What Does It Mean to Be Slaves of God? Part 2

Thank you, Mr. Wilhelm, I think. Let's hope the message isn't bold today, although I am saying so.

Well, welcome to all of you. Good to see you on this beautiful, beautiful Sabbath day here. I'd like to welcome our guests here with us today, and welcome to those tuning in on the webcast.

And also, a special welcome to the newest member of the congregation, Hugo Hye, who is visiting here today with his parents, Travis and Katie. So, good to see that little cute Hugo in there. So, that's a very proud parents there, and well deserved. So, welcome to all of you here. Today's sermon is an outgrowth of a trip that I've mentioned several times, that Darris McNeely and Steve Myers and myself took to Italy, a study tour back in late May, early June, about the Roman Empire and early Christianity in the Roman Empire, and how those two interacted with one another, what life would have been like for early members of the church in Rome and in other cities of the Roman Empire. And, of course, the Apostle Paul. His ministry was basically to the Gentiles of the Roman Empire, and we retraced his steps during the two times he visited Italy, visited Rome, the two times he was imprisoned there before his execution. And today we will be talking about a topic that I learned a great deal about on this trip. I've done a lot of studies since then, read three books, and started another one on that since then. And because today is quite a complex subject that we'll be talking about, I want to start off with a review of what we covered last time. And I know some of you weren't here to hear that sermon at being July 4th weekend, so I would like to take some time to briefly review some of the key points we covered then to lay a foundation for what we'll be talking about today. Again, it is a complex subject that we haven't really known or understood a lot about before. I began last sermon with a question, what word or term is most often used in the Bible to describe God's people? And we might think of terms like Christians, Church of God, servants, different things like that. But the word that is actually used to describe God's people more than any other word in the Bible, and I didn't count them all up, but the word appears over a hundred times in Scripture, is slaves. Slaves. We are called slaves of God, slaves of Jesus, slaves of Jesus Christ. And this is because of a translation problem. There is a Greek word, doulos, which was deliberately mistranslated as servant, or occasionally bondservant, instead of its proper meaning as slave. And why was this done? Well, we discussed how when the English translations of the Bible were first done in the 1500s and 1600s by William Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, then the King James Bible, because of the stigma that was attached to the institution of slavery, the translators wanted no association between biblical teaching and the slave trade and the slave world of that day. So they watered down the Greek word doulos and deliberately mistranslated a word that means slave as servant.

You might say this was an early form of political correctness here.

So they did water that down, and they did this more than a hundred times in the Scriptures. And because of this, it has obscured many important lessons that we should learn from what the New Testament means when it talks about slavery, when Paul talks about slavery. We looked at several well-known reference words. I won't go through and cover all of those again, but a number of reference works demonstrate this, including one that cites nearly all ancient sources, Greek writings, Roman writings, the works of Josephus, the famous Jewish historian, the Greek historian Herodotus, Philo, another Jewish historian of the first century, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament scriptures, and various Greek and Roman inscriptions from first few centuries BC and AD that show that the word doulos undoubtedly means slave. It also noted that this particular reference, also noted that translating doulos as servant basically is only done in translations of the Bible. And in some of the writings from the early American colonial period there. And again, they were doing that, changing the meaning of a word that means slave to servant. We also covered how some of the more modern Bible translations, and I gave you several examples of that, recognize this watering down, and now more and more of them are correctly translating this word doulos as slave instead of servant. And we also covered how most Bible translations get it right part of the time that when the word doulos is referring to other people as slaves, it will often translate it as slaves, but when it refers to God's people, it mistranslates it as servant. So they recognize that, they just don't translate it consistently all the time as they should. And this again is to avoid controversy there by associating Christians with slaves because of the connotation, the negative connotations with that. That is pretty typical of a lot of different Bible translations. So the overall theme that we talked about last time is, what does it mean to be slaves of God? What does it mean to be slaves of God? And we'll continue on with that topic today.

We also covered, went through a number of different scriptures, hitting some of the highlights about this. Various verses showing that the apostles Peter, James, John, James, the apostle James, and Jude, the two half-brothers of Jesus Christ, all referred to themselves as slaves, slaves of God and slaves of Christ. And that Peter and Paul and Jesus Christ himself specifically refer to church members as slaves. We also covered how basically every writer of the New Testament refers to church members as slaves. So there's a consistent pattern there. There's a consistent message there. The problem is that because we do not understand the concept of slavery or the way slavery was practiced in the Roman Empire, we miss out a lot of very important lessons for us there. And I pointed out something very important for us to remember, and that is that Paul, Paul specifically more than anyone because he interacted with the Roman Empire more than others, Paul and other biblical writers specifically refer to us as slaves to teach us crucial spiritual truths. You may want to write that down. Paul and other biblical writers specifically refer to us as slaves to teach us crucial spiritual truths. And that involves understanding that slavery in the Roman Empire was very different from the slavery that we are used to from our history books or from our national history here in the United States. And I talked about how that that differed, and I want to again review some of this to help set the stage for what we'll be talking about today. Because as Rome expanded, as the empire expanded grew and defeated and conquered other nations, other kingdoms, other cities, what did they do with the people that they took captive?

They didn't kill the people because that was a waste of valuable resources. The Romans were really into efficiency. They were masters at that. And they put the people to work doing the kind of work that they were skilled at doing. I covered how from inscriptions on tombs and tombstones and other things, we know that slaves worked in more than 50 different occupations in the Roman Empire.

We tend to think of slaves as just the common laborers out working in the field, something like that. But that was that was at best maybe half the slaves in the Roman Empire.

Because after all, if you had people who had specific skills, you didn't put them to work out working in the fields. You didn't put them to work doing hard labor. No, you utilized the skills that they have. And some of the skills we know again from different inscriptions of that time, some of the skills that the slaves put to use included accountants, administrators, astrologers. We covered an example of that in the Bible. Bakers, barbers, bookkeepers, butlers, cooks, doctors, engineers, engravers, hairdressers, handmaids, jewelers, launderers, lawyers, leather workers, merchants, metal workers, nursery attendants, sailors, secretaries, seamstresses, shoemakers, singers, teachers, tutors, and just about any other occupation you could think of. There were slaves doing those as their full-time jobs, not out working in the fields. There, as we would commonly assume, with slavery. And while many of the slaves were out working in the fields like that, as agricultural or common laborers, many slaves, and particularly those that Paul would have interacted with in the church areas that he visited or wrote to, like Rome, like Corinth, like Ephesus, like Philippi, like Thessalonica, places like that, they were urban slaves or city slaves, you might say. Slaves working in large households where the slaves were considered, as much as anything, part of the family, part of the household, not just as a piece of property to be worked to death, worked till it was useless and broken and then discarded there. So bottom line is the picture of Roman slavery, at least in the urban areas where Paul interacted with and that we see reflected in the books of the New Testament, was actually much more like Downton Abbey than Gone with the Wind. Because again, the slaves, like the servants in Downton Abbey, if you're a fan of that series, you know how they are known, they interact with the family household members, and they are appreciated for that. Slaves were viewed as valuable members of the household, and as we'll see and cover in some detail today, at times even members of the family. We concluded covering some of the differences between a slave and a servant, and those differences are significant, and this should help our perspective on what it means to be a slave to God. Because again, God does call us his slaves repeatedly, time and time and time again, and not his servants. And there are crucial differences between the two. Here are some of the differences here. I'll just go through these rather quickly. I don't need to try to write all these down because we'll hit them quickly. But first of all, a slave is exclusively owned by the master, whereas a servant could hire himself out to other masters.

