To Be a Slave

This morning I would like to focus once again on Romans 6:16, so before we begin let’s remind ourselves of precisely what the apostle Paul says:

Romans 6:16 LSB

Do you not know that when you go on presenting yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?

And, I trust you will remember that this is how Paul has begin to answer the charge laid in verse 15, that his doctrine of justification by faith alone in the finished work of Christ alone would lead people to live a sinful life, this time asking Romans 6:15 “What then? Shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace?” And once again, the immediate response is, “May it never be!”

Now, you may ask yourself, “didn’t we cover this verse last time?” And we did begin looking at it, but in truth, this verse has far more depth to rightly understanding it than the introduction we gave the verse last time; we have by no means sufficiently grasped the full depth of its meaning.

While introducing Paul’s response by considering that a person is never truly the master of their own fate, we went back to the last half of Romans 5; that a person is either in Adam, or instead they are in Christ Jesus; that there is no middle ground. And we discussed the matter that the master determines the service – the master determines the sort of service, and indeed the characteristic of the master will determine the characteristic nature of the service his slaves perform. To use an example from our own nation’s history, the master who owns a cotton farm is likely to have his slave work the cotton field which he owns, rather than to work in a shipyard which he doesn’t.

The Nature of a Slave

But modern society, both in our own country and others, shuns and hates this idea of slavery. And it’s true, many times slavery does work itself out in particularly horrid and wretched manners. But understanding the nature of a slave is critical to understanding what it means to be a Christian.

So although our cultures with increasing fervor seek to eradicate historical realities from our collective memory, it’s important that we understand what is and what is not meant by the apostle in this critically important portion of Scripture.

Now, I know that this focus upon the nature of a slave is not particularly popular, many churches follow right along with the culture in declaring, “Oh, no, you can’t say that! Slavery is entirely and wholly wrong, there is nothing about it that is good and wholesome, we’ve totally eliminated and outlawed slavery!”

And so, with such a negative connotation, you see people thinking in terms of servant, when in reality the Bible is talking about real and true slavery many times. Take, for example, the word “bond-servant”, which many translations will use instead of slave. Why do they do so? Because in our modern world we don’t like the idea of slavery, it makes us uncomfortable.

What we’re talking about here in this last half of the 6th chapter of Romans is specifically slavery. Now, if you use the King James, you may see the word servant here in verse 16, but that translation is nearly criminal, Paul this is talking specifically about slavery, δούλος, and it’s important that we understand the very real and significant difference between the two.

As a language, Greek has plenty of words for servant, and if the apostle meant that we are simply to be a servant here he clearly could use one of these terms; διάκονος meaning servant and minister is one; θεράπων with its sense of an attendant is another; λειτουργός is yet another, talking about a servant of God in ministering to people in their need; παιδάριον talking about a serving boy; or οἰκέτης regarding a house-servant.

But the fact is, none of these words are what Paul uses here. The word Paul uses is specifically δοῦλος – slave. And it is worth our time to truly properly understand this word! In Gerhard Kittel’s formidable 10-volume Greek lexicon translated into English as the “Theological Dictionary of the New Testament”, he and contributor Karl Rengstorf write, “All the words in this group serve either to describe the status of a slave or an attitude corresponding to that of a slave… the meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfluous to give examples of the individual terms or to trace the history of the group [of words]”. In other words, no study of history is necessary, the stress and emphasis is the slave’s dependence on his lord.

Now, a slave and a servant do have some similarities. They both have a master, they both strive to please that master. But the servant renders his service in a free and voluntary fashion; he chooses when it is he will start, he chooses who he will work for, he can even choose to end that service at any time. Not stopping there, a servant is not commanded to do a particular task, rather he is either asked to do that task, or the task is agreed to as part of the service he willingly enters into. At times, he can even refuse to do the work he is asked to do without fear of punishment. Going yet further, the servant earns a compensation for the service he performs.

And so it would not be a stretch that, if Paul had used the idea of a servant here in the middle of Romans, the many people who emphasize the popular idea of man having a free will so as to be able to freely chose God or chose to ignore God, such as what Jacobus Arminius taught, would be right to think that we could enter into and then later leave a state of salvation.

But that’s not what Paul is saying to his Roman audience. Kittel, again, writes that the distinction for the δοῦλος from every form of servant is that in the δοῦλος “we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner.”

In other words, all of the things which man in our self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-exalting boastful pride of life which demands in its insistence of approaching God in the style of the servant, is instead faced with something far different.

Unlike the servant we described earlier, the slave does not voluntarily hire himself out, but is subject to his master’s will which is alien and outside of himself; the slave does not chose the time or type of service; the slave is not asked, but commanded; the slave has no possibility of evading the tasks laid upon him, he has no personal choice in the matter. Not only does the slave perform the will another, but the slave also refrain from what the master prohibits; he is bound to his master’s will and is unable to end his service to his master, and cannot escape without severe punishment; he is his master’s slave until he dies or is sold to another.

And so it is with this perspective in our minds that we can now realize how the saints in Rome would have understood what Paul is saying in this verse when he declares that every person “presents themselves to someone as slaves for obedience.”

At this time, although there are some differences of nuance between the Greco-Roman and Jewish regional approaches to slavery, both groups held large numbers of slaves; in fact depending on the source you use, at the time Paul wrote the letter to the Romans anywhere from 1 in 5 people to 1 in 3 people were slaves throughout the Roman Empire, coming from every ethnic group and culture.

In other words, the believers in Rome – and in truth, believers throughout the Empire – in a real and visceral manner understood what Paul was writing in a way that we, so removed from this kind of slavery, can find hard to relate to.

But it is vital that we understand precisely what Paul means, and that it is not the lesser, anemic notion of a servant that he is talking about, but instead a slave is firmly fixed in his mind.

