Episode 143 - Sin As Slavery

Sin can sound like an abstract doctrine until you realise how often the Bible describes it as something that masters you. We start by challenging a common mistake: letting a metaphor become more “real” than the reality it points to. When people talk about sin as a cosmic tyrant, it can drift into the idea that sin is an actual external being that Jesus fights like a monster. Scripture’s imagery is stronger and more personal than that, because it locates sin in the corrupted human self that learns to crave what destroys it. 

We walk through Genesis 3 to show sin’s many layers: disobedience to God’s command, falling short of God’s glory, self-glory, failure to love, and unbelief. Then we follow Jesus in John 8:34 as he says that everyone who practises sin is a slave to sin, even when they feel independent. From there we camp in Romans 6, where Paul speaks about sin and righteousness as masters and even as employers, connecting slavery language to desire, habit, and what we obey day by day. 

The heart of the argument is how the cross and resurrection work together in atonement theology. The death of Jesus breaks the old slavery by putting the old Adamic humanity to death, while the resurrection brings a new humanity with new freedom and new desires under grace. We close by shifting to Jesus’ favourite metaphor for sin: debt. If sin accrues a debt we cannot pay, what does it mean for God to forgive, to write it off, and to absorb the loss himself? 

If you care about Christian doctrine of sin, Romans 6, John 8, forgiveness, ransom, and the meaning of grace, listen through and share your biggest question. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell a friend: which metaphor of sin helps you most, slavery or debt?

The theme music is "Wager with Angels" by Nathan Moore

Transcript

Welcome And Why Sin Matters

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Well, welcome to the next episode of the Christ-centered cosmic civilization as we continue to think about atonement. And now we want to continue thinking about what sin is. Because I do think that what has happened, what happens sometimes is when people are trying to explain the atonement as it's described in the scriptures, sometimes metaphorical language kind of runs away from them and gets out of control, so that they take literally a metaphor and don't take literally things that are quite kind of straightforward descriptions of real life relational reality. So this happens, I think, in this idea of sin as a slave master. And I think what happens is the idea that Christ therefore must defeat this slave master, and and the the metaphor has run away from some people's control, such that they have ended up thinking that sin really is an entity that exists, and

When Sin Becomes A Cosmic Tyrant

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that it's like a king over a kingdom, and that king is like a hypostatic thing, an actual person, and that that must be destroyed. And the difficulty with allowing a metaphorical language that's quite rare in the Bible, we don't find sin described in this way very often, but it is sometimes described this way, and the the very notion of being slaves in Egypt has implicit within it something to do with this problem of slavery and being under an oppressive dominion. But is Egypt there depicted as sin? Or is it the gods of Egypt that are the problem? And then this problem about liberated from the gods, and this is the so which means the devil and his forces, that needs to be addressed. We get that. Now you might think that's just silly. Well, the difficulty is that I I think that has happened a little bit with this second facing of the cross. We've thought about the cross-facing humanity. Now, the cross-facing cosmic tyrants. And here, when we're trying to understand what sin is, and the idea is that sin is a cosmic tyrant that Jesus has to do battle with, destroys it to set us free from that. I think that the metaphor may have become taken on a life of its own. That's the phrase. Now, let's think of how the Bible presents sin as slavery, and that there's a kind of binding nature of sin such that when we fall when we sin, we it it doesn't leave us unaffected. It's not as if we sin and are just the same after we sin as before we sin. And we we see that very powerfully even in Genesis chapter 3.

