5053, 5053, 5050.
SPEAKER_00Philemon. Yeah. Philemon. Yeah. I've been thinking about it a lot. Well, we've been working through this very complex scenario between Philemon, Onesimus, and Paul. Been thinking about it a lot, trying to put myself in Onesimus's shoes. And truth to be told, I think I would have run away too. I like my freedom. I think freedom is really important. I think slavery is deeply unnatural. And even though it might not be the shrewd thing to do, and I'm not sure it was shrewd or strategically sound for his own well-being, for Onesimus to run away, but even if it wasn't strategically shrewd, I think I'm with him. I think I would have done the same thing. It's hard to imagine. I've never been in a situation that comes anywhere close to what this guy was living through in his daily life. But I know how I react when I'm in situations where I'm kind of stuck in something. And I don't how did this happen? Like why how am I obligated to this? I gotta get out of here. Stuck in a set of circumstances I don't want to be in. That, I mean, I find myself getting really fidgety. How much more so would I be constantly eyeballing the door and thinking about ways to build a new life if I were in Onesimus' shoes? Again, I'm not saying that it was the best idea for him to run away, given the circumstances of the ancient world and what he would be facing when he got out there, but I cannot blame the guy. We've been doing this what if thing where, you know, it's just kind of a fun and sort of backwards way to work our way to understanding the circumstances of the situation between Philemon, Onesimus, and Paul. And in this fun, sort of work our way backwards into understanding it approach, what we're doing is we're asking the question, what would have happened if Paul hadn't sent Onesimus back to Philemon? What would have been the ripple effect of this alternate version of history? We spent the last couple days thinking about that from Paul's perspective and thinking about the implications for Paul's life. And in light of all that, I came away understanding why Paul played it the way he did. We're not done exploring all of that, but I definitely came away sympathetic for what Onesimus and Paul chose together, which is Onesimus, you have to go back to Philemon. But it's dangerous to go alone here, take this letter with you. However, as I just mentioned a second ago, I'm also really sympathetic to Onesimus's decision, even if an emotional one, and even if it wasn't the most shrewd, I'm sympathetic to his decision to run away. So let's game it out. How do things play out for Onesimus if Paul doesn't send him back to Philemon? Well, thing number one, I think he's gonna end up like the prodigal son from Luke 15. You remember how all of that played out, right? A beloved son of a father in this story, who basically goes to his dad, and instead of stealing from his dad to fund his escape, he goes and demands his part of the inheritance from his dad. And it's like, give it to me now. And weirdly, the dad is like, all right, here you go, go get him. And then Jesus says, Luke 15, 13, not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country, and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he'd spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country who sent him into his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything. Look, horrible situations like this can still happen today. You don't even have to make a bad or immoral choice, and enough things could bounce against you that you could end up in a pretty tough spot. Feels like there's a little more of a safety net in place, though, now than there was back then. It was very possible to completely fall off the ladder in this era. And if you were lucky, you would get absorbed into a household as a slave. And this runaway son, oh, he took his dad's money and he just burned through it in no time flat. And pretty soon he has fallen all the way off the bottom rung of the ladder. And now the state that he finds himself in, completely impoverished, no family to help pick up the slack, having burned all of his bridges, it's a bigger crisis than it would be for you and me today if we found ourselves in a similar situation. Again, because we have more societal safety nets now. So what do I think is going to happen to Onesimus if Paul's like, you have to go back? And Onesimus is like, nope, I will not do it. And maybe Onesimus in this hypothetical steals some stuff from Paul on the way out the door and goes and takes the money he has left from Phileamon and what he just got from Paul, and he runs off and he tries to set up a new life. Well, I don't think Onesimus is the moral equivalent of the prodigal son. I mean, the prodigal son is clearly much worse. Onesimus, poor guys, just trying to find freedom, but they're gonna end up in the same place just given the economic realities and the social realities of the ancient world. Onesimus, if he's lucky, is going to end up mucking around in the slop with a bunch of pigs, wishing that he ate as well as the pigs do. If he's less lucky, he's going to end up in much bleaker circumstances. I don't think it's very likely he's gonna land on his feet as a runaway slave in a household like what he had with Philemon. Again, I we've done this like 20 times, but let me just be clear. Is slavery good, therefore? No, I'm not saying that. I'm just trying to deal in the reality of the moment where all of these things happened. So if Onesimus refuses to go back, or if Paul, you know, maybe Onesimus wants to go back, but Paul's like, no way, I'm not writing a letter, I'm not doing that. That's not my strategy. Onesimus isn't going to have a way to meet his needs. He's not gonna have a way to make money, and the little bit that he still has is gonna run out pretty quickly. And then I think the original audience would have expected that he would end up in a situation like what I read you in Luke 15 about the prodigal son. So, one, he's gonna run out of money and he's gonna get desperate. And then two, he's going to have to do something desperate. I