Book of Titus - Ch. 2, vv. 9-10

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Okay, if y 'all want to turn to Titus chapter 2, we are going to turn to a couple different places this morning, but you can turn there first.

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Okay, so really quick, while y 'all are turning, you can turn to Titus 2, you can even turn to Luke chapter 13 if you wanted to hold that spot, we'll get there in a minute.

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But at this point, we have now worked our way through chapter 2 and covered, we're covering,

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Paul here is covering his bases with regard to every group that he could discuss and give

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Titus some feedback on how he can exhort each and every one of these groups from older men to older women to younger women to younger men.

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We've talked about all of these groups in detail up to this point. Morning, fellas, come on in. And we now come to verse 9, where we discuss the final group of the church, of the local church body that Paul is addressing.

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Well, keep in mind, he's addressing Titus and giving him the information that he needs and the pastoral guidance that he needs to properly pastor himself all of these groups of people.

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So we come to verse 9. And actually, let me say this really quick, because what's funny about it is the group's reverse.

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Last week, we had basically Katie, Dave and Mimi, and everyone else was out for various reasons.

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And then this week, everybody else is back. Katie, Dave, Mimi are gone. Last week, we talked about young men.

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We kind of finished up that topic. We spent three lessons on it. And those final verses, let's start in verse 6.

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It says, young men, likewise, exhort to be sober minded in all things, showing myself a pattern of good works and doctrine, showing uncorruptedness, gravity, sincerity.

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And then this was the key verse last week, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that he that is of the contrary part may be ashamed, having no evil thing to say of you.

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And we spent all of last week essentially talking about sound speech and what exactly that means.

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And what we did was we looked at a number of passages looking at two sides where it's basically a two edged sword kind of deal where this isn't necessarily

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Paul saying that these young Christian men, in order to be holy, in order to be proper and godly and all these things isn't to be sheepish in their speech, sheepish in their speech, but rather to simply be sound in their speech.

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And we looked at some examples where rhetoric is, in fact, used as a righteous weapon. In many cases, we looked at Ezekiel last week, but we also have the

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Apostle Paul as an example. We have the Lord Jesus himself in Matthew 23 and many other places as well with sharp, biting rhetoric used as a weapon against the enemies of God.

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And so to have sound speech as a young Christian man doesn't mean that you have to, again, be sheepish with it.

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What it means is that you have to be intentional and godly with it all the time. And I won't rehash it all out.

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If you guys would like to check out the recording, again, we discussed all this in great detail. But what it comes down to is it's about the attitude of the young Christian man.

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It's about having Christian character that people can see. Like we said a few weeks ago, it's putting flesh and bones on the doctrines that are in the

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Bible. And this is one of those areas. There's a time and a place when forceful, polemical rhetoric is used as a righteous weapon.

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And we looked at some examples of that last week. But the main thing and focus in Paul's words in verse 8 here is that no matter what, whether you are being meek in your instruction and showing forth brotherly love and things like that in your speech, or whether you are wielding that sword that we talked about last week in sometimes harsh, last week

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I called it verbal, righteous verbal violence. Regardless of what context you're looking at, what you find yourself in, no matter what, even when that weapon must be used, everyone around the young Christian man can definitively say that his speech cannot be condemned.

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That's what it comes down to. It can't be condemned. It can't be used against him. It can't be an uncontrolled speech.

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So that is right where we left off last week, just as we kind of transitioned in this last part here.

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Now, there's a very important reality that I want to remind you all of today. In fact, if you want to hold your place in Titus and just turn with me to Luke chapter 13,

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I want to actually start there this morning. But there's a very important reality that I want to remind everyone of today.

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We're all familiar with it, but it's worth reminding ourselves of every now and then.

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And this is something that needs to be considered in all areas of life, not just about the topic at hand today.

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It needs to be considered in all all areas of life and perhaps especially in a world that is moving faster than ever.

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But it applies perfectly to the passage that we're going to be looking at in Titus today. But first, let's look at Luke.

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Look at chapter 13 and let's look at verse 18.

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And what we're going to see here is Jesus simply giving us some parables to give us an idea to put a picture in our minds of how the kingdom of God manifests itself in time and space on this earth.

