Leviticus 25

What’s Happening?

From the beginning, God’s design was for holy people to dwell with him in a holy place, all centered around holy time. Everything in humanity’s life with God was to be set apart in communion with him. In Eden, God planted a garden, placed humanity within it, and then rested on the seventh day. Unlike the six previous days of work, the seventh day had no evening or morning because it was meant to continue forever—a day when heaven and earth were one, and all creation lived in the rhythm of God’s peace. Humanity was created to enter that rest—to share in God’s holy time and extend Eden’s order and flourishing into the world.

But sin shattered that rhythm. Work became toil, abundance became scarcity, and rest turned into slavery. The land that once flowed with life became marked by sweat, blood, and death. Leviticus 25 is God’s plan to begin undoing that curse. Through Sabbath years and the Year of Jubilee, he re-establishes Eden’s rhythm of rest, justice, and renewal in the midst of a broken world.

Every seventh day, Israel stopped working and remembered that creation belongs to God. Every seventh year, the land itself rested, reminding them that even the soil depends on God’s provision. And after seven sevens of years, came the great Sabbath—the Year of Jubilee.

In the Jubilee year, everything and everyone was restored. Debts were canceled. Slaves were released. Families returned to their ancestral land. No one was left trapped in poverty or slavery. The entire nation pressed “reset.”

The Jubilee made visible what God intended since Eden: a world ruled by generosity instead of greed, rest instead of restlessness, freedom instead of oppression. It was a society built around holy time, where justice wasn’t a one-time event but a recurring rhythm. Through these patterns of release and renewal, Israel’s calendar itself became a tool of redemption—a way to rescue all time from the grip of sin and make it participate in God’s Garden of rest.

Where Is the Gospel?

Israel never fully lived out the Jubilee. They never let holy time re-create their world. But Jesus came proclaiming that the long-awaited Jubilee had arrived—not as a date on a calendar, but as a holy person in a holy place.

In Luke 4, Jesus stood in the synagogue, read from Isaiah 61, and announced, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me … to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This year of favor is the year of Jubilee. What Israel never realized, Jesus came to complete.

Through Jesus, the rest of Eden returns. As Jesus heals the sick, releases those imprisoned by evil spirits, and proclaims good news to the impoverished, he is claiming a new Kingdom of Jubilee is coming to earth. He is unworking the brokenness caused by sin and death in order to usher in a new way of peace and life. He releases the captives from their masters of sin and death. He cancels debts—destroying every bond our enemies held against us (Colossians 2:13-15). He gives back the inheritance we lost—the new heavens and new earth, our true home.

Jesus doesn’t just promise rest one day a week or one year in fifty. He brings the eternal Sabbath—a holy time that never ends. In him, the rhythm of work and rest, of creation and renewal, finds its completion. We live now inside the Jubilee, a new creation where time itself is redeemed.

Through Jesus, God is re-creating the world as his garden once again. Holy people, made in his image, live in holy places filled with his presence, shaped by holy time that restores what sin has broken. The chaos of the old world is giving way to the peace of God’s kingdom.

See for Yourself

I pray that the Holy Spirit would give you eyes to see the God who turns time itself into an instrument of justice and renewal. And may you see Jesus as the true Jubilee—the one who restores creation’s rhythm, frees the captives, cancels every debt, and invites us to dwell forever in the unending Sabbath rest of his kingdom.