Biblical Slavery

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Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. I was recently on the Christian Worldview Project's Table Talk show, and we had a lengthy discussion on the issue of biblical slavery.

It's an issue that comes up all the time when we are on the streets evangelizing. People always make arguments against Christianity, dealing with the issue of slavery. That's coming your way today on The Rap Report.

One, two, three.

Welcome to The Rap Report. With your host, Andrew Rapoport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity and the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

So good evening, Pastor Andrew. Good evening.

Okay, so thanks for You good evening. For me, morning. I forgot. I forgot too. Yeah, it's actually morning over there. So first of all, I would like to thank you for coming on and taking the time to have a conversation with me.

I really appreciate it. And before we start, would you mind telling us a little bit about yourself? Sure.

I grew up in a Jewish home, so I was a bar mitzvahed and raised Jewish. At 16 years old, I converted to Christianity. So I went, being raised Jewish, I was actually raised to believe that Jesus Christ is Hitler's God.

That's basically, you know, a generation after the Holocaust. The Catholic Church had supported Hitler, so that was our view. And so I wasn't really looking for Christ, but I can't refute logic. And so this bus driver who was driving the bus that we were on for the summer was a Christian and shared the gospel and shared prophecy and the short story.

There's a longer story. You can go to my rap report podcast, go back to my personal testimony. It's there somewhere. But I got saved. And then I ended up in seminary, being a pastor of a Chinese church for several years and as a preaching pastor, been in other churches as well, but not as the preaching pastor.

And then after that, I had resigned from there and ended up traveling internationally, which is where I was with you with, I guess, last May. Just a year ago, a lot has changed, Jordan. You and I were together in Philippines, right?

This has been a very different year for the world right now. And so, yes, I've traveled. I've been privileged to be able to travel the world, to share the gospel, teach. And now with the Internet, I was preaching just a few weeks ago in Philippines at Rock Refuge Church.

I'll be teaching, I think, like 75 pastors next week in India. Well, I'm able to preach all over the United States and I do it all from here, my house. So it's very different doing ministry now. But all my preaching schedules have cleared up.

I'm supposed to go to Guatemala end of the year. We still haven't canceled that yet. And so, but I've been privileged to be able to travel and work for Striving Fraternity, which is a discipling ministry.

So we do we do a lot of different things. We have an online classes on YouTube, so they're free of charge. All you need is Internet. And those are at Striving Fraternity Academy on our website at strivingfraternity .org.

I have books that I write on different religions, theology. I'm working on the deity of Christ. Then we have podcasting, which we're doing right now. I am the director of the Christian Podcast Community, where we disciple podcasters to improve both their quality and their content.

And so we have, I don't know, somewhere upwards about 30 podcasts, five of which are mine. So I have the rap report, the rap report daily, Apologetics Live. So you want to be a podcaster and Theology Throwdown.

So just a few. I get bored easy. You know, I don't I need to keep myself busy. Now, I don't know if you could hear this, but I have a real problem right now. And I don't know if it comes through, but there is a bird that has a fetish with my window.

And it's not the reflection, because when I when I covered up the window with plastic, he went around the corner to hit another window. I don't know what it is, but he has a fetish with my window. So I hope that doesn't come through.

No, no, I certainly doubt it's going to come through. And can you tell us something also about your book, What Do They Believe? I think it's a systematic theology book, am I correct?

Well, they both are. What do they believe and what do we believe? What do they believe is a systematic theology of the major Western religion. So it covers Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, Mormonism and Jehovah's Witnesses and then Christianity.

So those are the six major ones in that we deal with in the Western world. Some thereby you Catholicism, you guys deal with that. It's very big there. You're but the thing that I tried to do with that book was to systematize these religions from their their system.

In other words, it was to look at what's their authority, what's their view of God, specifically the Trinity. What's their view of Christ, specifically deity, man, sinfulness, salvation and end time. So I take those six doctrines with all six of those religions.

The nice thing about it, it's quick reference. Get that and read any one of those sections. There's basically 36 independent sections. So if you want to study those religions, you could just do that. Now, my what do they what do we believe is a systematic theology of Christian religion.