In other words, if our understanding of the term which Paul hinges his argument on is not right, we will most certainly have a definingly defective understanding of the whole thrust of his message, resulting in a defective and deficient form of christianity itself. And indeed, the great numbers of people claiming to be Christians while not only living in open, sinful disobedience to the clear meaning of God’s word, but reveling in that fact, bears out that this is either misunderstood at best, or more likely flat out rejected by them.

It is therefore essential that we have an accurate understanding of what is meant by δοῦλος, especially as we work through this last half of Romans 6.

So now on that basis, let’s turn our attention once again to Romans 6:16,

Romans 6:16 LSB

Do you not know that when you go on presenting yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?

Now the most important thing to realize here, is that Paul is not giving us instruction or a command in this verse. In fact, he’s not even describing what is true of us in the manner we saw in verses 3 through 10. No, instead what Paul is doing here is providing us the principle which will help us understand why it is that the idea of us sinning because we are not under law but under grace is so very abhorrent.

When we read Paul saying “do you not know”, just as he did earlier in verse 3, he is giving us the most succinct and clear answer to very real, and very necessary question.

What Paul is explaining to us, is that the real question we ought to be asking is not really “shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace”. No, that’s a surface-level, skin-deep question. What the real question we should ask instead, is “who is your master?” And we ought to think of it in that term, because as we said last time “the master determines the service.”

Now I want us to consider for a moment just who that master is, what is his nature, his authority? In Greek, the word corresponding to the idea of who owns or is master over a slave is a word you may be familiar with, κύριος. Often translated as “lord”, but also translated as “master”, this is the one who has the absolute right of ownership over a δοῦλος, a slave. And there can only be one owner of a slave – no joint ownership, here.

This is a distinct difference between a slave and a servant - a servant hires himself out, and he can apportion his day so that he has a day job and a night job without any issue. Not so with the slave – the slave is wholly and totally owned, all of his time and all of his efforts are the property of his master.

Perhaps Jesus’ statement in Matthew would help us to understand the exclusivity of this ownership of a master or a lord:

Matthew 6:24 LSB

“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Now, I get why this is translated “serve”, on account of the Greek not working well to our English-speaking minds, but the pertinent phrase there is “κυρίοις δουλεύειν”, or “no one is able 2 lords to do the slaving of.” Why? Because you can only be owned by one owner, and since that ownership is totalitarian, meaning that it encompasses the whole of you and leaves nothing out, such that there’s nothing left available for any other potential owner. And so, I can either be slaving for one master or another, but to say I am a slave of both simply doesn’t work, I can only obey one of them.

So when we come back to this first part of the statement in Romans 6, we are now beginning to truly comprehend what Paul is speaking of when we read:

Romans 6:16 LSB

Do you not know that when you go on presenting yourselves to someone as slaves for obedience, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin leading to death, or of obedience leading to righteousness?

He’s saying the same thing as Christ – the one you obey is the one you are really the slave of, you can’t be a slave to 2 masters, it’s either the one or the other.

And like Jesus’ statement in Matthew, it ought to be immediately apparent to us that the masters are diametrically opposed to one another; their purposes and their means and their results not only don’t coincide with each other, but indeed are facing completely opposite directions!

It’s not just a matter of what we claim, Paul is saying, but rather a question of which master we obey that matters. We are either a slave of sin on the one hand, or a slave of obedience on the other. Just like you can’t hop in a car and travel both east and west at the same time, neither can you follow both masters at the same time.

And these Masters, these Lords, are very specific here!

“Sin” as slave-owner is the “Mark-Misser”, if you will; it is failure; it may or may not know the mark necessary for obedience, but at any rate whether it knows the mark or not it does not do obedience.

So it is right and appropriate then that the opposing slave-owner is Obedience, now hitting the Mark, meeting the requirement. Doing not only what God commands, but also what He desires us to do.

So right from the beginning, we realize that these two slave-owners are at complete odds with each other, antithetical to each other; to please one, means to displease the other, to despise one is to be devoted to the other, to love one is to hate the other! Sin and Obedience are bitterly and violently opposed to each other; so for me to obey one of them is to do violence to the other!

So when I present myself as a slave to sin, doing the things that Sin approves of; not simply doing things which displease God, but even more doing things which fail to please God, I am revealing to all concerned that I am Sin’s slave. Sin is commanding me, and I am obedient to it. I remain in Adam, I remain under the realm and rule of Sin. And because I remain under the realm and rule of sin, death being the condemnation for sin will certainly come to me through that sin.

But on the other hand, when I present myself as a slave to obedience, I become careful with my aim, I become focused on what my master desires of me. I take time to become acquainted with the mark He has set for me to do, and by His will, I am indeed able to do His will, I can meet the mark He has laid before me. You will note, that though you might expect that he talks of faith here, he speaks instead of obedience. And the reason is quite simple, James 2:17 tells us “Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead by itself.” A faith which truly saves yields a life of obedience, otherwise it is no faith at all!

Thus, we have before us two mutually exclusive, entirely contradictory masters. One leading to death, the other leads to righteousness, and their very paths are in entirely opposing directions, they will never converge.

Paul’s object is to show us just how ridiculous and monstrous a thing it is to say that we can sin because we are not under law but under grace. To say such a thing, he is telling us, displays for everyone to see that you do not understand the nature of Salvation, and indeed you very likely are not saved if you think you can freely sin because you are now under grace.

To be a slave of one, to do what pleases Sin or else doing what pleases Obedience unto righteousness, excludes being a slave of the other and doing what pleases the other. You cannot be a slave to one yet obey the other.

Very well, Lord willing we will go on next time as Paul works out for us just how this great principle he has given is worked out.

Let us pray!