The Earth Is the Lord's

Today's Reading

Read Psalm 24:1: "The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein."

Then read Leviticus 25:23: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me."

Reflection

Before we can talk about capitalism, socialism, or any economic system, we need to establish a biblical starting point. And the starting point is this: God owns everything. You own nothing. Neither does anyone else.

Psalm 24:1 is blunt. The earth belongs to the Lord — not to nations, not to corporations, not to individuals. Every acre of land, every mineral deposit, every dollar in every bank account exists because God created it and sustains it. Human beings are stewards, not proprietors. We manage what belongs to another.

Leviticus 25 turns this theology into law. God tells Israel that the land of Canaan cannot be sold permanently because "the land is mine." Every fifty years — the Year of Jubilee — all land was to revert to its original family allocation. Debts were to be cancelled. Slaves were to be freed. The economic slate was to be wiped clean.

This is astonishing. It means that the God of the Bible enshrined in his law a mechanism to prevent the permanent concentration of wealth in a few hands and the permanent impoverishment of others. The Jubilee did not abolish private property — families owned and worked their land for fifty years. But it placed an absolute limit on how much any family could accumulate and how far any family could fall.

Tim Keller captured the logic: "The Jubilee means that no family was to become permanently destitute and no family was to become permanently wealthy. There was to be a regular, systemic rebalancing of resources — not because private property was wrong, but because God owned the land and no one else did." Private property is affirmed. Unlimited accumulation is not.

Scholars debate whether the Jubilee was ever fully practiced. But its theological significance is undeniable: God structured his economic laws around the principle that wealth must serve the common good, not merely the individual. The resources of creation are entrusted to humanity for the flourishing of all, not for the enrichment of a few.

C.S. Lewis put the spiritual dimension simply: "He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only." If Lewis is right, then our frantic accumulation of wealth is not just economically problematic — it is spiritually pointless. The one who has God and a modest income is richer than the one who has billions and no God.

Going Deeper

The Jubilee principle does not translate neatly into any modern economic policy. But it establishes a direction: God's economy moves toward equity, restoration, and the prevention of permanent underclass. As you read this week, let the Jubilee question haunt you: Does my economic life reflect the conviction that the earth is the Lord's — or the assumption that what I have is mine to do with as I please?