Genesis 3 And Sin’s Inner Damage

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When Adam and Eve sin, and sin there is seen in different ways. That what they did is described in slightly different ways in different times in the Bible because it's this multi-layered reality sin. So, in one sense, we can just say it is as simple as God gave them a command and they disobeyed that command. So that's a sinner's law-breaking, but they also didn't live up to what he was what he created them to be, they've fallen short of God's glory and opted for some a much lesser kind of life. In fact, they pursued their own glory. Sometimes the Bible looks at it that way. In Hosea, when when Hosea is entirely about the marital relationship, the divide romance between Christ and his church. And so when in Hosea, when Adam's sin is examined, the the problem is a lack of love. Sin, and Anselm says this is the worst sin of all is failure to love. Or another way the Bible says is whatever we do and that is not of faith is sin. So when we go back and look at Adam and Eve from that perspective, they don't trust what the Lord has told them. They don't trust the Lord to have the correct the right knowledge of good and evil, that good and evil is his knowledge. They don't trust him about that, and therefore it's unbelief that's at the root of it. So there's all these many ways we could think of it, but we do see the way that once they have committed this sin with all these aspects to it, they are changed by it. They become ashamed of their own bodies, they become suspicious of each other, they become fear, they no longer have a love relationship with the Lord, they're now frightened of him and hide from him, and they hide their own bodies, their own bodies are they're alienated from their own bodies, so that they have become different in themselves. Something's changed within them, and that they become kind of we we might even say that this bondage to slave to sin has begun, that they have become gripped by something that now is pulling them in another direction, and they're no longer free to think and act and feel as they were before. Now their feelings are being pulled in another direction into a kind of individualism, a godlessness, an impiety, a lawlessness. All those things that we thought about in the last episode, that they are being pulled in that direction by this force, like as if sin is some, sin is doing something. Something and what it really is is something's happened to them inside them. James says it's when our evil desires, that e that evil that's now uh within us, something we have become corrupted inside us, and that what was once we were once full of light, but the light has been blocked by sin. So now there's a darkness within us, and there are evil desires, no longer just good desires. There's uh we've lost something inside by sin, and therefore we want more sin. It becomes a craving for more sin. And in this way, sin has a binding nature, an enslaving nature, and it it kind of is like the spider's web that traps us, and the more we kind of almost wriggle, the more we're ensnurred by it, or quicksand, like the more we move, the worse it gets, and and this controlling of it. Jesus says in John chapter 8, verse 34 that everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. This is powerful because it's in this discourse where his religious opponents believe they are free, they're not enslaved. Because if you remember, he says, I he says, I can set you free. This is back in I think verses 31 and 32

John 8 Slavery And False Freedom

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of John 8, and they don't believe they need to be set free. They're like, we're not enslaved to anybody or anything, and then he says, True, I'm telling you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. So sinning is not something you can just do but remain autonomous. Once you give yourself to sin in all these different aspects of godlessness and uncleanness and law breaking, it's all of these things. But once you do that, it has an effect upon you so that you can't just walk away from it, you've become defiled by it, gripped by this thing, and that you what you once thought was horrible now becomes attractive. Something has changed within you. It's not really the metaphor is that there's like a tyrant of sin that's exercising control over you from outside of you, but in truth, it's it's all it's within you, it's within you, it's the it's the humanity, this old fleshly adamic humanity that you that's within you. There's something within you, and that's why Jesus in in John chapter 8 addresses it as who are you born of? Are you born of, you know, he really says you're born from the devil's influence, who was a murderer and a liar from the beginning. So Jesus does go back really to Genesis chapter 3 and says, Look, that is your lineage, you are part of that heritage, that kind of humanity, and you're you're still enslaved in that way. And so you're not listening to me, and you are not free. You're not free, you're full of lies, and you're enslaved. And rather, there's another kind of humanity, and Abraham had that, and that there's a that that's that's what's needed. So there we have in John 8, Jesus speaks about sin. Whoever practices sin is a slave to sin. But this kind of language about sin, this the language of slavery, comes out, it is really concentrated in Romans chapter 6. That's where we get it. Sin is portrayed really in this way, this metaphor, almost like a slave master who holds us. Not necessarily against our will, because in the in the context of the argument,