Second, a slave could not leave his master, whereas a servant could leave to find a new master, if he did not like his master. A slave was totally dependent on his master, who provided him a roof over his head, clothing, tools, food, that sort of thing, whereas a servant is partially dependent on the master and partly on himself. A slave was often viewed as a member of the family, whereas a servant was hired help. Somebody would come in, do a job, and leave, and not be around after that. The slave had no option other than complete obedience to his master, whereas a servant had options, including the option to leave, if he didn't like the work he was given to do or didn't like the people he was serving. A slave had to show complete unquestioned submission, whereas a servant chooses whom he will submit to. And a slave, last of all, a slave is totally motivated to serve and please his master, whereas a servant is partially motivated to the master, but he also serves himself. And a servant's approach is passive, in other words, doing only what he's told to do, whereas a slave knows that his job is to please and serve his master.

Of course, we can see a number of obvious parallels in our lives as Christians. We went into that a little more deeply last time, but again, this is just a review. So we'll pick it up today with that background, that overview, and talk more about this theme of what does it mean to be slaves of God. And we'll cover some more lessons for us from being slaves to God the Father and to Jesus Christ. More specifically, we'll talk about seven different ways or lessons from the life of a slave that has major implications for us and our future as slaves of God. Let's start off talking some more about the master-slave relationship.

What was that relationship? We touched on it briefly last time, but the slave was viewed as a piece of property. As a matter of fact, there are some quotes from Roman literature that refer to the field workers, slaves out working in the fields. They called them animate tools.

In other words, they were viewed like a plow, a hammer, an axe, something like that, except they were moving. They were called animate tools. That's the way they were viewed, just a piece of equipment, essentially. The slave was a piece of property. He or she had no rights, no freedoms, other than what the master might grant the slave in his mercy and compassion. Slaves had few or no legal protections. Through the course of the Roman Empire, they gradually got more legal protections, but initially they had just zero protections. They were a piece of property, a tool there.

As evidence of this, I'll show you something we saw in one of the museums there in Rome. Sometimes they literally had a metal collar riveted, permanently attached, around their neck.

This has a little tag on it, like a dog tag, you might say. Notice the inscription there, written in Latin, I have run away. Catch me. If you take me back to my master, Zoninus, you'll be rewarded with a gold coin. So this is a literal tag and ring that was riveted around the neck of a particular slave, saying, I've run away. Catch me and my master will give you a gold coin. Didn't say what would happen to the slave once he got caught from running away, but that punishment could be swift and brutal and severe, up to and including possible execution by crucifixion there for that. So a slave's lot in life, the relationship with a master, obviously then depended on a great deal on who his or her master was, and the nature and the character and the temperament of that master. For instance, if a slave had a good and kind master who valued and appreciated him, life could be quite good, like we talked about last time, again, like the servants in Downton Abbey. Their life, relatively speaking, was quite good.

They had all of their needs met. They had health care from doctors, things like that.

Had three square meals a day, the clothing, good shelter, good living conditions, that kind of thing. So life could be quite good if you had a good and kind master. And again, there were, as we talked about last time, and I showed this photo, there were Roman owners who considered slaves so much a part of the household and the family that slaves were buried in a family tomb, like this one we see here. For those of you who didn't see it last time, this is the interior of a tomb. Here are niches on the opposite wall. There would have been probably the family god here, the patron saint, you might say, where that idea came from. Here would be the potter familius, the male head of the family, and the female head of the family here. And niches, they didn't actually bury the bodies there. The Romans practiced cremation. So they would cremate the body, put the remains in an urn, and that would go in these niches here. And there would be a little sign, either carved in stone or perhaps painted on the plaster, identifying who this was. So there would be the family members, perhaps some cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. And right along with it in the family tomb would be the slaves, the household slaves. And tomb there has been part of the family tomb. Why?

Because they're considered part of the family. Because there are valued contributions there to the family. And we saw this in several places in and near Rome. So a slave in this position was respected and was taken care of for his or her abilities in service to the master.

Their needs would be taken care of by the master so they could focus on serving the master and doing what needed to be done. On the other hand, if your master was cruel, I was just trying to get every last ounce of work he could get out of you, your life could be a living hell. As has been the typical pattern for slavery over the centuries, you might not get enough to eat. If you're sick, you might just have to work anyway. Work until you literally drop. You might have to work so hard every day until your hands and your feet bled from the hard labor. You might not get enough sleep or rest to be able to function normally. You might get sick or be ill much of the time due to ill health and being overworked. In a worst-case scenario, you might literally be worked to death. There was a particular prison sentence that was given to some people to literally be worked to death in the mines underground, working hard labor in that. You've seen the movie Spartacus. You see that illustrated there, the slaves being worked to death in the mines. That wasn't for the average slave, but those who are convicted of various crimes could literally be worked to death in the mines. So what lesson does this relationship between the slave owner and the slave hold for us?

Well, several obvious ones, but to begin with, who is our master? And who was our master?

What is the difference between the master that we used to serve and the master that we serve now?

Let's notice what Paul wrote about this in Romans 6, verses 16 through 23. Most of today, I'll be reading through Greene's literal translation simply because it does correctly translate doulos as slave every time it comes across the word. So that's primarily why I'm using this particular translation. But notice what he says here. It's a familiar passage, but you'll read a little bit different here than what we're used to. Paul says, don't you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living. Thank God, once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you. Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living. Because of the weakness of your human nature, I am using the illustration of slavery to help you understand all this. Previously, you let yourselves be slaves to impurity and lawlessness, which led ever deeper into sin. Now you must give yourselves to be slaves to righteous living so that you will become holy. When you were slaves to sin, you were free from the obligation to do right. And what was the result? You are now ashamed of the things you used to do, things that end in eternal doom.

And what was the result? Oh, excuse me, repeated that verse here. But now you are free from the power of sin and have become slaves of God. Now you do those things that lead to holiness and result in eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. So what is Paul doing and saying here? Well, again, who's he writing to? He's writing to the church in Rome. As we talked about last time, perhaps as much as a quarter, maybe more of the population of Rome was slaves. Slaves there, maybe a quarter million or more slaves there in Rome. So people would have been very familiar with slaves. And when Paul talks about slaves, they understand exactly what Paul is talking about here and the point that he's making here that we used to be slaves to a very cruel taskmaster. That's a point I'd like us to take from this this first discussion here. That we were slaves to a cruel and harsh master.

