What Does It Mean to Be Slaves of God? Part 1

See if our microphone is working and the projector here is working.

I said I wasn't going to start a new trend, but actually this is very comfortable. We may become a new trend here, after all.

Okay. And is the microphone working okay? I'm doing a wireless mic up here today, too. Okay, as many of you know, several weeks ago, Darris McNeely and Steve Myers and myself took a... went on a study tour to Italy for about 12 days, retracing the footsteps of the Apostle Paul, his travels in Italy, and studying the Roman Empire at the time, the culture, the culture that the first century church interacted with, and how that is reflected in Paul's teachings and other scriptures and verses in the New Testament. And the purpose of this trip was to help Darris and Steve, and particularly in teaching at ABC, because Darris teaches the Book of Acts, which covers Paul's travels through the Roman Empire, and Steve teaches the epistles of Paul.

And I'm going to be going on the tour to Turkey, the Turkey tour for the feast this year, and I'll be doing a lot of the instruction there. So this was something that we felt could give us better insights in sharing information with the membership of the church, as well as with the ministry as a whole. And some of you may have seen the Beyond Today Daily videos that have shown up on our website as well. We recorded, I think, about 15 to 20 of those. And some of them have been...

there are still a few that haven't been fully edited and the sound cleared up and things like that. But you can check those out. Those are some recorded in Rome at the end of the tour, covering some of the different things that we had learned there.

But today, I would like to start sharing some of that information with you. And I would like to start by giving you a short one-question quiz to start off today's subject. And that one-question quiz is what word or term is most often used to describe God's people in the Bible? There are several options for you to choose from.

Christian or Christians, disciples, Church of God, sheep, ambassadors, friends or friends of God, servants, and none of the above. Again, Christian or Christians, disciples, Church of God, sheep, ambassadors, friends, servants, or none of the above. How many of you think it's Christians? Nobody? Disciples? Church of God? Most of you know that. There are 12 references. I have several references to Church of God.

I don't remember what the top name is. Sheep. Quite a few takers for sheep. How about ambassadors or ambassadors for Christ? Friends or friends of God? Servants. Quite a few for servants. How about none of the above? Correct answer, none of the above. Because the answer, surprisingly, is none of the above. Because all of these words that are on this list do appear, are used in the Bible to describe God's people, except for none of the above.

But they're not the word or the term that is used most often. The word that is used most often in the Bible to describe God's people is quite likely surprising to you. I know it was certainly surprising to me when I found out. That's because the word that is most often used to describe God's people is slaves. Slaves. God's word uses the term slaves to describe His people far more often than any other word.

We're called slaves of God, or God's slaves, or slaves of Christ repeatedly in the Bible. And what does that mean? And the title for today's sermon is, What Does It Mean to Be Slaves of God? Now, about this time, probably you're scratching your head about now because you probably can't think of a single scripture that refers to God's people as slaves. Probably can't think of a single one.

And you would be justified in that because the Greek word that means slave was systematically disguised and mistranslated for centuries. You might say that it's hidden in the Bible. It's hidden because of what you might call a mistranslation mystery. That the Greek word doulos, which means slave, was mistranslated for centuries as a sermon. Now, a servant was in the list, and you'll find servant appearing well over a hundred times in the Bible. But it is this Greek word doulos that actually means slave. Now, why was this done? Why did the Bible translator systematically for centuries mistranslate a word that means slave as servant? Think back to when the Bible was translated into English.

The King James Version was published in 1611, just over 400 years ago. But the King James Version built heavily on two earlier English translations. One was the Geneva Bible, which was published 51 years before the King James Bible. And that in turn built upon the translation by William Tyndale, which was published about a half a century before that. And all three of these Bible translations, first Tyndale, then the Geneva Bible, then the King James Version, all systematically mistranslated this word that means slave as servant, or something similar.

Most often bondservant. You'll come across that sometimes in the Bible. What is a bondservant? A bondservant is somebody who has essentially sold himself into slavery. It's not a term we come across or use in English these days. But why, though, did they mistranslate this word that means slave as servant?

Well, the answer is actually pretty simple. You might see it as one of the first forms of political correctness, because at that time slavery was viewed as something that was terrible, something that was horrible, and it was. It was indeed horrible. It took centuries to get slavery stamped out in the Western world. It was bloody, it was brutalizing, it was evil, and it took decades for it to be outlawed in the British Empire.

And it took a civil war here in the United States to stamp out the institution of slavery. And just to be clear, when I'm talking about the word slave here, it's used in the Bible. In no way am I defending slavery, or for that matter, in no way does the Bible defend the kind of slavery that was practiced when the Bible is translated into English in the 1500s and 1600s, or as it was practiced in the British Empire, or as it was practiced here in the United States before it was abolished in the Civil War.

Or for that matter, the way slavery is still practiced in many nations around the world today. The Bible does not defend or condone that type of slavery. As a matter of fact, the Bible, back in the book of Deuteronomy, dictates the death penalty for anyone who would kidnap another person to sell them into slavery, as was the root of the slavery system that existed in the British Empire and here in the United States for centuries.

So the Bible is clearly against that kind of slavery, and dictating the death penalty for that. That's what should have happened. So in no way am I defending slavery, nor does the Bible defend that kind of slavery. I'm just explaining why that concept was mistranslated for that long. So what happened then when the early biblical translators came across this Greek word duos, which means slave, and it was referring to the people of God in the Bible.