Romans 6 Addiction And Enslavement

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it's it's it's what it becomes like we may wish, we may kind of think about freedom, but we actually like willingly are enslaved to sin. It's what we kind of want. It's rather that it's something within us that enslaves us. And this is why we might sometimes say in the modern world, we we have we've many of us have experienced addiction and severe addictions and obsessions, and it's something that we end up serving and can can do so with a kind of single-minded, brutal, merciless intensity, though we hate it, yet we serve it willingly. And the concept of addictions and obsessions is is the kind of idea going on in Romans 6, that there's this kind of old human nature within us that we are, and it makes us addicted to lawlessness, godlessness, shamefulness, selfishness, all these things. And even though we sometimes can stand over against those and and and judge them to be wrong, we nevertheless are addicted to them, we crave them, we cannot escape them because they they they are our deepest desires. It's like that. So either if we if we if we keep the metaphor of the external master, and we'll see that at the end of Romans 6, where that comes out more, or it's more as as some is this the internal craving of our nature. We have to be broken free of it. We are enslaved to sin, and we need to be broken free of it, and the death of Jesus breaks the slavery, but is it does the death of Jesus replace that slavery with something better? And I think Romans 6 says, no, the death of Jesus kind of puts an end to the old to that slavery, but on its own, considered abstractly, the death

Death Breaks Chains Resurrection Gives Life

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of Jesus doesn't grant a freedom, a new nature that is free of sin. It's the resurrection of Jesus that does that. And you might say, well, we you know, you must keep the death and resurrection of Jesus completely together. Yeah, of course they go together, but the Bible itself attributes certain things to the death of Jesus and certain things to the resurrection of Jesus, and then certain things to the ascension of Jesus, and so on. And Paul in Romans 6 talks about what we do with the what what's the meaning of the death of Jesus and what's the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus and why you need both of those. One to put to death the slavery of sin, and one to bring to life a new free freedom, a righteous life that emerges from the resurrection. So there is a need for the for the slavery of sin to be broken, but does it is it really an exterior tyrant, or is it something more interior to us, something that that that is much more related to God than related to an external tyrant? Let's see what he says. Let's read some verses. Romans 6, let's go from verse 12. Do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its desires. So this is reminiscent of what Jesus says in John 8.34. Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. Here, Paul probably has that verse in mind when he says, We, if we are bel if we belong to Jesus, we must not continue to practice sin, because if we do that, then sin reigns in us. It's got control over us, it's mastered us, and that mustn't be the case. Sin must not, we must not be a slave to sin. To obey it. It's desires. Notice that. It's the desires, and it's not external desires, they're internal. So don't present the parts of your body to sin as instruments of right uh of wickedness. Don't offer up your body to be a tool, to be a slave of this power of sin, but rather present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present the parts of your body to him as instruments or slaves of righteousness. For sin shall not be your master, because you're not under law, but under grace. Now that that law and grace is part of a wider argument in Romans, but can we get this sense there that there's this metaphor then of sin as a master and God as a master? And this one master is we uh we are it we were enslaved to, and we must not serve him anymore, serve this master of sin. That's the idea. But the remedy, anyway, the remedy to it is takes us at we mustn't observe that too much, but notice it's the death, death it free, like breaks the slavery by getting rid of this old humanity, and the resurrection brings brings a new humanity. But look at verse 16 of Romans 6. You are slaves of the one whom you obey. Again, probably Paul has John 8 34 in mind there, because remember, Paul, in all his teaching, he's incessantly exegeting the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. Whenever we read the teaching of Paul, always try to figure out which part of the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels is Paul exegeting here, and then if he hasn't got any of the teaching of Jesus in mind, he actually says, I don't have anything from the Lord Jesus on this, but this is my best judgment. So he owns up to it if he isn't exegeting Jesus' teaching. So we can usually find it in here, it's obviously this John 8 material. So Romans 6 16, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness. So we either we are so the obedient to obey sin is actually a disobedience, if you notice in that verse. So if we obey sin, we are disobeying God, and again, by implication, sin there is being defined as disobedience to God, breaking his commands, or it could you might we might say there's an implicit command in that we were designed to live up to the glory of God, and if we fall short of that, we are disobeying what we have been created to be. You could argue that, but the that that we obey either sin, which is a form of disobedience, or we obey God, and that's true obedience, and that but notice each one one leads to death, the other leads to righteousness. Look at verse 18. Having been set free from sin, you have become slaves of righteousness. So again, this idea of free there's we must be enslaved. We are either enslaved to, and then here, righteousness is put is depicted as an external master over against sin. So sin and righteousness are thought of metaphorically as tyrant, not tyrants, but as lords or employers, even. And in and Paul is going to bring out this metaphor of employment in a moment. So do we serve righteousness, which is a form of obedience to God, or do we serve sin, which again, if we if we are understanding what he's saying, it's a way of serving ourselves, it's being driven from our own desires. It's the desires within us, selfish desires. And if you go back, if we go back to Genesis 3, we understand that the the that that sin that becomes so archetypal for the whole everything in the Bible, as well as an origin point, that it why why do Adam and Eve eat that fruit? Because it's for selfish reasons. It actually says, you know, Eve sees it and it looks good to eat, but it's also beneficial to them. And also she believes, so she believes that this is for their own selfish benefit. There's something always intrinsically selfish about sin. But let's move on to verses 22 to 23 of Romans 6, and this will just move us forward. Now that you've been set free from sin and become slaves of God, the benefit you reap leads to holiness, and the result is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. So again, sin is like a master who pays a wage in his service. And that wage is death.

