The topic of slavery for me in my limited understanding brings about a sense of fury and disgustedness. I feel a deep sense of rage when I think about how in the world any human being could ever want to turn another human being into a mere piece of property or worst into a blunt instrument to further their agenda. So I admit that this passage has been tough for me to study. Look at it with me…
Ephesians 6:5 – 9…
5 Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, 6 not by way of eye-service as people pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, 7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. 9 Masters, do the same to them and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him.
Introduction…
Slaves and masters. How about that for a touchy topic in this day and age? It’s a touchy topic in any day and age. I admit that this passage has given me fits for the last two weeks as we’ve inched our way closer and closer to it. My first issue is that the biblical theme of slavery is an absolute beast. My second issue is that the theme of slaves and masters isn’t a simple one. It’s a theme that has what appears to be a million different nuances from the beginning of time until now. My third issue is that I want to be sensitive to the powder keg that this topic can be while still being faithful to what God’s Word actually says.
So before we dive into what God’s Word has to say to us in this passage, I think it’s vital that we set some context and get a framework for hearing this word. I don’t want to be cavalier or irresponsible or naïve about how touchy this topic is. And I also don’t want the sensitive nature of this passage to shut our hearts down immediately either.
The topic of slavery for me in my limited understanding brings about a sense of fury and disgustedness. I feel a deep sense of rage when I think about how in the world any human being could ever want to turn another human being into a mere piece of property or worst into a blunt instrument to further their agenda.
The dehumanization within slavery goes against the very heart of the gospel which teaches us that every person regardless of skin color, regardless of social economic background, regardless of religious belief or experience, was created in the image of God and then sin infected that image and then our Savior came and died on the cross and rose again on the third day so that his image bearers could be restored. Slavery is antithetical to the gospel.
And furthermore, we live in a country that has in its history, quote unquote heroes that actually went to war to preserve their so-called right to make another image bearer their property. Dress it up in whatever economic or political garbage you want to dress that topic up in and at the end of the day we fought a war over whether or not a man could own another man. We celebrate these men in our history records and we build monuments to honor them. We literally honor what is antithetical to the gospel of Jesus Christ instead of mourning the horror of our history together.
But herein lies a problem. This passage wasn’t written to slaves and masters in America in the 1800’s. So if you are getting all excited because think you are going to hear a sermon on the evils of slavery you’re wrong. And if you’ve already tuned me out because I just smashed your hero’s statue all over the floor with the gospel then you’re wrong too.
This passage wasn’t written to slaves and masters in the 1800’s and it wasn’t written to speak against the powder keg of ethnic upheaval that we are facing in 2018. But, it is applicable. And this is where we need a biblical framework for what we are about to study. While the horrific history of slavery in America is grotesque and infuriating and depressing, the culture of the Ephesian church was radically different is many ways and radically similar in other ways.
Let’s not forget that Paul is writing to Christians in the Ephesian church about the relationship between masters and their slaves. There’s no getting around that. He’s not addressing the unbelieving culture outside the church in Ephesus. The culture outside the Ephesian church did have similarities to our culture of slavery in the 1800’s but in the church it was different. Paul is actually addressing slaves and masters who are sitting in the same seats together in the same church gathering together. So the picture is radically different from our frame of reference here in America where there was a time where black folks were prohibited from drinking at the same water fountains as white people.
We have to be uber careful not to transport our American experience into the Ephesian church. But that doesn’t alleviate the fear or the uneasiness that I feel with this text. How could there be slaves with masters in the Ephesian church? Weren’t these people Christians? Hadn’t they heard the gospel? Didn’t they understand that we are all equally created in the image of God? Why didn’t these slave masters turn their slaves loose once they began to follow Jesus? Why didn’t they take up arms and fight to abolish slavery in Ephesus? Why didn’t the bylaws of the Ephesian church or the membership covenant of the Ephesian church prohibit slavery?
And that’s not all. That’s my only beef. If you spread the context out and you look at the book of Philemon also written by the Apostle Paul you find that he’s writing to a slave owner on behalf of a run away slave whom Paul is sending back and he’s pleading with this slave owner to receive the run away slave as a brother and a friend instead of a convicted felon.
What’s up with that? The apostle Paul is sending this man back to his owner? Why didn’t Paul write a hate letter to this quote un quote Christian slave owner and tell him that if he was a real Christian he wouldn’t own a slave? Why didn’t the apostle Paul jump on Facebook and blast this dude with all sorts of articles written by the latest and greatest theologians who supported his case to abolish slavery?
