Slavery and Reparations

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Hello, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and I'm going to be spending the entire podcast episode today on the topic of reparations for slavery, because that is the big topic, and going forward it's just going to get bigger because the
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Democratic candidates for president are pretty much all endorsing a version of this, and it's being echoed by even evangelical social justice warriors.
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So why talk about this? We need to understand this topic, I believe, biblically and also historically as best we can if we're going to respond to the assertions that are being made.
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And so, like a lot of the episodes, this has some apologetics in it, and I could have talked about other things.
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I thought about doing a synopsis on all the different developments that have been taking place in broader evangelicalism when it comes to social justice, but frankly
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I can't keep up with it. The fault lines are drawn, especially since after the Shepherds Conference, social justice types seem to be very sensitive to being called
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Marxist or socialist, and a lot of articles to that effect came out this week, and I just can't keep up with it.
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But one of the themes that I did notice was more and more evangelicals are endorsing a concept of reparations, and it is concerning to me.
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I don't believe that, at least from what I've heard, these are biblical concepts.
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This is not restitution in the biblical sense, I'm going to demonstrate that, I think. But I've got,
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I think, a great little show for you. It could probably have more in it, but it's hard to know where to cut information just because you could go all day talking about this, especially if you're someone like myself who enjoys talking about history and theology.
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But I packed in as much as I could. If you've listened to Daryl Harrison, I'm endorsing this,
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Daryl Harrison's Just Thinking episode on reparations which came out earlier this week, I think you should.
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Not necessarily first, it's not like I'm reinventing the wheel, so I'm not covering the same things that he's covering, but I am supplementing them.
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And so if you've listened to that, then you're going to like what I have to say, and I think it's going to add to what he's already said.
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And if you haven't, and if you don't plan to, well, this still, I think, will be good for you to go through.
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So before I jump into it, one quick thing, if you are a fan of mine, and of the show,
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I guess I should say, that sounded so narcissistic, if you're a fan of mine, if you're a fan of what I'm doing on the podcast, and you go to an evangelical seminary, and you're concerned about social justice on your campus, and you have stories,
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I would love to hear from you, just to know you're in the audience, just to hear your story. So look me up on Gab, on Mines, and then, of course, the traditional ones,
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Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube. I will try to get back to you, and I really would like to hear from you, though, so please reach out.
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And that voice in your head that says, ah, it doesn't matter, he doesn't want to talk to me, yes, I do. So please, yeah, pause the video right now and go send me a message, leave a comment, something.
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I don't see the comments as much. Better to send a message. All right, so let's jump into it. Reparations, big topic, big topic, and I put together a little slide show, sorry for those who are just listening.
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I'm going to try to describe what you see here. Elizabeth Warren, fist raised, headline says,
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Elizabeth Warren backs slavery reparations. And then we got on the left, Duke Quan, evangelical leader, and he says, you know, the church really needs to be the one doing the reparations, because they were the ones that forwarded slavery through their arguments.
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He's doing this, I believe, at a TED Talk. And then Thabiti Anna Wibley, if you are a
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Twitter follower of mine, you know the little comment that I made in response to this that got a lot of traction.
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But here's what Thabiti said, I'm sad for folks who hear the word reparations without any specific proposal attached to start exclaiming blacks just want to steal whites' money.
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It's a retort that reveals possible idolization of mammon and willful blindness to 250 years of stealing black people themselves.
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So, well, you heard it here first. Thabiti is saying if you don't want reparations, if you're against that, well, we know what
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God said about loving mammon, you just don't love God, and you're ignorant.
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So quite the accusation being made there by Mr. Thabiti Anna Wibley. Now I'm going to give away one of my biases as I start this.
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I believe that slavery is a universal condition. In some ways, it's an inescapable condition.
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Proverbs calls debt slavery, we have a lot of that in our country. There's obviously spiritual slavery, everyone's either a slave to the devil or slave to God.
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In some ways, our welfare system and our progressive income tax and other things that we have resemble slavery in some ways.
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But I'm going to narrow this down to, we're talking about slave labor, right? Maybe we have that in our prison system today.
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I mean, again, it seems like it's inescapable and most cultures have some version. But when we talk about the transatlantic slave trade, the
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African slave trade, we're talking about still a situation that I think is a universal human condition.
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And why do I say that? Well, here's John Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World 1400 -1800.
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This is a textbook used at graduate schools throughout the country on the transatlantic slave trade. And this is what he says.
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We must accept that African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers.
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This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange, but even at deeper levels. Europeans possess no means, either economic or military, to compel
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African leaders to sell slaves. Let me read that again. Europeans possess no means, either economic or military, to compel
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Africans to sell slaves. This is John Thornton in one of the textbooks that is used in master's programs throughout the country on this topic.