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Keep in mind, the Jews for hundreds of years, thousands of years expected a particular manifestation of the kingdom of God.

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And it's a topic I'd love to talk about more detail one of these days. I'm sure we will. But when

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Jesus came on the scene, what he did was he brought to fulfillment certain specific messianic prophecies that we now know in the

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New Testament age had to do with his first advent. But the Jews were expecting one big just thing, one big monolithic event of their king arriving to defeat the

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Romans specifically and to usher in a nationalistic, theocratic kingdom.

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It was what their great hope was. What's interesting about it is we share in that hope, but it's different.

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It's similar, but it's different. There are some similarities, some crossovers, but there's some very important distinctions that turn that old second temple

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Judaic hope into what is now the Christian hope of the second coming and the ushering in of the millennial kingdom and things like that.

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And so Jesus comes on the scene and he starts talking about the kingdom. It begins with his forerunner,

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John the Baptist. The kingdom of God is at hand. It is near. And so Jesus comes and he arrives and he begins to give parables about it so that his disciples and even us could better understand what it's all about.

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Look at verse 18 and listen to a couple of these parables. They're only a verse long each, the whole parable.

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Now that's the end of the parable. Single verse, the mustard seed. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed.

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The most, the noblest of all seeds, this tiny little thing, the gardener puts it in the ground and after time it grows into this magnificent tree that the birds would lodge in to shade from the sun.

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But look at verse 20 and following. He says, And that's the end of the parable.

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A single verse. The kingdom of God he is trying to demonstrate is a slow burn.

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It's not what the Jews were expecting. Of course, the Old Testament prophecies discuss this as well.

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It's just they were focused on the aspects of the prophecies that had to do with his second coming, which would be a baptism of spirit and fire, as John the

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Baptist foretold. But Jesus is saying there's a process first.

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There's a process that gets us there. There's a process in which the kingdom of God manifests and in which the elect are drawn in prior to the second coming.

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So what is really difficult for people to grapple with so often is God's timing.

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It's his timing. It's not necessarily his methods per se. It's not his, you know, there are things that he does that are somewhat mysterious.

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The secret things are God's. The revealed things are ours. We know that from Deuteronomy. And people grapple with some of those things, too.

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But what it really comes down to so many times is God's timing. We want to move fast.

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We want revolutions to take place. We want victorious campaigns.

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We want for our enemies to be defeated swiftly, not slowly over time, not through reform.

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We want for our kings and for our emperors and for our prime ministers or presidents and congressmen to decree what we know to be good and righteous and to do it quickly.

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I mean, there's nothing that would be more, nothing that would be more magnificent than to have a fast sweeping political upheaval that brings in God -fearing,

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Bible -believing Christian men that just undo all of the cultural decay in one fell swoop that we are experiencing and have been experiencing.

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That's what we would want. But the kingdom of God has never worked that way. It's always been through slow reform as the gospel is preached, as it pierces men's hearts and as things change over time.

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We can look back over the course of 2 ,000 years and we can see the movement of God take place and that happen.

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And so we know it's there. We can see it. We know that it can happen. But we still find ourselves in the same situation that the

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Jews found themselves in while Jesus was alive, and we're wanting it now. But he's saying, no, it's like a little leaven in the lump.

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It's like a mustard seed going into the ground. That is what the kingdom of God is like. But again, not only is the swift decree that we all want, that everyone has wanted throughout time, not only is that not how

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God works in time in general, but it's also the opposite of how he told us that he would work in time in general.

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He says that his kingdom does expand, but it expands slowly, like a little pinch of leaven that over time overtakes the whole lump of dough.

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It doesn't happen immediately, but it will happen. And it is a promise. In Acts chapter 1 verse 8, he says, but ye shall receive power.

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This is Jesus talking right before he ascends into the clouds to go to the right hand of the Father. You shall receive power.

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After that, the Holy Ghost has come upon you and you shall be witnesses unto me, both in Jerusalem and in Judea and in Samaria and into the uttermost parts of the earth.

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So was the gospel proclaimed wholesale at the moment that Jesus is standing on the

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Mount of Olives about to ascend? No, it started in Jerusalem. It started in Judea, and then it spread out into Samaria, and then it spread further and further and further until it eventually reached the uttermost parts of the earth.

