Understanding Biblical Slavery and Freedom

Scripture, use it tonight on Deuteronomy chapter 15, beginning with verse 12. Moses is telling the people, as they enter the land of promise, what God wants them to do. And you notice, if you read the Bible, God feels like He has the authority to direct every single part of our lives. All of the things. He just finished talking about how He was directing their use of money. About what they were supposed to give Him, and why they were supposed to do it. And the basic principle behind all of this is, God is the supreme ruler of the world. Everything in the world belongs to Him. Every person in the world belongs to Him. And so, His idea is, if you will listen to Me, and you'll live the way I tell you, your life will work right. Because I know how all this works. And so, if you'll listen to Me, and do what I tell you, everything will work as it should be. And so, because of that, He talks about every detail of a person's life. He talks not only about the religious things, about prayer, and going to the temple. But He talks about relationships between people. He talks about the management of money. He talks about how you deal with circumstances and people around you. And in this situation, He's dealing with... He just finished talking about the money part, and now He's dealing with what we would call labor issues. But labor for the people in this time of the world was very different than it is for us. Because the labor that they managed, what we would call common labor, or ordinary jobs, were not done by people like we have, who go to work for a company and work for them for wages. Much of the labor that was done in the ancient world was done by people who were slaves. Now, when we use the word slaves here, we think about the South, and where you have a master, and you have black people, and they rule them with an iron hand, maybe unkindly. But in this situation, in the ancient world, most of the slaves came about as the result of people being in financial difficulty. And if they were in financial difficulty, they would sell themselves to someone who had business, or someone who had land, and they would sell themselves for a certain amount of money. If they had a debt that was, say, for $10,000, they would say, okay, I will be your slave for $10,000 over the next so many years. And then when the debt was paid off, in terms of their service, they were set free. It's a term for that called manumission. It's a person, a person, man, who's remitted or turned loose. So the slavery that came about was not like we would have it. They would have the room, and the board, and all their needs taken care of. But every year, so much of the money that should have come to them for the debt that they owed would be eliminated until the end of that debt was done, and then the person would be turned loose or set free. I read one time that in the city of Corinth in Jesus' day, that one-third of the city, that whole city, it was a pretty large city, what we might say is a city kind of like Wichita, that one-third of all the people in that city were slaves. And one-third of the people were former slaves or freed people. So in that city, two-thirds of the population either had been slaves before or were slaves currently. That's how prominent the issue of slavery was in the ancient world. And it wasn't looked on as a negative factor. It was looked on much like you would say, I've got a job working for somebody. The only thing, the difference was you were committed to a person, and then that person was committed to take care of you, to feed, clothe, and give you a place to live, and then to eliminate your debt, the debt that you owed. And they might, when you came and said, I sell myself to you, they might go pay your debt, and then you would owe them back how many ever years you would work. Now, the Hebrew people also participated in this kind of economic system. But when they entered the land of promise, what God did was set the rules by which this should operate. They hadn't had very much difficulty with this, because when they were traveling through the country and they were traveling through the wilderness, God brought them manna, everybody got that. God gave them water, everybody got that. And God provided for them. Now, when they come into this place where they're going to be living and working the ground as farmers, he understood that some people would be better at that than others. Some people would have a ground in a place where maybe the rain wasn't as plentiful. So they would end up with economic differences. Some people would prosper, others would not. And some people are better managers than others, and some would manage well and some would not. So you'd end up with people who would be in debt, and because of their debt would have to say, I can't pay my debts and so I want to sell myself to you as a slave. It's with this understanding that the issue that we're going to read in just a moment is brought together. Now, I want you to hold Deuteronomy 15 and turn back to Exodus chapter 21. When the people left Egypt and they came to Mount Sinai where God gave them the Ten Commandments, the very next thing that he did after he talked about not having any idols was to address this issue of human slavery. So chapter 21 of the book of Exodus, verse 2, begins what Moses told the people God wanted them to do. If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. Let me stop and talk about this word Hebrew for a minute. If you were to ask anybody what the word Hebrew means, they would be apt to say it stands