Did the apostle Paul even want to abolish slavery? And was slavery in the Ephesian church the same as what we’ve experienced here in America? The simple answer here is yes and no. I don’t believe Paul supported systemic slavery and I don’t believe that slavery was necessarily the same in the Ephesian church. But a more nuanced answer is this. The Ephesian Christians were being saved out of a Roman culture that had adopted a system of slavery that was very similar to our American experience of slavery in the 1800’s. Some scholars say that nearly a third of the Ephesian culture were slaves. But… and it’s a big but in my understanding.
While there were for sure some similarities between the Roman practice of slavery and the American practice of slavery, at the time of the writing of the book of Ephesians there was a massive cultural reform taking place and according to my sources (a number of commentaries and a really good friend who is a black pastor in Lincoln) according to these sources, slavery ranged from everything as horrific as we could possibly imagine all the way up to something as harmless as being an employee who lived in the home of their employer.
With all of that information, the clearest counsel I’ve received from my friend in Lincoln and from my commentaries is that we must not let the language offend us but we also need to see the way that the Apostle Paul actually does take a shot across the bow at systemic slavery. Because if you hang with this text until the end, you’ll see Paul take his shot at abolishing slavery as we’ve known it. And lastly before going to the text, it’s important for us to understand that the vast biblical topic of slavery applies to every one of us more than we know.
My friend in Lincoln quickly reminded me that every one of us is a slave to someone or something. Borrowers are slaves to lenders. You cannot be enslaved to money and God both but instead can only be enslaved to one master. You are either a slave to your sin to do what your sin demands that you do or you are enslaved to Christ who sets you free from the slave owner of sin so that you can freely live in obedient freedom. So the language of the Scriptures rebuilds the framework for how we talk about slavery.
Furthermore, we have our own immediate context to apply this passage to. Credit card debt is a cruel master and many of us are enslaved to it. Our vocations and our employers can be cruel masters that we are enslaved to. Our political system, our social system, our judicial system, our educational system can all be cruel masters that we can become enslaved to. Don’t translate our system into the Ephesian system but instead let the Ephesian system redeem ours. So what does Paul say about slaves and masters to the Ephesian church?
#1: Paul Gives Instructions To Slaves… (5 – 8)
In verses 5 – 8 Paul says 5 Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, 6 not by way of eye-service as people pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, 7 rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, 8 knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free.
Paul’s instruction to slaves is fairly straightforward and he doesn’t leave much to the imagination. His simple call is one of obedience within a structure of authority. We are called to obey our earthly bosses not with a cowering fear but with a holy and sincere reverence just as we are called to obey Christ.
We are not called to obey Jesus out of an unhealthy fear of what he will do to us if we are disobedient but instead we are called to obey out of an authentic reverence for Christ’s loving care of us. Our obedience is not to be merely an outward physical performance to impress people around us. Our obedience is to be motivated by a right understanding that if we’ve trusted in Christ as our Savior then we belong to him and we are his possessions to lavish his love upon instead of being used to further our master’s selfish agenda.
This is what it means to do the will of God from the heart. The question we are not called to ask is “What will they think about me”? The question we are called to ask is “What does God require of me based upon what he has done and is doing for me”? Every act of service or work that we perform for anyone here on earth must be driven by the knowledge and the understanding that we are serving God who has served us so well in the cross of Christ.
And lastly our service here on earth to our earthly masters whether they be debt collectors, employers or governmental authorities, our service to those masters and more must be rooted in the truth that there are rewards awaiting us in Heaven. We have received more than we can ever comprehend in the cross of Christ and we will receive more than we can ever comprehend from our obedience to Christ when we run out of our graves and into heaven.
#2: Paul Gives Instructions To Masters… (9)
In verse 9 Paul says 9 Masters, do the same to them and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him. The first thing Paul says to masters is “do the same to them”. What is the “same” that Paul calls masters to? I think the “same” that Paul is referring to here is the “same kind of God-honoring relational interaction” that he calls slaves to.
He calls slaves to a Christ-honoring, Christ-exalting, Christ-serving obedience to their masters. This isn’t the kind of obedience that acts one way when the bossman is around and acts another way in their absence. It’s the kind of obedience that exalts Christ as a servant of Christ with integrity of heart at all times.
This is the same kind of obedient from the heart performance that Paul calls masters to. This would have been absolutely revolutionary in the culture that the Ephesian church was being saved out of. There was definitely reform taking place in the Ephesian culture outside the church in regards to slavery. Taking care of those who worked for you was definitely becoming a value. But that value wasn’t being valued because people are valuable. This value of treating our workers well was becoming a value because if you treat your workers better you get more work out of them. It was a value that was based on usury rather than service.
