Christs Picture Of Slavery

➡ Paul, the voiceover for a ministry called Your Daily Bread, discusses the teachings of Christ and how they guide our daily lives. He emphasizes the importance of living a life worthy of our calling to salvation, which means living as Christians in the world. This involves walking in a manner that reflects our spiritual transformation, imitating God, and being filled with the Holy Spirit. Paul also highlights the importance of joyful worship, constant thanksgiving, and mutual submission in our relationships, as well as the noble concept of being ‘slaves of Christ’, which means serving God willingly and wholeheartedly.
➡ In the past, if a slave was harmed, they could be set free. If someone was cruel to their slave, they could face death. Family members could also choose to free a slave. Contracts allowed slaves to be freed every seventh year, and during the Jubilee, the fiftieth year. If a slave chose to stay with their master for life, they would have their ear pierced as a sign. This information is part of a study on the biblical view of slavery. To learn more, visit goddessgovernment.com.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am the voiceover for a ministry provided to you by Jim Pugh at God is Government, called Your Daily Bread, taken from Christ’s teaching of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6.11. This is a daily devotion ministry, focused not only on uplifting Scripture, but Scripture that will grow your spiritual connection with Christ. We hope that you receive these devotions to uplift you, encourage you, but most importantly, advance your knowledge base of the Holy Scriptures. Today’s focus discussion will be Christ’s picture of slavery. The first three chapters of this short epistle dealt with the issue of salvation, the Gospel.

The last three chapters deal with the issue of sanctification, living as a Christian in the world. And that’s where we are. And we have been directed, starting in chapter 4 verse 1, with the word therefore into the practical section, after the wonderful doxology that ends chapter 3, a peen of praise, if you will, for the glory of the saving gospel of Christ, the theme of the opening three chapters. We then come down to earth in chapter 4 verse 1, where Paul says that you are to walk in a manner worthy of the calling with which you have been called, and that’s a call to salvation.

Having been called to this salvation, we are to walk in a manner that is worthy of that calling. In other words, sanctification follows salvation. And how are we to walk? Well, we’ve been learning that through chapters 4, 5 and 6. If you go down to verse 17, we are to no longer walk as the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind, being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart. They too, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness.

But you did not learn Christ in this way. And he goes on in verse 22 to say, that was your former manner of life, but you laid aside that old self which is being corrupted in accordance with the lusts of deceit, and you have been renewed in the spirit of your mind, verse 24, and put on the new self. So we are new creatures in Christ, and we no longer walk the way we used to walk. How do we walk? Chapter 5 verse 1, as imitators of God, as his beloved children.

He is our Father, we are in his family. We show evidence of that by our life. In verse 2 he says, walk in love as Christ loved you and gave himself up for you. In verse 8 he says, walk as children of light. What does that mean? Verse 9, goodness, righteousness, and truth. In verse 15, walk as wise. So walk is simply a picture of daily Christian living, and we have gone through all these aspects of it in the months past, and it’s been an incredibly blessed time together. The key to it comes in chapter 5 verse 18, that is to be filled with the Spirit.

In order to walk this way, you need the power of the Holy Spirit, and you need him to activate the Word of God in your life. The filling of the Spirit, and letting the Word of Christ dwell in you richly, as Paul’s words in Colossians express it, are one in the same thing. You submit yourself to the Word of God, and you are therefore submitting to the Spirit of God who’s the author of the Word, and when you’re filled with the Spirit, you’re filled with his Word. So we can live this Christian life, and it will be evident.

The first evidence of it is in verse 19. If you’re filled with the Spirit, if you’re fulfilling the desires of the Lord, if you’re walking in the Word, you will be marked by joyful praise, joyful worship, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord. Which is what we do when we gather together, and what you do on your own all the time, as you express the joy of your salvation. So the first is joyful worship. The second response or result of the filling of the Holy Spirit is constant thanksgiving, verse 20.