don't know what the desperate thing is, but most of the desperate things you can do when you're out of money and on the run are not very morally desirable. They're not good to other people and they're not good to you. And Onesimus is gonna find himself in that kind of a situation, you know, assuming that he had not been discipled or had not deeply onboarded this stuff, he may to some degree revert to a pre-Jesus operating system and find himself really in a world of hurt in some remote corner of the empire, trying to run from his past, which is a pretty tough way to live. So that's one way it could play out. Here's another very likely way that it could play out if Paul decided not to send Onesimus back. Let's say Paul was just said, Onesimus, you're great, you're very useful to me, as he says in Philemon. You know, formerly he was useless to you, but he has become useful both to you and to me. Paul really likes this guy, he thinks very highly of his talents. Let's say Paul decided to keep him around and just not do anything. Just this is Onesimus. Yeah, he ran away from Philemon. Now he works here with me. I don't know, maybe he'll get back to Colossae someday. Well, he's gonna get ratted out, he's gonna get caught. There were people whose job it was to go about and enforce slave codes and things like this. This kind of deal wasn't gonna stay a secret. This was gonna bite Onesimus and Paul in the butt, he's gonna get caught. Or if Paul tried to get really clever and deceptive and changed Onesimus' name and cut his hair and made up a backstory and paid to get some fake paperwork forged or something, I think he's still very likely to get caught. And if he gets caught doing shenanigans like that, one, it's gonna be ruinous for Paul and the reputation of Christianity. But Onesimus is he I mean, he's gonna suffer terribly for all of that. Remember the stuff we read about runaway slaves and what would happen? Almost surely Onesimus is going to endure physical punishment, probably from the state or whoever's job it is to transfer Onesimus back to his master. That's not gonna be a pleasant trip for Onesimus. And then when he gets back, I can't imagine he's gonna run into a Philemon character who acts like the prodigal father. I don't think we're gonna get a scene that would sound something like this. But while Onesimus was still a long way off in chains being accompanied by the slave catcher, Philemon saw him and was filled with compassion for him, and he ran to his runaway slave and threw his arms around him and kissed him. I mean, maybe. I would like to think that's what would happen. But if Onesimus comes back without a letter from Paul and because he got caught, I think Philemon's probably gonna be mad. I also think there's a decent chance that burned or etched into his forehead are gonna be an F and a U, and also a G. It stood for fugitive. I mean, the Latin checks out there. Fug, not kidding, they'd put that on the foreheads of slaves that were particularly likely to run away with scarring or etching, so that there was just no hiding it. You could look at the guy, this is before the invention of the baseball cap, and be like, well, that guy right there is either a slave that is likely to run away, or one who has recently run away. Let's just observe his behavior and figure out which it is. Either way, as a former household slave in good standing, if you get fug etched on your forehead, well, that pretty much destroys all of your future prospects for anything. It's a mark that says, this person will never be a freed man. I can't imagine there were a lot of fug-branded free people running around in the ancient world. And if you're like, stop it, dude, you're having fun saying fug. Like you're just like you're rubbing it in because it sounds weird and goofy and maybe somehow a cousin of something crass. Well, to you, I would say, what is that over there? What is that? Uh no matter. What were we talking about? Oh, yeah, how things are gonna go for Onesimus when he gets back to Colossae if he doesn't go back voluntarily with the blessing of Paul, if he goes back because he got caught. The answer is I think it's gonna go really, really badly for him. I don't blame him for trying to get out, but I also don't think it was the most shrewd move. And I think Onesimus made the right call along with Paul in doing an about face and trying to see if he could reframe the relationship with Philemon into something unprecedented, something new, rather than trying to just live a life on the run, always looking over his shoulder, afraid of being caught. Well, just like with Paul, I didn't get through all the possibilities in one day. So we'll have to consider the rest of the possibilities as to how this might have worked out for Onesimus if Paul had not sent Onesimus back to Philemon. All right, cool. More on this tomorrow. Oh, also, hey, a bunch of you ordered the the book. You pre-ordered the book that I wrote. That makes all the work I put into that feel a lot better. Also, many of you sent me cool little encouraging notes to say that you heard about the book and that you're getting it. The book, I should say what it's called every time so that you can find it if you don't know about it yet. It's called The Lightning Fast Field Guide to the Bible. And it I it's very important to me. It took a lot of work. It's a distillation of a whole life of studying this stuff and an attempt to ruthlessly try to make it make sense to normal, competent people. And I'm really excited for it to actually come out so that you start getting your copies here in a while. Uh, thank you. Just thank you so, so much to everybody who's going out on a limb with uh a few bucks of your hard-earned money to invest in this thing that I hope is not just a favor to me. I hope it makes your life way better. It's written to, I really think that's what it's gonna do. I think and I hope you're gonna love it. I'm going on and on. The point is thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. More on Onesimus Magnana. I'm Matt. This is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.