In Paul’s final words to slaves, “whether he is a slave or free” (Ephesians 6:8), the word “free” refers to slave masters, allowing Paul to transition to his counsel to them while imagining slaves and slave masters standing on an equal footing before Christ in the judgment (compare 2 Corinthians 5:10; Colossians 3:24-25).

Assuming that you are a Christian slave master who is listening to Ephesians being read out in your house church, how might you react to this counsel, offered in the presence of your slaves? Ephesians 6:9.

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Paul addresses masters, slave masters, in a pointed exhortation, which turns on the sharp contrast between “the lords” (Greek, hoi kurioi, translated as “masters”), who had a habit of “threatening” their slaves, and “the Lord” (ho kurios), Christ, with whom there is “no partiality” (ESV).

Paul asks masters to “do the same to them” (ESV), the slaves, which would have been shocking to a first-century slave owner. Masters should respond to their slaves with deeds of goodwill governed by their allegiance to Christ, corresponding to what Paul has just asked of slaves (Ephesians 6:5-8). He tells them to stop threatening their slaves, a common practice of a time in which masters administered a wide variety of punishments, including beating (1 Peter 2:20), sexual abuse, being sold (and parted from loved ones), extreme labor, starvation, shackles, branding, and even death. For this, they will be judged—by God.

Paul supports his commands with two motivations that call slave masters to look beyond the social structures of the Greco-Roman world: (1) they and their presumed slaves are co-slaves of a single Master (“knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven,” ESV; compare Colossians 4:1); and (2) the heavenly Master judges all without partiality. Since their own Master treats those regarded as slaves on an equal footing with others, so should they (compare Philemon 1:15-16).

Much of Paul’s language in Ephesians would be especially heartening for Christian slaves: adoption as sons (Ephesians 1:5); redemption (Ephesians 1:7); inheritance (Ephesians 1:11,14; Ephesians 3:6); being enthroned with Jesus (Ephesians 2:6); becoming “fellow citizens,” “members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19; compare Ephesians 3:14-15), and integral parts of the body of Christ (see Ephesians 3:6; Ephesians 4:1-16; Ephesians 6:5-9 activates all the teaching in the letter as operative in the relationships between slaves and slave masters, including the counsel about speech (Ephesians 4:25-32) and sexual ethics (Ephesians 5:1-14).

<–Wednesday Friday–>

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You can view an in-depth discussion of Practicing Supreme Loyalty to Christ in the Hope Sabbath School class led by Pastor Derek Morris. Click on the image to view:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRN5nyBpt8c?si=A6QzLJdkv7vkL_fo&w=560&h=315]/p>

With thanks to

Hope Channel – Television that will change your life.

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Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: 3 “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.” Ephesians 6:1-2

My Grandmother and Mother at my Grandmother’s 100th Birthday Party

One summer when I was ten years old I spent a week with my grandmother in Arkansas, just a couple hours from where I lived in Oklahoma. At the end of the week my mother came to pick me up. As we were all visiting, my mother said something, and I responded with a rude comment. My grandmother told me, “You don’t talk that way to your mother!” I thought she was going to say, because she is the boss of me or bigger than me or something like that, but what my grandmother said next took me by surprise and I have never forgotten. She finished by saying, “You don’t talk that way to someone who would die for you!” My grandmother was right.

Of course we obey those in authority because they do know best. We respect them because of their wisdom, experience and guidance, but we should always honor our parents because they love us so much they would give their life for us. 

This does not mean we cannot have disagreements, but those disagreements should always be respectful disagreements, keeping in mind the person we are disagreeing with loves us so much he or she  would give their life for us. This also goes for school teachers. How many tragic school shooting stories have included a teacher dying while protecting her students, even though those students may have been very disrespectful to her? It also goes for law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line. Just earlier this summer I read about an off-duty police officer who intentionally got in the path of a wrong way driver and gave his life, to save others who would have been hit. Before cursing the stranger who took the parking space we were aiming for, remember you don’t know their story. Maybe they have risked their lives to save another life. Maybe they were the ones who donated the blood that saved your uncle’s life. Maybe they would take a bullet for you too, you never know. 