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Now, I'm already probably getting in trouble with some people for even mentioning that this is the case.
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But it is. I mean, it's just history. So, I mean, this happened. The slave markets were already set up there when
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Europeans arrived. This wasn't a new thing in human history. In fact, the word slave, the etymology of it, it's
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Slav. It's white people. It's not necessarily Africans. But the only concept we seem to have in the
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United States is of the slavery that took place in the United States. And we do need to put this in the broader historical concept,
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I do believe. So Africans are selling Africans. Tribal warfare is going on.
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And during the Middle Ages, especially, Arabs get involved in this. And you can see if you're watching, but if you're listening,
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I'll describe it. There's some Arabs, some Muslims, and they're going through the desert and they have in shackles some sub -Saharan
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Africans that they've got as slaves. And the map shows the trade routes, the slave trade routes during the
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Middle Ages. And none of them are going to the United States. The Europeans haven't gotten involved in this yet. This is pretty much an
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African thing, sorry, a Middle Eastern and African thing, before the
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Westerners ever came down. Now this doesn't minimize the
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West's involvement at all, but it does at least show that this is, again, a hard condition. This is a universal condition.
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Now, here's a map of the transatlantic slave trade. You can see 5 % went to the
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United States, 35 % Brazil, 60 % the West Indies, 5 % from the Ivory Coast go to the
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United States. Very interesting, because that's what we're so concerned about.
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But if we're going to have an honest discussion about reparations, then we would need to discuss, what about Brazil?
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What about the West Indies? What about the Arab world? Where do they fit into all this? You don't really see a lot of people from sub -Saharan
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Africa in the Middle East, and there's a reason for that. Most of them died. The rate of death on the way to becoming a slave, and usually that would mean being in a harem, a lot of them were female, that was about 80 % to 90%.
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In the transatlantic slave trade, it was about 10%. Now neither is good, but 80 % to 90 % is a lot worse.
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The conditions were much worse, and families could flourish more in the United States.
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In fact, if you were part of the 5 % that got to the United States, in a way you hit the jackpot. That doesn't mean it was good in the
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United States in every way, but it means it was better than other places, because you could have a family.
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Our modern situation attests to that. We have descendants of slaves in the United States, in the Arab world, not as much.
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So this is the situation going on in the African slave trade.
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When we think in the United States of slavery, generally the picture that we have in our mind is the picture of this man to the left, his name is
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Gordon. He's got scars all over his back, and he was found by some Union troops.
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Some say he escaped, it's a little shrouded in mystery as far as what happened, but clearly something happened to his back, and looks like he was whipped, looks like there could have been hot water, abuse, and this picture, it's gone everywhere.
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It's in just about every interpretation of slavery, when you go to a national park or in a book, is that picture.
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To the right we have Simon Legree beating Uncle Tom as an illustration in Uncle Tom's cabin, which is a fictional work by someone who never actually witnessed slavery firsthand, never traveled south, but Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the novel nonetheless, and said she did so from accounts that she had heard and been passed to her.
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But this is the other, kind of like in pop culture, picture that we have of slavery.
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It's not a complete picture though, and one of the points that I want to make, and it's going to be important going forward,
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I'll tell you why I'm making it, is that we don't want to ignore the abuses within slavery at all, far be it from me to do that.
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Absolutely disgusting. I mean, I believe that everywhere slavery was practiced, pretty much, it was always bad.
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Always. With the exception, perhaps, of the Hebrew slave system, which was regulated by God, and even then humans abused it,
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I'm sure, but slavery is not a good thing. Let's be clear,
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I don't like it at all, I'm really glad that it's gone, like really glad. And I don't want to minimize the abuse within it, but neither do
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I want to absolutize the abuse in it and say that's all it was. There were
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Christians who were involved in the institution of slavery. There were
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Christian slave masters who taught Christian principles. Stonewall Jackson, even, is a good example of this, had his own Sunday school for slaves.
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And I could go down a list of people in the United States who championed
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Christian education and treating slaves with respect and putting biblical parameters into the way that they interacted with slaves.
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We should remember that, that those people existed. Now it's going to be important later on because, well, who pays the reparations?
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Five percent of Southern whites in 1860 owned slaves. Ninety -five percent did not.
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Do we go to that five percent? And then of that five percent, well, who was doing it according to God's law with, like Robert E.
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Lee, with the intent of even freeing their slaves perhaps, and then who was doing it wrongfully and abusing, like Simon, you know,
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Simon Legree wasn't a real person, but people like Simon Legree. So this gets complicated really quick, and I'm about to show you pretty soon why it gets really, really complicated, but let's keep going here.
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So this is the picture that we have in our minds as Americans. Now we don't have this picture in our minds.
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We don't have, this is a family worship in a plantation in South Carolina in 1863.
