A Sermon on the Roots of Slavery

Consider the Words of God:

“Know ye not, that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, his servants ye are to whom ye obey; whether of sin unto death, or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked, that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart that form of doctrine which was delivered you. Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness.” (Romans 6:15-18)

“Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” (II Corinthians 3:17)

It is no surprise that the Bible speaks in many places concerning the issues of slavery and freedom, bondage and liberty, tyranny and justice. While we often think of these issues in a cultural or political manner, it is clear that all of them have to do with very personal conditions, and it is from these that flow the societal consequences.

What I would like to do this morning is to give you the briefest of summaries of history, and redemptive history in particular. Where did slavery and bondage originate, how has it been manifest historically, and what can be done about it in our day?

Let’s start in the beginning. In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, we see the creation of the cosmos, this world, and the special creation of man, who was placed in an environment that God pronounced as being good. There was no disruption of Adam’s relationship to his Creator, nor was there any disruption in the creation itself. However, all of that changed when Adam chose to give heed to the temptations of the serpent, rebelled against the commandment of God, and ate of the prohibited fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This action plunged all of mankind, the sons of Adam, into condemnation, separation from their Creator, and into the realm of sin, death, and bondage. We would do well to note that one of the first reactions manifested was that of attempting to shift the blame. Adam blamed Eve and God (because He gave Eve to him), and Eve blamed the serpent. This “not my fault” attitude continues largely unabated to this day.

The consequences of this rebellion bred more of the same, and by the time of Noah violence and corruption filled the earth. God determined to purge the earth of this corruption by a flood, and commanded Noah to build an ark to save his family, along with a representation of the animals, and anyone who might respond to Noah’s preaching concerning the impending flood. Remember that it took Noah and his family about 100 years to build the ark, and no one responded to his prophetic message, choosing rather to mock the whole idea. The bondage of the inhabitants of the earth was nearly total, manifesting itself in their inability to hear the truth. Only Noah and his family were rescued.

After the flood, the descendants of Noah multiplied and repopulated the earth. However, even among his sons, and grandsons, and great grandsons, the root of this bondage was not cured. We see this in the attempt to build a kingdom of man, Babel, one representing the deification of man that assumed no limits or constraints on man’s abilities, personal or corporate. This appears to be one of the first attempts at formulating what we, in more modern terms, call statism. Because this form of unity was expedited by common language, God chose to confound their languages, something that remains with us to this day. The aspirations to form the ultimate god-state were thwarted, at least temporarily.

God then chose a man of Haran, Abram (later renamed Abraham), to leave his home nation to venture to lands unknown to him. In the process of his wanderings, Abraham became known as a friend of God because of his faith, trust, and obedience to the Lord. God’s promises to Abraham created a whole race of people who were to be bound in a covenant with Him.

Yet the posterity of Abraham found themselves, generations later, in bondage and forced slavery in Egypt. And there appeared no hope of deliverance for quite a long time. The hand of successive Egyptian leaders became heavier and heavier, culminating in extremely hard working requirements and the attempted genocide perpetrated against the Hebrews by Pharaoh. All of the male Hebrew babies were to be killed. It was into these circumstances that Moses was born, divinely rescued, raised by Pharaoh’s own daughter, and called by God to lead the Hebrews out of the bondage they were in. This was accomplished by many miraculous events which, in due course, led to the exodus of the people to the wilderness. Here, by divine revelation to Moses (and by the very hand of God) the people received the Commandments of the Lord, the codification of the covenant between Him and them. This was the birth of the Jewish nation. Yet we see that while the people had been delivered from Egypt, they were not liberated from the bondage of sin, demonstrated by their repeated rebellions against their God, and the unhappy wandering in the wilderness for forty years.

Once the conquest of the land of promise was largely complete under Joshua, the Hebrew tribal states were formulated into a structure of covenantal confederacy. Some have called this a theocratic republic, and this definition also seems satisfactory in terms of describing its structure. God anointed various men (and occasionally women), as judges within the nation, offering counsel and leadership in times of necessity. And these times were quite frequent. When the populace would rebel against God, He would bring (again and again) oppressors against them, allowing them to experience the heel of tyranny. When they were finally brought to the point of repentance, the Lord would deliver them, by various means, from the oppressors. It is from this time period that we have the accounts of Gideon, Sampson, Jephthah, and others. Interestingly, one of our Colonial period preachers, Samuel Langdon, comments on this arrangement in this manner; “The Jewish government, according to the original constitution which was divinely established, if considered merely in a civil view, was a perfect republic. The heads of their tribes, and elders of their cities, were their counselors and judges…Counselors and judges comprehend all the powers of that government, for there was no such thing as legislative authority belonging to it, their complete code of laws being given immediately from God by the hand of Moses.“ He, and others, offered this as a model of what the emerging independent nation should consider and emulate.

But this arrangement, with the Lord as their exclusive King, did not long suit the Jewish populace. Their hearts declined from serving Him, and they demanded a revision of their “divinely appointed government”, insisting on the establishment of a monarchy, just like the pagan nations around them. To this the prophet and judge Samuel responded with resounding rebukes, warning them of the dire consequences of such a move. He warned them that this was an outright rejection of their God, and that the establishment of such a government would lead to a state that would take, and take, and take. The people would not hear any of this and, in chastisement, the Lord granted their wish to be governed by oppressive monarchs. This is not to suggest that all of the ensuing kings were wicked, but merely to recognize that the people demanded to go from a state of responsibility, self-governance, and liberty, to one that radically diminished all three.