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And if you look at the book of Acts, what's interesting is that's Acts 1 .8. And Jesus's little message there,

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Acts, is kind of an outline of the whole book, because what you see is the first portion of the book where the apostles are in Jerusalem, then they're in Judea, then eventually they are in Samaria.

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And then by the end of Acts, you have the Ethiopian unit had been converted. You had you had

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Paul on his mission journeys throughout the West. You had it being spread throughout the whole earth.

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And of course, at this point in time, that has happened. The kingdom of God hasn't been consummated yet, but it was certainly inaugurated.

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It started and it has been spreading and it has been growing like a lump being overtaken by the leaven.

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It has been growing like a tree from that mustard seed ever since. And so the gospel of his kingdom began in Jerusalem, but has since spread to the uttermost parts of the earth.

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And there will come a day as he sits upon the Davidic throne that the whole world will be

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Christian and his kingdom will be consummated in full form. Now, why is this important to remember?

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And what on earth does it have to do with our study in Titus? Well, number one, it's important for us to remember these realities.

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It's important to remember generally, because we know that God cannot lie, as he told us at the beginning of this study in Titus chapter one, verse two, he can't lie.

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And he said that his kingdom would come and he gave us a multitude of parables to demonstrate exactly how it would come.

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We have all the information we need and that promise will stand. So number one, we know that he cannot lie and he has promised us that the gates of Hades will not prevail against his church.

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So even in the darkest times of human history, we may very well experience some ourselves in the future.

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We don't know when Jesus is coming back. There have been people have thought that the second coming was going to happen in every generation for 2000 years.

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And I can tell you this, there have been far darker times than we're experiencing right now. If you think about what

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Christians experienced in their persecution in the first couple centuries, let alone in the dark ages and in many centuries that followed, there are dark times.

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There are peaks and there are valleys throughout church history. We may experience another deep valley, then maybe some more peaks and then maybe some more valleys.

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We don't know how many more we have before the Lord returns. But what we do know is that the gates of Hades will not prevail against his church.

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Times will be very tough, but our hope is never in vain, regardless of how bad it looks. So that's the first reason that it's good to remember this reality of the slow burn that is the kingdom of God, that little leaven that is overtaking the whole lump over time.

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And of course, where we're at now, we can see so much more than the apostles in the first century

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Christians could see. We can see the way it's expanded already. Okay, so there's all that.

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But for the purpose of this study, I want us to consider this reality, this reality of the slow moving reform of the kingdom of God as it pertains to the abolition of slavery and to the evangelizing of the world through that.

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So now let's turn back to Titus chapter two. Let's look at verses nine and ten together, because remember,

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Paul is now addressing the final group in the local church at the time he was alive in telling

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Titus how to pastor this group, exhort slaves to be obedient to their own masters and to please them well in all things, not answering again, not purloining, but showing all good fidelity that they may adorn the doctrine of God, our

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Savior and all things. What a fascinating couple of verses, especially for those of us that sit in the 21st century after experiencing so much of the kingdom of God's expansion over 2000 years, where we have seen that the principles and the foundation that the apostles laid throughout the principles have manifested themselves in such a way as to abolish such an institution.

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But at the time that Paul is alive, this institution is alive and well. And not only is it alive and well, the entire world is depending upon it.

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The entire Roman Empire is depending upon it. It's one of the things that it was built on. So before we get too far into this passage, one quick thing

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I want to say is if you would like to hear a little bit more of a longer treatment on slavery through a biblical and honest historical lens, when we did our verse -by -verse study in Philemon about 18 months ago,

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I did two lessons. If you go to our website and you go to my verse -by -verse study in Philemon, I think there are two lessons that are titled

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A Parenthetical on Slavery. And if you all listen to those, I go into a lot more detail as to how to view the

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Bible's discussion on slavery, not through an anachronistic lens where we are attaching all of our own baggage to the first century

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Roman Empire, which doesn't make any sense historically, but it's also very important when it comes to interpreting these scriptures and understanding what the apostles were doing.