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Now you can see you have the authority, the person that's preaching here, pointing up to heaven with a
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Bible in church is a black man, and the slaves are all watching him, and you have the slave master and his family integrated.
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Now this wasn't the picture everywhere in the South at this time either, but it did exist.
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It did happen, and we can't ignore that some of these things did happen. We have on the right -hand side, this is
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I believe still hanging in the North Carolina History Museum, but this is a young boy.
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Why this young boy's wearing a dress, it was the style at that time, I don't know why that was the style, but Clifton Wheat Hunter is the boy's name, and he's being pictured with this young slave boy, and they were friends, it looks like it, at least from the picture.
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Clifton's father, Thomas, owned 24 slaves in Halifax County, North Carolina, and they decided to take a family portrait, and this wasn't the only time those kinds of things happened.
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I mean, here's another picture. This is slaves with some kids in the family, slave boys, it looks like different workers in the house, and then on the right -hand side, you have a young boy who's a slave and a girl and taking a picture together, and at that time, pictures were not cheap.
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This was important to the family to have these pictures. So this is the other side of the coin, so to speak.
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This is what does not get a lot of fanfare, but it did happen. Now to make this a little more complicated, not all of the slave masters were white.
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Of that 5 % of southern whites that owned slaves in 1860, not all of them, well, all of those were white because that's of the white people, but not all the slave owners were white.
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Here we have the picture of Gordon again. Now Gordon, we don't know exactly who his master was, but it's very possible his master was actually the widow
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C. Richards and her son P .C. Richards. Widow C.
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Richards, she was a widow, was a black person, and her son was a black person.
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William Ellison, who's pictured here, is also black, and he had the largest plantation, well, in South Carolina, as far as I know, it was one of the largest ones, in 1860 when the war began, and black man.
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So this is part of the untold story of American slavery.
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We don't really ever talk about this, but there were black people who had slaves, and there were white people who had slaves.
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By far, more white people, but in 1830, there were almost 4 ,000 black people owned by almost, or, sorry, almost 4 ,000 owners that were black of almost 13 ,000 slaves, 1830.
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By 1860, and this is in South Carolina alone, there were 171 black slave owners.
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This is South Carolina in 1860. Native Americans owned thousands of slaves. So this is a human condition.
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And so, I'm not saying any of this to try to, let's just take the burden completely off of the
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Europeans who were involved in it. Well, no, they were absolutely sinful. Those who abused slaves were sinful, right?
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But let us not think that every single one of them was an abuser. Some of them inherited slaves.
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I mean, it would have been cruel for them to not take care of them. I mean, there's a lot of ethical questions that should be asked, and every case is going to be different, and I don't think the social justice warriors want to admit this.
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They want to just paint with a broad brush and, well, if you're white, you owe something to someone who's black, and that just is not the way it works.
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It doesn't break down that way. There are black people who are the descendants of slave owners, whether it's in Africa or even in the
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United States or, you know, think about Liberia. When some slaves went back to Africa, they started enslaving each other.
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So this is a complicated mess, is what it is, and trying to calculate who owes who what is going to be very difficult.
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I'm going to read for you. This is something that I find horrifying because this happened over and over, but this is sort of me showing that there is a dark side to this.
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It says, my master was so cruel. This is part of the slave narratives by Bill Collins, a former slave. It says, my master was so cruel to his slaves that they were almost crazy at times.
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This was an Alabama slave named Bill Collins in 1846. He said, he would buckle us across a log and whip us until we were unable to walk for three days.
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On Sunday, we would go to the barn and pray to God to fix some way for us to be freed from our mean masters.
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Now to me, this kind of horrific treatment, it's almost unthinkable to think, it's offensive to think that reparations today to some descendant can make up for this.
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I don't think, you know, they can't. It's not like guilt is just now alleviated because some descendant paid another descendant.
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Now again, not minimizing that these things took place, these cruel things, but I'm against universalizing it.
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The story I just read you is horrific, but it wasn't the only story. The slave narratives, 2 ,000 former slaves, the
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Works Project Administration under Roosevelt decided to go out and get the stories of these 2 ,000 slaves.
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There's a book called Time on the Cross where Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel does a study.
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He demonstrates that, number one, nowhere in the Western Hemisphere were slaves better treated and cared for than in the
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American South. And then, really politically incorrect guy, right? And then he goes on to say, but he's a
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Nobel Prize winner, and he did this extensive study. He said after studying the slave narratives, he concluded that 60 to 80 % of the respondents had only positive things to say about their masters and their life during the slave days.
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Only positive things. Now, this is my challenge. If you're saying, that's ridiculous, that can't possibly be.
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I don't know if you're reading Eugene Genovese, I don't know if you're reading the slave narratives. I would encourage you to read both. Read Roald Jordan Roald by Eugene Genovese, but read
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Time on the Cross. Go back and actually read the primary sources in the slave narratives and do the study yourself.