What was our master? Who was our master before? We served sin, as we saw here. We served Satan the devil. That's the first point I want you to note about this parallel between slavery and our lives today. That we were slaves to a cruel and harsh master and slave to sin, enslaved to Satan. And basically what Paul is saying is we used to be enslaved to the worst master imaginable. And again, the people in the church in Rome could identify with this because they knew, everybody knew, people who had slaves. Probably some of the church members there in Rome were slaves. Probably some of them owned slaves. And Paul in his writings a number of times talks about the relationship between masters and slaves there and tells masters to treat their slaves well, knowing that you have a master above Jesus Christ. And he tells the slave, slaves serve your masters as though you were serving Jesus Christ. So he encourages good relations between those two. But we used to be enslaved to the worst and most cruel master imaginable. Let's notice some of the contrast here of how slavery to sin is different from slavery to God. I jotted down just a few here. If you're a slave to sin, what does that bring?

It brings curses on us. In contrast, if we are a slave to God, that brings blessings to our lives.

If we're a slave to sin, that leads to a life of lawlessness, of rebellion against God's law.

On the other hand, being a slave to God makes us or a live a life of holiness or a life of righteousness. Being a slave to sin leads to shame. Being a slave to God leads to joy.

Being a slave to sin brings oppression, suffering. Being a slave to God brings freedom, true freedom.

Being a slave to sin ultimately leads where? Leads to death, eternal death, if not repented of.

Being a slave to God, on the other hand, leads to life, to life everlasting.

There are many important lessons for us to learn regarding our master, our owner, today, and the differences between being a slave to sin and a slave to God. We could go through and talk about these for a long, long time, but we don't have time for that. There's other key information I want to provide to you today. As I mentioned earlier, a good owner truly cared about his slaves. They were a valuable asset to him, so he treated them that way. He provided everything they needed. Why? So they could serve him, so they could serve him with their whole heart and mind and being. So remind us of any scriptures, any scriptures that pop into mind about how we are treated as servants of God. A couple of scriptures I jotted down here. 1 Peter 5, 6, and 7.

And Peter says here, Therefore humble yourselves unto the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time, casting all your care upon him, for he cares for you.

Here's just a brief glimpse of the kind of master, the kind of owner that we serve as slaves, someone who cares for us. And because he cares for us, we don't have to spend all of our time worrying about where are we going to get a roof over our heads, where are we going to get our next meal, how are we going to clothe ourselves and our family, that kind of thing, because he will take care of us, because he loves us, because he cares for us. Another familiar passage, it ties in with this, Matthew 6, 31 through 33. Jesus Christ says, Therefore do not worry, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or what shall we wear? For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. So again, God knows our need, so we don't need to be overly concerned about that. God wants us to focus on something that is more important. As a master provided his slave with clothing, with shelter, with food, so that the slave could focus on serving the master, that's what God wants from us. How? Well, as we see here, he wants us to focus on seeking first the kingdom of God, making that the highest priority in our lives, and then also seeking God's righteousness. What does that mean? It means becoming like God.

If we are seeking God's righteousness, we are seeking to become righteous as God is righteous.

So familiar passage, become perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. That's what it's talking about here. God is our owner, as our master will take care of us, will provide us, so we can focus on the crucial and important thing in life, the priority of seeking the kingdom of God and becoming righteous as God is righteous here. So God does this so we can make those our highest priority in life. Let's move on to another point here that ties in with the parallels of the life of a slave, moving from the fact that we were owned by one master, and the second point I want to talk about is that we have been bought by a new master.

We have been bought by a new master. If you lived in the first century and were a slave of a harsh and cruel master, how could you get out of that horrible situation? As we talked about briefly last time, you could try to run away, but where are you going to go? Because you're in the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire covers basically the whole of the known world at that time. You'd have to flee hundreds, maybe even thousands of miles to escape the boundaries of the Roman Empire. And if you were caught, you would be severely punished and possibly even executed.

So what would you do? How could you get out of a situation if you have a cruel owner there?

Well, basically, bottom line is your situation is pretty much hopeless.

It's pretty much hopeless there. You have no choice in the matter. After all, you're a slave. You have no rights. You're a piece of property. So the best that you could hope for would be that someone else might come along and buy you. That was your best hope, that you could be sold or bought by a new master. That was the only way, realistically, barring a total change of heart in your master, that you could escape a life of misery. And guess what? That is exactly what happened to us when we were owned by a harsh and cruel owner, Satan the Devil. We were bought by a new master. Bought by a new master, God the Father, who purchased us with what?

With the greatest price imaginable. With the blood of his Son. The blood of the Creator of the universe. This is a classic example of grace. What is grace? Grace... Bottom line is God's goodness toward us. Not because of anything that we have done, not because of anything that we deserve.

Anything like that. We were enslaved to sin, as we talked about there, according to Paul and Romans, trapped in a situation that leads only to suffering, to misery, to death, trapped with no way out, no options. And suddenly what happens? Somebody comes in, unknown to us, buys us, pays a price for us, takes us out of that situation to become a part of the household of a new master.

That is God's grace summed up. One aspect of God's grace. God's goodness toward us, because he's a good God, because he's a loving God who loves us. And again, not based on anything that we have done or anything that we deserve. A number of verses talk about the very high price that our new master paid for us to buy us out of our slavery to our former master.

I'll talk just about one of them here. 1 Peter 1 and verse 18. This is from the NIV.

And Peter says here, For you know that it was not with perishable things, such as silver and gold, that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect.

So he says here that we were bought. A price was paid for us. And this happened many times. We talked about this briefly last time in the Roman Empire. In a typical year, based on the records, partial records that we have, in a typical year, it might have been common for a quarter million slaves, 250,000 slaves, to be bought and sold in a given year in the Roman Empire. Most of those would be bought by one master, and they would serve that master to the end of their lives there, good or bad. But we are different. Although we did nothing to deserve it, again, we were bought by a new master, a different master, who paid a very dear price for us.

Paid the price of the life of his only son. He paid the highest price possible to purchase us.

The question we need to ask is, how well are we reflecting the investment that he made in us?

Purchasing us with the blood of his only son.

It's a pretty sobering question to think about there.

Let's move on to another aspect of this flow, and we are going through a flow which will become more evident as we go on. The next step in this process is that we have become slaves to a new master. We were, first of all, slaves to a crarish and cruel master.

Second step, we are bought by a new master. Third step now, we have become slaves to a new master.