Again, I try to write it as a quick reference. The thing that's going to be really different with that from other systematic theologies is one, it's not real thick. It's 200 pages. And so it's not intimidating.

It's not something that gets you to be so worried. Oh, that's too too scary. It's too much. I try to write so that everyone can understand. But it also the thing that I put in there is something you don't see in other theology, systematic theology books, which is a chapter on textual criticism, which is how you could trust the Bible.

It is the number one question when I evangelize that comes up, that the Bible has been edited, it's been copied, it's been changed, it can't be trusted, it's been written by men, it's errors, all those things.

And yet, with just a little bit of training, we can answer those things very easily. And so I tried to water a difficult topic down to something that everyone could be able to comprehend and be prepared to argue.

Well, thank you so much for that information. So it's available, it's available in Amazon, right?

What do they believe is available in on Amazon and in Kindle? What do we believe is not yet? We're trying to reformat that. OK, so that's driving fraternity dot org. I'll put it that way. That's OK. Yeah.

And if it's going to the Philippines, we could probably try to figure some other way. We've been talking with, we actually have a relationship with Rocco Refuge Church there in the Philippines, and they've started to reproduce some of our training manuals, the hermeneutics class that we have.

They have the rights to reproduce them there.

Is that the place where Pastor Steven Lawson preached or had a conference?

No, I think he was, I can't remember the name of the church that brought him out. It was another group. I met the pastor when I was there, when we were in the Sky Dome. I had the privilege of having lunch with him, but I cannot remember the church.

OK, OK. No worries. But how long have you been in the ministry?

There were only like a thousand people there that day. Come on. I didn't remember everyone's name.

No, it's not a problem, actually. How long have you been in the ministry, Pastor Andrew? So, of course, for those people who are aspiring to be a minister also will be inspired by your work.

Well, I started Striving Fraternity back in about 2000 and I guess 2007, around 2005 -2007 is when we actually started that. But it didn't, it has changed since then. But I've been in ministry as pastor before that.

Well, I don't know, probably going back about 25 years. I started when I was one. Yeah, that's it. I'm only 26. Well, look, my wife is 25, I can't be too much older than her. I don't know what we do, because in a couple of days we're going to be married 26 years.

So I guess she's going to have to start being 30.

Filipino Food, Balut, and Ministry Travel

Yeah, you're actually making this conversation really easy because of, you know, having so much fun, so much fun, even from the beginning. Have you learned any Filipino language?

No, I have not. But I have, I have had Balut and enjoyed it. It was really so, so they've had a bunch of Americans that came over and Mark Spence, EZ, Ms. Wayne from Living Waters and Justin Peters. And and it was it was really funny because none of the Americans were willing to even look at Balut.

And so when they explained what it was like, yeah, I'll have it, it's a big deal. So after church, I get done preaching and Pastor Armand goes, we have a surprise for you. And I think it literally was like the parting of the Red Sea just with people.

Like soon as he said that, everybody got up from their chairs and spread out and like all of a sudden they brought in a table. I'm like, what is going on? And then I saw a carton of eggs and I went, ah, all I could say, all I could say is I enjoyed it.

It tasted good, but better than the taste was the look that I got to see on Justin Peters face as I ate it, because it was something like it was great. I wanted to get a still shot of his the look on his face as I just took that egg and popped it in my mouth.

After looking at it, I went to show him that, yeah, it wasn't good for me. I thought it was good.

Well, I haven't eaten Balut for quite some time because of this quarantine days.

I know I've been missing sushi. That's I think that's going to be the first thing I'm going to do when I get it. I told my wife that we're going to have to make homemade sushi.

I love my sushi. How about Filipino food aside from Balut?

Yeah, I enjoyed. I enjoyed a lot of it. I didn't find anything. When I travel, I like to try local food. I will problem when I go to India. India is the only food that my stomach hasn't been able to handle.

And I do have a group that's trying to get me to India, actually two groups. And the only fear I have is the food, because I know I've tried it about a dozen times and it just doesn't sit well with me.

