Our National Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors
[Editor’s Note: This is the second of five articles in the "Your Jubilee in 2010" Series, with the first entitled, “'Jubileer' or ‘April Fool’?”; the third, "Your Personal Jubilee's Forgiveness Factors"; the fourth, "Getting Psyched Up for Your Personal Year of Jubilee," and the fifth, "Crucial Steps into Your Personal Year of Jubilee." All comprise a section at the heart of Ken's forthcoming book, Judo Politics--The Transformation of the Electorate that Upsets Big Brother. To access the entire series, click on “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series under the Categories section to the right.
And He opened their understanding, that they might comprehend the Scriptures (Luke 24:45).
As we contemplate the state of things in the world today, we are very deeply impressed and oppressed with the prevailing malady of spiritual blindness. It is the root malady of the time. We should not be far wrong if we said that most, if not all, of the troubles from which the world is suffering, are traceable to that root, namely, blindness. The masses are blind; there is no doubt about that. In a day which is supposed to be a day of unequalled enlightenment, the masses are blind... The leaders are blind, blind leaders of the blind. But in a very large measure, the same is true of the Lord’s people. Speaking quite generally, Christians are today very blind.
--T. Austin-Sparks, Spiritual Sight, Chapter One
Dear Walk Show Family,
The five articles in this "Jubilee" series contains the essence of what I have been taught by the Holy Spirit in over 44 years of intently listening for the Savior’s voice. I decided to release this section from my Judo Politics book even before the book is published, due to what I believe to be the urgency of this message. That way, you can experience the heartbeat of the "Jubilee" message without even having to buy the book!
I hope this series is for a very limited readership, for these reasons: It all started when my favorite childhood TV show, “The Man and the Challenge,” was canceled in 1960 for lack of public interest. I was devastated and perplexed. However, it alerted me to the phenomenon of inverse relationships, which I have observed and noted a myriad of times since. Take, for example, the study on the French Riviera, wherein it was discovered that there’s an inverse proportion between the size of the yacht and the number of people on it. Then, there’s the inverse relationship between the number of lawyers and the cultural integrity of a nation.
My own personal suspicion is that I either have something like leprosy and halitosis combined, or there’s an inverse ratio between the things that are most important to me and the interest of my audiences in those same things. When flexing my fleshly propensities as a young communicator, it earned for me what was at that time the world’s largest radio and TV audience: with a daily potential audience of 500 million people in 30-some countries of the world.
Yet, through the decades since, the more I sensed my message was being conformed to the mind of Christ, I noticed that it becomes of less and less interest to my mass-media audiences--especially in what calls itself the American "church." In recent times, for example, I have received approximately ten times as many “REMOVE!” requests for The Walk Show’s email list than new subscriptions!
Isn’t that wonderful?!
That means at long last we’re shedding the dead weight and getting down to the “fiercely loyal and proactive minority” that we’ve all been longing for for so long! Remember, in Part One of this three-part series, under the heading, “Your Own Personal Jubilee in 2010 or ‘April Fool’?”, I said, “All it takes is a tiny minority within a minority to become the salt and light of a culture, to become the ‘little leaven that leavens the whole lump,’ to become the tail that wags the dog, to become what I call ‘the three percenters’—the history-makers who bring about genuine hope and real change you can believe in.”
It is not the many, but the few, who will do the great and might work with which we are now presented. Yes, you can kiss “The Moral Majority” goodbye, ‘cause in our lifetime it never existed! Then, please welcome the awakening of the three-percenter "Jubileers"!
Think about it: all of the above-mentioned inverse relationships—from yachters to lawyers—appear to have as their common denominator unseen, spiritual factors. This Jubilee series of five articles seeks to address the most central and powerful of all such spiritual factors: forgiveness. Forgiveness does, indeed, make the whole world go around, and the lack of it incrementally disintegrates culture, eventually resulting in “world wars” of various sorts.
The “Jubilee forgiveness factor” of which we will speak will entail not just fiscal debts, but all other types of debts, as well. As I see this as a matter of Lifestyle or Deathstyle for all of us, I am praying that fiercely loyal and proactive Jubileers will grab a hold of it like a dog on a bone! I believe it not only holds the combination for each of us, our marriages, our families, our communities, and our churches; it holds the key to any future Liberty (“Jubilee”) we might envision for our American Constitutional Republic. So, here we go again!
