Deuteronomy 15:1 “At the end of every seven years thou shalt make a release.”

Deuteronomy 15:2 “And this is the manner of the release: Every creditor that lendeth ought unto his neighbour shall release it; he shall not exact it of his neighbour, or of his brother; because it is called the Lord’s release.”

If you gave a significant amount of money to someone… only in a few years or even months time for that debt to be completely “released”, annulled, for free… with you never to be paid back what you were owed, no interest, no repayment, no nothing… how would you feel about that?

Short changed? Cheated? Maybe you’d hold your money even more tightly in the future. Because we never want to “lose” in life, particularly financially, and as such, we tend to only lend to those who can repay us, and even then if we give money, it’s often begrudging… nothing like money to sort out what kind of a person we really are right!

…If you can’t solve your love of money in the love of God, you will never be Jesus’ disciple. This doesn’t mean you waste money and throw it away, but the Bible says “the liberal soul shall be made fat”, and not liberal as in terms of corrupt government ideology and identity who by liberal means they’re liberal in taking your money, but liberal in terms of heart of giving of self having freely received from God the grace of life.

Look at the banks, the biggest institutions in Australia, and they only loan you money after they have first of all rigorously and comprehensively assessed your ability to repay it, to say the least, they’re making damn sure they’re gonna get it back… and some! and it’s loaned with interest on it to, so their giving is not love, it’s cold, hard business because what they lend is going to be exacted to the last cent, and at a profit. There is going to be no release of that.

See, our laws aren’t as good as Bible laws, definitely not as loving! Because this is a law that’s gonna take an immense amount of love not just to follow… but lovingly follow!

… today we are looking at Deuteronomy 15, a chapter of God’s word I have been mightily blessed by. I arrived here after reading Jeremiah 34, which references this law, and the failure of Judah in this law is what cost them Babylonian destruction and captivity.

The law laid out in Deuteronomy 15 is a law God himself called “the LORD”s release”. Remember that, because that’s key to it all. Please read this chapter for yourself, it’s a blessing.

The use of God’s law is to take us to the end of ourselves, seeing our deep spiritual poverty of self so we can see Christ “but we see Jesus”. This is a wonderful law in here, which could never be the case in our nation, because our nation’s laws are not built on love. Imagine the banks being forced to release your mortgage? Woah. We aren’t that loving a society!

…It’s amazing the attitude that we have developed to the law of God, even in Christian circles there is a resistance, negativity, a superiority to, and a loathing and contempt for the law of God and like God is somehow divided in himself, which if were the case, his kingdom and their hope could not stand… but Jesus attitude to law was very different. Remember him? The Lord? Jesus said of the law “I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” When you fulfill something, it’s to find the true purpose, meaning, realization and completion of it… that’s Jesus and the law.

You know the apostle John, the beloved?… well, he wrote of God’s commandments, that “his commandments are not grievous” something we are going to see referenced in Deuteronomy 15 as plenty of people were grieved at the prospect of having to keep this law… but John in fact went on to write about the Christian relationship to God’s law… “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments” and “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God, and keep his commandments” …!

Wow, saint John the legalist hey! And yet no disciple wrote more about God’s love also, and his books, the gospel and his three epistles have the beating heart of the love of God at their core. He wrote that Jesus is in the bosom of the Father, and we read scripture to find the heartbeat of God, and the heartbeat of Deuteronomy 15 shows just how out of sync our heart is with his. John writes to clear something up for us, which is needed in our world more than ever, he tells us how to know if we are loving someone else… and its if you love God and keep his commandments… exactly as Deuteronomy 15 will show today.