Just purchased us as we covered here. Once sold, a slave became the property, the possession, of his or her new master. This ties in with the ties that the slave had with his previous master were now broken. They were no longer in effect. He has no linkage, no relationship with his previous master. In the same way, we have now become slaves of a new master. All of our ties with our previous master of sin and slavery to Satan the devil were broken. They no longer exist. We are now serving a new master. Let's notice again, going back here to Romans 6, 16-18, from the New Living Translation. This is a different translation, but I think it captures the flavor of it a little better here. Don't you realize that you become the slave of whatever you choose to obey? You can be a slave to sin, which leads to death, or you can choose to obey God, which leads to righteous living. Thank God! Once you were slaves of sin, but now you wholeheartedly obey this teaching we have given you. Now you are free from your slavery to sin, and you have become slaves to righteous living. So again, the point that's brought a little more forcefully in this translation is that our old master no longer owns us, no longer has any hold over us, it no longer enslaves us. We are now slaves to a new master, to righteousness, to righteous living, to a godly lifestyle, to a godly way of life here. We have become, as it says here in the last line, slaves to righteous living, to godly living, not slaves to sinfulness, and licentiousness, and that sort of thing. We find another close parallel to this over in the book of Hebrews.

It's a familiar passage talking about something slightly different here, but it makes the same point that we are now serving somebody else, serving somebody different from our old master. Familiar passage, Hebrews 9, verses 13 and 14, this is from the New King James version, For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer, this is talking about the sacrificial system of Israel, of the temple that existed at that time, sprinkling the unclean, sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Again, we see a contrast between two different masters. The old master that we're cleansed from now, the old master of dead works, the word just means acts or actions, the things we used to do, in other words, God has cleansed our conscience from the old way of life, the old things we used to do and think and say were cleansed from that by the sacrifice, by the price that was paid for us of the blood of the Messiah to serve whom? To serve our new master, to serve the living God, as it says right here. So again, we've shifted from serving the old master, and those ties, those old links, that old form of slavery is gone. We now serve a new master here.

And what, again, I mentioned this last time, but as a slave, what is a slave's foremost thought every day? And you should write this down. A slave's foremost thought every day is, what does my master want, and how can I please him? What does my master want, and how can I please him?

And we'll discuss why this is his foremost thought or her foremost thought a little bit later as we go through this progression here in the life of a slave. What does my master want, and how can I please him? Again, we saw what our priority as slaves of God should be, which is seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That should be our highest priority in life, our highest priority, our greatest priority, our number one priority in life. And this leads us to a fourth point. This is fairly long, and this is one of the most fascinating parts of this study as I've been looking into that. It's fairly long, so I'll give you some time to write this down. And that is that our new master gives us opportunities to demonstrate whether we will accept his rule over us and serve him with our whole heart. Our new master gives us opportunities to demonstrate whether we will accept his rule over us and serve him with our whole heart. And here's where I came across a concept that I'd never heard of before. Well, actually I had, but I didn't know what it was because it's actually clearly spelled out in several examples in the Bible. But again, it goes back to this problem because the word doulos, meaning slave, was mistranslated as servant. It covers up this very important aspect of our lives as slaves of God. And we miss a great deal of the point of what it means to be slaves of God because of this. Now to understand this concept, we need to go back to some of what I covered last time in considerable amount of detail. I touched on a bit earlier today. I mentioned that when the Romans captured a city or a kingdom or an empire, they would have all kinds of slaves with all kinds of abilities, and they would put the slaves to work using those skills and those abilities to generate a profit for the master. Again, they might, I use the example, they capture a city. And the city has 30,000 inhabitants. Well, a fair number of those people are going to be common laborers, workers, agricultural workers. They're not going to have valuable skills, you might say, so they will be put to work out in the fields.

But you'll also have the other occupations I mentioned. You'll have engineers. You'll have administrators. You'll have bridge builders. You'll have metalsmiths. You'll have goldsmiths. You'll have jewelers. You'll have seamstresses. You'll have carpenters. You'll have all of these different abilities and skills, accountants, bookkeepers, singers, any number of things. And the Romans just wouldn't take those valuable skills and put them to work out in the fields. No, they wouldn't utilize those skills to generate a profit for the master.

So the Romans also had what you might call a much more enlightened view of slavery.

Like nearly all of the peoples of the ancient world, they didn't see anything wrong with slavery.

It was a fact of everyday life. For centuries, for thousands of years, people had been conquering and enslaving other peoples. It was just the way things were done.

You either conquered and enslaved them or they conquered and enslaved you. So what's your choice?

That was the pattern of human history. So slavery was just an accepted part of civilization in society. But again, the Romans had a more enlightened view about it. The Romans had a unique twist or take on slavery because it kind of goes back somewhat to the way they viewed the Roman Empire. They viewed the Roman Empire, the Roman citizens did, as the pinnacle of civilization and culture there. They wanted to see that they were very patriotic. This is one of the things that led to a lot of conflict between the early church and the Roman Empire because if you did not worship the gods of the Roman Empire, if you did not worship the Roman Emperor, you weren't patriotic.

You weren't part of the system. You were a subversive. And this is what led to a lot of the persecution in the early church. But the Romans thought that everybody would want to be like them.

The Roman Empire is the pinnacle of civilization. So naturally everybody would want to be like them. And they viewed it as in their interest to grant freedom and citizenship to their slaves.

This is key to understanding this concept. They saw it in their overall interest to grant freedom and citizenship to slaves. Not every slave, not the common field worker out there because they're not cultured enough. They're just not really going to contribute a lot to the Roman Empire there.

They're not smart enough. They don't have the skills. They don't have the culture. The intelligence to be a proper Roman citizen would have been the way they would view it. But the best and the brightest, the most talented, the most skilled, the most hard-working, those who could be a real asset to the Roman Empire had a pathway to freedom and citizenship by working their way out of slavery.

We see this mentioned in passing passage in Acts 22 verses 25 through 28. I'll give you a little bit of the background here. I just want to touch on one phrase out of this so we won't spend a lot of time on it. But Paul is visiting the temple in Jerusalem and a riot is starting because it's assumed that Paul has brought Gentiles into the forbidden area of the temple grounds. There were Gentiles were not allowed. The Roman soldiers who were in a fortress immediately adjacent to the temple come swooping down and they grab Paul and they take him back into the Roman fortress.

Then this incident that we'll just touch on here briefly takes place. Romans 22 and verse 25, and as they bound him, Paul with thongs, Paul said to the centurion, the military officer who stood by, is it lawful for you to scourge a man who is a Roman, a Roman citizen, as Paul was, and unconned without trial, in other words. When the centurion heard that, he went and told the commander of the fortress, saying, take care what you do for this man is a Roman citizen.

Then the commander came and said to Paul, tell me, are you a Roman citizen? And Paul said, yes. The commander answered with a large sum, I obtained this citizenship. And Paul said, but I was born a citizen. So that's what I want to focus in on. Just a short, quick exchange here and the implications of it. Because again, we talked about this earlier, but in the Roman Empire, not everybody was created equal. Not everybody had equal rights under the law. The lowest rung of society were the slaves. They were property. They had zero rights, no rights at all.

