In our study on Philemon, the situation by which Paul appeals to his brother in Christ to receive back Onesimus as a fellow saved brother, is slavery. Now one of the attacks on Christianity is that God doesn’t give a prohibition on slavery. Instead, we see rules governing the practice. The accusation is, that, “if God is good, then why didn’t he get ride of such an immoral act?”
So in order to do justice to the issues that Paul’s letter to Philemon deals with, we also need to address the elephant in the room known as slavery. So we’re going to take two weeks to dive into this contentious topic.
In the whole of the Scriptures, there are about 140 references to the idea of slavery. Most are in relation to calling someone a slave or describing them as one. The passages that we will focus on are the passages that consider the legal ramifications of slavery. In the Old Testament, these passages are most readily found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy; whereas in the New Testament, they are sprinkled throughout the entire testament.
Let’s begin this huge topic by starting at the ground level. The Hebrew term for slave is ebed (eh’-bed), meaning bondage, slave, servant. It is also translated as attendant or bondservant. The word is connected to subjects of a chieftain, worshipers of God, and even the person mentioned in the Servant Songs of Isaiah. The word has more connotations than our perception of American-Slavery. In the ancient Near East, the term slave did not carry with it the horrific ideas of slavery that are history books record of slavery in the U.S. The word slave was used of anyone who was a lower political or social position of another. A king was the slave of the gods; the people, free and non-free, were slave of the king.
In the Septuagint, the Greek word that translates the Hebrew is doulos (doo’-los) which means enslaved, or slave. However, it is also translated as bondservant, or to give a clearer definition, a person who has no ownership rights over themselves. In the New Testament, it is this same root word that Peter, Paul and other writers use to describe both the social reality of slavery and the spiritual slavery we have both to sin and to God.
Now that we have that understanding of the word, we can begin to look directly at the non-free idea of slavery in the Bible. The first use of the Hebrew word, doesn’t come until Genesis 9:25, and it is used in a curse on Noah’s grandson Canaan that he would be a “servant of servants” or a “slave of slaves.” Meaning that he was to be the lowest of the low. This doesn’t mean he would be a slave, but rather those from his linage would be the lowest people in society. What this shows us is that slavery is a result of sin, not of God’s original design.
Because of this, early Church theologian Augustine of Hippo wrote, “Slavery, therefore, is introduced to the world by sin and not by nature. (https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/teachings-about-slavery-in-the-bible-and-by-the-early-church-fathers/#_edn14)"
Since we know that God’s original design did not include slavery and this hierarchal lowering of people, we can then see how God responds to sin when we look through his interaction with Israel as a nation.
The book of Exodus is steeped in God’s work of freeing his people from the bondage of slavery. In fact freedom from slavery is so heavy in the Scriptures that the Museum of the Bible’s associate curator Anthony Schmidt told the Smithsonian Magazine, that out of the 66 books of the Bible, “… the astoundingly reduced Slave Bible contains only parts of 14 books. (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/heavily-abridged-slave-bible-removed-passages-might-encourage-uprisings-180970989/)” Only parts from 14 books were acceptable, because the rest of the books of the Bible emphasized God’s desire for people’s freedom.
In Latin America, the recognition of how many biblical passages were pro-freedom, led to liberation theology, which has at it’s roots the breaking of bondage of oppressed people (https://www.britannica.com/topic/liberation-theology).
In Exodus, the first mentions of slavery are those of Israel being in the state of bondage. Once Israel is released from Egypt, God instituted three things: The Passover meal, the consecration of the firstborn, and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Within the Feast of Unleavened Bread, God states in Exodus 13:3, that the purpose of the Feast is to “… Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery, for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out from this place. No leavened bread shall be eaten.”
This theme of remembering that God brought Israel out of slavery permeates the rest of entirely of God’s covenantal relationship with Israel. Being emphasized at least fifteen times just in the book of Deuteronomy.
In fact, as God begins to give his covenantal laws in Exodus 20, be begins in verse 2, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” Everything God speaks to the Israelites is in the context of freedom from slavery. Why? Because slavery is a result of sin, and personal freedom is a hallmark of God’s original design.
So then, why didn’t God come out and command the end to the sin of slavery? As we read through God’s covenantal laws, what we call the Ten Commandments do not give an explicit rejection of slavery.
Without going into a deep dive of how Exodus is set up, the Ten Commandments are general commands, from which all other civic laws are derived from. In the theocracy that God is setting up, the purpose of the commands are to restrict sinful people from doing sinful things.