But I enjoyed the Filipino food. That was it was really enjoyable. And the look on Justin's face when I had Balut was worth all of it. It was better than everything.

Well, I think if I were there, that would also be one of my unforgettable experience when, of course, to see Justin Peter's face looking at the Balut. OK, so I guess we have already a lot of viewers watching us.

I guess we should start our topic for tonight over there for today. You wanted to say this evening. I know. I know.

Super early. No, not really. It's only nine o 'clock. My time. It's not that early, but, you know, we can make it. I woke up super early. Just for this show, it'd be a complete lie.

Why the Bible and Slavery Trigger Intimidation

All right. So I think the subject of slavery is very intimidating when a Christian is being asked regarding this issue. And because of its, of course, the presupposition from the object, from the one who objects it, that slavery is the slavery of the Bible or in the Bible is evil.

Is it normal to be intimidated by this kind of objections?

It's intimidating to be challenged with any objection, especially one that seems difficult to understand. However, I can remove that intimidation very easily because there's one thing that I always practice.

When someone makes a challenge, I ask a question. And if you do that, then there's no burden on you. Think about it. The challenge is how could the Bible be true? It supports slavery. Right. Coming is a challenge.

Well, I'm going to ask a question instead of sitting there and trying to defend slavery, which I can do and we'll discuss today. But I'm not in the position of having that burden. If they say that the Bible can own slavery, there's a couple of different ways I typically go.

I'll first ask them to define slavery. I'll ask them, what does slavery look like? Because for most people, when they talk slavery, they're thinking of like the African slave trade or slavery where you have ownership of another human being where they work as an indentured servant without pay.

They have no rights. And that is the idea to have. And I will keep asking them to explain the what their ideas of slavery until we get that worked out. There's a reason I'm going to do that. We could dig into this more during the show.

But here's the thing. When they admit that, I'll say, oh, oh, so what do you think about employment? I mean, is that indentured slavery and indentured servitude? Is that slavery? Because at least in America, we ended up having the people in the south who got worked outside, used to refer to the people in the north that worked in industries, worked in buildings where they worked long hours for little pay back many years ago.

That was they said that was voluntary slavery because they were having to work all these long hours for someone else to tell them how long to work and tell them how much they could get paid. And so it was an interesting view that they had of it.

But the reason I do that is this reason, because once they say that employment is not slavery, why is it not slavery? Well, it's not slavery because people can they can, you know, they get paid. They can kind of pick and choose where they go.

Things like that. Now, this is going to be where we can make a difference between the slavery in the Bible and the slavery that we have in that they're thinking of. See what very few people that bring this question up realize is that slaves in the Bible had rights.

Slaves in the Bible got paid a half day's wage. So they weren't they were not unpaid labor. They were paid labor. They didn't get paid as much. Why not? Because it was often they were paying off debt.

It's often that they owed someone money or they couldn't provide for themselves. They couldn't manage their money. And they rested on on someone else to care for their housing, their health care, their food, all their needs.

They just didn't get paid as much because part of the payment went toward their living and all that. A great example we have of really what that slavery would look like would be Japan in the 80s. After World War Two, Japan had changed where you worked for a company and they owned everything.

The Japanese companies owned your house. They paid for your clothes, your food, your health care, your education, everything. And the idea was if if the company is paying for everything and owns everything, the better the company does, the better you do.

You can get a better car. You can get better clothes. It all depends on how the company does. So people would be more likely to work for that. That was the concept behind it. But but they owned everything.

You didn't pick up and leave the company. You couldn't do that easily. And they got to say how many hours you work and they got to say what you could do. But you got paid. That's closer to the biblical slavery.

That's none of and no one would call what happened in Japan slavery. They call that industry. And so I will I avoid a lot of the tension there because what I'm going to start doing is just asking them questions with the goal of getting to that point of getting them to actually admit what they think slavery is and then ask them, did you know that slaves in the Bible got paid a half day's wage?