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There were some horrible things, like the one I just read to you, but there was also those who didn't say anything about anything horrible happening.
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And they could have, because it was much later and there was no threat to their life. And they could have. So a lot of them talk about, if you read some of them, you get into it, you know, they miss their masters, they're looking forward to seeing their masters in heaven and these kinds of things that their descendants, much of the time, well, they would not say.
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And it seems to me, it's interesting, you get the sense when you read the slave narratives, even, you know, here's one of my favorite books by one of my heroes,
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Booker T. Washington. I love that guy. It was just at his, where he grew up not too long ago.
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And you know, he was, you know, his whole family, very happy to be freed. But then they realized when they were freed that, man, they're going to have to say goodbye to their master.
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And, you know, we've had so many experiences together and we love that family. And there was this, there was a love, at least in his situation.
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And he talks about the blessing that it was to be brought from pagan nations in Africa and then taught the word of God and becoming a
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Christian. He would never have known it if it wasn't for this. Now he doesn't justify it and say, oh, it was right because of that.
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But what he does do is he says that God's sovereignty, his providence, worked in such a way that the gospel was brought to him and his family.
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And he was thankful for that. You don't see the resentment there. You don't see the resentment in the slave narratives.
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You see the resentment in those who never experienced slavery. That's the interesting part of all of this.
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Those who actually experienced it were not as resentful. There were some that were, but most of them were not.
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Completely different worldview than what we see around us today. I'm going to go through a little more as far as slave conditions.
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I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I just, I do think it's important to get the rest of the picture. In 1860, according to the census,
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Southern black population was shown to have increased by 23%. The Northern free black population only increased by 1 .7%.
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1850 census, it shows that one out of every 1 ,000 people that were white was deaf, dumb, and blind, insane, or idiotic.
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In the Northern states, one out of every 506 black person of the black people population had the same handicaps.
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And then for Southern blacks, it was merely one in 1 ,464 persons who possessed these inabilities.
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Now you could say there's some bias going on there or something. I don't know. This is all we have to go on from the census.
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It just says that there were enough masters who were treating their slaves with charity that their population was growing.
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And that is one of the indications that you can tell if a people is experiencing some measure of success.
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Foreign observers, I'm not going to read their quotes, but you might want to check out what Tocqueville and James Silks Buckingham, who was an
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English guy, and then Frederick Olmsted from the North said when they went South. A lot of the travel journals in the mid to late, well, early to mid,
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I should say, 1800s, some of them were by people that never even experienced what they were writing about.
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I mean, that was the most popular type of literature. But these guys actually did travel and they saw slavery.
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So read their accounts and see what they said about it. And they were comparing it to what they knew in England, in France, in the
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North. Now, when it comes to Christianity, I'm going to give you kind of the big picture here.
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Circuit riders would care for the spiritual needs of slaves. I mean, that's just true.
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You may not like it, but it is true. This is from John Blassingame in the
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Slave Community book he wrote. He said, white ministers emphasize oral instruction, memorization, interrogatories, and singing in their efforts to Christianize the slaves.
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Slaves memorize the Lord's Prayer. The Ten Commandments and many aspects of the denomination's liturgy. Ministers, bishops, and masters often question the slaves to make sure they understood what had been taught.
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And when it came time to go to a church, slaves exercised their own choice, demonstrating their autonomy. Slaves catechized by Episcopalians or Roman Catholics persisted in joining
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Baptists and Methodists. It's very interesting that you see this on the frontier too, to an extent.
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But slaves generally did not go with the mainline denominations. They had this mixture of their own kind of their own style.
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I mean, you see that even to this day. They had their own style, and they sometimes formed their own churches. Now, discrimination is part of the story of why that happened, but there is another part of the story.
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They tended to worship a little differently, and they formed their own communities in some ways. And so this is where it started.
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Not downplaying discrimination. It happened. But there's more to it than just that.
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Again, this is a fascinating quote. This is from an address to Christians throughout the world by 96 ministers in the
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South, 1863. This is during the war between the states. Listen to this. Most of us have grown up from childhood among the slaves.
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All of us have preached to and taught them in the word of life, have administered to them the ordinances of the
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Christian church, sincerely loved them as souls for whom Christ died. We go among them freely and know them in health and sickness, in labor and rest from infancy to old age.
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We are familiar with their physical and moral condition and alive to all their interests. And we testify in the sight of God that the relation of master and slave among us.
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However, we may deplore abuses in this as in other relations of mankind is not incompatible with our holy
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Christianity. And that the presence of the Africans in our land is an occasion of gratitude on their behalf before God, seeing that thereby divine providence has brought them where missionaries of the cross may freely proclaim to them the word of salvation.
