Human Imperfection, Teboho Kibe [read a book .txt] 📗

according to tradition, after which the land could be peacefully worked and the Jubilee system begin to count. So the land was a God-given land, and Jehovah had a right to dictate how it should be used. All the earth is his creation. He made provision, no, not for great land barons to hog the land and crowd the common people into the cities, but for every family to have a fair-sized piece of land which was to continue in that family from generation to generation. Not even the king could legally take away this ancestral inheritance from a family. One king tried to do it by underhand means and Jehovah God had him executed for it.

God promised the Israelites that if they kept his law there would be no poor in the land. (Deut. 15:4) But God foresaw that because of sin, imperfection and selfishness in this world many Israelites would become poor, whereas some would become rich and would selfishly want to hold onto their riches at the expense of their fellow Israelites. So he added these words: “The poor will never cease to be in your land; that is why I am commanding you to open wide your hand to your poor and needy fellow-countryman in your land.” (Deut. 15:7-11, AT) To meet their expenses some Israelites would become obliged to sell part of their ancestral land or even all of it and thus for the time become landless. Others would have to sell members of their families or sell even themselves to be slaves to their fellow Israelites or to foreigners in the Promised Land. If a relative was not able to buy back his land for him or to settle his debt and procure his release, or if meantime he did not acquire the means to secure these benefits for himself, then the Jubilee year held out bright hope for him.

The Jubilee year was one of release, of liberation. It took care of all these unfortunate developments, for in that year all such Israelite slaves were to be set free. All ancestral estates that had been sold were to be returned to the rightful owners, and families were to be reunited. As for the land itself, the Jubilee was a year of rest for it. Every seventh year was a sabbath year for the land, when it must lie fallow. The forty-ninth year was thus a sabbath year, but in addition to that the fiftieth year was also a sabbath year for the land, so that it got an extra year to revitalize itself. What grew of itself could be eaten, but it must not be harvested and stored up. Thus not only did the Israelites have a chance to recuperate materially and start out on a new basis, in possession of property and on a level with their fellows, but also the land had an opportunity to build up its productive strength again. By God’s blessing for their faithfulness the forty-eighth year would have yielded such a rich harvest that it would provide food for three successive years, till they reaped the crops they sowed the next year after the Jubilee.

Because of what this wise and loving provision foreshadowed for all mankind’s future, God took this sabbath-year and Jubilee-year arrangement seriously. For improperly keeping these sabbath years he punished the Israelites by exiling them that the God-given land might rest for seventy years while the disobedient Israelites were captives in the land of Babylon. They had sold themselves into this captivity by their sin against Jehovah’s law. But in the spirit of the sabbath-year benefits he acted mercifully as their Liberator. He broke the enemy oppressor’s power and restored them to their homeland. Here again Jehovah displayed himself as the God and Author of liberty.

By requiring slaveholders to free their Israelite servants and by requiring buyers to restore ancestral estates to their rightful owners God committed no unfairness with those who had made legal purchases. All purchases were required to be made based on the number of years that remained till the Jubilee. Furthermore, the land all belonged to earth’s Creator. That is why his law said: “The land must not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is mine, since you are only resident aliens and serfs under me.” (Lev. 25:23, AT) They must all remember, too, that they were liberated slaves, once oppressed in Egypt and later on in Babylon. And just as Jehovah had had mercy upon them for his name’s sake and had delivered them from servitude in the enemies’ land, so they must show the divine quality of mercy and let their Israelite slaves go free on the Jubilee year in obedience to the great Liberator’s command. “For it is to me that the Israelites are slaves, being my slaves whom I brought out of the land of Egypt, I, the LORD, your God.” (Lev. 25:55, AT) Thus the entire arrangement was just and merciful. It was carried out without violent revolution and bloodshed. The Jubilee horn therefore sounded peace and joy throughout all the land.

This foretells a greater release from debt and slavery for mankind and a greater revitalization of the earth. And to think, it is just at our doors! That man has been enslaved by his fellow man there is no question. This is so, whether it has been done by military power, by usurpation of political power, by great monopolies, cartels and commercial and industrial systems, or by the trickery and hypocrisy of religious clergymen. Moreover, the land has been gobbled up by the selfish, the rulers and the aristocrats and the religious clergy. In recent years there has been some breaking up of the great landed estates and the distribution of these to the people. But this has been brought about with great reluctance on the part of the owners, and only by pressure from governments that favored such a policy. In Italy, the cradle of Roman Catholicism, there have been loud complaints and violent moves because of the slowness of the republican government in carrying out its election promise to distribute the land to the poverty-stricken people. One Oriental ruler has recently announced his purpose to have his large estates broken up and apportioned out to his subjects the people. But this is no part of the fulfillment of the promised Jubilee for mankind. It is only part of the desperate efforts of the rulers and systems of this world to perpetuate man’s rule of man or the people’s rule of themselves independent of Jehovah God. Even if all the workable lands of the earth were distributed among all the families of the earth, there would still remain a great liberation to be effected from mankind’s great oppressors.