What did they do? What did the translators do? Well, because of the stigma attached to the institution of slavery, they wanted no association between biblical teaching and the slave trade and the slave world of that day, so they watered it down. They chose instead to translate the word as servant, but there's a big difference, a huge difference between a servant and a slave. We'll talk about that a little bit more later. But a servant is more or less an employee.

A servant is voluntary. He can walk away from the job if he wants to and find another one. He can walk away if he doesn't like his employer, the person that he's working for. A servant has a degree of freedom of choice in that regard, whereas a slave does not have any freedom of choice. He doesn't have the option of walking away. He is the property of his owner. Now, to prove my point about this word for slave being mistranslated and watered down, I'd like to look at what several well-known, commonly used biblical reference words have to say about this.

One is the Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament by Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich. It's one of the classic works on the meaning of Greek words of the New Testament. And notice what it says up here. I actually forgot to bring my laser pointer, but the first paragraph up there says, DULOS, colon, slave. And then it adds a parenthetical thought. Servant for slave is largely confined to biblical translation and early American times. In other words, yeah, let's see, here we go. Thank you. The yellow one. Okay, good. Okay. Yeah, right here is where I'm reading from.

Notice it says that servant substituted for slave is largely confined to biblical translation and early American times. In other words, the translators of the Bible, like I just explained, John Wycliffe, the Geneva Bible, King James translators, and early American times. That means early American writers, the colonists, when they came across that word, they also would mistranslate it again for the same reason, because of the shame and stigma attached to the institution of slavery.

It goes on, it's a very long entry about this, but it goes on just to summarize. It cites nearly all ancient sources, including Greek and Roman writers, Josephus, the Jewish historian we're familiar with, the Greek historian Herodotus, the Jewish historian Philo, the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and various Greek and Roman inscriptions from the first few centuries we see in AD for understanding that the word doulos means slave.

So basically what it's saying is every ancient source makes it clear this word means slave. It's only the Bible translators and early American writers who mistranslated it as servant. Another one, the complete word study dictionary, New Testament by Scuros Zodiades, says doulos, a slave, one who is in permanent relation of servitude to another, his will being altogether consumed in the will of the other, one serving, one bound to serve in bondage. So his definition also confirms that this means a slave, someone in a condition of slavery. And the last one I'll read from the Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words by Lawrence Richards.

Words in the Delao group, what that means, the group which is the root from which doulos comes, the Delao group would be referring to the various forms of that, its verb form, its noun form, its masculine form, its feminine form, while often translated servant or serve, designate a relationship of subjection in which one is subject to another's will as a slave. Words in this group, in their appearance in the New Testament, are dulai, which means slavery, dulaiu, to be subject to or to serve, dulai, a female slave, dulos, a slave, and dulao, to enslave.

So every variation of this word has to do with slavery. So you've been describing the condition of slavery to be subject to one another in bondage, a female slave, a male slave. So every word of that word group has to do directly with slavery. So the word dulos does clearly mean slave, and some of the more modern translations do recognize this watering down, in this best translation, and correctly translate dulos as slave most of the time.

I didn't check every version. I checked some that I have on my shelf and computer. And Green's literal translation typically gets it right probably 95-98% of the time. The New English translation gets it right about 90% of the time. And the Holman Christian Standard Bible gets it right about 90% of the time. Incidentally, this word dulos appears, I believe it's 127 times in the New Testament.

So these get it right about 110 or so of those times, whereas many of the other Bible translations get it right part of the time. Such as the New King James Version will typically translate dulos as slave when it's referring to other people, but when it refers to God's people, they will inexplicably change it to servant instead. So they only get it right maybe 20-30% of the time, something like that. And that's pretty typical of most Bible translations. In practical terms, when you read the Bible, when you read the New Testament, and you see the word servant, if you just mentally substitute the word slave there, you're going to be right at least 90% of the time.

There are a few other Greek words that do mean servant, but those words are rarely used, and they're even more rarely applied to God's people or God's church. When referring to members of the church or God's people, the Bible nearly always uses this word that means slave.

And again, most of those times it refers to God's people. Let's notice a few verses that demonstrate what I'm talking about here. Where the Bible writers and speakers call us slaves to illustrate what I'm talking about. The verses I'll be quoting from are from Reins' literal translation most of the time, because again, this is the one that gets it right most of the time. I'll go through these pretty quickly, so don't try to write down the verse reference and slave beside it, so you can go back and review these later.

I'm just going to go through these to make the point for us here. First, Acts 4, verse 29, this is where the apostles Peter and John called themselves slaves of God. This is when they're being persecuted for preaching about Jesus Christ and they're actually thrown in jail. And they pray and they say, O now, Lord, look upon their threatenings and give to your slaves, doulos, to speak your word with all boldness. So they refer to themselves as God's slaves. The apostle Paul called himself a slave repeatedly.

Romans 1-1, Titus 1-1, and Galatians 1-10. There are many others. These are just representative. Romans 1-1, he begins his letter to the Romans by saying, Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ, a called apostle, separated to the gospel of God. Titus, he begins his epistle to Titus by saying, Paul, a slave of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ. And Galatians 1-10, for do I now persuade men or God, or do I seek to please men? For if I yet pleased men, I would not be a slave of Christ.