for a race of people. But in the ancient world, all of the Semitic languages, that is, the languages of the Palestine area and what we would call the Middle East countries, they had kind of a common language. Hebrew was similar to many of these other languages, what they call Semitic languages. And in the Semitic languages, there was a word that is used through much of this material, and it's not very clear exactly what the word stood for, but it was this word for Hebrew. And one of the ways the word was spelled was, let's see if I can find it here, just a minute, I lose my place. One of the ways the word was spelled was H-A-B-I-R-U. It would be Hebrew, Hebrew, Hebrew. And the word meant to pass by or to trespass. Another way you could have this word was H-A-P-I-R-U, happy rue. And the reason there's not certainty about it is that the B's in some of the Semitic languages and the P in the Semitic languages were used by a small curve like a comma. And they weren't very clear about how they wrote these words. So the second word means dirt or clay. And it's not clear what these words were in the beginning, but they found in all these Semitic languages that these words Hebrew or happy rue were constantly used to describe people who were lower class citizens. Sometimes they were criminals. Sometimes they were just poor people. Sometimes they were foreigners who came to live in the land. Almost all of the Semitic languages use these words. Now when you come to the Bible and you were to look in a concordance to try to see this word Hebrew, how it's found in the Scriptures, there are 72 times that it's found in the Scriptures when it's a reference to somebody, a person. And it's found six times in reference to the language, the Hebrew language, which is said when you speak in Hebrew. But in all of these instances, in the Old Testament primarily, and the New Testament is used differently and only a few times in the New Testament it's used. Paul uses that I'm a Hebrew of the Hebrews. But in the Old Testament, it's a reference to these people who were what we would call the children of Israel. And it's a reference to them as a lower class of people. Sort of what we might say, you see sometimes around here, white trash. People use that phrase to describe people who are lower class or lower economic social class. I went by somebody's house one time. They had a pickup out there and on the back of the window of the pickup it said, oil field trash. You know whenever people use that language what they're talking about. They're talking about a class of people. It appears as if the other people around the Israelites called them Hebrews because they were foreigners in Egypt for all that long period of time. And all the references in the description of the people in Israel, they're called Hebrews. And when they came to settle a land traveling through the wilderness, they were called Hebrews. They were foreigners traveling in different places. When David was fighting the Philistines, they called David a Hebrew because he was a bandit. He gathered people around him and he robbed the other countries around him and brought the money back to his soldiers. He had a group of soldiers that were kind of like Quantrell's Raiders really in the Bible. So he was a bandit. So the word Hebrew in the Bible is a reference to the people of Israel as an insult. A lower class of people who are foreigners or travelers or people who don't have a home. And whenever God uses this word, He adopts it from the language they have as an identification for His people. The word Baptist, for example, is one word that's kind of like this. In the beginning, Baptists were called Baptists because they baptized people by immersion who had already been sprinkled in another church, Catholic church or other churches. And so their enemies called them re-baptizers. Anna, which means again, baptized again. And it was a way of insulting the Baptist people. But as time went on, Baptists adopted it not as an insult for themselves, but as a word of identification. This is who we are. The same things appear to be happening in the Bible about this word Hebrew. And when you read it in the Bible, if you'll notice the context, it's not always a place in which the reference to the people of Israel is a compliment. Now here, he's talking about when you buy a Hebrew servant. Now, if you look at this and think of it in this context, when you buy a poor man as a servant, one of your fellow brothers who's in the poor class, this lower class, when you buy him as a servant, he's to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free without paying anything. If he comes alone, he is to go free alone. But if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master and only the man go free. But if the servant declares, I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free, then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost, pierce his ear with an awl, and he shall be a servant for life. Now, this is a description about what God gave right at the time of giving of the Ten Commandments with regard to Hebrew servants. Some time later now, people of Israel wandered in the wilderness forty years. Now they're getting ready to enter the Promised Land. Moses now gives them instructions again. But notice the differences that appear in his instructions. If a Hebrew man, he uses the same word, if a Hebrew man or a woman is sold to you and serves six years, in the seventh year you must let him go free. All of a sudden, as they're getting ready to settle in this land, God extends to the women the