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And the work is not interrupted by agitating fanaticism. They're talking about Northern abolitionists right there.
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The South has done more than any people on earth for the Christianization of the African race. The condition of slaves here is not wretched as Northern fictions would have men believe, but prosperous and happy.
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Now, some of you might think, oh, man, they're just telling lies. There, there's so many things to back up some of the things that they're saying, though, and this is where you have to be careful.
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It's a nuanced picture. There's, it's, there's a big spectrum here and you can't just focus on one shade.
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If I just read that and said, that's all there is to slavery, then I would be focusing on one shade. But there's a bunch of ministers, almost a hundred of them that sign this thing.
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You know, I could go on, a Methodist paper in 1851, after cotton prices had dropped, told masters not to overwork their slaves.
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Southern Episcopal Bishop George W. Freeman said, it is the duty of masters, not only to be merciful to their servants, but to do everything in their power to make their situation comfortable and to put forth all reasonable effort to render them contented and happy.
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Reverend A .T. Holmes, in a sermon that became published in the Southern Baptist publication entitled,
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The Duties of Christian Masters said, equity pleads the rights of humanity. And in the conscientious discharge of duty, prompts the master to such treatment of his servant as would be desired on his part, were that, were those positions reversed.
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I could go all day. I've got tons of other ones written down here by different Christian publications, denominational publications, pastors, all saying the same thing.
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Listen, slave masters, you better regulate yourself and treat your slaves according to biblical standards.
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According to the slave narratives, if you do, this is, I believe this is by Fogle. I can't remember where I got this, but someone did a study and they said that 15 % of the
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Georgia slaves who had heard Antebellum White preach, Antebellum White's preach, recalled admonitions to obedience.
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So you would think that number would be higher if what the social justice warriors are telling us is true, which is that's the only time they ever used the
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Bible was to just compel obedience. Well, yeah, they did. They did preach what the Bible said about it, but you had only 15 % of Georgia slaves who had heard
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Antebellum White's preach that really only 15 % doesn't sound like it was preached maybe as much as, and of course, different regions are different, but, um, but there's a bigger picture again, paint and color don't broad brush.
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Now I, again, I have to reiterate this probably like five times. I think slavery is terrible.
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I think it's great that it's gone. I don't want it coming back. Good riddance to it. Right. There are a lot of abuses within it, but I would never make the mistake of saying that it's not possible for a
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Christian in that society who let's say inherited slaves to function in a way in which, um, you know, he could be a
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Christian function in a way in which that the slaves could be educated. And, um, even if he was going against the law, like Stonewall Jackson was educated, um, taught
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Christianity, uh, thriving. I mean, that is possible. And it did happen in some circumstances.
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It would be wrong for me if I lived in a society like our society, let's say, where the institution of marriage is as horrible as it is.
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We have no fault divorce. Um, you know, half of all marriages end in divorce, right? And there's a lot of abuse in marriage.
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And for me to say, you know what? Marriage is a horrible institution because look at all the marriages and look what's happening and look at all the battered wives.
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That would be wrong of me to broad brush and say, well, marriage is just wrong. Um, the system of marriage is not wrong, the institution.
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And, but there are some horrible people out there that have really been abusive in the marriage situation.
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Now, I think the slavery situation tends to lend itself more to that, but especially because of some of the laws in our country, um, depending on the region you were in, they were not in conformity with biblical standards.
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And a lot of the Southern clergymen knew this. Um, but you could individually on an individual level, regulate yourself and behave in a way that honors
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God, just like in our culture with the institution of marriage, even though, I mean, homosexuals are getting married now, but you know what?
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You regulate your marriage according to the law of God and function in a way that honors the
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Lord. And you find, especially in the new Testament, a lot of the passages that deal with marriage, and relationships between parents and children.
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They also include relationships of masters and slaves. There's about as much, if not more said about the relationship between a master and a slave as there is between a husband and wife in the new
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Testament. So, um, very important for us, I think, to get the full picture of what exactly was
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American slavery. Now let's read some scripture on this.
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Ephesians 6, 5 -9 says, Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters, according to the flesh, with fear and trembling in the sincerity of your heart as to Christ.
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Not by way of eye service as men pleasers, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.
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With good will, render services to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good thing each one does, this he will receive back from the
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Lord, whether a slave or free. And masters, do the same thing to them and give up threatening, knowing that both their master and yours is in heaven and there is no partiality with him.
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Now why read that verse? Why talk about what the
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New Testament has to say about slavery? Well, the reason I started in the New Testament is because biblical slavery was not being practiced during Paul's time.
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In fact, Roman slavery, I think you could very well easily make the argument, was more brutal than American slavery was.
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And yet, this is what Paul says. It didn't have to be brutal if you had a Christian master, right?
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But it could be. And Paul does not say start a revolution. He doesn't say there needs to be reparations.
