Demancipation
This week's verses are on Jeremiah 34:8-16:
In the Old Testament law, it was illegal to keep someone enslaved for more than seven years. Every seven years there would be a Sabbath year, where debts were forgiven and slaves were freed. Slavery was basically like bankruptcy, except with some protections we don't necessarily have today.
For lenders, it gave them some limited recourse if someone took a bigger loan than they had collateral to pay. Instead of being able to run up a bunch of debt, spending it all on tattoos, breast implants, and comic books, then ringing the Bankruptcy bell and starting the routine all over again, leaving the lender with no recourse, the borrower was held accountable. Imagine if we had that system today, where if someone was financially irresponsible they could be sent away for years of hard labor. Do you think there would be as much credit card debt? Do you think interest rates might be more reasonable? But the downside is that nobody in their right mind would take out a mortgage or a car loan, and colleges would be nearly empty. And very hard times would have disastrous consequences.
For borrowers, it also provided some useful protections though. If you fell on hard times, or made the sorts of mistakes many of us make in our younger days, there was a limit to how long you could suffer for it. Imagine if the maximum debt you could be held accountable for in any settlement was seven years of post-tax earnings. No financial mistake you made could plague you for the rest of your life. The idea of someone paying off their student loans well into their forties or fifties would be impossible, because no lender in their right mind would loan that much money without more collateral than "I promise to wash dishes until it's paid or until closing time, whichever comes first."
The result was a system that put safe limits on how much people could exploit each other over money and property. The problem is, much like serial bankruptcy claimers or exploitative payday and school loan lenders, wherever there's a system, there's unscrupulous people who learn how to game that system. People created loopholes and regulations to make sure that slaves stayed slaves until their debt was paid. In Jeremiah's day, for better or for worse, people did business with the assumption that they could ignore the bits about forgiveness of debts and just squeeze people until they were paid. Until Zedekiah laid down the law.
Zedekiah restored the original protections God had mandated from the beginning. People went along with it until they realized it would come at a cost. Or maybe they just found a way to loophole the poor slaves back into slavery. "Sure we'll forgive your $1000 debt like we are legally required to, but there will be a $1200 processing fee for early cancellation." So while in a ritualistic sense the slaves were freed on the Sabbath year, in the sense of mercy they were not. It was a mockery of what God had wanted, and what Zedekiah had tried to enact.
It was an evil thing for the slave owners to do, but look at it from the perspective of the average slave owner. The new leader of the country has enacted some crackpot legislation you assume will go away when the next king comes to power. Meanwhile, most of the other people who owned slaves have good lawyers and have managed to find a way to get their slaves back. Do you continue to operate at a loss, paying people to do your needed work while everyone else gets it for free, or do you buckle and take your slaves back too to remain competitive? What if you were in danger of having to sell one of your kids into slavery to make ends meet unless you dragged your freed slaves back into service? It's still evil, but now it's less of a black and white fairy tale, isn't it? A lot of people thought of their families, or their standard of living, or the shareholders, and fell from grace. Do we ever do that?
In the interest of keeping the Bible verses short, I included God's verdict, but not the sentence handed down to these people. God saw what they did, and even the best lawyers aren't enough to hide evil from God's eyes. In pursuing their own interests over what God wanted, they showed him contempt. God's sentence for them was a curse. They would be captured and slaughtered by their enemies, starve to death, or be tormented by disease. It must have been horrible for them.
Do we ever "temporarily forgive" people of things we hold them to? Are we ever the family that behaves well in church but is at each other's throats the moment they leave the parking lot? Do we ever tell someone something is okay and no big deal, but then our words and actions later send exactly the opposite message? If so, we're gaming the system too.
We forgive freely in places where we're socially or religiously expected to, like in church, or situations where we're expected to downplay our hurt, but like the people under Zedekiah's reign, how we act when we feel like we're not being held to a standard is where our real priorities show through. If we refuse to forgive when God says we should, we show him contempt. Contempt makes for difficult relationships. That won't turn out any better for us than it did for Zedekiah's subjects.
Much like the people in Zedekiah's time, we can come up with all kinds of justifications. The cultural momentum right now is for conflict and division, divorce and lawsuits, reparations and sanctions even to the children's children's children's generation, and all of that affects what we perceive as normal. But God's norm, even before Jesus died to forgive all of our debt, was that there has to be a time where you say enough is enough and let people live their lives, even if it means taking a loss to make it happen.
If you've dragged people back into your "people who owe me" or "people who will never be off the hook" lists, take some time and reestablish God's order over the situation. Ask God for forgiveness, and trust that when your debt is forgiven, it is repaid for good.
The Lord spoke to Jeremiah after King Zedekiah had made a covenant with all the people in Jerusalem to grant their slaves their freedom. Everyone was supposed to free their male and female Hebrew slaves. No one was supposed to keep a fellow Judean enslaved. All the people and their leaders had agreed to this. They had agreed to free their male and female slaves and not keep them enslaved any longer. They originally complied with the covenant and freed them. But later they had changed their minds. They had taken back their male and female slaves that they had freed and forced them to be slaves again.