same right as men for freedom. This was not true in all the other countries around the Hebrew people. For the women had a standard and a situation much lower than men did. You can look at the Middle East now and see the status of women in some of the countries. I read an article the other day about a woman in Pakistan who was a doctor and when the Taliban took over, she's not able to go out of her house. She's not able to work. She's a doctor, but she stays in her house, takes care of her kids, and has no right to work in public. The Hebrew people grew up in the same culture that is now prominent in the Middle East. But from the very beginning, God has made clear that the status and standing of women are of equal concern to him as is the standard and concern for men. I think this is important in our culture to understand that God does not see this gender difference in terms of classes of people one above the other. Instead, he sees an equality with them. So if a man gets to the place where he owes a debt and has to sell himself into slavery, he can work that out, and the same is true for a woman. She would be very vulnerable because there would be no one to protect her, and that's the story of Ruth. When you read that whole book, that's about a woman who was sold into slavery, offered herself to be sold into slavery. So the same conditions are to work. She works six years, and on the seventh year, you must let them go free. Now, the word that's used here for free is the word to dismiss or remiss something. It's the same word that's used in the Hebrew language for forgiveness. You are to release. It's the same word that's used whenever they take the ground and they don't plow it on the seventh year. You're to release the land. You're to release the slaves, to turn loose of them, to forgive them. You are to turn loose of these people after the seventh year of their service to you. What he does is sets for the Hebrew people a standard of compassion. If you're in a situation where you have no money and you go to someone that has money, they have control over your life. And if you have no money when you come to them and you work for them for six years, you don't gain any money because all that you have over and above your room and board goes to pay off your debt. They could extend that on and on and on and on. I remember going when I was in Alabama one time and they were talking about the sharecroppers there. And someone told me that the sharecroppers that work for the farmers, they raise a lot of raised tobacco, never could ever pay their debts off because they would start working. And then when a child was born, the guy on the farm would pay for the hospital bill and he'd write that down. And a lot of times they'd have if they had a big place, they would have a store where you could go in and get stuff and put it on your bill. And said many of those workers worked years and years and years and never got out of debt. And they couldn't leave because they owed money. And if they left, they'd turn their name into the police and they'd get them and bring them back because they still owed money to them. They were perpetually controlled by the person who had the money. What God does here is to say to the people with the money, you cannot take somebody and make them a perpetual servant or slave of yours because they are my children too. There's an equality here that is required. So you can get that person if they owe you money and you can say, okay, I'll pay off your debt or I'll dismiss your debt and you can work for me. So they work for the six years. At the end of the six years, they are to be set free. The debts are to be settled. You can no longer control their life. The next section shows us something about God's concern for people. Verse 13, And when you release him, do not send him away empty-handed. Supply him liberally. That word, that phrase, supply him liberally, is really the word for a necklace. It's a very literal word. Physically, a necklace would be tied around someone on which they would hang all of these things that he said. You must put a necklace around him or supply him liberally from your flock so you'd have sheep on it or goats on it. You'd take from the threshing floor so you'd hang grain on it. So he'd have grain to feed his goats or his sheep or his animals. You must take from the wine press so that he would have something to drink as well as the food from the grain and food from the animal. And it must be given to him generously or liberally. Give to him as the Lord your God has blessed you. Now, when God gives us instructions to do things, like for the man that has taken this person in, who owed him money and says, okay, you can work for me this length of time and at the end of this period, six years, I'll forgive your debt. You must then turn around and give him something to start his life over with. If you take a man who owed you money and he couldn't pay it, and he worked for you for six years and you said, okay, now your debt's paid, get out. He would leave with nothing. He would be no better off than when he came because he would still be in a situation of absolute poverty with no way to care for himself. So after he's worked for six years, you are required as the owner and the person who owns the ground or the business, whatever it is, whenever this time is over to give this person enough to be able to start their life again. So he has animals that he can take out to feed. They will reproduce other animals. You'll have some feed to be able to feed them and to feed yourself. You'll ever have wine which