Leviticus 25:23

"And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity; for the land is mine: for ye are strangers and sojourners with me. And in all the land of your possession ye shall grant a redemption for the land. If thy brother be waxed poor, and sell some of his possession, then shall his kinsman that is next to him come, and shall redeem that which his brother hath sold. And if a man have no one to redeem it, and he be waxed rich and find sufficient to redeem it; then let him reckon the years of the sale thereof, and restore the overplus unto the man to whom he sold it; and he shall return unto his possession. But if he be not able to get it back for himself, then that which he hath sold shall remain in the hand of him that bought it until the year of jubilee: and in the jubilee it shall go out, and he shall return unto his possession."

"The land is mine ..." All of the talk in the newspapers of our day about "Israel's land," and the "integrity of Israel's authority" are contrary to this. Following the rejection on the part of official Israel of their divine Messiah, the Son of God himself, God threw them out of "their land," to which they could not return for nearly two millenniums, and present world powers that are taking upon themselves the authority to "Correct God's action" in this matter may yet find that neither their authority nor their power is sufficient to the task. Yet it is an enigma that Christ himself left a glimmer of possibility that the heel of the Gentile would be lifted from Palestine (Jerusalem) at a point in history when the "times of the Gentiles are fulfilled" (Luke 21:24). Mighty things are now under way in world history.

The right of redemption, whether by kinsmen, or by one himself, was here made to be unalienable. That failing, the year of the Jubilee still restored every man to his possession. The spiritual overtones of this provision are of the most magnificent dimensions. It is Christ, our near kinsman, who redeems us from sin and restores us to our lost possession of innocence and communion with God. As a footnote in the Polyglot Bible expressed it, "Through sin we had sold ourselves as bondmen to Satan and to our lusts, but our near kinsman, who is Christ, redeemed us. Only He could have done so."[14]

"Ye are strangers and sojourners with me ..." (Leviticus 25:23). This is the true status of all men, whether or not they may be aware of it. One of Isaac Watts' hymns has these lines:

Those dear delights we here enjoy

And fondly call our own

Are but short favors borrowed now

To be repaid anon.

"Sojourners ..." This word was rendered "pilgrims" in the N.T. (Hebrews 11:13; 1 Peter 2:11), a word which captures the precise meaning. It means literally, "one who crosses the field," and it came into usage during the Crusades, when all across Europe, it was nothing unusual for settled citizens to see a lonely traveler crossing a clearing or a field on the way to the Holy Land. It came to have a very rich connotation as referring to one who had no certain dwelling place, who had forsaken all in pursuit of some worthy ideal. All life is ephemeral, transitory, short and uncertain. "We are here today and gone tomorrow." All of those possessions which would so readily possess ourselves - all of them shall be the possession of others tomorrow. The land still belongs to God.