Paul also refers to himself and Timothy as slaves of Christ. In Philippians 1, verse 1, the introduction to that letter, Paul and Timothy, slaves of Jesus Christ, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who were in Philippi. Peter, the apostle Peter, also calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ. In 2 Peter 1, verse 1, the first verse of 2 Peter, he begins Simon Peter, a slave, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to those equally precious with us. James, who is the half-brother of Jesus Christ, also calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ.

He begins his epistle, James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the dispersion. Greetings. Now think about that. This is the half-brother of Jesus Christ, who grew up with Jesus Christ there in the household as his half-brother. And how does he refer to himself as a slave of Jesus Christ?

He doesn't even refer to himself as the half-brother. Or anything regarding his physical relationship with Jesus Christ, he calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ. And for that matter, so does Jude, another of Jesus Christ, half-brothers who became an apostle in the church. He also calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ in the first verse of his epistle. Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ and brother of, not Jesus, but he calls himself brother of James, to the ones called in God the Father, having been set apart.

So it's interesting how both of Jesus Christ's half-brothers refer to themselves as slaves of Jesus Christ, not even his half-brothers. And there are many other verses where these same writers make the same point, calling themselves slaves of God or slaves of Jesus Christ. These are just the most obvious ones. Incidentally, if you count up, we have nearly all of the writers of the New Testament here referring to themselves as slaves of Jesus Christ.

The only three who don't are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. But they quote Jesus Christ, calling us slaves. Paul also calls the ministers of the church slaves, 2 Timothy 2, verse 22, But a slave of the Lord, this is talking about the ministry, ought not to quarrel, but to be gentle towards all, apt to teach, forbearing. And it goes on, lists other attributes of what would be a minister. Also in 2 Corinthians 4 and verse 5, also referring to the ministry, he says, For we do not proclaim ourselves, but Christ Jesus as Lord, and ourselves your slaves, for the sake of Jesus. Paul also refers to church members as slaves. Many times, I'll just give one of the more obvious here, Romans 6, verses 16-18.

Interestingly, this is from the New King James version, and it does get it right here. So I'm quoting from the New King James here. This is a very familiar passage. A lot of information packed into that. We'll talk about that in a future message here. But again, he's clearly talking about church members and referring to us as slaves. Note also who this epistle is written to. It's written to the people in Rome. And Rome at that time had literally thousands upon thousands of slaves. Rome, it's estimated to have had a population of up to perhaps as many as half a million to a million people in the first century, of whom maybe as much as a quarter of the population, or perhaps as many as 250,000 people in Rome, were slaves at the time Paul wrote these words.

So Paul would have been very, very familiar with that concept. The Apostle Peter also refers to church members as slaves. 1 Peter 2 and verse 15.

He calls us here slaves of God. And Jesus Christ, last of all, also calls us slaves. Revelation 1, verse 1, introduction to that book. A revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him, to Jesus Christ, to show his slaves things which must occur quickly or soon. We're clearly called Jesus Christ slaves. And John 15 and verse 20, familiar passage on his last night with his apostles there. Remember the word which I said to you, a slave is not greater than his Lord. You're used to reading that.

A servant is not greater than his master. It actually means a slave is not greater than his Lord. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. And if they kept my word, they will also keep yours. And again, there are many other verses, literally dozens. And I'm again just giving you a few here to illustrate some of the magnitude. Now, every biblical writer refers to us as slaves of Christ or quotes Jesus Christ, referring to us as his slaves. And again, basically every time, every place you come across the word servant in the New Testament, the word is actually slave.

Do you find that surprising? I know I certainly found it surprising. I've never heard that before. I doubt many of us have at all. But the question for us today, going back to the title of the sermon, is what does the Bible mean when it refers to us as God's slaves? What does it mean to be slaves of God? After seeing how many times the apostles referred to themselves as slaves, how they referred to the ministry as slaves, how they referred to the church membership as slaves, and how Jesus Christ calls us his slaves, get the idea they're trying to tell us something?

Duh! Isn't it a little bit obvious? We're familiar with the common meaning of slavery as it was practiced in this country up to 150 years ago. The cotton plantation, the typical view of slaves working out in the fields, picking cotton from sunup to sundown with the masters or supervisors standing by with a whip if they didn't work hard enough, if they tried to escape being chased down, hunted down with dogs and that kind of thing, or having their families split up when a husband or wife would be sold to a new master or the children sold off to a new master, that sort of thing.

And it was a brutal and inhuman system that was in no way advocated in the Bible or condoned there. But is this the kind of slavery the Bible is talking about that it calls us the slaves of God, or the slaves of Jesus Christ, or something else going on here that we don't understand? As we've seen in going through our studies on the Gospels, the Bible usually doesn't give us all the background, a lot of the terms that it uses.

The biblical writers were writing for people of their day. They didn't think we'd be reading their mail or their memoirs two thousand years later, as we are doing today. And they didn't see a need to spell everything out, because everybody knew what those terms meant. Everybody knew what slavery meant at that time, so they didn't go into all the details. You won't find the details about slavery spelled out.