THE ESSENTIALS OF TRUE FREEDOM

The chief oppressor of the human race is Jehovah God’s great adversary, Satan the Devil. His very name Satan means “opposer”, whereas his name “Devil” means “slanderer, false accuser”. Jehovah God stands for true liberty of all his creatures. Satan the Devil stands for their enslavement. He opposes the divine purpose to free them, because this means freeing them from the Devil’s power. For this reason he slanders and falsely accuses the true and living God and wants to have all creation believe that Jehovah is the one who is the tyrant. Satan the Devil has coveted the earth as his possession, and he has sought to wrest it from God’s universal sovereignty. Satan claims all mankind as his slaves. He has challenged God to put on earth a man who would assert his independence of Satan’s rule and swear his allegiance to God and keep it faithfully under the most extreme test. He saw the opportunity to enslave all mankind in man’s original home, the garden of Eden, which lay somewhere over in the Orient in the neighborhood of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. At that time he was a son of God and was a mighty angel whom Jehovah the Creator had stationed over the first man and his wife as their “covering cherub”. (Ezek. 28:13-18) By getting control of our first parents, Adam and Eve, he could make all their offspring his slaves from birth.

So the “covering cherub” rebelled against Jehovah’s universal sovereignty and transformed himself into Satan, or God’s opposer. Then to win over the man to join in the rebellion he now approached the man’s wife Eve. He made himself a Devil or slanderer by falsely accusing Jehovah God to her, telling her that God was keeping her in ignorance by his commandments and was holding back what would make her and Adam like gods, independent and able to decide for themselves what was right and wrong, good and bad. He said that God’s threat of death to rebels was beyond carrying out, because they certainly would not die for eating the forbidden fruit. So they should make a break for liberty and eat what they saw to be good for themselves. Thoroughly deceived by this fraudulent liberator, Eve broke God’s law and afterward gave some of the fruit to her responsible head, her husband Adam. Under inducement by his wife, Adam ate, and this act spelled his willful rebellion against his Maker and God, Jehovah.

In this way slavery began in God’s universe. Satan the Devil became the slave of his own selfish ambition. By their rebellion Adam and Eve lost their true liberty under God and became slaves of God’s opposer, Satan the Devil. For the sake of selfish appetite they sold us all into a slavery from which it is impossible for any of us to make ourselves free. Hence all of mankind, down to us today, have been born from slave ancestors.—Genesis, chapter 3.

Since then Satan the Devil has built up his organization all about the earth. He not only led mankind into rebellion against the Creator but also induced spirits of heaven, angels who were once sons of God and just as holy as man’s “covering cherub” had been, to desert God’s free organization and join that of Satan the Devil. They have become devils or demons and have flooded the earth with demon worship in one form or another. Deceivers that they are, they have led men under the pious idea of worshiping their ancestors into the worshiping of demons instead of worshiping the true God. So the invisible part of Satan’s organization is superhuman and it is utterly impossible for mankind, or any government of mankind, including the United Nations, to break the power of the invisible satanic control and set men free. Resent our saying it as much as they want to, men cannot rid human society and human governments of the dominating influence and interference of Satan the Devil. He has made himself what the sacred Scriptures call him, “the god of this system of things” who blinds men’s minds to the truth. This accounts for the corruption, the decline and the fall of every man-made government that has existed on the face of the earth.—2 Cor. 4:4, NW.

Men who lift themselves up and pose as the liberators of the people are deceiving themselves and also those who follow them as leaders. Democracies and people’s republics do not blaze the trail to freedom. It is THEOCRACY, God’s Government, his great Jubilee Kingdom, that is to deliver mankind. It will wrest this earth, God’s creation, from the grasp of the oppressive land baron, Satan the Devil, and will restore earth’s domain and its inhabitants to the sway of Jehovah’s universal sovereignty, as free members of his universal family of intelligent creatures.

BONDAGE OF CORRUPTION

But there are other things besides Satan’s organization from which mankind needs to be emancipated. The son of God, “the man Christ Jesus,” plainly pointed out what these things are. He showed, too, how release from them will be brought about. He was not deceiving the people when he presented himself as the Apostle of liberty, but his heavenly Father Jehovah God sent him on this mission to give