All posts tagged: Year of Jubilee

The Year 2020 and God: Maybe this is a good thing.

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Can you remember Christmas of 2019, and the start of this new year, 2020? Those were innocent times. Where I live, the economy was struggling, but we were hoping for better things. There were rumours about a virus infection in China, but we had heard that one before. 2020 looked good, in January. In February, those rumors from China started to become scary, and we bought some extra groceries. In March, the economy started shutting down, and people started dying from the virus. Some nursing homes got the infection in our area, and some residents died. And people got sent home from work. I remember the day, Friday March 20, when I went to work and people looked at me like I had climbed out of a tree. I missed the announcement, and they told me to go home. And then we had April and May, with bickering and panic about jobs and virus infections. In June, a video circulated with a police officer in Minneapolis kneeling on a man’s neck, until the man died, …

Storm clouds ahead? Photo: TIPOSCHARSKY/Foter/CC BY

Shemitah: A time of shaking?

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You may have heard the Hebrew word ‘Shemitah’ being bandied about in recent days. The word refers to the “Sabbath year” mentioned in the Old Testament and practiced by orthodox Jews for centuries. The word has garnered new interest with the recent turmoil in the stock market which saw the American Dow Jones Industrial Average fall by 1,900 points at the end of August. Since then the stock market has been turmoil — up 200 one day and down the same amount the next. The word took on new meaning when Jewish Christian Jonathan Cahn released his  New York Time’s bestseller “The Mystery of the Shemitah.” In his book, Cahn discussed the Sabbath year or Shemitah which required Israeli farmers to rest the land every seventh year. The land could not be worked and was supposed to lay fallow for the full year. This also included vineyards and orchards. During Shemitah, the Israelis were to cancel debts and rest the land. All people were allowed to harvest any crops that grew on the fallow land …