Philemon Yeah Philemon Yeah. Hey everybody, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast, and this season is about the Book of Philemon. Kind of. I mean, there just isn't that much in the Book of Philemon. In that regard, it's kind of the weirdest book in the whole Bible, because not only is it incredibly short, but it's incredibly personal. And it just basically has one request. Hey, Philemon, I ran into your slave Onesimus. Turns out he's a Christian now. I uploaded to you guys this whole new operating system for how you make decisions about everything. You can see the other letter I sent along. Someday people are going to call it Colossians. Basically, it just says that Jesus is supreme over everything and that he is your new operating system. And then you'll like the second half. I mean, it's going to hit a little close to home, buddy, but there's a bunch of stuff in there about like how things should look at home with all your relationships there. And dude, I do mean all your relationships, including the relationship you have with uh my new pal hero Nesimus. Turns out uh he's uh apparently a runaway slave from your household. He impresses me. He's pretty great, but also he and I talked and it seemed best to send him back your direction. I know that without me commanding you to do this, I just know, Philemon, that you are going to do the right thing. I know you're going to fully onboard the new operating system, which is the supremacy of Christ. I know you're going to take to heart what I said in the other letter I sent along. And I know that you are going to receive Onesimus back, not as a slave, but as something more than a slave, as a brother in Christ. I look forward to seeing you make sure to get a room ready for me. Paraphrase is mine, but that's basically the entire thing when it comes to Philemon. I think I maybe could have read it faster than I just paraphrased it. So, as some of you've probably noticed over the course of this brief season, it has been somewhat challenging to linger in the book of Philemon and do this careful word-by-word, verse-by-verse study because of those factors. So instead, we've had to attack this book a little differently than other books of the Bible. One way we've done that is I've done some double duty history work, in part to set up Philemon and the situation in Colossae and the New Testament in general. I say double duty because that is going to pay off even further in the upcoming season that we're about to get started with. More on that, including a book announcement coming up a lot quicker than you would figure. I don't want to do a big run-up on this next book that I'm going to do. I want to jump in verse one, day one. So the Philemon material is going to do some heavy lifting both for the current season we're in and the next season. And the second way we've come at this book a little differently than we've come at books in previous seasons is by leaning very heavily on its twin book, its companion book, a book that was delivered by the same people who delivered Philemon at the same time, that being Colossians. And we've been hanging out there for the last few days. Well, well, well, in the course of all of that, we finally got to the part where the rubber really meets the road for the modern reader here. And that is on the issue of slavery. Paul starts in in Colossians 3.22 in this section on slavery, saying something that sounds deeply shocking and out of touch, if he were to say it right now, in our moment in history. Slaves, obey your earthly masters and everything, and do it not only when their eyes on you to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. If somebody were on a podcast or something, or they were saying this in like a presidential debate, and like, okay, to the question of slavery, a question for the senator from North Dakota. For people who are slaves right now, how should they act? First of all, I just want to say thank you so much for this question. And what I guess I would just address to this panel would be that I would encourage slaves to obey their earthly masters in everything and do it not only when their eye is on you and to win their favor, but I mean, everybody would be guffawing and in horror. Why? Because context, because of the moment in history that we're talking about. Well, here's my big bold proclamation for this episode. I think people would have made the same guffaws and shocked sounds when that verse was read publicly to the Church of Colossae with Philemon and probably Onesimus in the room to hear it on the virgin reading of this letter. I think that there would have been fainting women and shocked sounds that would have sounded almost identical to the shocks and guffaws and horror sounds that I invited you to imagine in that hypothetical debate scenario in our day and time. I think that same kind of group gasp would have come over the entire room when this letter was read aloud back then in the 60s A.D. Slaves obey your earthly masters and everything, and do it not only when their eye is on you to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Think about what just got done being read right before that. Wives, submit to your husbands. Do you think there was some sort of shock that went through the crowd when that was read in Colossae? No. That was a perfectly normal Greco-Roman expectation for the household relationship between a husband and a wife. No, probably everybody just would have nodded along and been like, yeah, well, that's what makes the world go round. Then husbands, love your wives and don't be harsh with them. Now I think that moment would have brought about a little more shock than the previous one, because I think probably culturally the expectation was wives submit to your husbands, and husbands act however you want toward them because they are in an inferior position. Here, the teaching in light of who Christ is and his supremacy is no, submit to them back in love. Well, then the next part gets read out loud in Colosse. Children obey your parents. Well, probably there wasn't a gasp there. The kids weren't going to gasp. Certainly the parents weren't going to gasp. Surely everybody was going to be like, yeah, we