Leviticus 25:17 Ye shall not therefore oppress one another; but thou shalt fear thy God: for I am the LORD your God.
So, who owns what? In my house I have two sons. Both of them are getting older, and so when my laundry gets done every week, we have this huge pile of socks. Everyone is wondering which socks belong to the youngest, which socks belong to the middle, and which socks belong to their dad. It is kind of hard to tell. That is why there are probably more than a few possessions in your life that you have marked or branded in some way so people know that they belong to you. An important question is, “Who owns what?”
When God’s people Israel were in the wilderness coming into Canaan, “Who owns what?” was a relevant question. Who owned the property, possessions, and so on? Leviticus 25 is in part to help negotiate that and to make their mindset clear. In Leviticus 25:10 God says, “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubile unto you: and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.”
What follows are instructions about the year of jubilee. Now, we are not going to get into that, however, there is a general ethic that comes out of God’s words here that applied to Israel and applies to you today. The thing to learn is how you treat what you have depends who you believe to own it.
For instance, verse 17 says, “Ye shall not therefore oppress one another, but thou shalt fear thy God: for I am the LORD your God.” The people of Israel were not to oppress one another in buying or selling. Why? It wasn’t merely out of deference for the other person; it was out of respect to who God is. God had brought them out of slavery, bondage, and Egypt. Who were they to treat a brother or sister as if they were inferior or as if God did not love them as much? So, who owns what? The answer is that God owns everything. That is a mindset.
Verse 23 says, “The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me.” So, when it came to their view of the land of Canaan, it wasn’t the Canaanites to give and it wasn’t the Israelites to take. It was God’s. It still is God’s, and it is God Who gave that land.
Verses 35-37 say, “If thy brother be waxen poor…take thou no usury of him, or increase, but fear thy God…I am the LORD your God, which brought you forth out of the land of Egypt, to give you the land of Canaan, and to be your God.” If I think others own something and I take God out of the equation, then I will become jealous of anyone who has something I do not have. That really characterizes so much of what we see today politically and socially.
If you think everything is yours, then it tends toward possessiveness and greed. You act like everything is yours, so you are always monitoring, saying, “Hey, that’s mine. Hey, that’s mine!” That is no way to live. If I realize that God owns everything, it is not just about being a good sport; it is about being a good steward. It is about realizing that if something does belong to me, it has been placed in my hands as a stewardship of God. If something is in someone else’s hands, then I need to respect that as a stewardship of God to them.
The bottom line is that life is so much better and I can feel so much more at ease when I thank God for everything I have and treat it as if it is a stewardship of God, because indeed it is.