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So go listen to those if you all want some more detail on it. I'm not going to rehash all of that here. It's on our website if you want to check it out.

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But in this context, as we check out these verses, when we think about the way that God would eventually abolish slavery throughout the

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Western world is he didn't send us revolutionaries. He didn't call his motley crew of disciples and apostles to take up the sword and take it to the neck of the

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Roman legion. They were too small. They couldn't have done that. That's not that wasn't the way that God ordained for abolition to take place.

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And you may be thinking, how on earth could you call the apostles a motley crew? Well, not long after Jesus ascended, there was a lot of craziness before they got their act together, so to speak.

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I mean, you have, first of all, the upper room. You had them waiting. You had them concerned. Then, of course, the day of Pentecost takes place and some amazing things happening.

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But what happens after that? You eventually get to Acts chapter 15. You have the Jerusalem Council. They're like, do people need to be circumcised still?

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Paul is bringing Titus with him. Paul rebukes Peter. So you had a lot of, you know, they were they were all unbelievable in their bravery and in their fidelity to Christ and in their desire to spread his word.

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But they had to work through some stuff. And so, yes, it was very much a motley crew there for a little while.

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And again, Jesus did not tell them to take the sword and go attack Rome and undo or up in slavery wholesale in that way.

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What he did was he ordained for the principles to be set that would not only abolish an institution like slavery, but abolish every institution against that that would be acting against the word of God in general.

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He gave them the principles and they would then give the world the principles to do undo all of this. And of course, it's the very basis for the abolition movement here in the

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United States was the word of God. So rather than taking a sword of the

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Roman Legion, he told them that he wanted them to deliver authoritative exhortations and teachings and preaching and exhibiting the godly character of regenerate

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Christians, in other words, loving their brothers and loving their sisters in doing all of that and delivering the word of God in such a way they would lay the concrete foundation of doctrinal truths that made institutions like slavery obsolete.

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Now, you might be thinking, what do you mean by that? What do you mean by obsolete? We'll turn to Ephesians chapter six with me.

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I want to look at just a couple of quick passages. In the very short amount of time we have together today,

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Ephesians chapter six, what do I mean by making the institution obsolete?

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Remember, Paul never in none of the none of the apostles ever condemned the institution.

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They never say that slavery is an evil. They never say that they're never telling the civil magistrates in charge, hey, you guys need to cut this out.

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But rather what they did was they gave us principles that would make the institution obsolete and not make any sense to have at all, even in a pagan land such as Rome.

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And let me show you what I mean by that. Look at Ephesians chapter six. Let's start in verse five.

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It's still the apostle Paul talking. And he says, slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trebling in singleness of your heart as into Christ, not with eye service as men pleasers, but as the servants or the slaves of Christ doing the will of God from the heart with goodwill, doing service to the

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Lord and not to men, knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the

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Lord, whether he be bond or free. Now, you read all of that. You think, all right,

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Paul is telling slaves that they need to be obedient to their masters. And he explains why he's not sugarcoating anything.

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He's not telling them it's going to be easy. He's not telling them if you do this, it's just going to be a walk in the park. He's saying you are doing this because ultimately you are a slave of Christ.

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And he is who you represent. He is who you serve. And you read all that. But then you get to verse nine and something really bizarre happens.

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Paul then turns to the masters, to the slave masters. And he says, in you, masters, do the same things unto them.

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What same things? What same things? Be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh with fear and trebling in singleness of your heart as into Christ, not with eye service as men pleasers, but as the slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart with goodwill, doing services to the

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Lord and not to men, knowing that whosoever or whatsoever good thing that any man does, the same shall he receive from the

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Lord, whether he be bond or free. In you, masters, do the same thing to them, forgetting threatening, forbearing threatening, stop threatening, knowing that your master is in heaven.

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Your master, you're a master here on earth, but you have a master that you serve. And he is in heaven and he has no partiality.

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He has no respective persons with him. So what did Paul just do? He made the institution of slavery make zero sense because in order for there to be a slave master dynamic from the viewpoint of the world, you obviously have a hierarchical structure there that entails bossing someone around.

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And yet what Paul says is he starts with the slave and he gives us a number of verses and he lists out character traits and things that they need to do in order to be honoring to Christ, not to anybody else, because Christ is who they serve ultimately.

