Week 2, Day 8 - The Power of Proclamation

"Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout the land. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants." Leviticus*25:9,10

REFLECT

The President was in his upstairs study with a few friends - no Cabinet members, no officials, just people who were close to him - and his hand paused as he took up the pen to place his signature at the bottom of the five-page document. His hand was shaking so violently that he couldn't sign. He collected himself and put his name at the bottom of what was the biggest gamble of the century and what would become one of the most famous documents in the history of the world - the Emancipation Proclamation. On that bright and clear New Year's Day of 1863, Abraham Lincoln used the power of proclamation to declare something as true, despite the reality that life in the country looked entirely different. The document's pivotal phrase was this bold assertion: "all persons held as slaves...are, and henceforward shall be free."

Nothing changed on that particular day. The North was still locked in Civil War with the South. Human beings were bought and sold, used and abused by other human beings. But everything did change that day. When a proclamation is founded on truth, justice, and the providential movement of history, then there is a transformation even in the act of proclamation.

Jubilee is a proclamation. God commanded in Leviticus 25 that every fifty years on the Day of Atonement the trumpet should sound throughout the land, and an ancient but new proclamation of liberty would go forth. That proclamation included all the themes of Jubilee: liberty, redemption, justice, healing. And it was not just a president or king or army backing the proclamation. It was God himself.

I would venture to say that all of us have some kind of bondage we are susceptible to and something we need to be liberated from. We all need to be forgiven and need to forgive. We all need rest and restoration. And it begins here: believing God's proclamation of what is true and then seeking the reality of it in our lives. Lincoln declared the people free before they were actually free - but because the proclamation had authority and justice behind it, the declaration became reality.

MAKE IT REAL

Proclamation is founded on truth. Today as you watch, hear, or read advertisements, identify the lie or the half-truth within them. If you are with friends or family, make it a game and see who can identify the lies within a TV commercial. Take time this week to re-acquaint yourself with the Proclamation of Truth found in the Scriptures.

Day 9