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We need to get rid of slavery and then have reparations. He doesn't do any of the things that social justice advocates would want to see happen.
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He tells slaves to be obedient to their masters. And he tells masters to treat their slaves in a way that honors the
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Lord. This is in a pagan slave system. Now, I'm not going to go through everything the
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Bible has to say about this, but I think that pretty much creates a problem for social justice advocates.
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If we're going to follow the example of Paul and of Christ, who even used slaves in his parables, slavery as an example, we're not going to come to the same conclusions that they're coming to necessarily.
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Exodus 22, one through four. I want to read this because I want to get into this idea of restitution.
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Should there be reparations? Let's say slavery is a sin, because in many cases, there was abuse. It was horrible.
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So what should we do now that we're downstream from this? Well, Exodus 22, one through four talks about restitution.
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In fact, the whole chapter pretty much talks about restitution, but we're just going to this first four verses. If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for the ox and four sheep for the sheep.
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If the thief is caught while breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there will be no blood guiltiness on his account.
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But if the sun is risen on him, there will be blood guiltiness on his account. He shall surely make restitution.
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If he owes nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. If what he stole is actually found alive in his possession, whether an ox or a donkey or sheep, he shall pay double.
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Now, why pay five times if the ox is sold or slaughtered?
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And then why pay two times if it's in his possession? Well, it's because ox and sheep, that's your means of livelihood.
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So you're losing much more than just an ox or a sheep. You're losing food for your family.
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I want to focus on verse three, though, for a minute. What happens if someone steals? And he can't make restitution.
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What happens to him if he owes something and he can't pay it? Says, then he shall be sold, verse three, for his theft.
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He shall be sold for his theft. Well, this was part of biblical slavery.
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If you couldn't make a payment, well, you're going to become a slave to that person until you can pay it off.
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Now, I didn't write that. God wrote that. So you see the problem that we're already coming into if we want to say that slavery is the existence of it in and of itself is cause for restitution.
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In fact, God is using slavery as a means by which restitution is paid in this verse.
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So what's the solution if you have wronged someone and, well, they're not around to pay it, to receive payment,
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I guess, from you? Let's read what Numbers 5, 5 through 10 says. Then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the sons of Israel.
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When a man or woman commits any of the sins of mankind, acting unfaithfully against the Lord and the person is guilty, then he shall confess his sins which he has committed.
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And he shall make restitution in full for his wrong and add to it one fifth of it and give it to him who he has wronged.
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But if the man has no relative to whom restitution may be made for the wrong, the restitution which is made for the wrong must go to the
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Lord for the priests besides the ram of atonement by which atonement is made for him. Also, every contribution pertaining to all the holy gifts of the sons of Israel, which they offer to the priest shall be his.
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So every man's holy gift shall be his. Whatever any man gives to the priest, it becomes his.
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Few things to realize about this. You have someone who wants to make restitution.
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They're still alive. They're still alive while they're doing this. It's not their great -great -grandchildren who are doing this.
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It's them who's doing this. If they can't find, if there's no relative to give it to, then it goes to the
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Lord. It seems to me, because this is something between them and God more than it is between them and the other person.
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It's both. But if the other person's not around, then they've still done a wrong and they're going to pay to the
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Lord for it. I think it's striking, though, that you don't find an example of this generationally.
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This is someone who's alive who has wronged someone else, and it's on an individual level. They're voluntarily doing this.
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This isn't government forcing them to do it. They are doing it. Now, let's move on.
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Let's look at another verse here, which I think also pertains to this. We're going to jump back to the
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New Testament. I put a picture here of a Roman slave market.
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Now, here's the reason I've put the picture there. I'll tell you when I read the verse. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another.
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For he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law. Now, these are some of the general commands that are used to say, hey, look, it's not loving to have a slave, so therefore it's a sin, because that's the general principle.
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Now, when Paul said this, what was the context, historically speaking?
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Well, that picture gives you the context, historically speaking. There were slave markets open in Rome when
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Paul said this. Owe nothing to anyone? So did
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Christian slave masters owe something? Did they owe reparations to anyone, to their slaves?
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Well, Paul doesn't specify that, but did they? I think we'd have to say no.
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And the reason that we'd have to say no is because this was the historical context Paul was writing in.
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If you recall another letter in which Paul sends Onesimus, a slave, back to Philemon, Paul does not force
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Philemon with spiritual authority to free Onesimus. He doesn't say that you owe
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Onesimus. He wants him to free him, I think, but there isn't a moral obligation there to do so.
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Very interesting. This was pagan slavery in Paul's time, and if there was a time for reparations to come up, that's where it would have come up, and it doesn't come up in Philemon, and it doesn't come up in Romans, where he's talking to people who would have read this, who would have owned slaves, some of them.