Did you know that slaves in the Bible aren't treated as property in the book? So they're going to argue for slavery being ownership, but that's not what we see in the Bible. In the Bible, if in biblical times, if you lost, say, a cow, say you had a cow, he wanders into my property.

I have a legal responsibility, according to biblical law, to return that cow. But if you have a slave that runs away, I don't have that same biblical responsibility because a person is not property. And so I don't return the person that runs away like I would a cow.

And see, they don't study that out. They don't know those things.

So by definition, what is biblical slavery?

Well, I would say biblical slavery is more of an employment system. You had a couple of reasons that people would be slaves. It was usually the and people will often look as if slavery was the worst thing ever.

If you get the book Twelve Years a Slave, this is written by a man who was born in New York. He was a free African-American here in the United States. He went down to D .C. to make some money, play music.

He was a violinist. He was kidnapped there and forced into slavery. Now, the first place that he was a slave, he was a slave to a Christian man. And he had he actually writes in the book, had he remained there his entire life, he would not have thought slavery to be a bad thing.

But he was moved to sold to another plantation where they mistreated people. And everyone looks at slavery as if it is always the worst possible way of living. And yet they did the in biblical law. We see that there are rules for the slave owners to care for slaves.

They had responsibility to provide for them and make sure that they're well cared for, not to mistreat them. There would be rules against the mistreating of them. So so what you end up seeing in biblical slavery is it's the focus on it is on the responsibility of the master to the slave to respect him and to follow rules.

And so biblical slavery, typically people would get themselves into slavery. There may be the Israelites took over a land and they would basically kill the men in warfare. Well, in a time where women didn't work, the only the only way to provide for those in the land that are left is employment system.

And that is what's called slavery. So they would be employed and provided for. Now, people say, oh, but they were they were slaves for life. Yes. It meant that owners there are the masters would have because they overtook that that land and own that land.

Now, they had a responsibility to provide for those families for the remainder of their life because they would have no other means. So it's to protect them from poverty. Another way you'd have people going into slavery is when they would get themselves in debt, they would kill themselves or family members.

And what ends up happening there is that that person would would be working until they work off their debt. Now, there is there was provisions where someone might say, I, I, I prefer working for my master.

And so they would become a slave for life. In other words, they may recognize that they don't have a means of employment. The master is taking care of me. I'm going to I'm going to be a slave for the rest of my life for him.

And so they remain that way. And the master would continue to provide for him. It's it's more than the provision you have at a company that you work for, where they just give you a paycheck. Here, they're providing your food, your lodging, your clothing, anything you need.

That's their responsibility. And so it's a little different than what people often think of slavery, because they focus on the slave. They focus on, well, they don't have rights. They're they're not they're just property.

They're not treated as humans. And that's not what biblical slavery would be. It's it's the responsibility of a master to take care of all the needs of the person who and there are people who just don't know how to manage finances.

There's people who don't know how to provide for themselves. And they they they overspend, they get in debt and they get trouble. And it's actually in the Bible we see is slavery is a protection against poverty, because if they didn't have the system of slavery, what would happen with these people here in the United States?

We see what happens when you when you have no system like that. They didn't live on the streets. You didn't see that in Israel. Why? Because they had a system to protect them.

Answering Slavery Objections with Questions

So have you ever encountered someone or engaged someone and then raised this kind of objection? How did you handle it?

Oh, I get this all the time. Remember, I do open air evangelism on the streets and well, even in the Philippines, Philippines, I got to do something I can never do here in the United States. I had this was I went to we went to a mall, one of the malls there in the Philippines, in in Manila, and actually set up a amplifier in their courier.

I watched that. Yeah. Three stories. I was actually preaching the gospel inside a mall. I can't do that in the United States. It was great. You know, everyone's like hanging down, looking up, is preaching and they're hanging down, listening.

But I go around the country preaching on the streets, the gospel. And I will get this a lot. There's two things that come up the most. The biggest thing used to be, can you trust the Bible in different forms?

