Slavery and Reparations

Slavery and Reparations

Hello, welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and I'm gonna 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 gonna get bigger because the Democratic candidates for president are pretty much all endorsing a version of this, and it's being echoed by even evangelical social justice warriors.

So why talk about this? Well, 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. And so, like a lot of the episodes, this has some apologetics in it.

And I could have talked about other things. 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, 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 Marxist or socialist, and a lot of articles to that effect came out this week, and I just can't keep up with it.

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. I don't believe that, at least from what I've heard, these are biblical concepts that are, this is not restitution in the biblical sense.

I'm gonna demonstrate that, I think. But I've got, 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.

But I packed in as much as I could. If you've listened to Daryl Harrison, I'm endorsing this, Daryl Harrison's Just Thinking episode on reparations, which came out earlier this week, I think you should.

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. And so if you've listened to that, then you're gonna like what I have to say, and I think it's gonna add to what he's already said.

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. So before I jump into it, one quick thing, if you are a fan of mine, and of the show, 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, 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 Minds, and then, of course, the traditional ones, 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.

And that voice in your head that says, ah, it doesn't matter, he doesn't wanna talk to me, yes, I do. So please, yeah, pause the video right now and go send me a message. Leave a comment, something. 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 slideshow. Sorry for those who are just listening. I'm gonna try to describe what you see here.

Elizabeth Warren, fist raised, headline says, 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.

He's doing this, I believe, at a TED Talk. And then Thabiti Anna Wibley, if you are a Twitter follower of mine, you know the little comment that I made in response to this that got a lot of traction. But here's what Thabiti said.

I'm sad for folks who hear the word reparations without any specific proposal attached who start exclaiming blacks just wanna steal whites' money. It's a retort that reveals possible idolization of mammon and willful blindness to 250 years of stealing black people themselves.

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 God said about loving mammon. You just don't love God, and you're ignorant.

So quite the accusation being made there by Mr. Thabiti Anna Wibley. Now, I'm gonna give away one of my biases as I start this. I believe that slavery is a universal condition. In some ways, it's an inescapable condition.

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 a slave to God. In some ways, our welfare system and our progressive income tax and other things that we have resemble slavery in some ways.

But I'm gonna narrow this down to, we're talking about slave labor, right? Maybe we have that in our prison system today. I mean, again, it seems like it's inescapable and most cultures have some version.

But when we talk about like the transatlantic slave trade, the African slave trade, we're talking about still a situation that I think is a universal human condition. And why do I say that? Well, here's John Thornton in Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400 to 1800.

This is a textbook used at graduate schools throughout the country on the transatlantic slave trade. And this is what he says. We must accept that African participation in the slave trade was voluntary and under the control of African decision makers.

This was not just at the surface level of daily exchange, but even at deeper levels. Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel African leaders to sell slaves. Let me read that again.

Europeans possessed no means, either economic or military, to compel Africans to sell slaves. John Thornton in one of the textbooks that is used in master's programs throughout the country on this topic.

Now, I'm already probably getting in trouble with some people for even mentioning that this is the case, but it is. I mean, it's just history. So, I mean, this happened. The slave markets were already set up there when Europeans arrived.

This wasn't a new thing in human history. In fact, the word slave, the etymology of it, it's Slav. It's white people. It's not necessarily Africans. But the only concept we seem to have in the 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, I do believe. So, Africans are selling Africans. Tribal warfare is going on. And during the Middle Ages especially, Arabs get involved in this.

And you can see if you're watching, but if you're listening, 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 Africans that they've got as slaves.

And the map shows the trade routes, the slave trade routes during the 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 African thing.

And Middle East, sorry, Middle Eastern and African thing before the Westerners ever came down. Now, this doesn't minimize the West's involvement at all, but it does at least show that this is, again, a heart condition.

This is a universal condition. Now, here's a map of the transatlantic slave trade. You can see 5 went to the United States. 35 Brazil, 60 the West Indies. 5 from the Ivory Coast go to the United States.

Very interesting, because that's what we're so concerned about. But if we're going to have an honest discussion about reparations, then we would need to discuss, well, what about Brazil? 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 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%.

In the transatlantic slave trade, it was about 10%. Now, neither is good, but 80 to 90 is a lot worse. The conditions were much worse. And families could flourish more in the United States. 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 United States in every way, but it means it was better than other places because you could have a family. And I mean, our modern situation attests to that. We have descendants of slaves in the United States.