You will find a lot of references to specific aspects of slavery, and that's what we'll cover in the sermon today and in the next sermon or two. I'm not sure how long this series is going to go, because there's a lot of material about it here. But again, they didn't spell out all the details because they didn't need to. So if we look at certain words like slave or slavery and view it through our understanding of what those words mean in our culture, in our history, we're going to come up with a very wrong understanding, a very tragic misunderstanding.

We're going to miss the point. Again, they used all those words that many times, over a hundred times, to teach us something, to teach us lessons about what that means. And if we don't understand what it means, we miss the point. It goes right over our heads. We miss out on that. We miss out on so much of God's teaching and His instruction. And particularly when it comes to slave and slavery as used in the New Testament, we miss a great deal.

As I said in the introduction, as we've seen in these verses that we just went through here, the Bible applies the term slave to us more than any other term. And if we don't know what that means, we miss out a lot on what it's trying to teach us about our relationship with our Master, God the Father, and Jesus Christ. So we need to understand what that term meant. When Paul and Peter and James and Jesus and Jude and John and all of these other writers used it, they had something very specific in mind, and it was very different from our concept of slavery.

To begin to understand why God causes His slaves so much, let's start with an overview of slavery in the Roman Empire at that time. Historians estimate that in the first century, about 5 to 10 million people were slaves in the Roman Empire. About 5 to 10 million. That was some 10 to 20, maybe as high as 25% of the Roman population of the Roman Empire. It's thought that about up to a quarter of the population of Rome itself were slaves.

So perhaps as many as 250,000 people in Rome were slaves. So slaves and slavery were very well known in the Roman Empire. And we do see this reflected in the Bible as well. Some members of the early church were slaves. Some members of the early church owned slaves. There are many references to this in the Bible, but I'll just quote two verses to make the point. One is Colossians 3 and verse 22. And here's a case where the NIV gets it right. And it says, slaves, this is Paul's writing to the church in Colossae, slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.

He's writing to a church there in Colossae which had slaves there. Also, Colossians 4, next chapter, he talks about masters who are part of the congregation there in Colossae, the Roman city of Colossae. And he says, masters provide your slaves with what is right and fair because you know that you also have a master in heaven.

This is just one of Paul's epistles. There are a number of Ephesians, Corinthians, Romans, where he gives instructions to the slaves who are part of the church there, as well as the masters who are part of the church there who own slaves. You find that shocking. Well, maybe not so much as we go through the explanation a little bit more. So, Paul's letter to Philemon. Fairly short letter about a page in our Bibles, but what's it about? Who is Philemon? Philemon is a church member, and the letter is about his runaway slave, Onesimus, who is runaway to Paul.

And the letter is about trying to get Philemon to forgive Onesimus for running away and to accept him back as a full member of the church. A letter about a runaway slave. Rome, where Paul was under house arrest for perhaps up to several years, we don't know for sure, he was under house arrest in Rome twice. Two periods. One, the first arrest, he was released from that. Later he was re-arrested and put to death in Rome by beheading. Rome had the biggest slave market in the Roman Empire. Ephesus, where Paul visited and lived for several years, had the second largest slave empire in the Roman Empire.

It's in modern-day Turkey. So Paul was very familiar with slaves and slavery. As a matter of fact, when he taught in these churches that we see that he visited places like Colossae, Philippi, Corinth, Ephesus, and so on, he probably was speaking to a group about this size in a house church that met in somebody's house, and sitting there in front of him were slaves and people who owned slaves. That's the reality of life in the first century. That's why he can write so much, so knowledgeably, about slaves and slavery. He encountered it every day of his life, except perhaps when he was locked up or under house arrest or in prison there.

So slaves were very real to him, and he and the other biblical writers specifically referred to us as slaves to teach us crucial spiritual truths. As we'll see as we go through this series of sermons. And that involves understanding that the slavery in the Roman Empire was very different from the slavery that we are used to reading about in our history books. To illustrate this, let's ask ourselves a question. Where did the slaves come from in the Roman Empire? How did they get so many slaves?

How did they get a quarter million slaves there in Rome? How did they get five to ten million slaves? In the Roman Empire? Well, various ways. You could be born a slave. If your parents were slaves, you would be born a slave. You could sell yourself into slavery. We'll talk about that a little bit later. Which some people did. Sounds bizarre to us. But they did. It's what's called a bond-serve. Bond-slave would be a more accurate term. Somebody who sells himself into slavery.

That was done. It was probably done by church members. Who would sell themselves into slavery. Why would you do that? What were they thinking? We'll talk about that later. Not today, but next time. But where did most of the slaves come from? Well, they came from conquest. Because as the Romans defeated, as the Empire grew, as it expanded, as they defeated other peoples, nations, tribes, cultures, cities, civilizations, what did they do with the people?

They didn't kill them because that would be a waste of valuable resources. Going back as far as you want in history, whether you go back to the Egyptian Empire, the Assyrian Empire, the Babylonian Empire, the Persian Empire, the Greek Empire, any of those, if you conquered a people, if you captured a city, what did you do with them? You didn't kill them again. That's a waste of valuable resources.

What you did when you conquered other peoples is you put the people to work for you to make your own empire stronger. And that's what the Romans did. Yeah, they might execute a few hundred or a few thousand to teach the lesson that you don't mess with Rome, but the rest of the people you put to work.