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But he tells them to do it in this way. He says, be obedient to their masters. And then he gets to the master.

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He says to do the same thing, to treat them in the same way. And of course, we see this play out in a very real time story in the book of Philemon.

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Because what do we have? We have Onesimus, the slave that leaves. The apostle Paul rebukes him for leaving and for stealing from his master

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Philemon, who was a Christian man. He sends Onesimus back, but he sends him with a letter. And in that letter, he tells

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Philemon, receive him back and receive him back to even greater service than he ever had served you in before.

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And of course, we can deduce within the context that he's referring to his own ministry. And in church history, church tradition anyway, we are told that Onesimus would end up becoming the successor of Timothy at the

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Church of Ephesus. In other words, the bishop of the Church of Ephesus. So this was a slave -turned -pastor over one of the most historic churches in history.

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And the slave -master dynamic of Philemon Onesimus didn't make any sense anymore with regard to how the

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Romans viewed it, to how the world system views it, because they were now brothers.

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They were now brothers in Christ. And so again, Paul doesn't have to condemn slavery. All he has to do is say, all right, you want to be a slave -master?

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You're a slave. This is how you do it in a God -honoring way. And once they actually live that out, they find themselves in this very interesting situation where they're like, well, you know, we're equals in the church.

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We're equals in the eyes of God. We're brothers in Christ. Why don't we just do this together?

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Why don't we just get in the ministry together? And that's what happened with Philemon and Onesimus. And this is exactly why slavery was abolished periodically in the

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West. Over the course of centuries, it took a while, but that's how God ordained it to be, because He doesn't call on us to be revolutionaries.

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He calls on us to be reformers. Now look at Colossians 3. One more quick parallel passage.

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Colossians 3, verse 10, it says, And have put on the new man. So what are we talking about?

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This new creature, this new man, the spirit that now lives within us. You have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.

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That's sanctification. We are being renewed in time after the image of our very creator. Verse 11 says,

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Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, scythian, bond nor free.

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In other words, slave, slave master. But Christ is all and in all.

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Put on, therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercy, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering, forbearing one another and forgiving one another.

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If any man have a quarrel against any, even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. And above all these things, put on love, which is the bond of perfectness.

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So in God's mind, when He looks upon His people in the new regenerate hearts within them,

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He doesn't see bond or free. He doesn't see slave masters and slaves. He sees

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Jesus Christ. He sees the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ. When He looks at the cross, He sees us.

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When He looks at us, He sees His son. At the same time, Paul, in one breath, without upending the institution that the world literally depended on, economically speaking at this time, he made it a living oxymoron.

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He made the institution not really make any sense from a biblical worldview by telling masters to treat their slaves in the same way that slaves are to treat the masters, with honor, with respect, with meekness, with love, with charity, with all of these things.

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Now back to the idea of the mustard seed or the leaven, slowly growing, slowly expanding over time.

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Consider one of the ways in which the power of the gospel could manifest itself in an incredibly potent fashion in a way that the world looks at and says, that doesn't make any sense at all.

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What is that about? Slaves living out the doctrines of God, which is what

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Titus chapter 2 is all about. It is doctrine lived out by the church. Slaves living out the doctrines of God, even with a froward master.

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What more potent example could we have of the power of the gospel and the change of a person within them than for a slave to be able to live up to these standards that Paul is laying out even in a context where their master is evil?

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It's possible, but it's only possible through the renewing of the spirit, the washing of the regeneration of the spirit, which by the way, is something we will get to in this very letter to Titus.

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Slaves obeying their masters and treating them with honor, even when they don't deserve it, is one of the most potent manifestations of the power of the gospel that the world has ever seen.

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When they're obedient, when they're not contradictory, these are all the things that Paul lays out in this passage we're in in Titus.

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When they're not contradictory, when they are not embezzling their master's money, and if you look at verse 8 again, where it says, excuse me, verse 9, excuse me, verse 10, not purloining.

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That's a weird word. Some modern translations have the word pilfering there, and that's still kind of a weird word.

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What is it talking about? The literal Greek term means setting aside. It means separation of the thing.

