can give today is deceptively simple: the whole purpose of the covenant at Sinai is to create a society that observed Shmita. It is in a land where Shmita is observed that human beings will learn to respect the Earth herself, by remembering that none of us can own her. “For the land is mine,” God declares, “and you are strangers and settlers with me.” (Lev. 25:23)
And if none of us can own the land, cannot sell it and buy it, then what we do own is ultimately not ours, then the difference between rich and poor is not “just the way things are,” then a person cannot be owned and the difference between slave and master is not real and not loved by God. In the Sabbatical year debts are canceled, and the land is ownerless. In the seventh sabbatical year, the Jubilee, all slaves are freed (including those who did not exercise their right to go free after the sixth year of their own service) and eery family returns to its achuzato, its original landholding, becoming equal to every other family.
Only in such a society, where “property” does not designate the right to use up what one owns, but rather a kind of fleeting relationship to what one cares for, can people learn the true meaning of justice. Only in such a society can people learn to share their wealth, nurture the poor alongside everyone else, relieve debts, end hunger, and respect the fundamental human right to be free. The Sabbatical year was the guarantor and the ultimate fulfillment of the justice that Torah teaches us to practice in everyday life, and it was a justice that embraced not just fellow human beings, but the land and all life. The Sabbatical year was the ultimate meaning of rest, which we practice every week in the observance of shabbat. It was the Sabbath of sabbaths, Shabbat shabbaton.
After telling us outright that Sinai is about Shmita, the Torah also gives us other pointers to Shmita’s ultimate significance. Failure to let the land rest is one of only two mitzvot that are described as being the cause of exile from the land (the other being idolatry), while the purpose of exile itself is described as a way to force human beings to let the Earth rest. If we do not observe Shmita, still “the land will enjoy her Sabbaths…All the days of her being emptied she will rest what she didn’t rest during your Sabbaths, when you were dwelling on her.” (Lev. 26:34) The Torah is clear: It is possible for us to have shabbat without giving the land rest, but doing shabbat just for ourselves, even just for God, is not enough. Exile happens because the land’s right to rest comes before our rest.
There’s another clue to the importance of Shmita, a more subtle one. During the Shmita year, we are commanded to let the wild animals eat freely from our fields. “The shabbat of the land (what the land grows while it is resting) will be for you for eating: for you and for your servants and hired-workers and for your settler living as a stranger with you, and for your beast, and for the wild animal which is in your land, all of her produce will be for eating.” (Lev. 25:6-7) The rabbis further expanded the meaning of this law, so that everyone was required to leave any gates to their fields open, and one could not eat in one’s house food that was not also growing in the fields—in other words, so that human beings and wild (and domestic) animals were eating the same food.
Think about the only other time when humans and all the animals ate alongside each other in peace according to the Torah. When, and where, did it happen? It was in the Garden of Eden, before so many tragedies befell humanity. Before the flood. Before the relationship between humans and animals was torn asunder; before humans exiled themselves from the Earth. After the flood, the animals live in mortal terror of human beings. After the flood, God makes a covenant—not with the human beings, but with all the animals—a covenant to not destroy the Earth because of humanity.
It is the Sinai covenant which is meant to bring back into harmony a world twisted by human greed and violence. It is the Sinai covenant that is meant to restore the fellowship of human and animal, and to reorder our values, so that the well-being of the land and the community of life takes precedence over our own perceived needs. This is what it means to “choose life so you may live, you and your seed after you.” (Deut. 30:19) This is what it means to “increase your days and your children’s days on the ground for as long as the skies are over the land.” (Deut. 11:21)
In modern parlance we call it “sustainability,” but that’s just today’s buzzword. It’s called Shmita in the holy tongue, “release”—releasing each other from debts, releasing the land from work, releasing ourselves from our illusions of selfhood into the freedom of living with others and living for the sake of all life.
How is it, then, that our generation is the one that can answer the question, “Mah inyan Shmita etzel Har Sinai? How does Shmita emanate from Mt. Sinai?” It is because it is only now, when we see that human beings can really “ruin My world” and that there may be “no one who will come after you to repair it,” (Kohelet Rabbah 7:13) only now can we understand what Shmita means. Only now can we see that the meaning of Mt. Sinai is Shmita. May it be Hashem’s will that we are seeing this in time to fulfill the vision, to “proclaim liberty throughout the land unto all her inhabitants,” (Lev. 25:10) to all those souls traveling together with us on this planet.
Amen!