Wages And Gifts Reveal The Battle

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We earn payment as we serve sin. It's a commercial or transactional pattern, isn't it? It's the idea that sin is demanding service and doing that earns, requires payment, actually, requires payment. It's deserved, it's required, and this master always pays his wage of death. He never fails to pay his wages. In that sense, he's a very honest employer in that he never defrauds his employees in this metaphor. So sin earns or deserves death. Sin earns death, sin pays the wage of death. But the contrasting idea is gift. So it's earning a wage, doing things that earn a wage, and then the contrasting idea is gift. Sin earns death, but God gifts us eternal life through Jesus. We don't earn it, we're given it eternal life through Jesus. But the but the death we receive is earned, it is deserved. Okay, so that that what I wanted to explore there is the complexity of sin is slavery, but it is in the argument, it's not that sin is an actual entity external to us, because the solution to it is to put ourselves to death and then to be born again by the resurrection of Jesus into a new humanity. That is what breaks the slavery of sin. It's not that the slavery of sin is broken by this external entity being killed, as if like sin is this monster that lives in the underworld, and in the death of Jesus, he kills this beast, and then once the beast is slain, then all the all all of us who were under his tyranny are now free. No, that that like we might tell the story a bit like that, but that isn't the act, that isn't the reality of what's happening. The reality of what's happening is Christ is dying on the cross such that he's putting to death the old humanity that crave sin. We're thinking, you know, Galatians 5 and things like that. Or Proverbs, the way of foolishness versus the way of wisdom, these two humanities. And the way of foolishness, the way of the flesh, must be mortified. And Christ does that on the cross and puts that to death. And that that's what breaks the slavery of our nature, our old humanity, such that we can have a new new desires within. It's not that there is really an external enemy that Jesus must fight. It's rather it's it's something much more. So the it in this sense, it's the cross is facing towards kind of it's it's about humanity. It's almost like it overlaps with that first category where the cross is facing towards humanity, but it is here facing towards human nature in its fallen sinful state. It's it's the flesh that must be crucified on the cross and put to death and done away with if we are to be free. Okay, we could that'll that'll have to do that. There's a lot more we want to say, but let's think of two other concepts of sin in our remaining time. Debt. The concept of that sin accrues debt or is a debt. Now that Jesus uses this concept quite quite often. It's it's probably his preferred way of describing what sin is in his parables and teaching, even in the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us. Debt. So he perceives sin in all it in the he really