Don’t ever let someone fool you about the law of God who has no idea what they’re talking about, of which there are many. There was nothing wrong with God’s Old Testament law, but there was something wrong with us, which it necessarily shows… and there is something wrong not with it, but your use of it, if you use it not how it’s intended… just like anything… when you use something not how it’s meant to be used it becomes “misuse” or “abuse”… but of God’s law the Bible says “but we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully”…

… how do you use it lawfully? Well the spiritual law needs the Spirit of Christ to spiritually connect with it! And we need not guess, for we are told how to use it, because the law had specific utility, use, “the law our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ”, and in doing so it holds up a mirror for ourselves to look into and see who and what we truly are… not how you favorable and with warped deluded judgment you see yourself, but how God sees you…. in the light in truth. And the law truly shows us that there’s something wrong with us… and how! …but even on the barebones practical level, if you look at societies around the world today, can you see a better way that they are doing it than how God says to do it?

Israel when they obeyed God did not have the drug, alcohol, depression, dysfunction, divorce, suicide, safety, division and debt issues that our nation has. We are an unsafe, unhappy people. So many people I know who’ve got everything, yet are unhappy, bitter, hate God, hate people, full of lies and adultery and deceit.

The thing you need to realize about God’s law is that it is totally contrary to our nature. That’s why it grates against you. Welcome to the club, it did the Jews back then too. Read Jeremiah 34 and oh how they didn’t like to do this law. Because their spirit was not God’s Spirit. The apostle Paul wrote that “the law is spiritual, but I am carnal, sold under sin.” The law found in Deuteronomy 15 is anti every selfish sinew in our body, if you lived under it you wouldn’t have liked it, not because it was bad, but because we are so selfish… that law grates against our rebellion to God’s authority, it exposes our meanness and lack of compassion to fellow man and love and reverence toward God, it shows how shortsighted we are to our state and God’s grace that he has had toward us…

If God’s law is beneath you, it’s only because you are from beneath and it came from above… it was brought down from the mountaintop from Moses, a place higher than us, in fact from a place where the Bible says “it was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator”. Moses’ face shone for it’s glory from whence it came. And Moses gave the law to God’s people, God’s commandments for God’s special little nation whom he had bought and brought out of Egypt by blood and power… a nation called by his own name, whom he made “to ride upon the high places of the earth”, a nation to whom he gave his own unique set of laws to teach them how to live and do business and give them a life and quality of life and society which would be the curiosity, envy and wisdom of the nations… “Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”

Part of the reason God gave the law to his nation was also for the purpose of worship. In fact, the entire law was a case study of worship down to the testing details. Obedience to it was an act of worship, disobedience an act of rebellion and worship of the devil. And why worship God? Because he’s God, because of who he is and what he had done for them.

God’s law is remains ever instructive to us today, because although the church and Israel are distinct, yet both are his people… Christians are his “holy nation”. And chapter 15 of Deuteronomy proves just as revealing as ever, where you were commanded to free someone at cost to yourself, not because it made fiscal sense, but because God said to do so. It was an act of trusting God’s good hand, that his ways were right and true, this law revealed the hearts of the children of Israel everytime they were exercised by it “when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died”.

In truth, the Lord’s release was as much a release to the creditor as it was to the debtor. Both parties were freed in this transaction. Maybe you’re yet to experience freedom that flows from obeying God, as the Bible says “the perfect law of liberty”… to have God’s blessing on your life is better than all the money in the world being in your bank account under your name.

There is blessing of God that comes only through obedience. Remember, it was only because Abraham, the father of faith, obeyed God in taking his only son to mount Moriah to offer him that the blessing of Christ wa assured to him… don’t believe me? Read Genesis 22 yourself, Abraham’s personal journey to the mountaintop. You want to go higher in your walk with God and revelation of God to you in your life? Obey what he says to do “… and offer him … upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.”

And so I hope you read it for yourself, Deuteronomy 15 … the LORD’s release. It is a law where you give never to receive back. It’s a law you obey not because it makes financial sense to you, but because God said so. It’s a law you obey because you see that everything you have comes from God, and it’s a privilege and opportunity to bestow that grace to others also. It’s a law of true worship and service to God proved in action. The Bible says by the law is the knowledge of sin, that’s mostly what this law does though aye. I doubt this law proved too many people righteous back then, it proved a lot in Jeremiah 34 very unrighteous! It tested their love of God and others… and… they didn’t! …Because of course if you’ve worked hard to make money, you don’t want to be making loans which you will never redeem …kind of thwarts your big financial plans for yourself.

