JUBILEE Sorely Needed But Badly Mired
By Al Cronkrite The Covenant News ~ April 11, 2006
Recently on CBS’s “Sixty Minutes” Leslie Stahl announced that Americans are world champions at working long hours. One couple told of sending emails to one another from different rooms while working at home. Other workers spoke of the peer pressure to put in longer hours and the advent of electronic connections that allowed them to bring their businesses home and continue to work twenty-four hours a day seven days a week. For many the sixty hour week has now morphed into eighty or more.
Some of the chief executives of large corporations earn pay packages that total $50 million per year. Forbes Magazine lists Mark Ruben, CEO of Colgate-Palmolive, as the highest paid executive at $148 million, David George, CEO of United Technologies at $70 million, Robert Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers at $67 million, and Henry Silver, CEO of Cendent at $60 million. A sixty hour week works out to a little over 3,000 hours per year and at a pay scale of $50 million amounts to $16,666 per hour. A mid-level executive making $100 thousand a year working an 80 hour week makes about $25 per hour while a factory worker might earn an hourly rate of $10.00 for a forty or fifty hour week. In an agrarian culture the rich man would enjoy the milk from 1600 cows while the workers tending his flock would share the milk from one. This scenario gets even worse when it is compared to low wage nations like China and Mexico.
The United Nations (PDF) estimates the combined income of the richest 50 persons in the world is equal to the combined income of the 416 million poorest.
According to Edward N. Wolff of Bard College, the average wealth of the poorest 40% of Americans declined by 44% between 1983 and 2001 to $2,900. During this same period the income and wealth of the top 20% increased at a rate close to 90%.
Globalization is wiping out the world’s middle class and creating a two tiered order with great wealth at the top and poverty at the bottom. It is an oppressive system in which wealth is being systematically transferred from the lower classes into the hands of the affluent and powerful.
As globalists gleefully remind us that we are now being forced to compete in a new world economic order, we need to remember that the low wage nations with whom we must now compete used the fuel of America’s markets to propel their challenge, and that it was our own leaders influenced by established wealth and power who sabotaged the world’s foremost economy to satisfy their avarice and the utopian whims of those behind it.
The hereditable power of accumulated wealth coupled with predictable human rapacity creates a vicious and evil circle that tends to vest an ever increasing amount of power in the hands of fewer and fewer individuals.
God seems to have provided a remedy to this harmful cycle by proclaiming a year of jubilee. This proclamation given directly to Moses was woven into the numerical fabric that makes up Christianity. It was to be a culmination of the sabbaths. The seven day week ends with the sabbath in remembrance of God’s rest following His creation. The seven year production cycle is capped on the last year with a sabbath for the land and seven of these yearly cycles are crowned on the fiftieth year with the year of jubilee.
The Year of Jubilee was to be a restorative year; slaves were to be freed, debts were to be forgiven, and the land was rested and restored to its original owners. It was to provide a fresh start for slaves, a fresh start for debtors, a fresh start for the land, and a fresh start to its original owners. Since the ownership of a limited quantity of land represented significant wealth there was an element of redistribution involved. However, there were other considerations that were unique to the time and place.
Pushed by generationally accumulated wealth and power, the world is being accosted by a pernicious human attempt at world domination variously called globalization. Accompanying this evil oppression is a futile attempt to amalgamate people and cultures through diversity and multi-culturalism.
Any effort at present day world restoration would seem to involve conforming geographic boundaries to ethnicity. So it is not surprising that the utopian globalists are doing just the opposite. Consider the problems involved with ethnic forces in Iraq and in Kosovo. North and South Korea have been separated for decades and in Europe and America purposeful multiculturalism has decimated the culture, banished Christianity and put together the ingredients for civil strife (short video clip).
Wealthy and powerful humanists are busily working at a vain attempt to force together what God separated. The world needs a jubilee that would return God’s creation to its intended boundaries and restore a semblance of economic balance.
Some theologians contend that the jubilee principle of restarting the race for wealth was nullified by the coming of the Savior. Since I am not a theologian my observations are open to correction. However, the advent of the year of jubilee and its intricate involvement in the underpinnings of the Christian religion make its excision difficult. The use of the number seven, the restorative theme, and the reflection of the forgiveness and new birth provided by Christ are but a portion of the significance of the jubilee.
There is another important element provided in the Biblical text and that is God’s desire that the jubilee year might prevent His chosen people from oppressing one another. (Leviticus 25; 14 & 17 KJV) As our world careens toward a despotic oligarchy this is a principle that would seem to warrant the attention of Christians.
Onerous as it is to libertarians and many Reformed Christians, it seems that God was concerned that His people not only understood that the land belonged to Him but that the covetous individual accumulation of power resulting from great wealth should not be long without remedy.
I am not contending here that stealing from those that have and distributing to those who do not is an acceptable method of honoring God’s mandate. It does, however, seem that in a theonomic social order God is recommending a resetting to a preordained condition thereby providing a deterrent to oppression.
It was this principle that our Founders incorporated into government with the understanding that the sinful nature of men would always tend toward oppression. Their experiment has lasted over two hundred years but has now given in to a humanistic ethic that defies the law and will end in slavery.
Land tenure in the jubilee laws did not apply to the city. Its application was to the suburbs and the land surrounding them. For ancient Israel it was holy ground won with miraculous Divine support to God’s chosen people and thereafter divided among the tribes. God intended that this division be maintained. The results of the repatriation restricted ownership of God’s land to His chosen people and as children were born to landed families it created pressure for expansion.
Slavery is an ancillary issue to any discussion of the jubilee laws. Northern hermeneutics would have seen the abolishment of slavery, but Southern theologians found scriptural affirmation. It seems that God’s economy would allow slavery in a restricted setting but that is another issue.
While some Libertarian Christians seek to extract the jubilee by its roots, Dispensationalists will frequently recommend egalitarian government intervention. There is extensive disagreement over the contemporary application of the principles involved in the Jubilee Laws. Dismissing them as being nullified by Christ leaves a void that God clearly intended to fill. Yet, it is difficult to find their proper application in today’s world.
One commentator quotes Hans Ucko who in spite of being connected to the World Council of Churches, seems to have partially defined the problem quite well, “Whether it is a dream of hope or a utopia that is nowhere, the jubilee is a resolve against a status quo of continued oppression and exploitation of people and creation.… There must be a temporary suspension or reprieve, a change of mind and conditions.”
As the world continues to fall into the clutches of a pagan, power hungry, elite cabal bent on a doomed global hegemony, the remnant of God’s people left at the time of its certain failure need to be ready with the clear legal mandates God provided for the government of His creation. The principles God provided in the year of jubilee proclamation should clearly be a part of that plan.