Leviticus 26:13

"Handfuls of Purpose"

For All Gleaners

"I have broken the bounds of your yoke, and made you go upright." Lev 26:13

God will have no slavery of a social kind. He is against all bonds and restrictions that keep down the true aspirations of the human soul. God has always proceeded upon the principle of enlargement and the inheritance of liberty. We know how much God has done for a man by the degree of that man's uprightness. That is an excellent and undeniable standard of judgment. God has no crouching slaves cringing around his altar and afraid to look up to the Cross which has given them forgiveness. In proportion as we are carrying bands and yokes, have we not known the Spirit of the living God. This relates to all conduct and religious observances, to the keeping of times and seasons, and the offering of all manner of sacrifices. Whatever is done through a sense of servility and humiliation is wrongly done, and is in no sense done in obedience to the command of Christ. When all is right within we run in the way of God's commandments, we sing at our work, we turn the very statutes of God into songs in the house of our pilgrimage. What God has been doing for man in the first instance has been the breaking of yokes. God has had much negative work to do for fallen humanity. We do not know how much of our progress is due to the breaking of cruel restrictions, the whole course of human history has been a course of enlargement and freedom in matters of education, knowledge, and the possession and exercise of personal and social rights. This is in accordance with the very spirit of the New Testament. Some men may not have made great progress in positive liberty, who yet have made some advance in the sense of having thrown off many restrictions and yokes, such throwing off being due to the operation of a gracious providence, which providence, indeed, is not always understood or gratefully appreciated; nevertheless, it works in human history with an undeviating and generous aim. There is an hereditary principle involved in this arrangement; it is impossible that the children of upright men can fail in some sense to partake of the advantages arising from parental uprightness; those conditions may not amount to personal righteousness, and, indeed, may have no necessary relation to such righteousness, but the whole atmosphere is the purer and healthier for our relation to forefathers who have been upright and wise and generous. More is expected of us, and the expectation is founded in reason and justice. We are the greater debtors to society on account of the liberty into which we were born, and the uprightness under whose blessing we were reared. Always acknowledge the divine hand in human history. Always see that theology is indeed the larger history. He knows nothing about history who is merely conversant with outward facts and the succession of measurable incidents: history lies in its spirituality: there is a genius of history, a religion of liberation and progress.