You enslaved and put to work because for the most part you weren't going to waste those valuable resources. It's recorded that Julius Caesar, when he conquered a particular region of Gaul, which is modern-day France, sold more than 50,000 slaves to slave traders on the spot. The Roman slave traders would follow the Roman army around as it battled, and when they would capture a town, capture an empire, a kingdom, something like that, the slave traders would be on the spot.

And they would bid to buy thousands of slaves at once that were taken by the army. And again, in this one case, Julius Caesar sold 50,000 slaves at once to the slave traders of Rome. In the first century, Roman records indicate that about a quarter million people were sold as slaves in any given year. Quarter million. 250,000. So the Roman emperor or the army, the generals of the army, would sell off the people that they captured to make a profit from the slave traders that would help underwrite the cost of the military and the war and the empire. And the slave traders would then turn around, this plot of slaves, they bought maybe hundreds or thousands at a time, they would turn around and sell them off to individual slave buyers at a profit.

And then the slave buyers, the individual slave owners then, would put the slaves to work to make a profit for themselves. Just as an employer today makes a profit off his employees. If his employee isn't making a profit for him, why have the employee at all? If the employee isn't adding to the business, making a profit for himself. Same principle, in fact, there is very capitalistic. And we'll see many references to that, particularly in the Gospels.

In the parables of Jesus Christ, he refers to this a number of times, which we'll touch on a bit later here. But it was capitalistic, but it's actually not condemned. That aspect of putting your slaves to work for you to make a profit. Think about the parables of the unprofitable servants, the unprofitable slaves. They were expected to make a profit for their master. It's not unprofitable servants. In the Greek, it's unprofitable slaves. Think about the parables of the talents, the parables of the pound.

Where the master, in Jesus' parables, who's the master? He's the master. He gives his slaves assets, money, and expects them to go generate a profit for him and then rewards them accordingly. What's the picture? We're Christ's slaves. He expects us to make a profit, to utilize the gifts that he has given us to benefit him. We'll go into that much more in a future sermon here. But again, it's based on profit, and Jesus Christ actually endorses that in these parables.

So when the Romans captured a city, getting back to my story, I digressed a little bit there. So when the Romans captured a city and took, say, 30,000 slaves, what did they have in this lot of 30,000 slaves? Were all of those prisoners alike? Think about it. What do we know from history at that time?

What do we know from our studies of the Gospels? We know that not everybody was alike. You had all kinds of different occupations represented in a city. Many were unskilled laborers, the poor of the land, farm workers, that kind of thing. And they were sold as slaves and put to work on farms, or estates, or on government building projects. They were put to work on that sort of thing as common laborers if they didn't have particular skills. Other unskilled slaves or captured soldiers sometimes were forced to become gladiators.

You probably heard that. And it's true. Captured soldiers or people who had no skills were gladiator fodder. They would be put to practice fighting with others in the arena, and their end purpose was to die for the entertainment of others there. Brutal, but that's the fact for those who didn't have valuable skills.

But in a decent-sized city, what else would you have other than the unskilled laborers and the farm workers and things like that? Well, there would be people with all kinds of skills that would be valuable to the Romans and to the slave buyers. There would be carpenters. There would be metalsmiths, coppersmiths, silversmiths, jewelers, and the like. There would be bakers. People who knew how to bake bread out of barley and wheat. There would be cooks. There would be chefs. There would be engineers. There would be builders.

There would be doctors. There would be administrators of the city. There would be all kinds of skilled people taken as captive when a city fell to the Romans. And if you were a Roman, you can take doctors and engineers and metalsmiths and jewelers and people like that and put them to hard labor in the fields or in the mines.

That was a waste of resources. You just didn't do that. No, you put them to work doing the kind of work that they were skilled at doing. The Romans were no dummies. The Romans were superb at organization and structure and efficiency, so they put the slaves to work in the areas where their skills could be utilized. Not as gladiators. Not working in the mines, being worked to death there. The people who were sent to the mines were criminals. And they were sent to the mines as a sentence to be worked at hard labor until you died.

Those were not slaves. Those were criminals. It was a criminal class and it was a punishment to go to work in the mines there, as depicted in the movie Spartacus. You may remember that. You may want to go back and watch this movie Spartacus because there are a lot of aspects about Roman slavery. This was not the kind of slavery we're talking about for the most part today, but you will pick up quite a bit on Roman slavery. It was practiced at that time.

From inscriptions on tombs and tombstones, and that's where we get most of the inscriptions we have from the Roman Empire, we know that slaves worked in more than 50 different occupations. More than 50 different occupations in the Roman Empire. Some of them included, in addition to the ones I just mentioned, accountants, barbers, bookkeepers, butlers, cooks, engravers, hairdressers, handmaids, launderers, leather workers, merchants, nursery attendants, sailors, secretaries, seamstress, and shoemakers, and teachers.

If the Romans had had modern advertising, as we have today, here's what an ad from that day might have looked like. The wording may be a little bit small for you to see, but I'll go through this and read us here. It shows seven different slaves for sale and the kind of skills that they had to offer. Starting on the left, here's Marcus. He's a chef specializing in fancy fish dishes and the use of garum. Garum was a very popular Roman spice made out of semi-rotted fish, to be blunt, but it's very popular among the Romans. This next slave is Nestor.