Above them was a combination of those who had been freed slaves or those who were just the people in the lands conquered by the Roman Empire, like Judea, like Galilee, that we read about in the Gospel so much, like Asia Minor, like Egypt. These lands were under the control of the Roman Empire, but the people weren't citizens of the Roman Empire. They were just kind of there. As we saw in an example last time, Paul and Silas get caught up in a deer riot there after they cast a demon out of a slave girl. A riot starts. They get thrown into jail. They get beaten to within an inch of their lives. That just demonstrates how the authorities could treat somebody who they didn't know was a Roman citizen of the Empire. They could be beaten and thrown into jail with no legal recourse. We cover the rest of the story how when they reveal they are Roman citizens, the town magistrates come and apologize to them and quietly get them out of town before they cause more trouble there. That just illustrates some of the difference in the level of rights. Then at the top of society were those with Roman citizenship. As we see in this example here, Paul was born a Roman citizen. That means his parents were Roman citizens. Paul is from Tarsus, which is a major city in the Roman Empire, a Roman colony, a Roman city there. His parents, being Jewish, had probably done something, made some contribution in some form to the Roman magistrates governing authorities and were granted citizenship as a gift. Perhaps they purchased their citizenship as well. We don't know. We just know that Paul, as we see here, was a Roman citizen from birth. But notice, this is where I want to draw the contrast, is with the commander. Now this is a military commander of several hundred Roman soldiers here. He says that with a large sum, I obtained or I bought my citizenship. So this was a route to citizenship. You could be granted it by the Roman authorities. You could buy it as this individual did. Actually, the same kind of thing is written into the laws of a lot of countries.

I just read in the last week or two that you can move to Australia and become an Australian citizen for about $200,000. You can do the same thing here in the United States if you're wealthy enough.

Or you can sneak across the border and stay underground for a few years and get it for free.

We're not as smart as the Romans were. I mean, to be blunt about it. Citizenship is a prize position and we give it away free. It was not that way in the Roman world. It was very different. It was very prized. Very valuable here. In the case of this commander, he probably was never a slave.

The parallel is slightly different, but the overall picture is the same. Probably the Roman army used a lot of mercenaries. They would hire people as soldiers.

There he may have been a mercenary. He may have been a commander of a people or a city or a town that the Romans defeated and was given the option to, hey, you can become a part of the Roman Empire or look it off your head. Your choice. So that would have been fairly typical, too. So probably he was either a mercenary or a fighter in another army who became a mercenary, became part of the Roman army there. But that did not make him a citizen. It didn't make him a citizen. You could, depending on the time period of the Roman Empire, serve for 20, 25, 30 years in the Roman Empire, after which you would be granted citizenship and be given the equivalent of 40, 50 acres of land and a mule and that sort of thing. That was the way the Romans founded a lot of their colonies, a lot of the cities that we read about that Paul visits were founded by soldiers who had done their time in the Roman Empire. This is a sidelight, but it's but it's entering helps us understand a lot of the context of the New Testament. They would be mustered out of the army after their term of service was over and they would be given land where the Romans wanted to establish a colony or a city.

And it worked out well for all concerned because you had men there in the city with military experience to help defend the city, build the city. The Roman Empire spent most of its time not just guarding as our military does today, but they were building roads, building walls, building streets, building water systems, building aqueducts. They were the the engineering corps.

So by mustering soldiers out of the army, you had a guaranteed trained workforce there that could defend the city under attack. You'd have officers who would retire there who could become the city administrators and officials. So it's a very good system and that's why so many of the Roman cities, even places like London, many of the cities in France, in Germany, are old Roman colonies that existed that were founded as Roman cities by these men who were mustered out of the military. So in this case, that's a little bit of a digression there, but let's see where was I and my notes here.

So yeah, getting back to this officer, he has purchased his citizenship. Well, why? What would he gain by that? Well, by purchasing citizenship, that would mean that when he had children, they too would be citizens. So it would be something you could pass on to your children to give them a good head start in life there. So he has probably saved up his earnings as a Roman military officer for a number of years, 10 years, 15 years, and purchased his citizenship there.

But that wasn't as good as Paul's citizenship because Paul was born a Roman citizenship. So my whole point in this is to illustrate what we're talking about here, that a route to become a Roman citizen was to to work your way out of slavery, to purchase your way out of slavery, and to work your way or purchase your citizenship as a Roman citizen. There's also a term we find mentioned twice in the New Testament. It's called freed men. Freed men. It's only used twice, but it was commonly understood in that day.

A freed man or freed woman was somebody who had been a slave, and they were either given their freedom by their masters, or they had worked their way up and purchased their freedom from their masters. So a slave could do this, save up the money to buy his freedom and citizenship.

I touched on this briefly also, but this is an interesting side note that illustrates how slavery was much more enlightened in the Roman Empire, and there are historical records of this. If again you were just an average Jew in Judea or Galilee, or if you lived in Egypt or Asia Minor or North Africa or someplace like that controlled in the Roman Empire, and you weren't a slave or you weren't a citizen, another route to becoming a citizen was to sell yourself as a slave because of what I talked about earlier.

It sounds bizarre to us who would ever in their right mind sell themselves as a slave. Well, there are two advantages of that. One, if you sold yourself as a slave, you got a little nest egg. You get the purchase price for selling yourself, so that money could be used to provide for yourself or your family if you had a wife and children too.

So you're taking a risk, though, because you never knew who your master would be once you put yourself on the auction block to sell yourself as a slave. So there was a definite downside to that. But if you got an enlightened master and you were a hard worker, you could take this route by selling yourself as a slave. You could eventually work your way back out of slavery, purchase your freedom again, and purchase or be granted Roman citizenship. Because again, the Roman Empire saw it as in their best interest to grant citizenship to the best and the brightest of the slaves.

There. And we'll see this as we go through this point. This is a long and involved point because it's such a concept that's so foreign to us here. So this gets back to what I talked about earlier. What is a slave's foremost thought every day? How can I serve my master? How can I please my master? Because there is a strong incentive in this system to work hard for your master because the harder you work and the more diligent you are, the more likely you are to either be granted your freedom and the gift of citizenship or to earn money to purchase your freedom and citizenship.

So this worked to the benefit of all concerned. There's the obvious benefit to the slave because he is a route to freedom and citizenship. It worked to the benefit of the slave owner because he's got a highly motivated slave. And ultimately, it worked for the benefit of the empire because the more productive your slaves, your citizens are, your economy is, the better off it's going to be for the empire. So it was a system in which everybody benefited. But an obvious question comes to mind. What's the obvious question?

If you're a slave, how do you get money? How do you get money if you're a slave?

And here's where it gets really interesting. As I mentioned before, many of these household city slaves had valuable skills, craftsmen, tutors, bookkeepers, scribes, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and the like. And their owners would actually sometimes set themselves, set the slaves up in their own businesses so that they could earn money to eventually purchase their freedom and their citizenship. Sounds bizarre to us, but it happened. Here's proof of it.

