Leviticus 23-25

(April 2, 2014)
There is within me such a huge desire to be completely independent.  I don’t know whether that is just something with me or whether it is something that is uniform across human nature.  But I want to be able to provide for myself, and I want to be left alone.  But that isn’t a good thing.  The first thing that I thought when I read this chapter was to wonder how the people would feed themselves in the seventh year.  But Moses answers that – the Lord will provide for the people.  They will have a bounty every sixth year, and this will hold them over until the seventh year.  The Lord had built in to His program a mechanism for ensuring that the people never forget to rely on Him.

But, and this is perhaps more interesting, the Lord didn’t require them to go into the test of their faith until after they had seen the miracle.  They had the double harvest, and then they were to not work.  I wonder if there is a principle here in the method of the Lord, or whether it was simple necessity.  It seems, often enough, that the test that we have to pass in mortality is sometimes to recognize our blessings rather than to patiently wait for them.  Perhaps that was the challenge to ancient Israel as well.  They were to remember that what they had been given was a gift from the Lord and they should still honor the Sabbath on the seventh year.