Slaves And Masters (Ephesians 6:5-9)

Introduction

A. Preliminaries

Welcome: Please turn with me in your Bibles to the sixth Chapter of Ephesians, beginning in verse 5. Our text this morning will be verses 5 thru 9 of Chapter 6, which you can find at the top of page 1163 in the navy blue Bibles found in your pews.

Ephesians 6:5–9 (ESV)

Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ, not by the way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man, knowing that whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord, whether he is a bondservant or is free. Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

B. Review

Paul has been applying the theology of Chapters 1 thru 3 and in this portion of the letter, and I would argue, especially commands given near the end of chapter 4 about putting the old man to death and seeing the new man raised to life.

Beginning near the end of Chapter 5, the Apostle Paul is applying obedience to Christ to particular vocations in his world. We have already covered husbands and wives, as well as children and parents.

Today in verse 5 we arrive at Paul’s application of service to Christ to the vocations of slave and master, or in the ESV, bondservants and masters.

And this is a challenging text for us to consider. Mostly because in our context where within our historical moment, in the United States, slavery as a formalized and government sanctioned economic institution is a thing of the past, and furthermore, putting it in our past came about at the cost of not a small amount of bloodshed, upheaval, and turmoil.

And so it is that Americans tend to be especially bad at talking about passages like this. For that reason, I am going to take two Sundays with it. This Sunday will be mostly an overview of some basic principles that I think we should get some clarity on, and then next Sunday we will investigate some of the more specific commands here and their ongoing application to us today.

So we have a hard text before us. What do we do?

Well, as I have said before, my dream for you Grace Presbyterian Church is that you are firmly committed to the proposition of No Problem Passages.

I’m not saying that no part of the Scripture is difficult for you to understand. That will always be part of our labor together—difficulties and insufficencies in our understanding.

But I want us—as a body—to be absolutely committed to the conviction that we have no problem passages in our Bible. No passages that make us nervous or that cause us to hide, or that trigger some kind of automatic impulse in us to long to find a commentary that will force that verse to say the thing it is not saying, so that then we can agree with it.

So in that situation (the situation of a challenging text) the strategy is decide what the text can’t mean. Find somebody who says that it means something we like. And then give that interpretation our strong Amen.

Rather, I want us to be a body that says “Whatever this text means, whatever the Holy Spirit meant when he gave it. We will learn that together, and we will give that our glad ‘Amen!’ no matter what it costs us.” So we start with the Amen, now let’s get to work understanding it.

So if we are committed to the proposition that we have no problem passages, what do we do when certain passages seem to present some problems?

The text before us this morning is—I will admit—vulnerable to misunderstanding. There’s even a whole explanatory note about it in the preface to your ESV. If you look in the pages of your pew Bible in the preface, before you get to Genesis 1, a few paragraphs are given to some of the challenges of translating the Greek and Hebrew words for slave and bondservant.

The ESV’s general approach has been that if—as best they can tell—the term referred to someone who had no hope of buying or otherwise achieving his own freedom some day, they went with slave. And if it referred to a person who had a reasonable hope of buying or otherwise getting his own freedom someday, they went with bondservant. And I think that’s a wise choice. Basically in short, if the situation was a lifelong or generations long situation with zero hope of escape or getting out, then it’s slave. And if the situation had some hope of getting out, then it was servant or bond-servant.

It is for that reason that our text this morning speaks to Bondservants. Because in the Roman empire, most slavery was to pay off a debt. It was not lifelong. It certainly was not race-based. Bond servants were vulnerable to mistreatment (true enough) but they could not be murdered at will by their masters. They did not dress any different, so it would be very hard to identify a slave by appearance in public.

But when we read of the account of Israel in Egypt, in the accounts in Exodus, they are called slaves.

So when Paul is addressing these Ephesian Christians here in Chapter 6, under Roman law, most slaves or bond-servants could reasonably hope to buy their own freedom within a decade. So the ESV translates it as bond-servants.

But when the Egyptians put the Israelites to hard labor with no hope, we read,

Exodus 1:13 (ESV)

So they ruthlessly made the people of Israel work as slaves

because as far as Pharaoh was concerned, that is exactly what they were.

And so this morning, you will hear me use the term bond-servant, but please don’t be alarmed if you hear me use the term bond-servant and slave somewhat interchangeably.

Now I will say up front, I will probably not say everything that everyone in here wants me to say this morning. Some of that is time, and some of that is that in preaching, I am preaching to you, Grace Presbyterian Church, not to the least charitable person I can imagine. If this sermon provokes you and I to further conversation, so much the better.

As I said earlier, we will deal with some of the obstacles to understanding the text this morning and then next week we will unpack the specific commands and instructions.