This is what is so radical about what the apostle Paul is saying. This is how he drops the bomb that ultimately abolishes slavery. He gives his instruction within the context of the structure of authority without attacking the structure but instead gets beneath the structure to the heart of equality which will ultimately cause the structure to crumble. Every one of us, regardless of ethnic background, regardless of our experiences, regardless of our political alignment, regardless of economic welfare, will answer to the same God who is master over all of Creation.
God is no more partial to the person who has been oppressed because of their skin color than he is partial to the person who has been oppressed because of their economic status or religious experience.
Therefore Paul’s instruction to masters is to “do the same” to those who work for you, not because doing this will advance your little earthly kingdom but instead because doing this is right since all of us are under the sovereign rule and care of a sacrificial and loving King.
Therefore treat your workers right. Treat them as though they are equal to you because they are equal to you. Don’t threaten them but instead seek to serve their every need and see to it that they are enabled to grow under your care of them.
So What’s The Application For Us Here?
What do we need to believe and what do we need to obey? What is the one thing we need to put into action from this sermon? Let me take a stab at it this way. Every one of us is simultaneously a slave and a master. We are enslaved to some things and we are masters over other things. We are enslaved to debtors, bosses, political systems, friends’ expectations, etc. And we are masters over people who serve us, people who work under us, children we take care of, people who owe us money, the waiter at the restaurant, etc. We are all simultaneously slaves and masters.
And the question is, are you honoring Christ, exalting Christ, promoting Christ and obeying Christ in your relational interactions as a simultaneous slave to some and master of others? At the end of the day every one of us has blown it badly here. You’ve either walked out a begrudging, pouting, water cooler complaining kind of obedience as a slave or you’ve walked out a belligerent, threatening, using, abusive, kind of authority as a master. I would argue that every one of us has walked sinfully in both of these areas.
I remember the day I came home and found out that one of my daughters had broken an expensive camera because she was trying to take photos for the family and I exploded on her and made her feel like she was an inch tall. The look on her face said it all immediately and I had to step back and ask the Lord whether I was honoring Christ, exalting Christ and obeying Christ in my moment of emotional and verbal tongue-lashing. Was my relational interaction with my daughter building her up as an image bearer of Christ that she was created to be? Or was my interaction with her tearing her down and destroying the image of God in her?
The answer of course is that I was being destructive. I was more concerned with an inanimate object that I could own and use for my pleasure rather than being concerned about the living breathing person in front of me. We often use people to get the things we want rather than using the things we have to build up the people around us. The image of God being built up in my daughter is far more valuable than a couple hundred-dollar camera.
Conclusion…
In conclusion let me remind us that Jesus didn’t die on a cross to pay the price to purchase inanimate objects like cameras or statues. Every one of us has reduced another human being into the object of our desires and has used people rather than loved them. But Jesus poured out his life so that the image of God or the reflection of God could be restored in his children. Let me ask… what does the image of God look like in and through you right now?
I’m not concerned about who you are enslaved to right now and I’m not concerned about who you have authority over right now. I’m concerned about whether or not you’ve become a slave to Christ who became a slave to a cross for you. Jesus died for you because he loves you and he wants to see you restored to a right relationship with your Father in Heaven.
Really, the picture of Paul writing that other letter to a slave owner to receive his run away slave as a brother in the gospel is a picture of the gospel because in it the apostle Paul demolishes the dividing lines of hostility that once separated us. The social, economic, ethnic, religious, political and relational lines that once divided us have been abolished by the one who is the sacrificial master of everyone.
Heaven will be a place where people from every tribe, every tongue and every nation will stand together as brothers and sisters worshiping the same resurrected Savior. This is what it means to be part of the church today. It’s what it meant to be part of the church in Ephesus. The church both today and back then is the earthly representation of the King of kings and the Lord of lords who gave his life for both slave and master alike at the cross of Calvary.
We are called to be the image of heaven on Earth. Never forget that the One we worship died as a slave though he is rightfully the Master so that we who were enslaved could be set free to worship and to serve Him as our master.
Now, doesn’t that make silly arguments about statues seem like child’s play? Doesn’t that make silly little social media rants seem like antithetical smoke screens from what’s really important? Doesn’t that make you want to surrender at the foot of the cross where your master became a slave for you? I pray it does.