you can use for the drink that was generous for them. And the wine they used in those days is not like we have now. Normally, they would put the grape juice in these big bladders that were made out of animals' stomachs, and they would tie the tops and things off so that they would stay in them. They would be animals' hides, and they would let them ferment. But they didn't add sugar to them to increase the alcoholic content. They just preserved them that way so that it didn't spoil. The water in the wells in that part of the world was not always good. So the wine, when they call it wine, was not high-alcoholic-content wine. If it was high-alcoholic-content, the phrase was strong liquor, strong drink. But the wine was generally just a mild kind of wine. It would be natural grape juice that had fermented some. So you're to give them something to be able to drink, as well as all these other things they would have. Now, why would I, as the owner, when you owed me a debt and you worked off this debt that you'd agreed, why would I give you anything? There's no economic benefit to the owner to give you anything, because you're not going to work for him anymore. And if you're a normal person and somebody comes to work for you and the final day works over, you don't give them a big bonus because they're leaving you. The Lord says it's not because of their work that you do this. It's because I want you to remember this. Give to him as the Lord has blessed you. I want you to remember that everything in this world belongs to me, and all that you have is yours. Now, the fact is that if a person, when he came into the land of promise, everyone received their own land. Everybody had the same. But here's a guy who some reason or other, a woman some reason or other, didn't work, things didn't work out well for them. They came out of big debt, now they have to work that off. And he could say, well, they're just not as good a manager. So, you know, if that's their problem, they have to work that out. He said, I want you to remember that your wealth is not the result of your hard work or your shrewdness, but it's the result of my gift to you. So it's not yours to hold on to. He'd already talked about that with regard to tithing. The money you have, and the land you have, and the cattle you have, and all things you have, I've given them to you. And I've been generous to you. So what I expect of you is to be generous with this person who's worked for you. So he requires of the owner of the slave to give back to this person because they have been blessed by God. Second reason, verse 15, Remember, you were slaves in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you. He came and bought you back. That's why I give you the command today. I'm giving you this command because I want you to remember that one time your forefathers were slaves in Egypt. They had nothing. They owned no land. They owned no cattle. They owned no houses. They had nothing. I want you to remember that in that instance, I took care of you. Now, in the story in the Bible about the Exodus, if I can remember exactly where that is, whenever the people of Israel were getting ready to leave and to come to the land of promise, all the plagues that took place came to them. And whenever the last plague came and they were getting ready to leave, the Lord Moses told them that they were to go to their friends and neighbors around them and to ask their neighbors for gifts of money, of cloth, of wealth. And this is what the Lord did. He made sure that they would have these things as they left. Let's see if I can find where that is in Exodus. 1235. This is what happened. And the Egyptians, during the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, Up, leave my people, you and the Israelites, go to worship the Lord as you requested. Take your flocks and herds, as you have said, and go. And also bless me. The Egyptians urged the people to hurry and leave the country, for otherwise, they said, we will all die. So the people took their dough before the east was added and carried it on their shoulders, kneading troughs wrapped in cloth. The Israelites did as Moses instructed and asked the Egyptians for articles of silver, gold, and for clothing. The Lord had made the Egyptians favorably disposed to the people, and they gave them what they asked for. So they plundered the Egyptians. For the long period of slavery that the Israelites had serviced, God gave them from the wealth of the Egyptians to the poverty of these people who were slaves, the gifts that they were able to carry out. Now, because God did this for your forefathers, this is to be a symbol for you from now on. Anytime a poor person works for you as a slave, you should do at least what the Egyptians did for you. You must give them what they need to start life over again. We have an obligation as followers of Christ to treat people with fairness and to be generous with them. What God is saying is the generosity I am requiring of you. It's not a matter of your human nature. I'm requiring you to be generous with each other. Then verse 16 he says, But if the servant says to you, I do not want to leave you because he loves you and your family and is well off with you. See, this wasn't a coercive situation. It was agreed on both by the man and by the owner that he would be a slave. Then you take an awl. You know what an awl is? It's like a screwdriver with a point on it. And you go to the doorpost, you're up against the door, and you drive that through there and it makes a hole in your ear. A lot of people do that now because they want