The era of the kings of Israel and Judah is one of startling contrasts. While there were a number kings who were upright, courageous, and just men, not one of them sought to return to the constitutional republic they previously enjoyed. This history is dominated by intrigue, divisions, civil wars, fratricide, murders, oppressions, infanticide, and many similar abhorrent acts. The seeds of the divided kingdom were initially sown in the reign of King David, and the root of their national idolatries can be traced back to David’s son, Solomon. These, and many other causes, led to the northern kingdom of Israel being conquered by the Assyrians, and the southern kingdom of Judah being laid waste, in time, by the Babylonians.

However, the Lord protected a remnant of Jews in the captivity population in exile in Babylon. While there, they were kept under a form of divine protective custody, by the Babylonians (oddly enough), while the other peoples of Palestine were essentially wiped out by the Babylonian armies.

After a period of seventy years, those Jews who wished to repopulate the cities of Israel were allowed to do so. The record of this enterprise is recorded in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. While this return was partially successful, the Jewish nation never returned to the prominence that it enjoyed in previous times and by the time of the birth of Jesus, had been conquered by the Roman Empire, and brought into rigorous subjection to it. Within forty years of the death and resurrection of Christ, Jerusalem was utterly destroyed, exactly as He had warned them.

So what is the common thread in all of this? Simply this; no society has ever prospered long when it has rebelled against God. When this occurs, the Scriptures inform us again and again that His wrath is incited by such behavior. Many have advocated that a society can be successfully formed without the acknowledgement of Christ the King and Redeemer. This can not be accomplished for one fundamental reason. There is no other avenue for the forgiveness of sins, neither personal nor collective, except in Him. There is no freedom from the bondage of sin and it’s consequences outside of Christ. The unconverted is not able to free himself from such bondage and, as such, is by nature a slave. A people who are slaves in their beings, in their very nature, cannot be made free by their own efforts, and therefore cannot develop truly free societies. But this is precisely what the power of God accomplishes by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

This is why, in our own nation’s founding, we hear of quotes asserting that our original form of government is only suitable for a religious people. Not a perfect people mind you, but those who know personally of the grace of God, and its manifold implications for those who receive this unfathomable gift. Recall our original texts. Who is freed from sin and bondage? Only those who believe and obey the Gospel. Who brings about true liberty? The Spirit of God Himself. It is obvious from the historic accounts that I have referred to that while a people may be free from external oppressions, they are not by consequence free from being slaves internally. Many have attempted this and utterly failed. If we are to have any hope for the future, we must be made free as only Christ can make us free. There is no political or cultural antidote for the bondage of sin. There is no store you can walk into and obtain a cure. Only the blood atonement of Christ can accomplish this.

So what are the implications of this for us, here today? Here are three that come readily to mind.

First, we need to recognize that we have become an idolatrous nation. Statism cannot arise without this being the case. We are no longer guided by the precepts, laws, and commandments of Almighty God, but rather by the many and varied ideas of atheistic humanists. Our nation no longer officially acknowledges the One, True God, but a pantheon of gods. Just take your pick. Baal, Mammon, Molech, Aphrodites, Jupiter, oh…and Jesus also. They are all there. But there is only one of these gods that you dare not blaspheme. That is the god of the State. The State is supreme and eternal, and will destroy anyone who dares to claim otherwise or defy its claims to deity. Like the vicious leviathan, its appetites are never satiated. It wants all….until all is consumed. We need to repent of all of this and return to the God of the Good News. Such repentance and belief needs to be extended beyond mere assent to these truths, or simple abstractions. Central to the Gospel is the fusion of the ideas of true belief and obedience. They are far from being mutually exclusive. More like being two peas in the same pod, and neither faith nor obedience are passive.

Second, in conjunction with true faith and repentance, we need to reject the assumptions of a culture that endorses theft as a justifiable personal prerogative or public policy. Many have noted that the protection of private property is essential to the well being of any society, and this is true. All sin corrupts, and this sin, theft, has corrupted our society beyond belief, extinguishing any hope for personal security and godly justice. The problem is that many of us do not recognize it for what it is because we are afflicted by theft’s near cousin, covetousness. We have been co-opted into materialism and therefore the modern mechanisms of theft don’t look as bad as they really are unless, of course, it is our own ox that is being gored.

Third, we need desperately to reinstitute godly justice. This begins with formally acknowledging the “right to life, liberty, and private property (the pursuit of happiness). Without formal protection of the first of these, there can be no basis for protection of the others. We must obey God, and protect the least and weakest among us. If we do not, we will all meet with the same indifference that contemporary sentiments express. Remember, the shedding of innocent blood figures big as a provocation of God’s wrath. Do we want to continue to anger Him? I hope not.

We are here today because we all believe we have a vested interest in the reestablishment of liberty. To this end, I hope that you will hear the words of hope interspersed with these grave warnings. We would do well to heed the words of Samuel Davies, Patrick Henry’s pastor, who advised the people of his time to “fly (flee) to Jesus on the wings of faith”. It is only by this means that we can be made free from the bondage of sin and death, and be enabled by the true Spirit of Liberty to work towards real societal liberty. We need to become “servants of righteousness”. And this can only accomplished by the grace and power of God.