“You don’t talk that way to someone who would die for you.” Twelve simple but profound words, I heard uttered one time almost 50 years ago, that have changed the entire way I look at life and other people. 

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What does Paul require of Christian slaves in his detailed instructions to them? Ephesians 6:5-8.

Paul asks Christian slaves to obey their masters, offering heartfelt, excellent service. What is notable is his repeated reference to a grand substitution that he asks them to make. They are not to place their slave master in the place of Christ, offering to him the allegiance that belongs only to Christ. Rather, in the commitments and allegiance that motivate their heartfelt, excellent service, they are to substitute Christ, the Lord, for the slave master. In encouraging this essential substitution,

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Paul is offering a transformed, Christian understanding of the master-slave relationship.

Notice the several ways Paul presses this substitution upon them:

• Their slave masters are diminished by Paul as their “earthly masters,” pointing toward the real and heavenly Master (Ephesians 6:5; emphasis added).
• They are to serve “with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ” (Ephesians 6:5; emphasis added).
• Paul notes this substitution most clearly in arguing that Christian slaves are to offer genuine service as slaves, not of their masters, but as “slaves of Christ” (Ephesians 6:6).
• In performing their service, they are to do “the will of God from the heart,” offering heartfelt service directed to God (Ephesians 6:6).
• Paul invites positively motivated service, offered “as to the Lord and not to man” (Ephesians 6:7).

For their heartfelt service, Christian slaves may expect full reward from Christ when He returns. They have done their work for Him and may expect reward from Him, an especially attractive idea for those trapped in this horrific institution. A slave might feel unappreciated or worse by an earthly master (compare 1 Peter 2:19-20). The believing slave, though, has a Master who is attentive, noticing “whatever good thing each one does” (Ephesians 6:8), and offering sure reward.

<–Tuesday Thursday–>

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Read through the counsel to slaves and slave masters in the following passages: Ephesians 6:5-9; Colossians 3:22-25; Colossians 4:1; 1 Corinthians 7:20-24; 1 Timothy 6:1-2; 1 Peter 2:18-25. How would you summarize this advice?

It is startling to hear Paul address Christian slave masters and to imagine Christian slaves and their Christian slave master seated together in the house churches of Ephesus. Slavery in the Greco-Roman world could differ from the later version in the New World in significant ways. It was not focused on a single ethnic group.

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Urban, household slaves were sometimes offered opportunities for education and could work as architects, physicians, and philosophers. Freedom sometimes occurred for these household slaves after a limited period of service, though most slaves never gained their freedom. In an attempt to acknowledge such differences, a number of recent Bible versions translate the Greek term doulos (“slave”) in Ephesians 6:5-8 as “bondservant.”

Regardless, slavery at any time, in any culture, in any circumstances, is an inexcusable evil, and God will judge, and condemn, slaveholders according to His infinite justice—and for that we can be thankful.

The cry of ex-slave Publilius Syrus is haunting: “It is beautiful to die instead of being degraded as a slave.” Given the full range of these realities, the translation of doulos as “slave” is to be preferred (NIV, NRSV), especially since these slaves are living under the threat of their masters (Ephesians 6:9).

Slavery was an ever-present evil in Paul’s world. He addresses it, not as a social reformer but as a pastor who advises believers how to deal with current realities and to cast a new vision centered on the transformation of the individual believer, which later could have wider implications for society at large: “His vision was not for manumission of slaves in the Roman Empire. Rather his view was about something other than legal manumission, that is, a new creation sibling-based fellowship on the basis of adoption as children of God. . . . For Paul the social revolution was to occur in the church, in the body of Christ, at the local level, and in the Christian house church and household.”—Scot McKnight, The Letter to Philemon (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2017), pp. 10, 11.

<–Monday Wednesday–>

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