One of the places we visited on this tour was Herculaneum. You've probably heard of it. Herculaneum and Pompeii were both buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

These cities are essentially time capsules from about 10 years after Paul was executed in Rome.

I'll give you an idea of the time frame there. It's simply a time capsule, and as such, they are a great source of information about life in the first century Roman Empire. What are we looking at here? We're looking at a house in Herculaneum. We're looking at a woman about to walk in the front door of the house. There's a little hallway about as deep as this stage, and it opened up into kind of an atrium, what we might call a living room, that would have been typically about a half to a third the size of this room here. Maybe twice the size of this of the stage area up here. So this is the main door to the house, but notice what's on either side of it. These are shops. These are shops that the owner of the house had built into the house for his slaves to operate their own businesses out of. We don't know what these particular shops were. They're just being used as storerooms today. These are actually have ironed grates in front of them, and there's different artifacts, tiles, stuff like that, jars, M4A, things like that that are stored back behind there out of the public reach there. But that's what this is, and during this during the 70s, before the eruption, these shops would have been operated by some of the slaves of the household to earn money to buy their freedom. The owner of the house was allowing his slaves to operate these small businesses right there beside his front door to earn money, to purchase their freedom, ultimately maybe to purchase their citizenship. Now, in a case like this, I'm not saying it was 100% altruistic because it wasn't. The owner wasn't just doing this out of the goodness of his heart because the homeowner no doubt would charge rent for a shop like this or perhaps probably more likely just took a percentage of the income, maybe half of whatever the slave generated by whatever he's selling or whatever his skill is, whether it's a goldsmith or coppersmith or leather worker, sandal maker, something like that. The owner would no doubt take a percentage of that. So it was in his interest, too. Yes, he'd have the slave working for him 10 or 12 hours a day, but then the slave in his second job would run a shop like this, and the owner would take a cut off that. So the owner is getting money back on his investment in the slave above and beyond just the purchase price there. So again, it wasn't totally altruistic, but it was a good system in which everybody ultimately benefited there, the slave and the owner and even the entire Roman Empire. So again, this shows that slavery in the Roman Empire was very different from the type of slavery that we're used to from American history here. It was much more enlightened in practices like this. Now with this background, there are two parables that Jesus Christ gave that make a lot more sense. And I've read through these for years and understood a lot about it, but something just wasn't quite adding up. And those are the parables of the talents and the pounds. And again, the mistranslation of the word that means slaves as servants obscures the lesson of the parables, because it's talking about this right here, talking about this exact practice here that we just described. Let's look at one of these two parables. They're very similar, so we'll just read through one of them in Matthew 25 verses 14 through 30. And again, this is from Green's literal translation. And Jesus says, for it is as if a man going abroad, a long journey is the way it's worded we're familiar with, called his own slaves and delivered his goods to them. Now it's translated servants in the verses, and the translations we're familiar with.

And for years I read through that, why does a master go away and leave money with his servants? That just doesn't make sense. That's when does a master leave his servants unsupervised with considerable sums of money? We're talking weeks, months worth of wages that he's given them here. Why does he leave them unsupervised for that? With that money, it makes no sense.

And it makes even less sense when you read it correctly as slaves. When does a master give his slaves money and then go away on a long journey? What could possibly go wrong with that? But it's understandable when we understand this concept that we've just been talking about here, about slaves earning money for their freedom and being highly motivated to please their master because that was the route to gaining their freedom. So do you see what's happening here? Let's continue on here. Verse 15, and to one indeed he gave five talents into another two, and to another one, to each according to his ability. Not all slaves were alike. Some were more skilled, more specialized skilled. So the master apportions out money to them according to their ability. This is where it differs from the other parable here. We'll get to that when we cover that in the Gospels and get into the full meanings of these. Verse 16, and going, so the master leaves them. Who's the master in the parable? The master is Jesus Christ. He's going away on a far journey, and he's going to return and demand an accounting from his slaves. Who are his slaves? You and me. That's the setting to make sure we know who's who in here. So the master goes away, and the one who received the five talents worked with him with that investment, with that money, the startup money, the owner had given them, and made another five talents. He doubles his master's investment. In the same way, what the one with the two also did, and he gained another two talents. But going away, the one who received the one talent did what? He dug in the earth and hid his Lord's silver. And after much time, the Lord, the master of those slaves, came and took account with them. Again, this is Jesus Christ returning in the picture that he's giving here. And coming up, the one who received five talents brought another five talents near, saying, Lord, master, you delivered five talents to me. Behold, I gained another five talents above them. And his Lord said to him, Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful over a few things. I will set you over many. Enter into the joy of your Lord, your master. And the one who received two talents also coming up said, Lord, you delivered two talents to me. Behold, I have gained two other talents above them. His Lord said to him, Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful over a few things. I will set you over many. Enter into the joy of your Lord. And the one who had received the one talent also coming up, he said, Lord, I knew you that you were a hard man. A cruel master, in other words. This is the slave's perception, at least. Reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter. And being afraid, going away, I hid your talent in the earth. I buried it in the dirt, in other words. Behold, here it is. You have yours. And answering, as Lord said to him, evil and slothful slave, you knew that I reap where I did not sow and gather where I did not scatter.

Then you ought to have put my silver to the bankers, and coming I would have received my own with interest. That's the least that you could have done. At least given it to the bankers, where it would generate a little interest while I was away on my journey.

Therefore, take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to each who has, more will be given, and he will abound. But from him who does not have, even that which he has, will be taken from him. And throw the worthless slave into the outer darkness. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. What's the lesson? First of all, do you see the parable with what we talked about? How a master would invest in his slaves, set them up, put an investment in them, and expect them to generate a profit. Then ultimately, they can use for their benefit to purchase their freedom and their citizenship, but also to generate a profit for the master, for the owner of the slave. So you see the parallel there. It's very, very obvious when we understand what this is talking about. And it's the same exact parallel in the other parable than Luke 9, I believe it is. But what's the lesson here? The lesson is that our master, God the Father, has invested a lot in us. Again, the purchase price purchased us with the blood of his son. But he's also given us talents and abilities as a gift from him, as we saw in the series of sermons we gave a couple of years ago on spiritual gifts. He expects us to use what he has given us to build and to edify and to strengthen, to encourage the body. He expects us to use what he has given us, and if we don't, if we take what he has given us and we figuratively bury it in the ground, what use are we? What use are we to God? What use are we to anybody? We have no use.

What happens in this parable? Two slaves take their master's investment in them and they go to work with it. They put in a lot of work. They put in a lot of effort, and they double their master's investment in them. What's their attitude? Their attitude is, I want to please my master.

I want to please my master. That attitude that's on the waking, every waking thought of a slave. What can I do to please my master? How can I serve him? That's their attitude. They want to please their master. They want to generate a profit for him. But the third slave takes his master's investment and does nothing. Does nothing. What does it say about the slave?

