The Lord's Shemitah

When Cometh That Thief in the Night - Directory
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On the holy day calendar, there is a weekly sabbath in a cycle of seven days and there is also a sabbath in a cycle of seven years.

1 The Lord then spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai, saying, 2 "Speak to the sons of Israel and say to them, 'When you come into the land which I shall give you, then the land shall have a sabbath to the Lord. 3 Six years you shall sow your field, and six years you shall prune your vineyard and gather in its crop, 4 but during the seventh year the land shall have a sabbath rest, a sabbath to the Lord; you shall not sow your field nor prune your vineyard. 5 Your harvest's aftergrowth you shall not reap, and your grapes of untrimmed vines you shall not gather; the land shall have a sabbatical year. 6 All of you shall have the sabbath products of the land for food; yourself, and your male and female slaves, and your hired man and your foreign resident, those who live as aliens with you. 7 Even your cattle and the animals that are in your land shall have all its crops to eat. 8 'You are also to count off seven sabbaths of years for yourself, seven times seven years, so that you have the time of the seven sabbaths of years, namely, forty-nine years. 9 You shall then sound a ram's horn abroad on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the day of atonement you shall sound a horn all through your land. 10 You shall thus consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim a release through the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you, and each of you shall return to his own property, and each of you shall return to his family.

Leviticus 25:1-10

The primary feature pertains to agricultural activity, which, on a deeper level, is an allegory for activity in the Lord's harvest field. The Shemitah is a unit of counting for the Yobel, the Jubilee, linking the two together. We know all the elements of the Lord's calendar are prophetic so what is the lesson of the Shemitah?

Back in 1999, I was wrestling with what I had learned about the times by means of absolute dating principles. Even though I studied engineering in college, I'm really not particularly quick at math, so, calculating times confidently is a challenge. I had gotten stuck on something that seems really simple to me now but at the time I just couldn't make sense of it. I knew Y'shua was born in the fall of 2 BC and that it marked the transition from the fourth to the fifth millennia from Adam. I also knew that the celestial marker for the beginning of the Lord's return in judgment was in the fall of 1991. I had been brought to the place of conviction that the Lord was counting by sevens of years and that a set of seven began on that marker in 1991. Now, I had never considered very deeply how this might be related to the Shemitah cycle. Counting seven years from the celestial sign placed the next transition of sevens in the fall of 1998. As many times as I counted, two thousand years from 2 BC always brought me to the fall of 1999. Now, if you count from 3 BC, which many consider to be the year of our Lord's birth, 2000 years brings you right to 1998, matching up the transition points, but yet, I knew 3 BC was not the right year to begin counting. It had to be 2 BC and I had full confidence in the interpretation I shared with you about the celestial date stamps of Y'shua's birth and baptism. What was bothering me was knowing that the turning of the end time cycles of seven was in 1998 and that the turning of the sixth to the seventh millennia was in 1999. I did not understanding the reason for the offset from one transition point to the other. Of course, the Lord led me to this dilemma because He wanted to teach me something. When I was brought to the place where I was able to articulate the question (that He gave me) I was ready for the answer. I was only able to ask the question when I had finally come to the place of full conviction about the correctness of the dates and their meaning, and the counts of years. I knew when the sevens turned and I knew when the millennia turned - and I knew that I knew! So, He gave me the question, then, within what was about a minute, He provided the answer!

It's really quite simple. The first key is knowing that the week of years that began in 1991 and ended in 1998 is one of the Lord's Shemitah, one of the sets of seven years in an unbroken cycle that began its count from Adam. The other key is realizing that the count of years by sevens and the count of years by thousands began at the same point in time. In seven thousand years of time, there will be exactly one thousand Shemitah. Although seven thousand is evenly divisible by seven, six thousand is not, neither five thousand nor any of the other millennial transitions that came before. Simple math. Each millennium spans one hundred forty two and six sevenths Shemitah cycles. When the first millennium drew to a close, there was one year left to go before that one hundred forty-third Shemitah was completed. At the close of the second millenium, there were two years remaining until the end of the Shemitah, at the transition of the third to the fourth millennia there were three, at the fourth to fifth: four, and the fifth to sixth; five. At the turning of the sixth to the seventh millennia there were six years remaining in the Shemitah cycle, which means it had begun the year before. The turning of the millennia was in 1999 and the turning of the Shemitah was one year earlier, in 1998! I had known before that the Lord was counting by sevens of years and that a new cycle began in 1991, and now I knew this was the very Shemitah cycle that began when years began to be counted!

With that understanding I was blessed to have the validation of the accounting of the Lord's Shemitah, which is a key insight with regard to how the chronology of the end times has been revealed!