That was when the Lord spoke to Jeremiah, “The Lord God of Israel has a message for you. ‘I made a covenant with your ancestors when I brought them out of Egypt where they had been slaves. It stipulated, “Every seven years each of you must free any fellow Hebrews who have sold themselves to you. After they have served you for six years, you shall set them free.” But your ancestors did not obey me or pay any attention to me. Recently, however, you yourselves showed a change of heart and did what is pleasing to me. You granted your fellow countrymen their freedom and you made a covenant to that effect in my presence in the house that I have claimed for my own. But then you turned right around and showed that you did not honor me. Each of you took back your male and female slaves whom you had freed as they desired, and you forced them to be your slaves again.
In the Old Testament law, it was illegal to keep someone enslaved for more than seven years. Every seven years there would be a Sabbath year, where debts were forgiven and slaves were freed. Slavery was basically like bankruptcy, except with some protections we don't necessarily have today.
For lenders, it gave them some limited recourse if someone took a bigger loan than they had collateral to pay. Instead of being able to run up a bunch of debt, spending it all on tattoos, breast implants, and comic books, then ringing the Bankruptcy bell and starting the routine all over again, leaving the lender with no recourse, the borrower was held accountable. Imagine if we had that system today, where if someone was financially irresponsible they could be sent away for years of hard labor. Do you think there would be as much credit card debt? Do you think interest rates might be more reasonable? But the downside is that nobody in their right mind would take out a mortgage or a car loan, and colleges would be nearly empty. And very hard times would have disastrous consequences.
For borrowers, it also provided some useful protections though. If you fell on hard times, or made the sorts of mistakes many of us make in our younger days, there was a limit to how long you could suffer for it. Imagine if the maximum debt you could be held accountable for in any settlement was seven years of post-tax earnings. No financial mistake you made could plague you for the rest of your life. The idea of someone paying off their student loans well into their forties or fifties would be impossible, because no lender in their right mind would loan that much money without more collateral than "I promise to wash dishes until it's paid or until closing time, whichever comes first."
The result was a system that put safe limits on how much people could exploit each other over money and property. The problem is, much like serial bankruptcy claimers or exploitative payday and school loan lenders, wherever there's a system, there's unscrupulous people who learn how to game that system. People created loopholes and regulations to make sure that slaves stayed slaves until their debt was paid. In Jeremiah's day, for better or for worse, people did business with the assumption that they could ignore the bits about forgiveness of debts and just squeeze people until they were paid. Until Zedekiah laid down the law.
Zedekiah restored the original protections God had mandated from the beginning. People went along with it until they realized it would come at a cost. Or maybe they just found a way to loophole the poor slaves back into slavery. "Sure we'll forgive your $1000 debt like we are legally required to, but there will be a $1200 processing fee for early cancellation." So while in a ritualistic sense the slaves were freed on the Sabbath year, in the sense of mercy they were not. It was a mockery of what God had wanted, and what Zedekiah had tried to enact.
It was an evil thing for the slave owners to do, but look at it from the perspective of the average slave owner. The new leader of the country has enacted some crackpot legislation you assume will go away when the next king comes to power. Meanwhile, most of the other people who owned slaves have good lawyers and have managed to find a way to get their slaves back. Do you continue to operate at a loss, paying people to do your needed work while everyone else gets it for free, or do you buckle and take your slaves back too to remain competitive? What if you were in danger of having to sell one of your kids into slavery to make ends meet unless you dragged your freed slaves back into service? It's still evil, but now it's less of a black and white fairy tale, isn't it? A lot of people thought of their families, or their standard of living, or the shareholders, and fell from grace. Do we ever do that?
In the interest of keeping the Bible verses short, I included God's verdict, but not the sentence handed down to these people. God saw what they did, and even the best lawyers aren't enough to hide evil from God's eyes. In pursuing their own interests over what God wanted, they showed him contempt. God's sentence for them was a curse. They would be captured and slaughtered by their enemies, starve to death, or be tormented by disease. It must have been horrible for them.
Do we ever "temporarily forgive" people of things we hold them to? Are we ever the family that behaves well in church but is at each other's throats the moment they leave the parking lot? Do we ever tell someone something is okay and no big deal, but then our words and actions later send exactly the opposite message? If so, we're gaming the system too.
We forgive freely in places where we're socially or religiously expected to, like in church, or situations where we're expected to downplay our hurt, but like the people under Zedekiah's reign, how we act when we feel like we're not being held to a standard is where our real priorities show through. If we refuse to forgive when God says we should, we show him contempt. Contempt makes for difficult relationships. That won't turn out any better for us than it did for Zedekiah's subjects.
Much like the people in Zedekiah's time, we can come up with all kinds of justifications. The cultural momentum right now is for conflict and division, divorce and lawsuits, reparations and sanctions even to the children's children's children's generation, and all of that affects what we perceive as normal. But God's norm, even before Jesus died to forgive all of our debt, was that there has to be a time where you say enough is enough and let people live their lives, even if it means taking a loss to make it happen.
If you've dragged people back into your "people who owe me" or "people who will never be off the hook" lists, take some time and reestablish God's order over the situation. Ask God for forgiveness, and trust that when your debt is forgiven, it is repaid for good.
Comments
Post a Comment