C. Three Points

1. The Hard Call to Obedience 2. The Patience of God 3. The Lordship of Christ

I. The Hard Call To Obedience

So, let us begin with verse 5

Ephesians 6:5 (ESV)

Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ,

This is a hard call to obedience.

Paul says to these bond-servants that they must obey their masters with sincerity. With their hearts. As they would Christ.

Why does Paul bring this up? Because slavery was very common in the Roman empire. And Christianity initially caused trouble for the social order in ways that are not always obvious to us.

In this newly flourishing Christian Church, the good news of the Gospel is—to quote one hymn-writer “Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease.”

Or, to use Paul’s words in Galatians:

Galatians 3:28 (ESV)

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Now when you start preaching like that and saying that slave and master are brothers at the Lord’s Table, that’s going to start shaking some things up.

Paul is teaching that under the cross, Bond-servants are now to be treated as full members of the body. No difference between slave or free. The distinction in the church has vanished. However, the distinction certainly remained in the world.

So what do you do with that? What’s the answer in the meanwhile? Well Paul’s answer to bond-servants is not an answer we tend to like very much. He gives them a hard call to continued ongoing obedience in the present.

Ephesians 6:5 (ESV)

Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ,

As much as we might not like it, we must note that immediate abolition at any cost was not Paul’s answer. Paul does not say two things that Modern Americans really want him to say at this juncture, and that is he does not say “Bondservants, rise up and start a revolution.” And he does not say “Masters, you are in sin simply for being masters.”

No, instead he says

Ephesians 6:9 (ESV)

Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

So Masters might be masters, but the masters have a Master, too.

And furthermore, to go back to the Bond-Servant, Paul does not teach that if you find yourself a bond-servant, within this man-made institution, that you are under orders to remain there forever if you can legally leave it.

In 1 Cor 7, he says

1 Corinthians 7:21–23 (ESV)

Were you a bondservant when called? Do not be concerned about it. (But if you can gain your freedom, avail yourself of the opportunity.) For he who was called in the Lord as a bondservant is a freedman of the Lord. Likewise he who was free when called is a bondservant of Christ. You were bought with a price; do not become bondservants of men.

Now notice what Paul is doing here. In Galatians, he says slaves and masters are brothers. In Ephesians, he says that they both have a master in Christ. In Corinthians he says “If you can get out, get out, and if you are out, stay out.” That’s critical.

What’s going on here?

Well. If the Gospel of Jesus Christ starts moving through a culture, and it starts re-forming people, and it starts reforming marriages, and it starts reforming families and parenting and economics and politics, and the people of God start combining these passages and living in light of all them, you are inevitably moving toward a day where slavery is but a memory.

What I am telling you is that it is inescapable that Paul is putting forward principles here that would, over time, be deeply subversive to the whole institution.

You can’t call slaves and masters “brothers” and not expect that to do some things to the whole institution.

And, to fast forward a few thousand years, while it is true that many Christians sinfully participated in the sinful institution of chattel slavery, it is also the case that Christians were the ones starting the abolition societies and calling for all of it to end. It was a Christian by the name of William Wilberforce who saw to it that the slave trade in Britain ended without anyone firing a single shot.

But what we do not see in this text is a call to outright revolution or revolt. Because God is far more patient than we are, even as he hates injustice and oppression far more than we do.

II. The Patience of God

One of the greatest things about God is his patience.

2 Peter 3:9 (ESV)

The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.

Is that not the patience of God for which you are very thankful? That he does not wipe you out where you stand and send you to judgement? We deserve no less, yet God is patient.

Patience is one of the most glorious things about God.

And yet, patience is one of the most challenging things about God. And even in our flesh we might say, one of the most frustrating things about God.

Imagine being an Israelite in Egypt, and hearing about the words that were spoken to Father Abraham long ago. You’re in Egypt, a Pharaoh has come up who has forgotten about Joseph and doesn’t care about the history. And he puts all the Israelites to harsh labor. And then you—one of those Israelites—remember that promise given to Abraham.

Genesis 15:13–16 (ESV)

Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there, and they will be afflicted for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. And they shall come back here in the fourth generation, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.”

Imagine knowing that—having that information—and being on the front end of that four hundred years. Knowing that you’re looking at about 10 more generations of oppression in Egypt. And saying “Lord, could you not be a little less patient with the Amorites?”

One of the most glorious things about God is his patience. And yet...

Patience is one of the most challenging things about God.

The Ancient of Days who does not grow weary and who is weaving all history together to a perfect end…he can afford to be patient, and he works over the long arc of generations and the long arc of history.

So why does Paul give directions to servants and masters rather than telling them to dissolve the whole institution overnight? Why does Paul give instructions rather than tactics?

What I’ve tried to help you see so far, dear saints, is that Paul is doing both.