Historical Perspective for Your Personal “Year of Jubilee”
As we said in our first article, "In Old Testament times God instructed the Children of Israel to observe a Jubilee (meaning, 'Liberty') every fifty years, in which all debts were erased, prisoners and slaves were set free, and all land returned to its original owners." Although there is no historical evidence that Israel ever obeyed this divine mandate, there is certainly lots of evidence that they paid dearly for not observing the Jubilee!
In "The Jubilee Principle: God's Plan For Economic Freedom," Dan L. White, billed as “an expert on Christian stewardship,” describes the connection between the Bible and the marketplace. White delves into Old Testament history and shows how God's relationship with the Israelites is a model, or a shadow, of the substantive spiritual and economic liberation being offered to the fiercely loyal, proactive followers of Jesus Christ today.
As White examines the economic "long wave"—a boom-and-bust cycle that happens roughly twice a century in free economies—he uncovers the wisdom of the fifty-year Jubilee cycle intended for the Hebrew economy. Simply put, this was God's plan to spare Israel of the tumult of financial crises, and we can still learn something valuable from our Creator’s timeless Jubilee wisdom today.
Some pretty basic economic thinking might lead one to conclude that any nation that practiced the Jubilee would experience tremendous blessing instead of the boom-bust curse like that experienced by Israel and other countries right up through our own Republic today. The Jubilee might eliminate all crushing debt, would certainly gravitate against an imbalance between the super rich and very poor, and would probably eradicate altogether inflation and those economic depressions that occur approximately every fifty years when we fail to implement the Jubilee.
The Jubilee as a Declaration of Reality
From my perspective on history, it would seem that the Jubilee, like the entire Old Testament Law, is not just some arbitrary, religious code superimposed upon a people by an absentee god; rather, it is backed up by the Reality a very personal God has actually built into the very nature of things. In other words, you don’t break such laws as the Jubilee; you get broken on them! The same holds true of the Sabbath, which Jesus described as being “made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27). Human history verifies that it is good for every person to rest one day in seven. And, if he doesn’t, he eventually pays big time!
“Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God” (Romans 11:22), for He not only blesses us with the Sabbath rest (a shadow of our substantive rest in Jesus Christ), but in Old Covenant times the penalty for breaking the Sabbath was death. (“Whoa!”)
We can also witness the Creator’s blessing, His Reality-backing, and his built-in penalties in the seven-year Sabbatical rest (see the forthcoming, Judo Politics chapter on “Avoid Burnout with ‘The Seven-Year Mastery Cycle’”). The penalty for breaking with that blessing was not just the built-in losses to soil and sower alike; it was experienced when God sentenced the Israelites to 70 years of slavery for failing to allow the land (and the farmer) to rest one year in seven. Yes, they were held in captivity until the land had been given its full 70 years of missed Sabbatical rests (i.e., 70 Sabbath Years)! Leviticus 26:33-34 says:
I will scatter you among the nations and will draw out my sword and pursue you. Your land will be laid waste, and your cities will lie in ruins. Then the land will enjoy its Sabbath years all the time that it lies desolate and you are in the country of your enemies; then the land will rest and enjoy its Sabbaths.
Through the Jubilee God provides us with a perfect picture of the kingdom of God, in which the King, Jesus Christ, makes the ultimate sacrifice to set the captives free, including the provision of a universal pardon for all of us sinners.
Apart from the Jubilee Year reflecting the very loving character of God, I can also imagine that it was instituted to protect the culture from the encroachments of sin. It is most certain, for example, that, given enough time, the rich will normally parlay their wealth to oppress the poor, and the poor will fall to many a temptation to make stupid financial decisions (like playing the State’s Lotto or drinking the State’s liquor). So, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer,” until the liberty-granting Spirit behind the Jubilee is suppressed to the point of an implosion, otherwise known as a crash or depression.
The fact that there is no evidence that either Israel or other nations up through our time ever actually practiced the Jubilee concept is testimony to the stranglehold the god of riches, “Mammon,” has on the nations, including both Israel and our own.
I was somewhat stumped not to witness the major crash I anticipated about fifty years after 1930’s Great Depression, yet the powers that be now have new tools to manipulate the economy much like chemotherapy does to a cancer: it can sometimes buy you time in the short haul, granting you a temporary, artificial sense of relief (what Judo Politics calls, “The Deathstyle Remission Curve”), but in the long run assures an even more complete and total destruction.