A couple of things. You can talk about this for old sermons. It says he's lazy. It's called slothful there. It says he lacks initiative. Jesus Christ called him evil. He lacks a sincere desire to serve and please his master. He lacks a sincere desire to serve and please his master. They all knew their master's instructions, which was to take this money I'm investing in you and do something with it to generate a profit. That's the instruction they're all given. Turn a profit. Be a profitable servant. But this slave utterly fails. Two things for us that struck me is, why do people not do things with what God has given us? Often it's a lack of confidence.

Lack of confidence in ourselves because we don't think we can. We've been maybe from childhood program to fail. Maybe we have the attitude that because we're a Christian, we can't succeed. The deck is stacked against us. Does that fly with God, though?

Do we lack that confidence in ourselves? Do we lack confidence in God? This may be a bigger issue because what does God tell us? God hasn't chosen us to fail. God chose us because He knows we can succeed. He chose us now to become His slaves, to ultimately become His children, because He knows that we can succeed. That's why He chose us now. At the best time, the optimal time for each of us.

He chooses us because He knows we can succeed, but this slave didn't see it that way.

He lacked confidence that with God all things are possible, and He ends up losing everything.

God has confidence in us. That's why He chose us, bought us from our previous master in the first place. That's why He invested the purchase price in us of the blood of His Son, the highest price imaginable, the blood of the Creator of the universe. He says He will never leave us nor forsake us. He says that He's given us His Spirit as a down payment on His gift of eternal life. He says that with Him on our side, who can be against us? He expects us to use what He's given us to generate a profit on what He's invested in us. If we don't, we see what happens to the unprofitable servant. Am I saying that we earn our salvation because of this? No, no, because salvation again is a gift of God. We can't earn it. We can't deserve it. We can never be good enough on our own to earn the gift of salvation. But as we see here, God has conditions on that gift. He has conditions. He expects us to do something. You know, if I offered you a $20 bill, if I took a $20 bill out of my wallet and held it up here and said, here, this is yours if you walk up here and take it out of my hand. Does that mean you earned it? No, it's still a gift.

But there is a condition. You've got to walk it up here and take it out of my hand.

Now, if you don't come up here and take it, is it still a gift? If it's laying up here on the table, well, it's still a gift. It's there for you. All you've got to do is walk up here and take it. Does that mean you earned it? No, it's just a condition. God has conditions on His gift of eternal life is the point here. You don't get the gift if you don't meet the condition of coming to get that gift, doing whatever it is necessary to get that gift. God simply has conditions. And those two parables of the pounds or the minas and the talents illustrate that point. But again, our point here, and this has been a long discussion because it's such a deep concept and such a foreign concept to our thinking, is that our Master, again, gives us opportunities to demonstrate whether we will accept His rule over us and serve Him with our whole heart, as illustrated by those parables there, as illustrated by the example from slavery there. And that leads us to the next parallel with slavery in the Roman Empire. Which is that we are adopted into the family of our new Master. We are adopted into the family of our new Master. Here's the photo I showed earlier of the family, too. And this again illustrates the point as well as anything I can think of to show that the slaves were considered part of the family. The household slaves were. And again, we saw this several times in tombs in and around Rome there. It was something that was fairly common. There are also, however, I found this interesting, there are also Roman records of slaves who chose not to pursue their freedom and citizenship. In light of what we discussed, why would they not do that? Why would they not opt for freedom and citizenship? Well, the answer was simple. It was because they loved the family so much. They loved the setup they had, they loved the situation they had so much that they wanted to stay there forever. For the rest of their life, rather, as part of that family. They didn't want to go anywhere else. They didn't want to be out on their own. They had it good there with the family. They loved the family. The family loved them, and they wanted to be a part of that household for the remainder of their life. And there are, at the same time, records of slaves who were so valued and so appreciated that they were, and this is the point of this discussion, they were literally adopted into the family. Literally adopted into the family of the master. They became sons and daughters just as though they were the natural-born sons and daughters of the family.

Now, if you study much about the Roman Empire, some of you may know about the history of some of the emperors. Julius Caesar, we're familiar with that name, the most famous of the Roman emperors.

Who was his successor and what was his relationship to Julius Caesar? How many of you know? How many of you know? It was the one who was Caesar. Yeah, who was it, Tina?

Augustus, Augustus Caesar. Was Augustus the son of Julius Caesar? No, he was his grand nephew, but he was the adopted son of Julius Caesar. Julius Caesar adopted his grand nephew as his son and heir, and the son became emperor of the Roman Empire. Another one, Tiberius. Tiberius succeeded Augustus. Tiberius wasn't the son of Augustus, he was the stepson. He was the son of the woman that that Augustus married. But Augustus adopted Tiberius, made him officially his son, officially his heir, and he became the next emperor of the Roman Empire. So adoption was something that was quite common in the Roman Empire, all the way up to the highest levels. Even the emperors, some of them, were adopted there. And Roman records do tell us that there were times when slaves even became adopted sons, and not just sons, but heirs of the estate, favored even over the natural born sons. Think about that for a minute there. The apostle Paul uses the word adoption five times, mostly in the book of Romans, three times he mentions it there, written again to Rome. Well, everybody's familiar with the practice of adoption in Rome. Let's take a look at two of those verses here, Romans 8, 15, and 16, from Green's literal translation again. And Paul talks about this concept here. He says, "...for you did not receive a spirit of slavery again to fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, by which we cry, Abba, father." The spirit itself witnesses with our spirit that we are what? Not slaves, we are children of God. Notice the contrast here. Paul says that we don't have a spirit of slavery. Slavery brings what? Fear, apprehension, worry. But instead, we have a spirit of adoption that brings us what? That brings us great joy, by which we cry out, Abba, father, dad, daddy. It's a close personal relationship with the father. He's contrasting that condition of slavery with that of being adopted as children by our master, God the father. He's talking about a situation in which we are no longer slaves, but we have become adopted. We have been adopted into the family to become God's own children. And as proof of that, he says, God has given us his Holy Spirit, which with our spirit, as he says here, witnesses with our spirit that we are now legally the children of God. Adopted, but in legal sense, totally the children of God.

A few verses down, verse 23, he expands on this even more. He says, we ourselves, having the first fruit of the spirit, also we ourselves, grown within ourselves, eagerly expecting adoption. There's that word again. It literally means roughly to set as sons or set in place as sons in the Greek here. And you can see that's what adoption means. Somebody is set in place as a son, as a legal son, eagerly expecting adoption, the redemption of our body. So he uses the same Greek word that means adoption here, but here he's using it in a different sense from a legal sense. Here he's talking about the point in the first resurrection when we will become forevermore the children of God through the resurrection. At that point, we are transformed. We eagerly look forward to the redemption of our body, the change of our body from this physical existence to spirit existence. Living forever is part of the family of God transformed into spirit. And then we are fully members of the family of God transformed to spirit and no one or nothing will ever be able to take that away from us. After that transformation, we will forever and eternally then be the sons and daughters of God as his immortal children. No longer flesh and blood, but now spirit. So again, these are some of the verses that show that we are adopted into the family of our new master. And this leads to the next point, which is that we become full sons of the Pater Familius, the father of the family. Pater Familius is a Latin word that you can probably make out here. You can see it's made up of two words, pater, father, and familius, family, the father of the family. We might use an English head of household, father of the family.