Because here’s the hard part for us to understand: according to Paul, neither slave-holding nor being a slave was itself sinful.

The only way to sin within the institution of slavery was to be a harsh master or an embittered, spiteful slave.

But the problem is that slavery is a condition where sin can spring up more easily than most other conditions. If you want sin to abound, slavery is one of the greatest environments for sin. It’s like the most fertile soil ever for weeds. The presence of the institution doesn’t guarantee that sin is happening in every corner of it, without exception, but it makes men far more vulnerable to sin in every corner of it, without exception.

III. The Lordship of Christ

Look again at verse 5

Ephesians 6:5 (ESV)

Bondservants, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling, with a sincere heart, as you would Christ,

And now look at verse 9,

Ephesians 6:9 (ESV)

Masters, do the same to them, and stop your threatening, knowing that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and that there is no partiality with him.

In short, both the bond-servants and the masters are called to the same thing, which is obedience to Christ.

You see, the reason why Paul addresses these different vocations in the family and society—the reason is that the claim that Christ is Lord started shaking the institutions of man as soon as Jesus took a few steps out of the tomb.

The claim that Christ is Lord is a cosmic claim. It is also, rather inescapably—a political claim. If Christ is Lord it means Cesar isn’t. If Christ is Lord, it means a Husband isn’t. He’s a husband, but he’s not the Lord. If Christ is Lord, it means a Father isn’t. He’s still a Father, but he’s not the Lord.

And if Christ is Lord, it means a slave-master isn’t.

And what we sometimes under-appreciate is that in some places, the initial effect of the spread of the Christian Gospel was a rebellion against authority. A sort of “Jesus is my Lord now, that means you are not, and so I don’t have to listen to anything you say!”

And I think what we see in Paul’s letters is that he is trying to correct that. Paul is speaking against a selfish dismissal of authority here. Saying “No, Christians are people who respect and obey their authorities unless the authorities command them to sin, or treat their neighbors unjustly.”

And I would argue that this is the most offensive claim of Christianity. Not that wives are called to submit to husbands. Boring. Not that children are called to obey parents. Boring. Not even that slave-masters can be slave masters without sinning, that is also boring compared to the unblushing claim that Christ is still your Lord even if your circumstances are hard, and that he means to glorify himself in your obedience rather than your rebellion.

Functionally, as a culture and as a society in our moment, we do not believe that. We believe that if our circumstances are hard enough, our sin is excusable. If you don’t believe me—as silly as this example may sound—look no further than the trope of the sympathetic villain. Disney is doing this a lot lately, where the whole premise of a movie is “This person’s wickedness is totally excusable once you hear about how hard their past was.”

That is altogether opposed to the biblical ethic that you are responsible for your own sin before God, regardless of your circumstances. Your circumstances might explain your sin, and help others to understand your motivations. But your circumstances never excuse your sin or release you from the call of Christ.

In fact, that is the whole point of Paul’s instruction that we have seen this morning. His whole point has been that obedience to Christ is the thing. For Paul it was more important that the church prove that Christian humility and Christian joy were untouchable than that Christianity was a justification for rebellion.

Why? Because that would rob Christianity of all its glory. The whole message of Christianity is not that our rebellion is finally excusable. It is that we now have a Lord who loves us in spite of every other bit of harshness or trouble or abuse we have ever experienced. Our joyful humility will greatly disturb and discomfort an embittered and terrified world.

We march under the banner of the Son of God who has died and risen again, and this means that we do not fear death. So what do our enemies have on the proverbial menu for us?

Suffering? Ok. Our God will use it to get glory.

“What else you got?”

Loss? We’ll count all things as rubbish for the sake of knowing Christ.

“What else you got?”

Hatred? Persecution? If you hate us and persecute us, you are going to catch us dancing little jigs when you are not looking because you’ve just proved that we’ve been counted worthy to suffer for the name.

“What else you got?”

A low economic station where there’s a master above us that could—without consequence—treat us unjustly?

Ok. I already have a master in heaven and I know for certain that he will never be unfair to me. If you violate how he’s told you to treat me, you will have to deal with him someday, and I’m actually starting to pity you if you do that without remorse.”

“What else you got?”

Death?

Oh, please.

Our God killed death and made fun of it in public.

Do you realize, church, how much that kind of fearlessness will in fact discomfort and terrify a world that worships fear?

But that is what a clean and blood bought people are capable of. We have already died in Baptism’s waters, and dead men cannot die. We come to a Table to feast on immortality. What can man do to us? The lower they lay us, the higher he will raise us. So fight on with gladness. Rebel against rebellion by serving a risen Lord who gives you a joy that cannot be shaken.

In the name of Jesus, Amen.