Biblical Stance On Slavery

It did not allow, in the Jewish context, it did not allow for any abuse of any kind at all. And it was the best of all situations in many cases, because you were cared for, housed, fed, welcomed into the family, maybe even in sharing part of the riches of the family. It was a very important place to demonstrate your Christian life, though, in the pagan world. So by the time we get to the New Testament, it’s pagan slavery that we’re facing. And it’s not the kind of slavery that the Old Testament regulated when Israel came back from Egypt and entered into Canaan and Leviticus 25, and parts of Exodus define what’s permitted and what’s not.

This is a very different world. That was a very helpful way to employ people and take their needs in, I think, the deepest level of commitment. Because if someone was your slave, you really had to take care of them. You possessed them. They were totally dependent on you, which was the best of all things if you had a good master. And we know people like Abraham had many such servants or slaves and cared for them all. So it was really an employment relationship. The concept of the word has been so demeaned over centuries because of the abusive forms of slavery.

But that’s no different than abusive forms of marriage, which doesn’t negate the goodness of marriage that God designed. So we have a work relationship, which is the next place where we have to demonstrate the transformation of our lives, where we have to walk in the spirit and show our joyful worship, our consistent thanks, and our willingness to submit to those around us. Now this is a big relationship even for us today. We don’t necessarily, some of you may work and live in the home of your employer, but it’s a little more rare.

In the Roman world they say there are many as 10 million were slaves. So it was the dominant form of hired work. But even so the next, next to family, you will spend most of your time in your life with the people you work with. You might spend more time with other people in the cycle of meeting people in coming and going, but you’re stuck with the same people for years, very often in your workplace. And the average person who works full time works 42 years, somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 hours.

So you have an awful lot of time and an awful lot of contact with people who need to see what Christianity looks like, right? And that’s your task. That’s your objective. You put Christ on display. And we’ll see that here. And the key thing that I want you to understand is this. There’s no such thing as a secular job for a Christian. You don’t have a secular job. You have a sacred job. And your boss is not the guy that you think is your boss or the lady that you think is your boss.

Your real boss is Christ. And that comes out in this text over and over again in verse five as to Christ. In verse six, slaves of Christ. In verse seven, as to the Lord. Verse eight, from the Lord. Verse nine, their master and yours is in heaven. So almost every verse identifies the fact that your real master is the Lord himself. And he’s the one that’s going to render the verdict on your work. And it’s in that environment of your work that you need to live the Christian life, filled with the spirit, joyfully worshiping, constantly being thankful and submitting yourself.

This is healthy. You say, well, wait a minute. I thought work was cursed. Well, you’re right. It’s cursed. Genesis three, God cursed Adam and said, you’re going to have to work the ground. You’re going to have to work diligently six days a week. And you’re going to have to sweat and toil. And there’s going to be all kinds of obstacles, thorns and thistles, and it’s going to be a difficult task because you’re dealing with a cursed world. And in the end, you’ll go back to dust. But although the world is cursed and work shows the reality of that curse, the Bible is very adamant that we need to work.

There is nothing worse than someone who doesn’t work. That’s really serious. There used to be a saying, idle hands are the devil’s plaything. And in a fallen world, you need something to occupy you. And work is what God has designed. There has even been since the time of the Reformation, something called the Protestant work ethic, which developed in the Reformation, because all of a sudden there was a completely new approach to work. Up until the Reformation, Roman Catholic people would work, do good things, do things well to earn their salvation, thinking that that’s how you earned your salvation.

That was the Catholic work ethic. You have to do what you do so you can gain heaven. The Protestant ethic was this. You have been transformed. Salvation is free. By grace, you have become a child of God. And now you work for the benefit of others. You work for the benefit of others, not to earn your own salvation. Not to find your way into heaven, but to demonstrate the power of the gospel, to change you from a person who is self-serving to a person who is others serving. That’s the Protestant work ethic.

And it is the Protestant work ethic, starting with the Reformation that changed the world. And even to this day, the most flourishing nations, economically, are those that experienced the Protestant Reformation. So we are slaves of Christ, and that’s a beautiful picture of what slavery, in its noblest, should be. Christ bought us, right? Bought us with his own blood, loved us, bought us, took us in, and actually adopted us as sons and daughters, and promised us everything we would need. All spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ are ours. He promised to be our saviour, our source, our protector, our security.

And he promised one day he would gather us to himself in his kingdom, in his house, where he’s preparing a room for us, and reward us eternally with an everlasting reward that has been laid up for us in heaven. I can’t think of a better relationship than being a slave of Christ, and he takes full responsibility for us. He is the perfect illustration of what a master should be, and what every slave would want. It wasn’t that way in the Roman world. So this is new, this is offensive, to talk about Christians being slaves of Christ, because slavery in the Roman world is an ugly reality.

One historian says on the island of Delos, in one day, as many as 10,000 slaves were sold. There was human trafficking, there was kidnapping, there was defeating an enemy, and then taking an enemy captive and hauling them off to your nation and selling them off as slaves. The Romans were bitterly cruel toward their slaves. Slaves had no rights, no right to court, no right to personal defence, and very often no right to kindness. And by the way, Exodus 21 16 does say that if you ever steal a man, any trafficking, you should be put to death.

So no one was to be taken and kidnapped into slavery. No cruel slavery could be defended on Old Testament grounds at all. But by the time you get to Rome, slavery has changed. In the book of Leviticus, you have chapter 25, which talks a lot about slavery and what is allowed. And the thing that’s repeated twice in Leviticus 25 is that you can’t take dominion over a slave, that you have to treat him with kindness as if he or she were a member of the family. In fact, in Deuteronomy 23, an interesting little word there about this, it says don’t return an escaped slave from a cruel master, let him live with you.

Thank you for joining us in this exploration of the biblical stance on slavery. Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].