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That's what the literal meaning means, but over time it became a euphemism for what we would call embezzling.

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So what slaves would often do is they would be taking care of their master's estate and all of the things. They could be harvesting grains and food.

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They could be handling their money and taking their money to a bank of some kind. They could be doing all these sorts of things and they could be skimming some of the excess off and embezzling that.

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And that was a very common practice at the time of the Roman Empire at this point.

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And so this is something that slaves often do. Paul said, don't do that. Don't purloin. Don't pilfer.

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Don't embezzle your master's money. That's not right. It's not right in the eyes of God.

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Don't do that. And so when slaves are obedient, when they're not contradictory, when they are not embezzling their master's money, but rather what are they doing?

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They are demonstrating all faithfulness. As it says, showing all good fidelity.

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That's how it words it in the KJV. Showing faithfulness, demonstrating faithfulness.

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When they do these things, when they are obedient to these two verses we're in in Titus right here, two things happen.

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Number one, as Paul tells us, they adorn the doctrine of God, our savior and everything.

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These slaves, the lowest of the hierarchical chain of the society at the time, the very lowest, even below women and children, which were viewed very low in Rome at that time.

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These people could adorn the doctrine of God, their savior in everything that they did.

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These slaves become a mirror of the glory of God on this earth. That's what Paul is saying when he tells them that they adorn the doctrine of God, their savior.

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That's the first thing that happens. They become a mirror of the glory of God. But secondly, what's going to happen?

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When they treat their masters with respect, when they treat their masters with honor, when they don't contradict, when they don't embezzle, when they are honest, hardworking

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Christians with a exemplary Christian work ethic, what happens when they do all these things?

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Well, one of the things that happens is that they are going to make the God that they serve attractive.

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They're going to make the God that they serve manifestly powerful, far greater than any of the gods in the pantheon in Rome at the time.

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These masters were probably indifferent toward anyway in many cases. They make their

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God attractive even to the rough masters. And it's a sanctifying experience even for the rough masters.

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In other words, their godly behavior, even when the master doesn't deserve it, is an inherently evangelistic thing.

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They are a witness. They are a living witness to these people. With every act of submission, being excellent in all things, being respectful and honest all the time, being loyal even when their master doesn't deserve that loyalty.

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They are like a mirror of God's glory on earth and they are a witness to those masters. And then guess what happens when those slave masters start converting?

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Because that's what happened. That's what started happening. What happens when the slave masters start converting and they start walking across the threshold of a church side by side with these slaves in equal view in the eyes of God and in the congregation?

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Slavery disappears. That's what happens. That's how God abolishes something like slavery.

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He doesn't call on revolutions. He calls on gospel preaching, discipleship, teaching his people how to live their lives in such a way that changes everyone around them.

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The slaves are converted. The slave masters could be converted through the behavior of their slaves and then slavery disappears, which it did because they are equally valuable in the eyes of God who shows no partiality towards his people, which is what

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Paul was telling us in Colossians. Now, we can obviously apply some of these principles to the employee -employer dynamic.

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It works drastically different now because of all the reform that has happened over the centuries, but there's still a authoritative structure even in modern day employment scenarios.

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And so as an employee in the land of the free where we have, you know, this desire to kind of just do whatever we want all the time, very individualistic mindset in our country, we can sometimes get a little haughty and sometimes get a little bit prideful and think that the way we do things are better than those that are in charge of us in our employment agreement.

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And so we can certainly take some principles and apply them even to a contemporary 21st century job scenario.

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But that's not what Paul was talking about. He was talking about slavery. And I'll say this one more time because a lot of people,

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I'll end with this. A lot of people want to take these uncomfortable passages on slavery where they don't like the fact that the apostles didn't just flat out condemn it without ever thinking through it in an honest historical lens and not sieve everything through the lens of the antebellum south and go backward from there as if that's how it always worked.

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You just can't do history that way and you certainly can't in the Bible. These are all historical letters that we're reading.

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So they're uncomfortable with this. What do they do? They take all these passages and they just apply it to contemporary employment situations.

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But here's the thing. Slavery still exists to this day. It didn't go away. Paul knew what he was doing.