As I mentioned earlier, a second biggest thing is slavery used to be, at least now the number one thing that's coming up almost every time is homosexuality. That comes up almost every time now. So slavery is now kind of bump to three.

But but I get this regularly. And really, the way to handle it is asking them questions, challenging them and then seeing how much they actually know about the scriptures. Now, what they're going to do, there's a couple of passages they always turn to.

There's a passage.

Yep. Exodus 21. Yep. Yep.

They're always going to go to that. And because what they're what they're looking, it seems seems in their mind to be like the ultimate proof, because what you you end up having in in Exodus 21 to 25, that you have the laws of slavery and they're there.

It's going to talk about this case where, OK, you get a Hebrew slave and a Gentile slave. So the Gentile slave, you have someone who comes in. They are you've the Israels come in, they've conquered a land.

There's people who are there. So you have this woman who has no other means of providing for herself or her children. And so she is a slave in the case here. She's unmarried and you get a Hebrew slave.

And by the way, here's the thing with the Hebrew slaves that within this is, again, Sonia, bring up with with them is to show how little they understand slavery. And in Israel, there was a year of Jubilee.

Every seven years, all debts were freed. So if you had a slave who's a slave because he owes someone money, but that money hasn't been paid off by the time of the Jubilee, all debts are free. All slaves that are there for debt are released.

So it's not this view that they have of not having rights and things like that. You see, there's there's all these laws protecting people and protecting the slaves and the responsibility of the masters.

So if you have a Hebrew slave who ends up becoming a slave, he gets himself in debt. He is finds another slave who's a Gentile and he decides he wants to marry her. He can marry her. But when the Jubilee year is up, the Hebrew slave is allowed to leave.

But the master still has an overriding responsibility to to protect and provide for that wife. And because of that, even if they have children, that responsibility is for the children as well. And so what ends up happening is that the the Hebrew man has a choice.

He can leave. He's free. But what the scriptures say is he has to leave alone. Why? Because he got himself in debt to start with, which which exposes that he may not be someone who can care for the wife and children without the provision of the master.

So the the protection that's provided for the Gentile woman and her children remains with the master, not to the husband who already has displayed a failure to handle his finances. And so now the the the Hebrew has a choice.

He can leave alone and the wife and children still have are under the headship of the master. Or he can remain a slave, give up his that freedom of Jubilee and remain a slave. And stay with his wife. And people think that that's a very strange text because it seems like that they're you know, that they're being a slave in it, that it's causing divorce.

But it's a protection law. And that's the thing we have to understand. This is it's a responsibility issue that the master has. Now, the other one that people will say when it comes to slavery is you have a master who they come into a land.

You have a woman who husband died in warfare. And what ends up happening there is as that that occurs, you you end up seeing that there will be times where someone's going to be attracted to a woman or want a woman as a wife who was a slave and he will take her.

Now, it's very interesting because people will say, oh, he you know, like here you got people, they pillage a land, they they rape the women and then they just take them as as wives. But they're slaves and they can't you know, they can't do anything.

Well, actually, they're making him a wife. And there's rules there. If a man does that, he's never allowed to divorce her. He has to always treat her as a wife. He can't let her go. And so it's not the way that they always picture it or explain it.

Like he just he rapes a woman, then she's forced to marry the rapist. And then, you know, she's just a slave and he can cast her aside. No, he can't cast her aside. You know, in fact, if he casts her aside, he's got he's got to give her the the money of an endowment so she could provide for herself.

You know, but, you know, this is the thing that you end up seeing is most of the people don't understand what the protections were. And they don't see it as a protection system. They see it as a system of ownership of another human being.

Now, let me do you ask how I deal with it. Here's something I do. I do this often. And I don't know if this will work. I don't know what the position is in your country with the issue of abortion. But what I typically will do when someone brings up this issue, I will challenge them and I'll tell you, I'll ask them, why is slavery wrong?

I will get them to a point where I what I want them to say is that it is wrong to say you own another human being. And I'll say, what's wrong with that? What's wrong with saying this is my property? And I really want them to argue against the issue of this is my property.

