In case you missed the first part of this post or the second part of this post please check it out before reading this one.

Now that we have discussed  the difference between the grid by which we see slavery and how slavery is viewed in the Scriptures, let me just go through a couple of biblical insights for you regarding slavery.  This will begin to show us the trajectory of God eliminating once and for all the injustice of particularly one people group, one ethnicity suppressing and relegating as lesser than other ethnicities. Notice in the creation narrative (cf. Genesis 1 – 3) when it’s not good for man to be alone and man has a lot of work to do, God doesn’t give the man slaves; He gives man a wife and says, ‘have babies. Fill the earth, subdue it. It’s going to be a lot of work. You’re going to need some babies.’  So men,grow up, get a skill, find a wife, have babies, fill the earth and subdue it. It is not, “Here are seven [insert people group here] to help you.  They basically inferior anyways so have at it”.  That is not what happened and it would be safe to say it will never happen.  You begin to see God in the theocracy use Israel as an agent of His righteous wrath against some people in the ancient world (which is a subject for another day I promise). Once a people group was conquered those brought into the nation were enslaved but in a way that respected there humanity completely.  Check out the passages in Leviticus that begin to unpack the Sabbath, New Moon Festivals, Festivals of New Grain and Wine, it was commanded in all those festivals that the Israelites were not allowed to shut down and party while the slaves continued to work. He said, “Everybody parties or I kill everybody.” So on the Sabbath, the slave gets off too. On the New Moon, the slave is off too. In the Grain and Wine Festival, they are shutting down the field, they are putting down the oxen and no one works. They all celebrate together.  In both Old and New Testament, provisions are made for the slave to be a part of religious festivals and rituals. This is completely different than how even Rome viewed the presence of a slave in a religious ceremony.  If a slave were to be there somehow the presence made the ceremony unclean. So they were good enough to run the empire; they just were not good enough to participate in the religious practices. God explicitly tells Israel, “No, they are coming in to the temple and they are worshiping Me.”

Another very interesting distinction is the Biblical injuction of “No interest loans” within Israel.  These were an attempt by God to reduce the amount of slave debt. So if I owed you $100,000 and I came to you and said, “I can’t pay $100 grand. Please don’t send me to prison. Please don’t have me arrested. Let me work off my debt,” you could not biblically go, “Okay, but at 20% interest per year.” You were not allowed to put interest on my debt if I put myself into slavery under you to work off a debt. That was also not heard of in the ancient Near East.

Although there is not text in the Bible that universally condemns slavery as a whole, colonial slavery and the modern day sex slavery that you’re beginning to see specials on and Christian groups are beginning to fight against is explicitly condemned in the Scriptures repeatedly. The idea of stealing someone from this country or kidnapping someone from this place and forcing them into slavery was viewed as wicked, and God [in the OT] used the nation of Israel to punish those countries and, even in some cases, destroy those countries outright.

In the end let us please be honest with ourselves, we don’t want to do that work. Most people don’t want to really wrestle with it what I have just finished writing or the many other things that can be said.  People rather  just use this as an excuse and then build around that excuse with the hypocrisy of people they know and then go, “See? God can’t be trusted. The Bible can’t be trusted.” But in reality, if we’re honest, we are lazy and watch the Discovery or History Channel [way] too much.

There is one last thing that I want to mention before. In a radical departure from the prevalent views of the day, Israel became a safety zone for runaway slaves. So if you escaped Gaza, if you escaped Tyre, if you escaped any of the neighboring countries and made it into Israel, Israel had not extradition treaties with any of those countries. If you made it into Israel, you were a free man or woman. They would not send you back to your master, and they would not enslave you when you got in. What you will see over and over again in the Old and New Testaments is the command put on God’s people to serve, to feed, to love and to embrace the alien stranger and sojourner.  So think of the redemptive themes that are already being the redemptive seeds that are being sown when God says, “If you make it into Israel, you’re free. If you make it into My people, you are free.” This is a shadow of what is to come.

In case you missed the first part of this post please check it out before reading this one.

“Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, no by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.  Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.  For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.  Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” – Colossians 3: 22 – 4:1

Even after yesterdays post I still cringe a little when I read those verses.  I’m sure it will wear off over time. Well I wanted to pick up where I left off yesterday.

In the ancient Near East, education of slaves was seen as smart business practice.  Slaves were educated by their masters, most times they were to a point that they were smarter than and more educated than their owners. Let me give you two examples of where this plays out in the Bible itself. Joseph was a slave who ended up being second in power only to Pharaoh in Egypt. Daniel was a slave who ended up second in power to Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon. These were slaves who were so educated and so trained and so smart in how they did things that there was an acknowledgment among their owners that, ‘this is an extremely gifted individual. Let’s let him rise all the way up to the top if they can.’  This was not the case colonial America as we all well know. There is no black man who is a congressman in the 1700’s, in fact, we’re late into the 1900’s before that occurs.  In the ancient Near East, it’s not uncommon to see a slave rise to an unbelievable amount of power to be able to own land himself and even have slaves that work for him. You had the ability to save your own money, purchase yourself out from slavery and then run the business with the slaves that you had purchased, which you are educating.  Because persons owned slaves across a range of economic levels, they developed no conscious awareness of being a class or a group of people. So in colonial America, they are black men and women. There are elements of Chinese men and women who were enslaved in those early centuries of American history, but primarily they were black men and black women who were dressed similarly, they began to develop their own culture, they began to develop their own class and they began to recognize that, “We are an oppressed people.” Like Israel in Egypt, they began to sense the heavy hand of their master as a group. That is not nearly the case in the ancient Near East, because you could be a millionaire and have a slave as your neighbor living in a house nicer than your own and not even be able to tell by how they dressed, where they lived, how they walked or how they talked that they were a slave.  In deep contrast to New World slavery, ancient owners did not regard their adult slaves paternalistically. You’ll find littered through our shameful history this idea that the black man and woman are so ignorant that the white master, would need to parent them, “lest they destroy themselves”, and some of even Christianity’s brightest minds bought into this nonsense.