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It was abolished in the West, but it is still alive and well in many parts of Africa. It is alive and well in varying forms in the

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East, in China and in India. So there are still people in the world today that may find themselves reading these words of Paul and needing to be encouraged and edified by them.

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Why? To adorn the doctrine of God their savior. Papa, did you have a question? Of course it is.

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Yeah, I know what you're talking about. And again, the apostle

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Paul understood what was happening here. There are a few, what we'll just say, uncomfortable passages throughout the epistles of Paul where, again, people want to say, oh, well, that is just because of his historical context.

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That's because of his cultural context specifically. But if you look deeper, you find out, no, that's not the case.

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These are things that are very much a problem have been for all of human history. And Paul was giving us the basis for how to deal with it 2 ,000 years ago.

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We still have it with us today. Yes, go ahead. So I always thought of biblical, like you're in that culture.

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The thought process behind why this is necessary was different from the thought process with American slavery.

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Oh, of course. This is totally justified because this race of people, they don't have souls.

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They're not, you know, they're... Well, that was my point a minute ago with looking backward through the lens of Southern slavery in the

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U .S. because that was particularly... If those are addressed, it just might take going to different passages when you're talking about American slavery.

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And even in a lot of Baptist circles today, they, you know, they have some ideas.

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I'll just say that about, you know, that God actually does have partiality.

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And, you know, there should be some distinctions still made. You know, just going back to like 1800

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Southern Baptist teaching that has lingered to this time.

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Of course. But it wasn't so like... I've heard just in studying in Ephesians about the concept of a household.

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We don't think in terms of households the way that they did. And to have a slave is to have someone you're responsible for.

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And for them to be just, oh, you're free. They would be on the street. Well, sure.

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And we talked about all this in those recordings I referenced at the beginning. So first of all, the

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Greek term when he's referring to slaves here is in context, most likely talking about household slaves to your point.

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So these are, you know, these aren't just. I don't know. These are these were these would have been slaves that were essentially a part of the family for better or worse.

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There were times when it was a great a great thing. There were times when, yes, they had forward masters.

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And we know that because Peter addresses forward masters later. And so I mean, to address what you were saying.

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Yeah. One thing that is important to keep in mind at that time is it would have been devastating for many people.

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They basically had the choice to be slaves, whether that was under a good master, a bad master, or to be a vagabond in the cities of the

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Roman Empire, which was a very dangerous business at that time. And so, yeah, again, the empire was built on the institution and it got bloated and it became this thing where when you get to the days of Jesus and the days of the apostles, again, if it had been something like an emancipation proclamation, if that had taken place, people would have been like, what do we do with that?

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And you go back to the times of Egypt, you know, look at Joseph when he was in charge, second most powerful in the world.

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He enslaved everybody, but it was not slavery in the way that it happened in the

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American South. What he did was he said, look, I prepared for the famine. You didn't heed my warnings.

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So they would pay for wheat with money. They ran out of money. So they come to Joseph and they say, what do we do now?

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He says, bring me your livestock, bring me your animals. They did it and they got their wheat. They ran out of it. There were still many years of the famine left.

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They said, well, we're out of money. We sold our property to Pharaoh to you. We sold, we gave you all of our cattle, all of our horses, everything.

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We don't have anything left and we're going to starve. He says, OK, we'll come be slaves to Pharaoh and you will be taken care of and you will receive all the wheat you need.

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So they then became property of Pharaoh because they had already relinquished everything else that they owned. They had nothing left to do.

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And it was the very basis of their survival at that time. So very in context, for sure.

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But regardless of the context, I think one of the things you were getting at is, you know, the apostles were setting these principles in place that could be all encompassing.

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And what's an amazing thing about it is the when you look at the black church in America and the way their faith and just their strength in many areas and their trust in God in many areas, even though they were, you know, going back to the 1800s and so forth, even though they were mistreated beyond any expression we could come up with their strength and faith in God was they came out of all of that incredibly strong and they were actually making terrific strides toward becoming a very strong community.

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Prior to a lot of the things that LBJ and a few of the liberal politicians did through government related programs, a really interesting book you guys might like is a book called

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Fault Lines, written by a pastor named Bodie Backham. And he describes the history of the black church.

