Rest for the Land

Tucked away near the end of today's reading is 2 Chronicles 36:21, which states:

The land enjoyed its sabbath rests; all the time of its desolation it rested, until the seventy years were completed in fulfillment of the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah. 

I'm pretty sure I both commented and spoke on this at the time, but I refer you back to Leviticus 26 (p216), which my NIV Study Bible divides into two sections--personally, I'll break it into three:

1. 26:1-13--Reward for Obedience

2. 26:14-39--Punishment for Disobedience

3. 26:40-45--Restoration

I strongly encourage you to reread Leviticus 26, because it's plainly obvious that this was prophetic in the manner in which the people of Israel would (and did) treat the land. Leviticus 25 described the Sabbath Year, in which fields were to lay fallow and be allowed to regenerate. As I pointed out at the time, this introduced the concept of land fatigue thousands of years prior to it being a recognized fact. Leviticus 26:34-35 explicitly states that these Sabbath Years wouldn't be recognized upon entry into the Promised Land, and lo and behold, almost 1,000 years later, we see the fulfillment of this prophecy.

There was a pretty interesting commentary in today's Wall Street Journal titled No One Reads the Bible Literally, which you can read if you wish by clicking on the link. I'll have no opinion on the piece, but in this particular instance, the Bible is pretty darn literal--God told the people how to live, knew full well that they wouldn't keep their promises, and eventually fulfilled his promise of exile and destruction. Absolutely nothing has changed for us today, and this merely reinforces the notion that the Bible isn't a story or a prolonged metaphor--it's the Word of God, logically consistent in all its parts and just as true in its day as it is in ours.

Scott