Always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to God, even the Father. So the first two verses, responding to being filled with the Spirit, have to do with our relationship to God. We praise him with joyful worship. We thank him in everything with constant thanksgiving to the Father through Christ. Then when you come to verse 21, we move from the Spirit-filled life as it relates to God, to the Spirit-filled life as it relates to others. Verse 21, be subject to one another in the fear of Christ.

What marks all of our human relationships in the body of Christ is submission. Submission. We submit to each other, and that’s laid out for us in verses 22 to 33 in marriage. The husband and then last week in chapter six, verses one to four, the children submit to their parents, and the parents submit to their children by not provoking them. Verse four, to anger, but bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Everything is, while there is an authority submission established there, the husband is the head of the wife, the parents are the head of the children.

There is mutual submission, as each of us does whatever we can do to provide whatever the other needs. We subject ourselves to the needs of all of those around us. To borrow the language from Philippians 2, we look not on our own things, but the things of others, which is what Christ did in his own self-emptying. So we have looked at the relationships that are most intimate, the marriage relationship, and the family relationship. Now in verse five, we come to the third category of close relationships, where spirit-filled living, godly living, shows up.

Let me read verses five to nine. Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your heart as to Christ. Not by way of eye service, as men pleases, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart. With good will render service as to the Lord, and not to men, knowing that whatever good thing each one does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether slave or free. And masters do the same things to them, and give up threatening, knowing that both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him.

Now this is a very practical, very direct portion of Scripture, that gives God’s divine design for our employment relationships, our work relationships. And just because you need to understand the context and the setting here, you have to understand that in the ancient times, most people who work were attached to a family. It was an agrarian culture, they had land, they farmed that land, or they raised animals on the land, or they had craftsmen skills. And it still was basically around the home where they applied their trade and earned their living. And so if they needed help, they would then have relationships, contracts with people who would come and work for them.

And that’s the setting that you have here. And the reason I want you to understand that is because you’re not talking about people who go off to a factory in this setting, you’re talking about people who are virtually living with the people who are their employers, and their bosses, and their leaders. And the people are also living with those who are their slaves. Now I know when you see the word slaves, it can put you off a little bit, so I’ll try to help define that as best I can. It should be very familiar to us in scripture, because if you notice down in verse 6, we are slaves of Christ.

Now Christ picked slavery as a picture of our relationship to him. He is our kurios, and we are doulos, slaves to him as our master, which is to say that there is a form of slavery which is noble and exalted. In fact, it is such a wonderful relationship that it can be used to describe the relationship that every Christian has with Christ himself. What is so noble about slavery? Well, slavery in its purest form, and it is certainly regulated in the Old Testament in wonderful and protective ways. Very different from the kind of slavery that you know about in more modern history.

But slavery was simply a way that people who needed employment could contract with someone in a relationship that would allow them to work for those people who then took care of them. And there were some very strict rules about that in the Old Testament. Very strict. You couldn’t kidnap anybody. You couldn’t buy people. There was no human trafficking. You couldn’t buy and sell people as such. Furthermore, they were slaves by their own will because they needed to be cared for. Furthermore, you couldn’t abuse them. If you did anything to, for example, struck a slave and harmed his eye or knocked a tooth out, he was to be set free.

If you ever acted grievously and abusive against your slave, it could cost you your life. There was a death penalty attached to it. Furthermore, any family member who wanted to redeem a slave could do so by redemption. He could go to the one the slave was serving and say, I want my family member back. I think we can take care of this individual. We want him for us. They could be redeemed. And even the contracts had to allow for the seventh year when all the slaves were set free, if they chose that. And the Jubilee, the fiftieth year.

So any time you contracted with someone for that kind of unique relationship, it was limited by the time. If you only had a few years before the seventh year, you would only be able to expect that slave’s work for those few years. He would have freedom to go. The Old Testament also laid out the fact that if, in Exodus 21, a slave decided that he loved his master and wanted to stay for life, then the master would take him by a piece of wood, by a piece of lumber, and hold out his ear where you’d pierce your ear for an earring and put a hole in it.

And that was the way he was saying, I want to be your slave for life. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of Christ’s picture of 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].