The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
Because the LORD has anointed me
To bring good news to the afflicted;
He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
To proclaim liberty to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favourable year
of the LORD (Isa 61:1-2a).
God wants to provide for us financially, because the scale of the task facing the church in these days is so far beyond anything we could provide for naturally out of our own resources.
This scripture in Isaiah is one that you will find we quote a lot at Freedom. It is one of the foundational scriptures for us as a church. It sums up the heart of what we believe God has called us to do in our community. And where it mentions the ‘favourable year of the Lord’, that was the Year of Jubilee, the year in which all debts were to be cancelled, everyone was to receive back their ancestral inheritance, and all property that had been lost was to be restored.
God is saying that we are living in the Year of Jubilee; we can have restored to us what has been lost or stolen, and all debts are being cancelled (we have to understand that if we are in debt, we are under the curse; and if you read Deuteronomy 28, you will see that any kind of poverty is actually a curse).
Therefore you shall serve your enemies whom the LORD will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in the lack of all things; and He will put an iron yoke on your neck until He has destroyed you (Deut 28:48).
In John 10:10 Jesus describes our enemy the devil as a thief, a killer and a destroyer. But,
Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law, having become a curse for us – for it is written, “cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree” – in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we would receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. (Gal 3:13-14).
So the good news is this: we have been redeemed from the curse.