I was outside of an abortion clinic preaching the gospel. We were there all day, but there was only one person who got the police called on them. And it was me. And it's because they had a black and African-American gentleman standing outside of the door so he could usher the women in.

And I was saying and they could hear me inside. I said, sir, what's wrong with slavery? Do you have issues against slavery? And he said, yes. I said, what's wrong with it? He's he says it's wrong to say you can own another human being.

I said, why? He said, because people don't have a right to own other human beings. I said, what is wrong with saying this is my property? If you paid for something now, it sounds like I'm arguing first for slavery, which I kind of am.

And that gets them to to to really want to defend their view. And so when they start saying it is wrong to say this is my property, then I turn to them and say, well, then explain one thing to me, sir.

What is the difference between saying this is my property and this is my body? Every woman who goes into that clinic says this is my body and I can kill another human being because I have ownership over that human being.

There is the only difference between slavery and abortion is that slaves were not always mistreated and they lived. Abortion is the same argument that they are against with slavery, but it always leads in death.

Well, most of the time death unless it's botched. And so I will take their argument and show that they're hypocritical because the majority of people that are going to challenge me on the slavery issue support abortion.

In fact, I'll play a clip if you want. This is what happened. We have a well-known atheist here in our where we live in a country named David Smalley, and he was doing a debate with a friend of mine, Matt Slick.

And it came time for Q &A. Their whole argument, their whole argument was on the issue that the Bible is immoral. And his whole argument was on morality. And he focused on slavery the whole time. He and I talked beforehand.

He knew exactly what my argument was because we talked about the abortion issue. And this is what he said when I got up to ask a question. Mr. Smalley, do you believe that abortion is moral? Oh, boy. I'm glad I'm debating him instead of you, because he knew he had no he knew that his whole argument when I made the case to him, there were even atheists in that room.

They went, oh, because they realized they want to support abortion. And he did. He tried to argue for abortion. But I said, it's an ownership issue. You're taking you're taking a position that you can own another human being.

That human being inside the mother's room has a totally different DNA, could have a totally different gender, OK, is a completely separate human being. Just they're inside of the womb. But when you say you can kill that human being, that is an ownership issue.

Yeah. No different than the slavery they are against. Wow. That was amazing.

So basically, the problem about this objection is the lack of understanding of the biblical slavery because of their interpretation, which is the 20th century or 17th to 20th century chattel slavery or African slavery.

Right. For the most part.

But I mean, that's what a lot of people are most familiar with. But slavery has been part of the work system, employment system. As far as we know from antiquity, I mean, you've always had cultures that ended up employing some form of slavery.

You can go back in, you know, even in scripture, we go back to Egypt and we see that we see that they the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. So there was always a form of slavery. Now, slavery was a work system, an employment system.

And yet we have to recognize the fact that even though this this system was in place, not all cultures practiced it the same way. Right. So we see that there were laws for Israel. We don't think of slavery the same way, I think, in the 21st century.

Yeah, because we have we think we have more rights. We can we can go and find a job somewhere. If we don't like working for this company, we just move to this company. But ultimately, they pay us. They tell us how long we're going to work if we want to get that paycheck.

And we have a little bit more freedom in most countries that we can pick up and go somewhere else. But we also don't have the protections that can come with that system. Now, it's always it always comes down to where you can have abuse.

And that's always the problem. That's why the Bible has restrictions on what can happen to protect people. And so that's why I think you always had slavery as far back as we can. We have recorded history.

We see that there's been slavery. So the question is, why? Well, because there's some people who who can take care of themselves and others and some who can't and the people who can't, if you don't help them and take care of them and provide work and things like that, what ends up happening is they go into poverty.

So which is better? I mean, you look around the world and you look at the countries that that don't have a system to protect the poor. They're going to have either a large number of of poor the countries that try to protect the poor, like they have welfare states over in Europe.

And you end up seeing that over time. It ends up being such a drain on the system that the countries end up collapsing over time. We in this country, my country have even the worst of both worlds because we're trying to be a welfare state taking care of the poor while having open borders, having everyone come in.