In the Arab world, not as much. And so this is the situation going on in the African slave trade. 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 Gordon. He's got scars all over his back. And he was found by some Union troops. Some say he's 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 is, I mean, it's gone everywhere. It's in just about every interpretation of slavery when you go to a national park or in a book is that picture. And 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.

But this is the other kind of like in pop culture picture that we have of slavery. It's not a complete picture though. And one of the points that I want to make, and it's gonna be important going forward, I'll tell you why I'm making it, is that we don't wanna ignore the abuses within slavery at all.

I mean, far be it from me to do that. Absolutely disgusting. I mean, I believe that everywhere slavery was practiced, pretty much, it was always bad, always. With the exception perhaps of the Hebrew slave system, which was regulated by God and even then humans abused it, I'm sure, but slavery is not a good thing.

Just let's be clear. I don't like it at all. I'm really glad that it's gone, like really glad. And I don't wanna minimize the abuse within it, but neither do I want to absolutize the abuse in it and say that's all it was.

There were Christians who were involved in the institution of slavery. There were Christian slave masters who taught Christian principles. Stonewall Jackson even is a good example of this, had his own Sunday school for slaves.

And I could go down a list of people in the United States who championed Christian education and treating slaves with respect and putting biblical parameters into the way that they interacted with slaves.

We should remember that, that those people existed. Now, it's gonna be important later on because, well, who pays the reparations? 5 of Southern whites in 1860 owned slaves, 95 did not. Do we go to that 5

And then of that 5%, well, who was doing it according to God's law with like Robert E. Lee, with the intent of even freeing their slaves perhaps, and then who was doing it wrongfully and abusing like Simon, you know, 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. So this is the picture that we have in our minds as Americans.

Now, we don't have this picture in our minds. We don't have, this is a family worship in a plantation in South Carolina in 1863. Now you can see, you have the authority, the person that's preaching here, pointing up to heaven with a Bible in church is a black man.

And the slaves are all watching him and you have the slave master and his family integrated. Now this wasn't the picture everywhere in the South at this time either, but it did exist, it did happen. And we can't ignore that some of these things did happen.

We have on the right hand side, this is I believe still hanging in the North Carolina History Museum, but this is a young boy. 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. 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. 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. This was important to the family to have these pictures. So this is the other side of the coin, so to speak. 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. Of that 5 of Southern whites that owned slaves in 1860, not all of them, well, all those were white because that's of the white people, but not all the slave owners were white.

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 C. Richards and her son P .C. Richards. Widow C. Richards, she was a widow, was a black person.

And her son was a black person. 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. So this is part of the untold story of American slavery. We don't really ever talk about this, but there were black people who had slaves and there were white people who had slaves, 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. By 1860, and this is in South Carolina alone, there were 171 black slave owners.

That's in South Carolina in 1860. Native Americans owned thousands of slaves. So this is a human condition. And so I'm not saying any of this to try to, let's just take the burden completely off of the Europeans who were involved in it.

Well, no, they were absolutely sinful. Those who abused slaves were sinful, right? But let us not think that every single one of them was an abuser. Some of them inherited slaves. Some, 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. 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. 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 United States, or think about Liberia.

When some slaves went back to Africa, they started enslaving each other. So this is a complicated mess is what it is. And trying to calculate who owes who what is going to be very difficult. I'm gonna 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. Says, my master was so, this is part of the slave narratives by Bill Collins, one of the former slaves.

He says, my master was so cruel to his slaves that they were almost crazy at times. 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.

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. 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.

I don't think, you know, they can't. You know, it's not like guilt is just now alleviated because some descendant paid another descendant. Now, again, not minimizing that these things took place, these cruel things, but I'm against universalizing it.

The story I just read you is horrific, but it wasn't the only story. The slave narratives, 2 ,000 former slaves, the Works Project Administration under Roosevelt decided to go out and get the stories of these 2 ,000 slaves.

And there's a book called Time on the Cross where Nobel Prize winner Robert Fogel does a study and he demonstrates that, number one, nowhere in the Western hemisphere were slaves better treated and cared for than in the American South.

And then, really politically incorrect guy, right? And then he goes on to say, but he's a 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.

Only positive things. Now, this is my challenge. If you're saying, that's ridiculous, that can't possibly be. 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. I read Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese, but read Time on the Cross. Go back and actually read the primary sources in the slave narratives and do the study yourself.