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One of the things he talks about is history of the black church from the time of emancipation all the way up until you get to the liberal housing projects and bringing them all out of the urban areas into the cities or the rural areas and into the cities.

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And all of the things they did that in the name of reparations and treating them, you know, giving them all these things back.

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And what it did was it decimated their drive. And I mean, all of this is just in the data.

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It has nothing to do with them. It has nothing to do with the race itself.

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It has to do with the situation that they were put in. And because of Christianity and because of the principles that the apostle laid in the faith that they had in these things, even when they were in the middle of that egregious slavery, they came out of it really strong, with an incredibly strong faith.

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And that still is with us today. You can see it. It's just about any black church you go to. It's an amazing, beautiful thing.

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And it's because they realized that these promises of God would be true, that the master they were serving was

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Jesus Christ all along. And that I think it was the Colossians passage that we looked at, where he is the one that gives ultimate reward in the end for the things that happen on this earth, both in the positive and in the negative.

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So they relied on that. They believed that promise and they will be rewarded for their faith in that promise too.

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I think if you really think about it, if you were the one in that situation where you didn't really have control like there's not really a path to okay,

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I'm going to work my way up and better myself. You know, there's been lots of systems, like systems throughout history where, you know, people pretty much remained in poverty and ambition didn't really change that.

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But to be told, you know, well, you're just, you know, you're just a victim.

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You know, to be in a situation where you feel like you have very little control to,

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I think it's an empowering message that is being taught that in the grand scheme of things, you really are serving.

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You're free from every lesser Lord and you are serving Christ. Right. To be to that kind of responsibility is empowering.

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Like I can, regardless of my physical situation in whatever society, or even in difficult marriages.

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Well, there's, I can, sir, I can submit to Christ and he's my true master. I'll end with this thought, but there's a very interesting parallel in first Peter at the end of chapter two, at the beginning of chapter three, where Peter makes a direct link between submission of slaves to masters and the submission of wives to husbands.

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And he does that on purpose. And there's very important doctrinal reasons why. And it is all, it all comes back to the central message of understanding who it is we're looking to for our fulfillment, which we've talked about recently and who we look to as the

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Lord that will divvy up the consequences of all actions in the positive and in the negative.

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And if you look at the original, if you go to the original sources, and you read the letters of some of these slaves, just in our own cultural context in the

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Southern United States, you can see all of this in there.

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You can see their faith in these things. You can see that empowerment that you were talking about, how even in the most lowly state that a person could find themselves in, in a state where the devil is actively wanting to crush every ounce of life that they have in them, they can sustain even through that with an unwavering faith and a faith that actually would be the seabed for their descendants to have what they should have had in the first place, which of course is freedom and being equal in the eyes of God and all the things we've talked about.

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Yes. Are some of those letters in Bachman's book? Yeah, of course. He goes, one of the things that I loved about it was he went to the original sources.

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You know, it wasn't there. And he's a black man for what it's worth. I mean, this is a guy that cares about.

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This is a guy who's, this is a guy whose ancestors were mistreated egregiously.

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And so he approaches this from a solidly biblical worldview because that's what he cares about more than anything is the truth and what

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God says about these issues, the pro like the good and the bad and the ugly that came out of all of it, including some of the answers to making up for the bad that happened in the past, which that's when you fast forward into the beginning of the 20th century.

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Right. Yeah. It's a lot. I mean, obviously this is a massive topic, but yeah, it's really amazing to go back and to see their their unwavering faith in these times because of the very principles that we're studying today.

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We still have with us. We still can learn from it. It's all still living and active just as much as it was Paul wrote it in the

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Roman Empire when the institution was what the entire empire was built upon. It's really amazing stuff.

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Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this wonderful day, for being with us and giving us this opportunity to be together and to abide in your word once more, to grow in our faith and to grow in our understanding of how the doctrines that we love and care about so much, how they come about and how they are lived out in our lives in the lives of our brothers and sisters going all the way back for millennia.

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We thank you for the testimony that they all have and we ask you to just be with us for the rest of today.

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the remainder of our services, our fellowship, and all of these things. We ask these things in your name. Amen.