He has building skills and is a master of mosaics. Those are the elaborate tiled floors that you see from that period there, common throughout the Roman Empire. The next individual, Gnaeus, is a tutor of military tactics, probably a captured military officer from one of the areas Rome conquered. A tutor of military tactics, physical fitness, and equine mastery. In other words, he's good at teaching people how to ride horses. And if you're a Roman, that can come in pretty handy. This next individual is Pallas. He's an astrologer and a fortune teller.

That sounds pretty weird to have a slave as a fortune teller.

You realize it's mentioned in the Bible? Acts, I believe, it's chapter 16. Paul and Silas encounter a slave girl who's a fortune teller.

Courtesy of demons. They cast the demon out of the slave girl. And it causes a riot that almost gets Paul and Silas killed.

Slaves telling fortunes is mentioned in the Bible. And Romans were very, very superstitious. They wanted to know what the future held. So it's not all that out of the ordinary for a slave to be a fortune teller or an astrologer. And the Roman Empire. The next one here, Corolius, a tutor of philosophy and history.

The next one, Anna, a singer, seamstress and scribe. And the next one, because they had women slaves too, quite a few of them. The last one here, Apulius, a tutor of languages. On our recent trip to Italy that I mentioned there, we saw a number of funerary inscriptions where masters praised their slaves. Actually spoke of them very, very highly. Very lovingly, at times. One that I remember in particular was for a slave who was a singer. When I saw this, it reminded me of the female singer there. Written an inscription from her master. Apparently her only job was to be a singer.

To entertain the household there. Apparently she was quite good at it because the inscription said that she sang like a goddess. And looked like one too. So you see these things on the funerary inscriptions that masters engraved to memorialize their slaves.

Does that sound unusual? Very different from the slave-master relationship that we're used to from American history here. Some households had dozens of slaves. Some had hundreds. In rare cases, if you were the emperor, someone very high up in the Roman Empire, you might have thousands of slaves. I think the highest number I came across was more than 4,000 slaves owned by one particular emperor. The top 1-2% of the Roman elite owned about half of all slaves in the Roman Empire. They often had huge houses in Rome or in the other cities of the Roman Empire, as well as large country estates. It would take up thousands upon thousands of acres. So sometimes their city house might be several times the size of this building here. It would take up the equivalent of several city blocks. If you've been to Pompeii or ever visit there, you will actually see houses that occupied entire city blocks. It wasn't all that uncommon for the wealthy. Their country estates, covering thousands of acres, agriculture was very profitable in the Roman Empire, but it was very manpower-heavy. So you would need hundreds, maybe up until the thousands of slaves and servants working your fields, planting and reaping and harvesting, and taking the produce to market and all of that. They didn't have refrigeration like we do, so all of the food had to be brought in to Rome every single day, enough food to feed a city of 500,000 to a million people. So agriculture was very profitable, very extensive in the Roman Empire. So in that environment, let's think about it for a minute. If you are a wealthy Roman and you have a house or household that's several times the size of this room, this building that we're meeting in, and you have maybe 50 slaves, where do you get your bread every day? To feed 50 slaves and maybe the 20 people of your household. Do you go to another local King's Super and buy your bread there? No, you don't. You buy your wheat and bulk and you hire a slave to do nothing but bake bread full-time to feed the 70 people of your household and your slaves there. It's a full-time job.

You probably hire one or two other slaves whose job is to do nothing but cook for you and your household, and your household includes the 50 slaves that you have here. You don't send all your slaves' clothing when it gets dirty out to the local laundry. No, you hire a slave or two to do your laundry for you because laundering for a household of 70 people is a full-time job and more. So you'd have a lot of slaves with very specialized jobs. This is where we get the 50 or so occupations that we know of. You might not be...if your household was big enough, 100 or more, you might employ a full-time leather worker who does nothing but make and repair shoes and sandals for your household. To create belts, to create other leather goods, aprons, workman's vests, this type of thing. Harnesses, that sort of thing. So you might have a specialized leather worker, and that was his only job there. So you would have a lot of very specialized jobs there in the Roman Empire. So in the large, wealthy households, you would have had many, many specialized jobs for slaves, like the ones that we've described here, the different things. Another factor with slavery there is that it wasn't all of that uncommon for some slaves to actually be more educated than their Roman masters. Think about it again, what I said. When the Romans would capture a city, the variety of people they would get. In that city, there would be doctors, there would be lawyers, there would be university professors, there would be educators, there would be poets, singers, things like that. People who knew all of the Greek classics, all about all the historical works and so on. There would be city administrators. So when those people are sold as slaves to Romans, a number of them would have been more highly educated, more knowledgeable of business, perhaps, certainly more knowledgeable of a number of things than their Roman owners would be.

