Blessed & Highly Favored - Deuteronomy 15

Chapter 15 is short and just reviews the policy forgiving debt and freeing indentured servants. From what I remember, I thought that debts were forgiven and servants freed only every 50 years, on the year of jubilee but this chapter says that it’s every 7 years. What TB pointed out was the while previously it had been discussed that it would be every 50 years, in practice, it became a problem because every 7 years the land was supposed to rest which meant that servants or debtors couldn’t repay their debts because there was no food to be harvested from the fields. So this new 7 year rule was implemented as to not further indebt someone because they couldn’t pay back their debts during that year. They were already going to be hungry enough, compounding debt on top of that would have been catastrophic for the very poor among them. They are also to be given gifts, and this whole thing is a reminder that everything they had belonged to and came from God, so if someone had a lot, then that was because they were being highly favored of God and had an obligation to help out those who were less fortunate because that’s all it comes down to, fortune. Some people prosper more because of their hard work or because they came up with a great idea, but any success that any of us has is solely based on God’s blessings. We need to be generous with our excess because it could be us just as easily. This definitely hits home today, so I needed to hear it.

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