If you need to “look in mirror”…. take a look into this law, and what you first think and what your first reactions are to it when you read it, because it’ll reveal what you are, and what you are not. It’ll show you what your heart truly is. It’ll show you how far fallen from God you are. It’ll show you how you first think about yourself. It’ll show you the type of spirit you have. It’ll show the lack of love for God and love for your neighbour you have. The law showed us… us! I’m right in there too, don’t say I’m self righteous, in reading this law I realized how mean and ornery I am. Because my first reaction is… uh no, how does this make sense. But then just look outside yourself for a second… if you’re the poor guy in this equation, you reckon this would be life changing for you? Of course. When we get our eyes of fourselves and serving our interests and consider and view that what we’ve got is what we can use to be a blessing to others also, and start serving God rather than our selves, that might well take away some of our little grumbles and gripes with life hey. Imagine release from all that!

In Deuteronomy 15, God talks about the hardened heart, the wicked heart and the grieved heart… three states of the heart that men of Israel had in facing this law.. because God knows us… because he knows that naturally none of us would want to lend to someone in year 6, knowing that in year 7 that debt gets annulled and you get nothing back. God knows that we wouldn’t want to “furnish him liberally out of thy flock” the servant who is freed because God says he’s free now.

But God’s showing us something higher… something so high that without his wisdom we cannot attain to. …imagine a master truly doing from the heart everything contained in God’s law, and after he tells his servant hey you’re free, he also finds way to be a blessing to that departing servant… imagine such a master reaching for the keys to the lambo saying, here’s a car for your new life, he writes out a cheque for him to start his new life with, and he says here take all the things you need… imagine a master who loves you like that? … if you were a servant with such a loving master who’s so perfectly right with God… would you really want to leave such a master? See, God is showing us Christ in this law strongly. Jesus Christ is our Master… and what out there is better than the privilege of serving him? How’d your past life free of Christ go for you when you were a law unto yourself?

The Master of the wind and waves of the sea is the best master for your life. You’re going to serve something and someone, why not make it the Lord of God, who died for you on the cross he loves you so much. Who became poor that we through his povery might be rich? Why not serve a God who forgave us the debt we could never repay? You and I are all that “poor man” Deuteronomy 15… as David wrote “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.” All we ever had is credit from God. You may take credit from God, but meanwhile you breathe the air God made with the lungs God gave you. God gave us every good thing we have. At the core of this law is the realization, it’s all God’s and all comes from God anyway… you’re not as independent and self made as you think you are… if you were …you’d be able to stop yourself from dying, but you won’t be able to do a thing about it when that day comes.

As has already been referenced, but worth it again, Paul wrote in Romans 7:14 “For we know that the law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.” The problem isn’t the law, the problem is the law was more spiritual than we are. We need the Spirit of Christ to … as 2 Corinthians 3:17 says “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty”.

What a release to obey God. We fail in obedience because we don’t love God neither our neighbour as ourselves, that’s why they fell apart in Jeremiah 34 on this law also. We have a poverty of the love of God and love of others, even while we congratulate ourselves on it. You know why we disobey God? Because we don’t love him. It’s as simple as that.

And so the only liberty that the people in Jeremiah 34 experienced, who had the privilege to perform this law, but no heart to do so… was not the Lord’s release… but God told Jeremiah go and tell them that I’m proclaiming liberty to them… to the sword, to pestilence and to famine. And God removed his protection and blessing from Judah, and they were conquered by the Babylonians. It’s serious stuff, as all matters of the heart toward God are. And so today I hope you will consider the Lord’s release! Have you been set free from sin by Jesus Christ? I hope this is the year of your release! Noone ever loved me like Christ did, and it is no different for you either. May God bless his wonderful word and this wonderful law to your heart today!

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