Sin As Debt And Costly Write Off

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does like to use this metaphor of debt and the forgiveness of debts. It's as if we have run up a debt to God and we need to be forgiven for our debt. That sin seems to be like it's like it's a financial metaphor, isn't it? It's a commercial view, and that that there's a cost. There's a cost attached to our sin. And to sin a great deal runs up a much larger debt because Jesus actually speaks about people having some having smaller debts and some having larger debts. And then when he confronts Simon the Pharisee, and he who believes himself to not have very much sin, and then there's that woman who is absolutely overflowing with love and gratitude to Jesus, and then Jesus tells this story about people, some people, someone who has a a relatively small debt, but it's still quite large if you think about it, and then someone has an astronomically huge debt, and in all these concepts, what he uses this sin is something that there's a kind of cost attached to each sin, and that every time we sin, debt is accrued, and the debt mounts up, and it's impossible to pay. But in the parables of Jesus, you know, the guy who is not grateful when his debt is is forgiven, he ends up being thrown into prison for his debt, and then is like given trouble in prison and and until he pays off the whole thing, and it's that quite, you know, it's it's it's an image of sin and sinner's debt that is not regularly preached on, probably, but Jesus does, and we need to be forgiven for our debt, or or the debt must be paid for us or written off for us. So this commercial or financial view of sin is, I think, Jesus's favorite one. Even when he calls himself a ransom, he will die as a ransom. The concept of ransom there is a financial model, also. Who is the ransom paid to? Again, this takes us back to Anselm. It can't be the devil as if the devil is rightly due a payment for humanity. Anselm's not happy with that, but rather it's this concept, because in the parables of Jesus, the debt is owed by the righteous king. There's the righteous king, and people are indebted to him. It's not some evil character in the parables of Jesus that is owed money, it's the righteous king who does what is right, and he's the kind and forgiving king who who forgives the debt. So in in all of this, Jesus isn't saying, ah, you are indebted to the devil. In the teaching of Jesus, we are indebted to the Lord God, and he is the one who forgives us because we owe him a debt. And it's God, we ask in the Lord's Prayer, forgive us our you, Father, Heavenly Father, forgive us our debts. So this idea of forgiving a debt is is worthy of a lot of meditation. Because Jesus uses this as such a central concept in his own teaching. We need to meditate on this a lot because a debt, how how is a debt forgiven? Or we might say a debt is written off. So if I if I owe someone a hundred pounds, I'm I could pay that debt, and so I pay, I the cost, the the the the yeah, the burden of it, I I carry that and then I pay that debt. But the person I owe that £100 to might say, I'm going to forgive you your debt and I'm going to write it off. In which case, they are the one who must suffer loss. They suffer the loss of a hundred pounds. So some one of us needs to feel the pain of the debt. Can you see that? With it with and this is why it's so significant that Jesus uses this language of debt. Some because with a debt, it's a kind of zero-sum game. Like there's that either the person who is owed the debt accepts the loss of that and and and is loses the debt and says, Okay, I'll forgive you your debt, and I will suffer that. I will have to find. So if it's a king who's managing his kingdom and someone owes a huge amount of money, that king is going to have to find that money some other way to make it up. Because they are now out, they are lot, they have suffered loss because they've written off a debt. So if one person is freed from debt, somebody else feels the loss. The person who's owed that money feels that loss. So, in this way, if the living God forgives us our debt, how he he loses, doesn't he? Like, what why does Jesus use this concept of debt? What how how is the f how is God uh how is this debt made up? Where is the loss felt for God? How does how does God feel that this loss when he forgiv for writes off a debt? Lot to be thought about there. And that is why transactional language. Some people find it horri and they merely say things like, How could you speak about the cross in merely financial and transactional terms? As if that is something that doesn't happen in the Bible, as if it the very concept of it is absurd, as if it was invented by Latin jurists in the 11th century or something. That's not true at

Why Transaction Language Matters Next Week

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all. It's entirely the language of Jesus, and in fact, it's embedded in the ancient law of Moses, also. So there's not this this is not alien to the scripture, it's absolutely smack bang in the scripture, but we need to think about it then and digest it properly and allow us to understand what that's really talking about. I want to touch just on one other quick point about what sin is, and that's sin as uncleanness. In fact, I won't I won't deal with this now. I'll I'll roll that over to to to next week.