Jubilee and the Year of the Lord's Favor

In a time when honing in on the "servant leadership principles" from Paul's epistles or using the teachings of Jesus as a means of "self-improvement" have become normative in our Sunday morning sermon, I believe a more relevant question for the church today is - how can we gain a more holistic understanding of God's workings throughout biblical history (or as Paul would call it in Acts 20:27, "the whole counsel of God")? For example, what do we make of the celebrations observed by the Israelites in the Old Testament?  In an article about preaching Christ from the Old Testament, David Murray describes the purposes of what happens typologically in the OT in this way:

The coming of the Messiah was delayed for many centuries after the Fall so that God could prepare and train His “infant” church for Christ’s coming. And the method of instruction best suited to their state of childhood was teaching through pictures of who and what was to come. By proceeding from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the unfamiliar, the future was brought into their present. Through the types’ resemblances to the higher future things, the realities of Christ’s kingdom were made present to their faith, acting as very natural and easy stepping-stones.

One such example is the correlation between the Old Testament celebration of the year of Jubilee and what Jesus referred to as the year of the Lord's favor. Look in Luke 4, after his temptation in the desert, Jesus walks into the synagogue on the Sabbath, opens the scroll to quote a series of Messianic passages from Isaiah, and declares that "today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). See what Jesus says in vv. 18-19a,

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has annointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

Here the Lord establishes his presence and the treasures he brings with his atoning sacrifce as the fulfillment of the Old Testament regime of the year of Jubilee - the fiftieth year when the trumpet is blown and proclamation is made throughout the whole land of the liberty of slaves, of the recession of debts, and the restoration of possessions to the original families (see Leviticus 25:8-13). But as wonderful as the year of Jubilee was to the Hebrew people, there was a sense that there was something greater to come in the future. A true feeling of relief and rest only comes with Christ - the year of the Lord's favor when the One annointed with God's Spirit would proclaim the infinitely better gospel message of liberty to the slaves of sin and death.

SDG