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, 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, 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.

And it seems to me, it's interesting, you get the sense when you read the slave narratives. Even, here's one of my favorite books by one of my heroes, Booker T. Washington. I love that guy. I was just at the where he grew up not too long ago, and he was, his whole family, very happy to be freed, but then they realized, when they were freed, that, man, they're gonna have to say goodbye to their master, and we've had so many experiences together, and we love that family, and there was a love, at least in his situation.

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 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, 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, and he was thankful for that.

You don't see the resentment there. You don't see the resentment in the slave narratives. You see the resentment in those who never experienced slavery. That's the interesting part of all of this. Those who actually experienced it were not as resentful.

There were some that were, but most of them were not. Completely different worldview than what we see around us today. I'm gonna go through a little more, as far as slave conditions. I don't wanna beat a dead horse, but I do think it's important to get the rest of the picture.

In 1860, according to the census, Southern black population was shown to have increased by 23%. The Northern free black population only increased by 1 .7%. 1850 census, it shows that one out of every 1 ,000 people that were white was deaf, dumb, and blind, insane, or idiotic.

In the Northern states, one out of every 506 black person of the black people population had the same handicaps. And then for Southern blacks, it was merely one in 1 ,464 persons who possessed these inabilities.

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. It just says that there were enough masters who were treating their slaves with charity that their population was growing.

And that is one of the indications that you can tell if a people is experiencing some measure of success. Foreign observers, I'm not gonna read their quotes, but you might wanna check out what Tocqueville and James Silks Buckingham, who was an English guy.

And then Frederick Olmstead from the North said when they went South. A lot of the travel journals in the mid to late, well, early to mid, I should say, 1800s, some of them were by people that never even experienced what they were writing about.

I mean, that was the most popular type of literature. But these guys actually did travel and they saw slavery. 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 North.

Christianity, Slavery, and the Slave Community

Now, when it comes to Christianity, I'm gonna give you kind of the big picture here. Circuit riders would care for the spiritual needs of slaves. I mean, that's just true. You may not like it, but it is true.

This is from John Blasingame in the Slave Community book he wrote. He said, white ministers emphasize oral instruction, memorization, interrogatories, and singing in their efforts to Christianize the slaves.

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.

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 Baptists and Methodists.

So it's very interesting that you see this on the frontier too, to an extent. But slaves generally did not go with the mainline denominations. And they had this mixture of their own kind of, their own style.

I mean, you see that even to this day. They had their own style, and they sometimes formed their own churches. Now, discrimination's part of the story of why that happened, but there is another part of the story.

They tended to worship a little differently, and they formed their own communities in some ways. And so this is where it started, not downplaying discrimination. It happened. But there's more to it than just that.

Again, this is a fascinating quote. This is from an address to Christians throughout the world by 96 ministers in the South, 1863. This is during the war between the states. Listen to this. Most of us have grown up from childhood among the slaves.

All of us have preached to and taught them in the word of life, have administered to them the ordinances of the Christian church, sincerely love 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.

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, however, we may deplore abuses in this as in other relations of mankind is not incompatible with our holy 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.

And the work is not interrupted by agitating fanaticism. They're talking about Northern abolitionists right there. 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. Now, some of you might think, oh, they're just telling lies. 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. It's a nuanced picture. There's a big spectrum here and you can't just focus on one shade. 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 signed this thing. I could go on, a Methodist paper in 1851, after cotton prices had dropped, told masters not to overwork their slaves.

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.

Reverend A .T. Holmes, in a sermon that became published in a Southern Baptist publication entitled 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 those positions reversed.

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. Listen, slave masters, you better regulate yourself and treat your slaves according to biblical standards.

According to the slave narratives, if you do, I believe this is by Fogel. I can't remember where I got this, but someone did a study and they said that 15 of the Georgia slaves who had heard Antebellum White preach recalled admonitions to obedience.

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 Bible was to just compel obedience. Well, yeah, they did preach what the Bible said about it, but you had only 15 of Georgia slaves who had heard Antebellum White preach that.

Really, only 15 Doesn't sound like it was preached maybe as much. And of course, different regions are different, but there's a bigger picture. Again, paint and color, don't broad brush. Now, I, again, have to reiterate this probably like five times.