One of those financial tools of destruction is inflation, a beautiful mechanism for a slow-motion crash. What baby boomer does not remember the day of one breadwinner per household and $7 tanks of gas?
[Working the other side of the equation (which is always an option during even the greatest of busts), I know of some who made millions or billions by borrowing vast sums at a rate equal to the inflation rate—what became for them, in effect, “free money.” Too bad, as Christ said, that “the sons of this age are shrewder and more prudent and wiser in (relation to) their own generation (to their own age and kind) than are the sons of light” (Luke 16:8—Amplified Bible).]
Inflation is achieved by removing the intrinsic value behind our currency, then simply turning on the printing presses. As economist Jay Ferris points out in his Inflation: The Ultimate Graven Image, any such created “idol,” or “graven image,” will sooner-or-later always return to its intrinsic value. In the case of the U. S. dollar, as more and more paper dollars chase the same amount of goods and services, the value of the dollar is driven down, and consequently, prices go up. Republican President Nixon took the U. S. off the gold standard in 1971, forcing our fiat money on its death march back toward its intrinsic value—that is, the price of the paper and ink alone! Ask the Weimar Republic, Argentina, or modern-day Zimbabwe, who have preceded us along this inexorable pathway.
As a NAUI SCUBA instructor, I discovered a good metaphor for the inviolable side of what is called “inflation.” In diving there is a phenomenon known as an “oxygen deficit.” The novice diver would often encounter this reality by entertaining this common thought process: “If I can stay down a half an hour with my tank, why don’t I just take every other breath and be able to stay down twice as long?” Yet, for every amount of work performed, there is an exact number of molecules of oxygen required. So, when the diver starts “building up an oxygen deficit,” so to speak, the body will get back every single molecule it needs—even, if necessary, at the expense of your life!
The same holds true with inflating the money supply. For every dollar of funny money injected into an economic system, a “dollar deficit” is built up which must be paid back in the proportionate depreciation of the value of the dollar itself, known for some reason as inflation.
Joined at the hip with the funny money problem is our lust for deficit spending. As the 20th Century Catholic sage, G. K. Chesterton opined:
No society can survive the socialist fallacy that there is an absolutely unlimited number of inspired officials and an absolutely unlimited amount of money to pay them.
[Note to self: “Maybe they never intended to pay it back!”]
I like the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s words even better, in a bitter-sweet sorta way:
The trouble with socialism is, sooner or later you run out of other people’s money.
As we have already entered a second, great depression, and we hang on the edge of a hyper-inflation that will once again illustrate the lessons of history we have chosen to ignore, perhaps we might also notice that the need for a Jubilee adjustment has been created by the corruption of our society on almost all fronts.
It’s not just our criminal government that has relentlessly, treasonously, betrayed, raped and pillaged the American taxpayer and trampled our Constitution, but theFederal Reserve’s international bankers that control our monetary system have done the same. Our mortgage and real estate industries have been rife with corruption (I once wrote my “Seven Mortgage Secrets” chronicling their scams), and our banks have proven themselves corrupt to a degree not yet fully understood (unless you understand derivatives).
Add to that our credit card companies, who have put the mafia out of the usury business. And, we must not forget Big Pharma, who has charged exorbitant prices to poison the populous. Of course, whatever the scam, the government is always right there in the middle of it, purchased more votes with free bread and circuses—whoops, I meant “free poisonous drugs”! All in all, we have, indeed, reached the place where nothing short of a Jubilee of some sort could avert a total crash.
With God’s Jubilee idea being a means of restraint upon a culture’s sins, and with those sins having reached the point where the stench has wafted to the heavens, do I detect the glimmer of the hope in a personal Jubilee for many who have been abused by “Our Enemy, the System” (chapter title in the forthcoming Judo Politics)?
Yes, I do!
So, I would guess that the basic question now is: “Do we want a voluntary or involuntary ‘Jubilee’?” It is quite apparent that we are presently experiencing an involuntary one nationally.
So, to deal with the national phenomenon, we shall need to delve next into the subject: “Your Personal Jubilee’s Forgiveness Factors.” Again, to access the entire Jubilee series, see www.TheWalkShow.com, clicking on “Categories,” then “Your Jubilee in 2010” Series.
Pullin’ and Prayin’ for and with you,
Ken
Ken Talbott
Host, The Walk Show
1-877-WALK SHOW [1-877-925-5746--locally 253-333-1813]
Ken@TheWalkShow.com
