I just think it's absolutely fascinating that slavery is such a prominent motif throughout the New Testament. I mean, we highlighted a bunch of places yesterday where that comes up around the New Testament, but I mean we barely scratched the surface. And it's not just that it's a motif, it's not just that it's a topic that appears in the New Testament. It's that it is also a metaphor, a powerful metaphor that gets used throughout the New Testament to illustrate stuff about our relationship with Jesus. That's wild. What's worse than slavery on the hierarchy of things that are terrible? There's maybe like two or three other things that would be so widely agreed upon as being heinous and horrible that they might even rival slavery. I mean, look, we rightly don't like slavery and the concept of slavery, especially against the backdrop of the post-industrial revolution world, the only world you or our parents or grandparents or their grandparents have ever known. I mean, slavery just makes no sense. So I totally get why anybody would pick up the New Testament and just recoil at the use of the word slave and slavery. And it comes up a lot because, of course, we think first of our own context when we evaluate things and when we consider history. It takes a lot of work to put ourselves in the shoes of people in any other time in history. So, of course, we're gonna read slavery as we would imagine it against the backdrop of our moment. Well, you and I did a little exercise here over the last week or so to try and get past that a little bit. Not to get past saying slavery is bad, but to try to get past inflicting our biases on how we might imagine it to have been on what it actually was. And in light of that, I go through the New Testament and I see all this stuff about slavery, and I'm actually struck by how effective the metaphor is. I mean, it's wild, right? I've cringed in the past when I've read through the New Testament and come across some of the parts I mentioned yesterday where prominent Christian leaders are like, I'm so-and-so, and I'm a slave for Christ. I'm like, ah, couldn't have picked any other word. I mean, that kind of triggers some people. It's a little too soon. Like, come on, any other word? Like I'm a super loyal servant to Jesus. I'm an employee of Jesus. You couldn't go with that. I mean, come on, New Testament translators, could you neuter this language a little bit so it doesn't make me feel weird? But again, after having done the work you and I have done and looking through some of this yesterday, I don't want the language to be changed. I think it's a wonderful image for what is going on in our relationship with Jesus. Am I a slave to Christ? Well yeah. I mean, if if he's the one who did this and his power to save is absolutely binding and his word is final, then yeah, I guess I'm not going anywhere. And as I read through the New Testament more, it makes it really clear that before I was a slave to Christ, I was a slave to sin and death. So don't imagine for a minute as you read through the New Testament that you get to pick like, don't be a slave to anything or be a slave to Jesus. No, you get two options, sin and death or Jesus. Well, I mean, of those two, I guess I won't uh the Jesus one is a lot, lot, lot better. It's kind of like the death thing. You're gonna die either way. Are you going to die apart from Christ or die in Christ? The dead in Christ will be made alive in Christ. Oh, I mean, if I gotta pick a death, uh that one sounds a lot better to me. But I think there are a couple things that are working against us as we think about slavery as a metaphor, as a motif throughout the New Testament, throughout the whole Bible. And one of those things we've taken some steps to remedy, and that is ignorance. Nobody knows anything about ancient slavery. It's just a lot of guesswork, right? It takes some actual effort to go and know that. Again, I applaud you. Nice job. You know more about that. And understanding that spectrum of what this institution was makes it much easier to appreciate those passages in the New Testament that do use slavery as an image or a metaphor for our relationship with Christ. The second thing, though, that I think works against us in appreciating the language about slavery in the New Testament for what it's trying to do is that there's a couple different, really important ideas that I think Christians and people who are Christian adjacent, especially in my country, especially when you get into political stuff, there's a couple different ideas that people kind of mush together, but they're not one idea. They're two separate ideas. It's really a question of two relationships, right? Relationship number one is the relationship between the individual and others, or you know, taking that out to the nth degree, the relationship between the individual and the state, the government. The other relationship is the relationship between the individual and God. And as you read through the New Testament and the whole Bible, I think there's plenty there to say that the American experiment, that is, all those ideas about the importance of the individual and definitely not slavery and bondage, and definitely not having any kings, and definitely checking our government and separating powers and delineating those rights that are held by every individual simply by merit of them being a human being, no matter how unpopular it might be. All of that really American stuff, I think, is defensible biblically as it pertains to relationships between us and other people, or us and our government. Such an arrangement was not possible in an empire. I mean, you set that against the backdrop of the Roman Empire, what I just said, all those values, it wouldn't make a lot of sense. They weren't built for that. That isn't how they thought. But if you move to a new continent and you have a chance to start all over with everything you've learned in the 1700 plus years since Jesus, yeah, I think the American experiment and that whole kind of democratic republic thing that we have going here with our constitution and our bill of rights and the high value on individual liberty and protecting the rights of the individual. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Now, it doesn't make sense when you carry that over into church, though. Well, church and government, they're not the same thing at all. When you go to church, you imitate Christ. And so your relationship with other people in church, nobody makes you go. I mean, well, maybe when you're a kid, your parents make you go, but theoretically it's entirely voluntary, right? So you go to church, you shouldn't be spouting things about I've got freedom of speech to say what I want here at church. Well, I don't know, maybe technically you do, but you're laying down your rights for your brothers and sisters. That's a biblical principle. You're taking care of people who are weak at church and who you're spouting all of your free speech. Like it might not actually be helpful. You choose your words based on what is profitable for building others up in the Lord. It's just a completely different relational calculus that you run when you're talking about the individual and the government versus the individual and other people in church or the individual and God. These are not the same relationship. In church, we are imitating and taking our cues from the ground rules of our relationship with Christ. When it comes to my relationship with the government, I am just as much a human and a citizen of this country as anybody else who is a human and a citizen of this country. That's why we don't like racism around here. It's why we don't like discrimination. Definitely don't want to see our government pulling that kind of crap. And we're going to keep an eye on the government and keep you weak enough and subject enough to us as the citizenry to make sure you don't start getting power hungry and doing stuff like that, ideally. But when it comes to God, you can't start your relationship with God based on suspicion of God's authority and how he might act. Huh? Well, no, God's right in all of his judgments. He's right about everything. He's a king who we can't hold accountable even if we wanted to. He doesn't do anything wrong. He doesn't need to be held accountable. All of his judgments are correct. He's the best king. He is the king of kings. No, the only thing that makes sense, I mean, democracy does not make sense with God. We do not have a republic with God. No, God is consistent with his own character and who he's revealed himself to be in the Bible. He will do without us making him do that. And further, my right standing in society comes from me being a human in this country. I have human rights, and it comes from my continued good behavior. My right standing with Jesus comes by Jesus. That's it. And look at all that we talked about in the book of Galatians. So the idea of being a slave to my peers or my government is rightly off-putting. We should chafe at that. Ick. We should be appalled at it. But the idea of me being a slave to Christ, a slave who he bought from my previous master, who was sin and death, and a slave to Christ, who then immediately upon buying me back at his own expense, manumitted me, and then immediately upon manumitting me put the royal robe on me and declared me his son, an agent and an heir of his kingdom, who gave me responsibilities and invited me to sit at his table and who gave me his name. Uh yeah, there's no reason to for me to be barking at him, and there's no reason, given how that relationship came to be, that I should imagine that somehow I am owed anything because of anything I've done. My solid standing in my relationship with God is because of God and his character and his decisions. I am not God's peer, but he does invite me to approach his throne of mercy with confidence, and he does invite me to call him and think of him as Abba and Father. This is so different than my relationship with the state. And like I was saying a minute ago, I think part of the reason some of the slavery language as a metaphor that points us to Christ in the New Testament is so jarring. We can, and I do mean me too, when I say we, we can kind of mush together all of our assumptions about our relationship with the state and the constitution and the government and our peers and our neighbors. We can mush that all together with our biblical assumptions about our relationship with God. They are not the same thing. Those two relationships don't start the same way. They're not rooted in the same thing, they're not sustained in the same way. One involves being a peer, the other does not involve being a peer. One involves giving and taking equally from society. In the other, I'm a beggar in need, and only by the grace of God do I have this standing. Now, when we take all of that into account, and then we just go and read the New Testament from end to end, and I'd encourage you to do that. It's gonna be a fun project in this upcoming year. Just do a quick sweep of the whole New Testament and look for language about bondservants and slavery and all of that stuff. And what you're gonna find is a little bit of language where Paul, in particular, behaves as though slavery is just part of society that isn't going anywhere anytime soon. But this is how to conduct oneself as a slave and a master, which should be entirely rooted in justice and in following the example of Christ. And then the thing that you're gonna see the most when you read all the way through the New Testament is what we've been talking about for the last two days: the idea of slavery, the process of buying a slave back, the process of manumission that points rightly to our relationship with Christ and to what Christ has done. And as I was saying yesterday, I just don't think we should dismiss that or move on from it because we're confused now, or because it's common in our culture to mush together a couple of different concepts and thus to be very offended and put off by the idea of God being above us and us being subject. Well, I never. No, to be a slave of Christ is idealized. And we're gonna be a slave to something. It's gonna either be to sin and death or it's gonna be to Christ. And I mean, come on, it's no contest between the two. A slave to sin and death equals just a lot more sin and death. A slave to Christ means that I am set free and I enjoy that freedom inside the bounds of this rightly and wonderfully inescapable relationship with Christ, Christ who calls me his son and who gives me responsibility and who takes me from being a slave to being one who shares in the inheritance of his kingdom. All right, I'm glad we spent a couple days on that. One day going through the actual text, another day kind of gaming it out. I think I needed to process that a little bit as well. Now, we need to go and think about much more practical things in terms of the unfolding of the story of Philemon and Paul's life as it relates to Onesimus, and that's what we're going to do next time around. All right, I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.