It was considered something of a status symbol among Romans to have a Greek slave as a tutor for your children, because the Greeks were viewed as highly refined and cultured. And to have a Greek slave to tutor your children was a sign that you were cultured also. It would be kind of like a wealthy American having an English butler. They're better because they're so cultured, they're so refined. It's a status symbol to have a Greek as a tutor for your kids, or a Greek as your butler, your personal valet. The bottom line is that when it came to Roman household slaves, the picture of Roman slavery, at least in the urban areas that are described in the New Testament, urban, the city areas, Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, Philippi, Thessaloniki, places like that, Colossae, the city areas that are reflected in the New Testament were actually much more like Downton Abbey than gone with the wind. When you read about Roman slavery, think Downton Abbey, not gone with the wind. Give you a very different picture. It sure did to me. Slaves were viewed not just as slaves, but often as valuable members of the household, even family members. Sometimes they were even adopted into the family, which we'll talk about that next time. As evidence of this high value that was placed on slaves, we saw in several places tombs near and outside Rome within and not far from the city, burial tombs. Not terribly large, about the size of our entry area out there, but the walls were... This is a three panoramic view where you're seeing three walls. The wall opposite, you see those three big niches. The big niche in the center would probably have been for an idol or a statue of a Roman god, perhaps the god of that particular family, and then flanking it on either side or other niches there for the father of the household, the potter familias he was called, and his wife over here, those would have been the chief members of the household. And then these other smaller niches would probably have been for family members, perhaps their children, their daughters-in-law, sons-in-law, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, maybe. But also in these little niches, and these niches, incidentally, that would have been for urns, funerary urns, because in Rome it was common to cremate people. They didn't bury them. They very rarely buried them. They would cremate them and put the remains in a little ceramic urn. So that's what these little niches are for. That's where an urn would go in an inscription identifying whose ashes were in that urn. And what they have found is that a lot of these niches contained the household slaves.

They were buried right there with a family because that's what they were considered part of the family, members of the family.

Again, very, very different concept of slavery from what we're used to thinking in terms of slavery.

We see an example of this kind of love and affection for a slave between a Roman slave owner and a slave actually reflected in the Gospels in one passage. Let's take a look at it. This is Luke 7. It's a familiar story to us. This is from Greene's literal translation again. This is where Christ is in Capernaum. And it says, A certain slave of a centurion. A centurion was a Roman military officer. This is probably, I've mentioned this before in our studies of the Gospels, there was a Roman military garrison at Capernaum. If you go there and you know where to look, you can find it. Not in the excavated portion of the city but a few hundred yards away off to the east. There was a Roman garrison there. This is apparently the commander of that Roman military garrison guarding the Via Maris, the international highway that ran very near Capernaum.

So it says, A certain slave of a centurion. One deer to him.

A slave that is dear to this Roman military officer. Having illness was about to expire, about to die. And hearing about Jesus, he, the centurion, sent elders of the Jews to him, asking him, some virgin say, pleading with him, that he might come to restore or heal his slave.

Think about the context. What's a relation between Romans and Jews in Galilee at that time? What are their relations like? Not all that pleasant. Because the Jews want to throw the Romans out and establish David's kingdom again there.

They hated the Romans. What do you think they thought about the Roman military? And what do you think they thought about a Roman military officer who commanded that military?

A lot of tension there.

And the Romans know this, and the Jews certainly know this. Yet this Roman military officer loves his slave, his servant, so much that he's willing to ask a Jewish rabbi to come and heal his slave. That says a great deal about the Romans' attitude. It turns out, we read actually a few verses down here, that this Roman centurion actually built the synagogue there in Capernaum for the Jews. And the Jews respected him highly for that.

But he asked a Jewish rabbi, how do you think that would have gone over with his superiors? He doesn't pray to Jupiter and Mars and the Roman gods and goddesses and so on to heal his servant. He asks a Jewish rabbi to heal his servant. Tremendous step of faith for this Roman military officer. And what does Christ say at the end of the story? He's skipping ahead a little bit. I wasn't going to talk about this, but what does he say? The centurion says, I know what it means to have faith. I tell my servants, my soldiers, go and they go and come and they come. All you have to do is say the word and I know my servant will be healed. And Jesus says, I haven't seen that so great of faith in all of Israel as that demonstrated by you. And he heals the servant. My point isn't all of this. My point is to show the affection, the love that this Roman military officer had for his servant. The servant was a slave. His slave wasn't just an expendable, you know, work them till they die and then, you know, bury them out in the woods somewhere. He loved his servant. He loved his slave and was willing to cross some very tricky bounds, minefields, you might say, to see the servant be healed. Because he had heard of this miracle working rabbi, Jesus, there in Capernaum.

So again, quite a remarkable testament. We see evidence here in the Bible of the kind of love, the kind of familial relationship and closeness between some Roman slaves and their masters. Another way that Roman slavery was so different from our concept of slavery was that in several ways, it was even better to be a Roman slave than a free man in Rome. If you're a free man, you had no guarantees. No one gave you a roof over your head. They didn't have the welfare systems we have today. Nobody gave you a roof. Nobody gave you subsidized housing. Nobody gave you a place to sleep. Nobody gave you clothing. Nobody gave you the food and three meals a day. But if you were a slave, your owner provided those things for you. Your owner gave you a place to sleep, gave you a roof over your head, gave you the clothing you wear, gave you the tools you needed, gave you the three meals a day. Why? Well, because a good slave was a valuable asset. A major investment that would be hard to replace, expensive to replace. So it was in the owner's best interest to treat a slave's will. And again, I mentioned this earlier, but some people actually sold themselves into slavery because they knew that their master, if it was a good master, would take care of them and treat them better. They would have better living conditions than they did as a free person in the Roman Empire than trying to make it on their own with all the tat and tail. For example, if you lived in a territory that had been conquered by the Romans, what were your rights? You know, there are different levels of rights in the Roman Empire. The highest level of rights is a Roman citizen. That wasn't everybody. Everybody didn't have citizenship. That was fairly restricted there to the wealthy, to those... If you were born into a family of Roman citizens, you became a Roman citizen by birth. Some people bought their Roman citizenship. Some people earned it by outstanding deeds of service or something to the Roman Empire. But if you weren't a Roman citizen, you had no rights. If you were a freed slave, freed slaves and non-citizens were essentially on the second tier. You didn't really have a lot of rights. And the third tier were those who were slaves. You had no rights. Except whatever your master and his good graces allowed you to have. Going back to the incident in Acts 16 that I mentioned where Paul and Silas cast this demon out of the fortune-telling slave girl. What happens? There's a near riot. They get beaten by the local magistrates, the rulers of the local town where this takes place. They get thrown into jail. A miracle happens there. It won't get into that. But the next day, they come and Paul lets it be known that he and Silas are Roman citizens. Now that fact is only introduced into the story after they've been beaten and thrown into jail. And what's the reaction of the people who've thrown them into jail?