know this. Greco-Roman culture hated it when kids disrespected their parents. The worst punishment in all of the ancient world, and I mean we're talking elaborate punishments, was for a kid who killed their parents. Now, the expectation was that children would obey their parents. I don't think this would have shocked anybody too much. Rather, the real revolution here in each of these three things that we get in the previous passage is that why, you know, why are we doing it? It isn't because of the Greco-Roman expectations, it isn't because the Persians came through and taught us to do it. It isn't because the Sumerian horse masters came through and were like, yo, wives must submit to her husbands. It wasn't anything like that. It wasn't because of the Phrygians or the Lydians, it was because of the Lord. Submit to your husbands, not because it's popular in Greco-Roman culture, but it's fitting in the Lord. Love your wives. I know that might be jarring to you, gentlemen, but you know, for the same reason, in light of Christ, love your wives. In Ephesians 5, Paul spells it out even more clearly. He's like, Love them as Christ, love the church. That's sacrificial love. Children, obey your parents, for this pleases the Lord. Now, I think for the most part, prior to the slave section, everybody in the public reading in Colossae, including Onesimus and Philemon, were probably all like, Yep, all right, that all sounds pretty good. I think the gasps would have come when Paul humanized slaves in a profound way that would have clanged against the assumptions of Colossian culture. Slaves obey your earthly masters in everything, and do it not only when their eyes on you to win their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. That little tag at the end is a pretty big deal. Paul is likening slaves making moral decisions and doing the right thing to wives, husbands, and children, implicitly masters making moral decisions and doing the right things, not because of Colossian fusion cultural pressures, but because it's unto the Lord. So wait a minute, you're telling me slaves are capable of moral calculation? Because that was not the dominant assumption of most people in the ancient world. I got a book right here in front of me that we're going to talk more about called Greek and Roman Slavery. It's by a guy named Thomas Wideman. It is really hard to read, both because of how unpleasant it is, but also because of how thorough it is and how small the print in this book is. This book that I've got in my hand that I've been working through here for the last chunk of time is an account of pretty much every reference we have in the ancient world in terms of primary sources to what people thought about slaves. We're talking about how they were thought of morally, intellectually, legally, thoughts about slave codes and how things should be handled when stuff goes wrong, slave marriages, what makes a kid a slave or born free, the process of manumission, how one becomes free. And I have been ingesting slavery from the ancient world a lot lately. But in light of what I'm reading in this book, Paul is already in that one sentence that we've been lingering on, he's already made some pretty revolutionary assumptions about slaves and their humanity and their capacity for moral and ethical thought, and the expectations it's reasonable to put on them that go beyond, hey, robot, do thing I said or don't do thing I said not to do. That would have been the typical assumption of the day. This language here where Paul is talking, I mean where he's even bothering to speak to slaves, that's pretty revolutionary. But the fact that Paul, in disagreement with great minds like, for example, Aristotle, is talking to these slaves not like they are a living tool, that is how Aristotle classified slaves, but rather Paul is addressing slaves as thinking, feeling humans made in the image of God, fully capable of moral decision making, and in whom it was reasonable to express expectations of them functioning like actual human beings capable of moral decision making and being intellectually competent, what Paul is doing here is dignifying the slave, even in this instruction, to obey their earthly master. Now, again, I say, if that verse right there was said verbatim in the hypothetical presidential primary debate that I just imagined earlier in our conversation, rightly everybody in 21st century America watching it would uh just be aghast and shocked. But the exact same phrase 2,000 years ago in this context is going to cause shock in the room for a different reason. That isn't how slaves are thought of, that isn't how slaves are talked to, that is how free people are talked to. Slaves are tools, they're robots, they do things. That's Aristotle. And perhaps most shockingly of all to the original audience is that Paul is saying that the slaves who are within earshot of this letter should do what he is saying, not because their master said so, but because the Lord said so. Obviously, there's a lot more to unpack here, and I don't know how long it's going to take. I had aspirations of wrapping up Philemon right around the new year as I'm recording this and rolling into uh the next book that I have not announced yet. But this subject matter right here is, you know, it's the unpredictable variable. It's a thing that could take a long time, or maybe uh we'll just take a day and I'll fly through a bunch of these and it'll feel like, oh, that was plenty. And then we just round out this relevant passage in Colossians and what happens over in Philemon, and then we poke around a little bit about what we know or suspect might have happened after and how it all worked out and roll into the next book. Usually I have a pretty good sense of it by this point in the season. This time around, I don't. So we'll see. Maybe we're two weeks from being done. Maybe we're six weeks from being done. I guess we're fixing to find out. Whatever the case, more on this slavery stuff and the shocking words that Paul is saying, not for the reasons you might have guessed, next time around. All right, that's plenty for now. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Allah podcast. Let's do this again soon.