to earn earrings. But then it was a sign of ownership by that person. Usually, if they had the thing in your ear, it would have an indication on it. I don't know what they did, but there was some kind of an indication on it that let you see when you looked at somebody, when you walked into a house and there were slaves there, who were there because of their debt, and there were slaves there because of their choice. The mark in their ear let you know that these people were there by choice. And the others were there by debt. So it was sort of a standing. A free person who was still working in the household was not there because of their own financial need, but because they found themselves in a situation they wanted to be in. You do the same for either a man or a woman, so there's no taking advantage of her. Now, it would be simple for someone to think, well, I don't want to give away all my money to these people who are slaves. This is a fair deal. I paid off their debt. Verse 18, Do not consider it a hardship to set your purse servant free because of your service to you. The six years has been worth twice as much as if of a hired hand. And the Lord your God will bless you in everything you do. What God promises, this is really hard for us to get sometimes because the promise is not seen. What he promises is, if you are generous and if you treat these people fair, then I make a promise to you. I will bless you financially. Almost all the financial instructions that God gives us are costly. He asked us to give money to the temple. He asked to give a tithe. He asked them to give all kinds of different tithes and sacrifices. And now he's asking, if somebody works for you for six years and you let set them free, then you are to make generous with them. And I promise you that if you do what I tell you, I will bless you. I will take care of your material needs. The issue at stake here was making sure that you did what God asked you to do. And God says, I will make sure that I take care of you. What this whole story shows is how God intends to provide for his people. One of the covenant promises is, I will provide for you. I'll provide for the people who are good at business and management. And I'll provide for those that are not. I'll provide for those that have good success and their crops are successful and their rain comes at the right time. And I will provide for those who don't have that. Why? Because you're my children. And I'll make sure that even if you get into difficult circumstances, you don't have a lifelong history of poverty. For every seventh year, all the debts will be released and everyone will start over again exactly free. Now, it wasn't that every seventh year all these were done. It was whenever you started, seventh years later after that, your freedom took place. Your neighbor might have a year or so behind you, but every seventh year you had an opportunity to know that there was never a time in which you were hopelessly in debt. This is God's means whereby he fulfilled the promise. I will provide for you. And as my people, I will provide. Now, his provision had to do with not only making people able to have something, but also making sure that those who had nothing had something to start out with again. So hopelessness was never a part of the Hebrew nation's experience. Did they keep up with this? No, they didn't. For the people that had money were like all people around the world who had money. They were greedy. Why should I give my money away? And the Lord constantly, through the people of Israel's history, kept reminding them that their failure to do these things ultimately led to the destruction of the entire nation. God's plans, even though he laid them out clearly, were not followed. And the Hebrew people suffered for that. It ought to be a lesson to us that even though God's instructions to us are clear as to how we should do things and how we should treat people, if we don't do these things and we're not generous, as God tells us, we don't get rich, we become enemies of God. And God wants us to do this not because he simply is weak-hearted, because he's made a promise to all of his people. Now, this was not a promise that was given to them for everyone in the world. If you were not a part of the people of Israel and you became a slave, you didn't get free every seven years. You didn't get these going-away gifts. This was for the people who belonged to God. We are responsible as followers of the Lord to care for each other in a way that we're not responsible for the rest of the world. There's a reason for that. It's because we are under the Lord's authority. Israel was under the Lord's authority. The Syrian people were not under that. The Babylonian people were not under that. For when you enter the kingdom of God, you suddenly have a new set of responsibilities. Why? Because the Lord guides us. That's why it's so important for you and for me to make sure we commit ourselves to serve God. Because there's a great deal of promises made to us as the children of God that are not made to the rest of the world. There's obligations, but there's also the promise. I will guide you, provide for you, protect you, and give you a life of purpose, meaning, and value. Let's pray. We're thankful, Father, for what you've done to provide for us. Teach us to live according to the instructions you've given. Teach us to trust you enough to believe that if we do that, you will take care of us. As you've been generous to us, teach us to be generous with our brothers and sisters and you. In the name of Christ, we ask it. Amen.