They come basically and grovel before Paul and ask his forgiveness.

Because beating a Roman citizen was utterly illegal, extrajudicial, and could have had you suffer that same punishment or worse if you were the one who did that. Now why do I mention this? Well, I mention this because the people who beat Paul and Silas didn't realize a Roman citizen. So that illustrates, that's an illustration of if you were not a Roman citizen with these rights up here, the local magistrates, town officials, could beat you, throw you in jail pretty much with impunity and get away with it. As they thought they could with Paul and Silas. It shows the lack of rights of those who were not Roman citizens. Later we see that Paul utilizes his rights as Roman citizen to defend himself to the full extent of the law, even to appealing to Caesar for the legal charges lodged against him, which is how he ends up in Rome later on in there. But again, this just shows how the average non-Roman citizen could be treated. He had no rights to speak of there. And the slave was even several wrongs down below that. However, if you sold yourself into slavery as a good master, you could actually end up better off in the long run. And we'll go into more detail about that next time because there are a number of biblical references to that that take some time to explain. I want to conclude today by going back to the title of the message, which is, What Does It Mean to Be Slaves of God? Specifically, I want you to think about the differences between a slave and a servant. We've touched on those just a little bit today, but I want to draw some of those contrasts because those differences are significant. And it should help our perspective on what it means to be a slave of God. So get ready to write pretty quickly here. Some of the differences, there are seven of them that I've listed here. A slave is exclusively owned by his master. He is a piece of property. He has no rights, no choices, no options. In contrast to that, a servant is what we call today the hired help. The hired help doesn't like his employer, his boss. He's welcome to leave and go find a job somewhere else, work for another master.

A second major difference, a slave could not leave his master. Again, he's a piece of property completely owned by his master. He couldn't even run away because where does he go? Running away is a crime anywhere in the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire encompasses virtually the entirety of the known world at that time. To get away, you've got to find a way to get hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away, and if you get caught anywhere along that way, you might be executed. So what's the point in trying to run away? It's hopeless. So a servant, on the other hand, could leave his master and find a new master. Think about the implications of these with us as slaves and our master. Are we allowed to leave our master? Next point, the slave, as I mentioned, is totally dependent on his master. His master is the one who provides for him. His master is the one who puts a roof over his head, gives him his clothing, gives him his three meals a day, provides for him, gives him everything he needs. So he can serve his master. The servant, on the other hand, is partially dependent on the master, partially on himself. His own resource is there.

Next point, a slave, as we've talked about here a bit, is often viewed as a member of the family. It could even be adopted into the family. On the other hand, a servant is the hired help. The hired help comes and goes. They come in to do a specific job, they do the job, they're off to work for another boss or do another job, something like that. He's not part of the family. Again, think of the implications of the relationship between us and our master. Another difference, the slave had no option other than complete and total obedience. In other words, a slave does exactly what the master tells him to do. He has no other option. If he disobeys, he's going to be punished immediately and severely. And he knows it. However, a servant has other options, including the option to leave if he doesn't like the relationship with his master. Another point, the sixth one, the slave has an attitude of complete, unquestioned submission to his master. Again, he has no other options. However, a servant chooses whom he will submit to, including another master or no master at all. And the last one, and this gets down to attitude.

Every moment, every morning when a slave wakes up, what's the foremost thought in his mind? It's, what does my master want and how can I please him?

What does my master want and how can I please him? Totally motivated to serve and please his master because that is how the slave would be rewarded, based on how well he pleases his master. Again, we see this in the parables that we'll talk about later. What's a servant's approach on the other hand? A servant's approach is more passive. He does what he's told to do because he gets paid for what he's told to do and that's pretty much it. He has no other motivation other than to get the job done and that's a very different motivation of the slave. Because the slave's motivation is, again, what does my master want and how can I please him? A very different set of motivations. We'll develop these themes and other themes further next time. We'll discuss various other slavery pictures that we find in the Bible. What they mean for us. We'll go more into the master-slave relationship. We'll go more into what was expected of a slave. We'll talk about who our real master is. We'll talk about slavery to God versus slavery to sin. A very evil master, a cruel master. We'll talk about how a slave could attain freedom. What that meant. So, look forward to continuing with the theme.