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So that's the New Testament. Now, I'm going to jump once again to another principle that I think is the heart of the matter,
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Ezekiel 18 .20. The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity.
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The righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself.
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You are not responsible for what your great ancestors did. You're just not. You bear the punishment for your own sin, and that really is the crux of this matter.
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I do think there is another issue going on, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have gone through all that history.
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I think you do have to answer the question, is slavery a sin? And what I mean by that is the relationship between slave and master sin in every circumstance.
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You say, well, there was man capture going on in the American slave system. Well, yeah, well, who was doing it? Okay, you know, the
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Northeastern vessels that went there and shipped slaves all around the world, maybe they were doing some of it, but it probably really wasn't them as much as it was those in Africa who already had the slave markets set up.
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Those were the ones, those were the people that were primarily doing the man capture element in this. Now, it doesn't mean that taking part in it is a good thing, but there's a lot of systems that we take part in that we're downstream from the evil, and we do not bear the iniquity of that evil in and of ourselves.
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And I'm going to give you some examples of that. I could probably go all day with examples. I don't want to do that. You know, every time a $100 bill,
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I guess, comes into my hand that's been drug money at some point, which I'm sure it probably has. I don't know how many dollar bills have a trace of cocaine, but I've heard it's quite a bit.
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But some more umbrella has just came to my head. So I shared it, but some more relevant examples to show the complexity of this.
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I am an American who pays taxes. Some of my taxes go to organizations like Planned Parenthood.
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How complicit am I in what is going on at Planned Parenthood? It's a question worth asking.
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I'm going to start raising questions rather than answering them because I think they need to be struggled through. I've answered some things.
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I've shed some light on things, but I think, you know, Jesus asked a lot of questions, and I think it's good to really think through some of these things.
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How about this question? I am a descendant of those who fought in the war between the states, both on the north and the south.
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My southern forebears, in fact, for a while, it was hard to trace my family history because General Sherman came and burned the church where the records for the family were held.
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I have relatives who died in that conflict. As far as I know, they were dirt poor.
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People today might have called them white trash. No slave owners in my family. Ironically, my wife, who's from the north, does have a slave owner in her family, but none of my family members on either the north or the south owned slaves.
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And yet, their churches were burned. Sherman's army left a devastating path.
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I'm sure destroyed their farms and raided whatever they had to live on.
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Do I get reparations for that? What about the people of Columbia, South Carolina, who had their whole entire city burned to the ground?
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I mean, read some of the accounts of what happened in Columbia, South Carolina. Union soldiers gang raping slave girls, ripping earrings out of the ears of women in the town, raping the white women in the town.
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Horrible abuses happened in Sherman's march. Now, are those people owed something now?
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Some of them weren't even behind the war effort, necessarily. What do you do with that? How do we cut this cake that we're going to divvy up with reparations?
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Am I owed anything? One of the things that social justice advocates,
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I think, run into is reality. They kick against the goads of reality.
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And it's a problem because these issues are very complex.
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If we want to take this outside the United States, let's go to, I'll show you some pictures.
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Let's go to some other places for those who are watching. On the top left, we have a picture of the
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Armenian genocide. Horrible. What do we do about that?
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On the bottom left, this was the situation that happened in Rwanda.
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How do we think through that? Who owes who what? I mean, you have
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Houthis that were extremists who went against the Tutsis, and then also some more moderate
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Houthis and Belgium soldiers. And the UN didn't intervene. Does the UN owe something on this? On the right, you have the rape of Nanking.
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What about what the Japanese did to the Chinese before and during the second, well, really during the Second World War?
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You take this out of this country, and this gets complicated. And you want the church to figure this out?
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So if you have a Japanese person coming to your church, does he now have to pay money to the
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Chinese person coming to your church? Does the Tutsi have to pay money to Belgian soldiers that, or, or,
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I'm sorry, I should say that I'm getting these words wrong, the Houthis, there we go. Do they have to pay money to the
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Tutsis or the Belgian soldiers? Do the Armenians who are in your church, do they, you know, need to be paid by the
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Turks? And if so, how much? How much? What if the Turks weren't involved in the genocide, but they just happened to be
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Turkish? They were part of a country that did this. It gets so complicated.
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South Africa has got to be one of the most complicated situations, because there you have multiple tribes, half of which
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I can't even pronounce. You have the British oppressing the Afrikaners in the last, like, you know, 200 years.
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You have the Afrikaners and the British oppressing, and the apartheid government oppressing the blacks.
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And then you have the blacks now oppressing the South Africans that are white. And there's tribal warfare involved in this.
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And it's so complicated. There is no way you're going to be able to divvy up this pie. No way.
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How do you create a balance sheet that factors in everything?
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Here's another question. In our situation in the United States, how do we create a balance sheet?
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Do we factor in current welfare programs? Do we put that into our calculation?