Patriarch would be that that's a word used in the Old Testament for that concept.

They all have the same meaning. It means someone who is the head of the family, the undisputed head of the family. So what do I mean when I say here that we become full sons of the Pater Familius, the father of the family? Well, what I mean by that is we become not just any children. We become the sons of the head of the family, not cousins, not some other relative, not nephews, not nieces, not step sons, not step daughters, but full children of the father of the family, the father of which is God. Let's notice this in Galatians 4, 4 through 7, Green's literal translation again. Notice what he says here.

But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those, there's that purchase price again, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive what? Receive the adoption as sons. What is this telling us here? What's Paul saying? He's saying that when the fullness of time had come, in other words, when all of the prophetic pieces of the puzzle were in place for the birth of the Messiah, when the time came for those prophecies to be fulfilled, when the Pax Romana existed, the peace of Rome, of the Roman Empire, that finally brought peace and stability to the Roman world, where the gospel could spread, where there was protection from invasion, protection from riots, protection from bandits, that kind of thing, the Pax Romana. Without that, the church couldn't have started and spread. There wouldn't have been the freedom to travel for Paul and the other apostles to travel and spread the gospel that had been used throughout the Roman Empire. So when that time had come, when those conditions were in place for the birth of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, he was physically born to a physical woman. And why? As we read here, to redeem, to make that purchase price for us to become his slaves, to pay the price and blood for us to no longer be slaves of sin, but slaves of God, whom he will ultimately give the gift of adoption as his very own children.

And verse 6, and because you are sons, sons of the potter Familias, God has sent forth the spirit of his son into your hearts, crying out, Abba, Father! Therefore you are no longer a slave, getting back to that concept again, you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

What's this telling us? It's telling us, to be brief about it, that we don't have a distant relationship with God as an adopted child. In physical families, you adopt a child, it's fairly natural for, especially if there are other natural born children in the family, to not quite feel the same level of love and affection toward that child.

But Paul is saying here, no, that's not the case with us. We are the full sons. We're no longer slaves, we are now sons. We're full sons of God the Father, not as an adopted son, but through God's Holy Spirit, through the same spirit that is of and is in Jesus Christ, we now have a close and loving relationship by which we cry out, Abba, Father, Daddy, this close loving relationship with our God, whatever we would affectionately call a father whom we love. That's the point that he's making there. We are full sons. We're not half sons. We're not half daughters. We're not step sons. We're not step daughters. We're not cousins. We're not nephews. We're not nieces, anything like that. We are the full children of God the Father in every way with that close loving relationship with Him.

And that leads us to our last point at parallel with slavery, and that is that we receive our inheritance as children of the Father, eternal life, and the family of God. We receive our inheritance as children of the Father, and that inheritance is eternal life in the family of God.

I'll give you a minute to write that down. You see the progression, as we've talked about here today, where we start and where we end up through this process of slavery. And if we don't understand slavery as it was practiced in the Roman Empire, we miss this beautiful, magnificent picture that is spelled out when we put all these verses together. Let's go back to a verse we just read, Galatians 4 and verse 7. Therefore, you are no longer a slave. You're no longer enslaved to sin, to Satan the devil, to the worst master imaginable, but you are a son, your child of God.

And not only a son, not only a full child of God, but an heir of God through Jesus Christ. In the Roman world, not all sons, not all daughters, not all children received an inheritance, kind of like today. Somebody may be the black sheep of the family, or maybe there's just not an inheritance to go around. Some of the kids get something, maybe one or two of the kids get everything, and some of the kids don't get anything. The laws of inheritance were pretty much the same in the Roman Empire in that regard. What it's saying is, we're not a child of God who can be lived without an inheritance. God has the greatest gift in store for us that we can imagine, the gift of eternal life in his family and in his kingdom, and the inheritance of everything. We will inherit all things, not just some things, all things, all that he has made, not just the physical universe that we see that stretches out billions of light years into the distance, not just the physical universe, but there's this parallel spiritual universe as well. A spirit world we don't see. You see the beautiful picture. I want to close with another passage here that talks about this progression, these concepts. It summarizes the concepts we've talked about today. Ephesians 1. Ephesians, again, Ephesus was a big port city, had the second largest slave market in the Roman Empire after Rome itself. Paul lived there several years in Ephesus working as a leathermaker, a tentmaker, a tentworker there, a leatherworker.

This is Ephesians 1, beginning. How does he set the stage for his message to the Ephesians? This is from the New Living Translation. Translation, all praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united, we are one with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us.

It's back to that concept. He looked down, he saw us as slaves and did what? Chose us. Chose us. Took us away from our former master.

Became our new master. Chose us in Christ to be holy, serving a new master and without fault in his eyes. But not only that, verse 5, God decided in advance to do what? To adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ.

This is what he wanted to do and it gave him great pleasure.

Nothing is more thrilling to God than for us to be his slaves, his sons, who ultimately become his children, become part of his household. That's what is being said here.

Verse 6, so we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear son. We belong to him because he paid for us with his blood. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom. Again, bought us from slavery to serve a new master with the blood of his son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us along with all wisdom and understanding. God has now revealed to us his mysterious plan regarding Christ, a plan to fulfill his own good pleasure, what he desires, in other words. And this is the plan. This is the plan. At the right time, he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ, everything in heaven, the spirit world, you might say, and on earth, the physical world, the physical existence. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God. For he chose us, there's that chose again in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan.

His plan for what? To transform us from slaves to heirs of eternal life.

This is summarizing in a few verses here this whole process that we've talked about today. And it's a wonderful and deeply inspiring picture. How do we start off in this process of slavery? What does it ultimately mean to be a slave of God? Just to review briefly, now to view it in sequence, where we start and where we end up. Step one, we start as a slave to the worst master imaginable, Satan the devil, and sin. Step two, we are bought by a new master, God the Father, who purchases us with the blood of Jesus Christ. Step three, we become slaves of a new master. Step four, our new master gives us opportunities to demonstrate whether we will accept his rule over us and serve him with our whole heart. Step five, we are adopted into the family of our new master. Step six, we become full sons of the potter familias, the father of the family. And step seven, finally, we receive our inheritance as children of the father, eternal life, living forever in the family and the kingdom of God. So back to our question, what does it mean for you and me to be slaves of God? It means everything.

It means everything. It means God is planned for you and for me, a future and a gift and an inheritance beyond human comprehension and imagination. Stay humble. Stay focused.

Stay intent on pleasing and serving your master. Stay a slave of God.