They begin with four laws that focus on worship of God: No other gods, no carved idols, not taking God’s name in vain, and remembering the Sabbath as holy. Within in the Sabbath command, it reads, “… but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. (v.10)” In the Sabbath command, the word translated as male servant is the word for slave. Slaves are given equal rest with those who are free; thereby elevating the slave from being overworked.
The elevation of the status of slaves in a world of sin, is how God moves people along. Augustine recognized what would happen if slavery went away the next day, “… abolishing slavery, although it is a sinful alienation from the standards of love, would cause too much social unrest. In the present state of the world, it ought to be endured. (https://seekingvirtueandwisdom.com/teachings-about-slavery-in-the-bible-and-by-the-early-church-fathers/#_edn14)”
Here is what most people miss about the ancient practice of slavery. In the ancient Near East, slavery was a social contract that fulfilled many areas of the economy. Raymond Westbrook in his work on “Slave and Master in Ancient Near Eastern Law,” found three types of slavery: Social Justice, Contract, Citizenship/Ethnicity. Social Justice and Contract were similar in that they dealt with people who were sold into slavery due to some sort of relief for a creditor or a debtor. This seems to be the majority of slavery within a social group or nation. The area of slavery due to Citizenship/Ethnicity, dealt with people outside of a social group where people were captured due to war or through slave trade. These three areas are recognized and dealt with in the Scriptures. Yet, as we will see, those who found themselves in a slave position were elevated by God through his commands. But, again we have to ask why didn’t he simply do away with it.
The answer could be better understood in our society today. We do not have slavery, but we do have debit collectors. We have and IRS whose job it is to collect taxes from people. We have banks and financial institutions whose job it is to collect on mortgages, and loans. But what happens when one cannot pay their debt? They enter into a bargain of some sort with the collectors. Their wages are garnished, they file for bankruptcy, their assets are seized and sold. And what happens when a person can’t take care of their debt? We have governmental programs to assist. Welfare programs help people as they struggle to make ends meet. Debt forgiveness through organizations help people get out of dire financial situations.
We in the modern U.S. have many assets that can be bartered with. But for the majority of human history, the only thing a person had was themselves. There were no social programs, when entire civilizations could be wiped off the map in a single generation because of a famine or plague. Where the vast majority of people were living hand-to-mouth, barely getting by. You just had yourself and your family, and so to pay debt, a person’s only way of repayment was to enter into these socially acceptable slave contracts, which were the majority of slavery. How do you deal with debt in a society where no one knows the financial future, and all you had to bargain with was yourself? And from a biblical perspective, how do you deal with such a society that is also steeped in sin?
It’s easy for us in the modern day to say, well they should just cancel debt. But we don’t even do that. The way debt is collected today is analogous to how it was collected then, we work it off. Yet their societies were not as stable as ours, they didn’t have additional means, they just had themselves. And even if they did just cancel debt, thereby getting rid of 2/3rds of slavery in one stroke, what keeps people from gaming the system? Of racking up ever higher debt and never having to pay it back. Of course we’re more enlighten than that, and we don’t have anyone in our society who would do such things, right? But if someone did try to take advantage of others forgiving massive repeated debt, the slave isn’t the one who is in debt, rather the slave becomes the one who reaps the consequences of another’s actions and has to pay for their misdeeds.
So how does God deal with the social need of debt collection and the sinfulness of man? He institutes laws by which he constrains the master’s power over the slave, and gives a few ways to have the debt forgiven. Next week, we’ll take a look at those passages and see just how God both elevates and restrains the position of master and slave.
But for no, we need to understand that God works within the human ability to follow, and even then we have a hard time putting what he says into practice.
Last week we talked about how God calls us to forgiveness. Forgiveness is one of the most basic principles of the Scriptures. If the world took it seriously and implemented into our lives fully, then all forms of indebtedness would be gone tomorrow. Yet we continue to seek what is owed to us, whether that be financial, emotional, or physical.
This is why the action on Jesus on the cross is so important for us to see God’s forgiveness in action. Which brings us back around to Paul’s words in Colossians 2:9-14, which Philemon, who had an indebted slave, would have heard. Paul writes, “9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.”
If the goal of God is for indebtedness to end, that end should start with the Church. If forgives is to start, it should start with Christians. Because our Savior forgave our debt, how much more should we forgive both the physical and non-physical debts that our owed to us?
My challenge for you this week, is to take a look at your life and ask the question, what debt am I holding over people. What have they done, either physically, mentally, spiritually, or emotionally to incur a debt with me? This week I want to challenge you to go before God and have that debt forgiven. Let none of us put others into a type of slavery to us, because our God desires freedom for all. And that freedom comes only through the forgiveness of Christ.
So let us be a people of God who carry forgiveness and no I.O.Us. Amen.
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