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Or aid that's gone to Africa? Does that go into the equation? Does affirmative action go into the equation?
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Is that part of reparations? You would have a lot of calculating to do. And then figuring out, you know,
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I'm a white person, but no one in my family ever owned a slave. Where do I fit into this? I wouldn't owe any reparations, right?
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One of the things you have to understand, this is an assumption that social justice advocates have, is that systems of oppression need a systematic answer to correct.
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Systems of oppression need a systematic answer to correct. And this is why it doesn't matter how bad you think slavery was if you're not willing to apply the solutions that the social justice advocates give you.
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I agree. Bad stuff happened during slavery. And you know what the solution was? Well, what the solution ended up being, they were freed.
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Eventually the slaves were freed. And beyond that, today we put in programs.
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I don't agree with all the programs, but programs have been put in place to compensate. There's a call for more.
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And I have to wonder where the motives for this are. I think the assumption that they're coming with, again, is that this is a systematic problem.
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You hear the word all the time, systematic racism. It's still systematic racism. They don't see, they don't locate this sin as a human heart sin, abuse within slavery.
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They don't see it as a human heart thing. It's a system problem. And so you need to adopt our system.
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It's always an argument for a new system. And we have to reject that. We have to reject the systematic argument.
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Slaves were freed and we have laws on the books now that you can't discriminate. And, you know, show me the racist law.
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I've said this many times. Show me the law that is enslaving, that is racist, that, you know, if you can show it to me on the books, in black and white, man,
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I'll stand with you for justice. That's wrong. But if there is no law like that, and you're just saying over and over that it's systematic racism, and I'm gonna have a hard time because I think there's a sneaky thing going on.
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What you're doing is you are trying to replace the current system. Let's face it, it's not as free market as it once was, but you're trying to transition it from being more free market to less free market.
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You want more government programs. You want the government to be in charge of divvying up the pie, so to speak.
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And I think there might be some bad motives. Some of the people doing this are ignorant, but there's some bad motives behind it as well because it's going to reward people.
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There's gonna be a third party that's going to be divvying up the pie, and they're gonna be getting the biggest share, and that's the government.
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And if it's in the church, it's going to be those in the church who are behind it. They stand to benefit more than anyone else.
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There's a political move here, and they're playing on the guilt that people have.
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You want to call it white guilt, you can. You want to call it Southern guilt. You want to whatever you want to call it. That's what they're using, and it's despicable to use that.
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Christ has taken away any guilt that we have. And as far as I know, no one alive today participated in the slavery or abused any slaves because that has not been around in this country unless you were part of sex slavery, in which case confess it to the
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Lord. Go to Him, all right? That's what the gospel is all about. But holding sins of the past over people's heads perpetually without any end in sight is a recipe for a race war.
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And if that's what you want, that's what you're gonna get. I don't want it. I want oneness in Christ with my black brothers and sisters in Christ.
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And you know what? In this country, I didn't even mention this, but there's been a lot of other minorities that have been treated pretty awful.
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The Chinese, even the Irish Catholics when they came over, Jewish people.
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I can give you story after story from upstate New York about things related to that. And you know what?
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There's not a huge push for giving them reparations, but there is for slavery for some reason.
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I think there's political motives behind it. And that's the reason. But I wanna be one with my brothers and sisters who are of every tribe, tongue, and nation.
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And one day we will be around the throne of Christ. As a final warning, look what happened to Germany after World War I when they were required to do reparations.
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It led to the rise of Hitler in World War II. So if you wanna follow this reparations stuff, think through what the implications might be and the resentment from the other side.
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There's gonna be a pushback and it's not pretty. I think forgiveness is better. I think letting go of some of these things and giving them to Christ is better.
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I think following biblical law is better. And the Bible does not support what social justice advocates are trying to further through this reparations tool.
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It is not biblically based. You cannot support it based on Zacchaeus. You cannot support it based on what the
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Egyptians gave voluntarily because God compelled them to. He put the desires in their heart for them to do so to the
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Israelites when they were leaving Egypt. You can't use these examples. They don't work. Look at the clear passages of scripture that talk about restitution.
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You're not going to find this generational restitution thing going on. So that's really all
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I have for today, at least, on the topic of reparations. I hope you found that educational and gave you something to think about, even if you don't agree with all of it.
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I hope it gave you something to think about. And well, next week is a new week. And I may be talking about some of these social justice advocates trying to distance themselves from socialism and Marxism.
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Or I may be talking about the gay Christian movement, especially the celibate gay
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Christian movement, because I think there needs to be a biblical answer to that.
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And so probably one of those two things we'll find out, see what happens next week.
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I mean, every day, it seems like a new thing is happening on the social justice front. So who knows? But I hope you enjoyed that.
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bless. Bye now. Bye.