Within the ancient world it was not uncommon for an indebted person to sell himself or herself into slavery to pay debt or to avoid poverty. So on the socioeconomic scale, the slave was not the bottom level, the day laborer was.  The slave could be the prince of Persia; or he could be sitting on a throne next to Nebuchadnezzar.  The slave might be working at the left hand of Caesar himself, whereas the day laborer is forced every day to try to find something to do to make money to feed his family. So that bottom rung would often offer themselves up to slavery in the hopes that they might be educated, trained and then released in the year of Jubilee. Or if they owed debts, they would offer up themselves to work off those debts. They were not kidnapped from another land and forced into labor. They sold themselves into slavery to cover debt or to learn a trade and make a better life for them. No African did that.

No African said to themselves, ‘I’d like to try to survive a long six weeks at sea in the hopes that I would be forced into an ungodly amount of labor until I died. I would like that as opposed to running free in the beautiful, Africa.’ I don’t know that there is any historical record of an African going, ‘I’ll take slavery in the New World.’

In the end there is a large historical difference between American Colonial slavery and Near Eastern slavery (especially of the Semitic cultures in the Bible).  When you address this subject please do so historically and not by lumping differing cultures and context together.  I know I can not stop some of you from just being bitter against the Bible but the fact is on this subject there is a difference.

For further information on this subject check out a sermon preached at a church called Redeemer Fellowship (click here for the link).

“Slaves, obey in everything those who are your earthly masters, no by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord.  Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.  For the wrongdoer will be paid back for the wrong he has done, and there is no partiality.  Masters, treat your slaves justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven.” – Colossians 3: 22 – 4:1

Can we just be honest for a minute?  When I first read this passage I immediately had flash backs to when, as a child, I read or heard about slavery in America.  How verses like this and many others were used to suppress the freedoms of a whole people groups.  I used to become angry when I knew that people took this out of context and it quickly sent me to find the historical context and I was very surprised by what I found.  So this week I wanted to focus on the historical aspect of the idea of slavery in the Scriptures.

Today I wanted to compare and contrast two different ideas of slavery. For you and I, our idea of slavery is built around European colonialism.  What we think of when we think of slavery is the Africans being abducted or traded for, in Africa and then brought over to work the cotton fields where they were mistreated and oppressed and beaten. That is our framework for slavery. It is accurate. But historically, the British were the last ones to get involved in the slave trade, it was deplorable to them. The first historical record of the British being involved in the slave trade was actually an act of piracy in 1540.  A man hijacked a slave ship and, instead of setting the slaves free, he sailed it to the Caribbean and sold the slaves, as a result Queen Elizabeth was furious.  From this point there is a progression of events.  The British overthrow Spain and Portugal in the Caribbean.  As a result the British take over the all the sugar cane fields.  At the time the English are so opposed to the slave trade that they send the Irish down to work the fields. Now what’s the problem with a bunch of Irish people working the fields in the Caribbean?  Over a period of about 100 years, England learns that the

Irish could not do the work there because of climate, temperatures and the rigors of working the fields. So slowly but surely, they begin to utilize and use the Africans for their sugar. Now it’s important to know that really at no point does slavery really take root in England. It’s always distant from them so it quickly became easy to justify it because you don’t see the horrors of it. Contrary to popular notions the slave trade was not built on cotton; it was built on sugar. Now when it comes to the colonization of the New World, what we now know as the United States of America, specifically in the South you have both cotton and tobacco. Furthermore, the British had learned in the Caribbean is that the Africans were legitimate workers. So they began to really build up the “New World” with slaves.

So the differences between colonial slavery and what the Scriptures are speaking to when they address slaves. And I acknowledge out of the gate that the Bible is clear that one human being can own another human being but there are some pieces that help us process this and watch the line of redemption.  An enslaved person in the Bible could not be identified by clothing, ethnicity or socioeconomic background, whereas in colonial America, the slaves [simply] were Africans, or those of African decent.  If you saw a black in South Carolina in the 1600’s, he wasn’t in business he was a slave. An certain ethnic group marked colonial slavery which is substantially different than “slavery” that was extant in the ancient Near East. Literally, anybody could be a slave.  Within the near east the cultural and religious traditions of slaves were usually that of their masters or owners, in other words they were integrated into society. Juxed opposed to the slavery that we are familiar with in which the Africans, until the gospel really began to penetrate and move through the U.S., had a completely different religious cultural structure than their white owners. They had a completely different way of living, a completely different way of eating (i.e. Soul Food), and a completely different way of interacting with God.  They were just completely different, that was not the case in the ancient world.

Well before this gets completely out of hand I need to stop for today but I really hope that this is helpful so far and I look forward to continuing the post tomorrow (click here for next post)…..