I think slavery is terrible. I think it's great that it's gone. 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 Christian in that society who, let's say, inherited slaves to function in a way in which he could be a Christian, function in a way in which that the slaves could be educated.

And even if he was going against the law, like Stonewall Jackson was, educated, taught Christianity, thriving. I mean, that is possible, and it did happen in some circumstances. 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.

We have no fault divorce. Half of all marriages end in divorce, right? And there's a lot of abuse in marriage. 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.

That would be wrong of me to broad brush and say, well, marriage is just wrong. The system of marriage is not wrong, the institution. But there are some horrible people out there that have really been abusive in the marriage situation.

Now, I think the slavery situation tends to lend itself more to that, especially because of some of the laws in our country, depending on the region you were in, they were not in conformity with biblical standards, and a lot of the Southern clergymen knew this.

But you could individually, on an individual level, regulate yourself and behave in a way that honors God, just like in our culture with the institution of marriage, even though, I mean, homosexuals are getting married now, but you know what?

You regulate your marriage according to the law of God and function in a way that honors the Lord. And you find, especially in the New Testament, a lot of the passages that deal with marriage and relationships between parents and children, 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 Testament. So very important for us, I think, to get the full picture.

Slavery, Restitution, and the New Testament

What exactly was American slavery? Now let's read some scripture on this. Ephesians 6, five through nine 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, "'not by way of eye service as men pleasers, "'but as slaves of Christ, "'doing the will of God from the heart, "'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 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.'". Now why read that verse? Why talk about what the 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. In fact, Roman slavery, I think you could very well easily make the argument, was more brutal than American slavery was.

And yet this is what Paul says. It didn't have to be brutal if you had a Christian master, right? But it could be. And Paul does not say start a revolution. He doesn't say, you know, we just, there needs to be reparations.

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. He tells slaves to be obedient. To their masters. And he tells masters to treat their slaves in a way that honors the Lord.

This is in a pagan slave system. Now, I'm not gonna go through everything the Bible has to say about this, but I think, you know, that pretty much, that pretty much creates a problem for social justice advocates.

If we're gonna follow the example of Paul and of Christ who even used slaves in his parables, slavery as an example, we're not gonna come to the same conclusions that they're coming to necessarily. Exodus 22, one through four.

I wanna read this because I wanna get into this idea of restitution. Should there be reparations? Let's say slavery is a sin. And because in many cases there was abuse, it was horrible. So what should we do now that we're downstream from this?

Well, Exodus 22, one through four talks about restitution. In fact, the whole chapter pretty much talks about restitution, but we're just gonna read 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.

If the thief is caught while breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there will be no blood guiltiness on his account. But if the son is risen on him, there will be blood guiltiness on his account.

He shall surely make restitution. 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 a sheep, he shall pay double.

Now, why pay five times if the ox is sold or slaughtered? 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. So you're losing much more than just an ox or a sheep.

You're losing food for your family. I wanna focus on verse three though for a minute. What happens if someone steals and he can't make restitution? What happens to him if he owes something and he can't pay it?

It says, then he shall be sold, verse three, for his theft. He shall be sold for his theft. Well, this was part of biblical slavery. If you couldn't make a payment, well, you're gonna become a slave to that person until you can pay it off.

Now, I didn't write that, God wrote that. So you see the problem that we're already coming into if we wanna say that slavery, the existence of it in and of itself is cause for restitution. In fact, God is using slavery as a means by which restitution is paid in this verse.

So what's the solution if you have wronged someone and, well, they're not around to pay it, to receive payment, I guess, from you? Let's read what Numbers 5, five through 10 says. Then the Lord spoke to Moses saying, speak to the sons of Israel.

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. 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.

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 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.

So every man's holy gift shall be his. Whatever any man gives to the priest, it becomes his. Few things to realize about this. You have someone who wants to make restitution. They're still alive. They're still alive while they're doing this.

It's not their great-great-grandchildren who are doing this. 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 Lord. It seems to me, this is something between them and God more than it is between them and the other person.

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 Lord for it. I think it's striking though that you don't find an example of this generationally.

This is someone who's alive who has wronged someone else, and it's on an individual level. They're voluntarily doing this. This isn't government forcing them to do it. They are doing it. Now, let's move on.

Let's look at another verse here, which I think also pertains to this. We're gonna jump back to the New Testament. I put a picture here of a Roman slave market. 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, 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.