Hi everybody! Ben Carpentier here.
I feel like I need to start with an apology for the
click-baity title of my talk - Old Testament Slavery: The Good, The Bad and The
Ugly. I can imagine some people seeing that and saying, “Slavery, good? There’s
nothing good about slavery!” And they’re right. The Old Testament law on
slavery is one of the areas of the Bible most attacked by non-Christians,
because in today’s world slavery is pretty much universally an evil – and yet
here in Leviticus we find laws creating a structure for slavery and servitude
among God’s people. People ask how we can worship a God who seems to approve
of, or at the very least condone and institutionalise, an evil like slavery?
Let me say right from the beginning I’m not going to be condoning slavery or
defending it; I’m not going to try and explain slavery away, or suggest that it
served some necessary purpose in ancient times. I’m not going to make
comparisons between Biblical slavery laws and other slavery codes of the
ancient world to show that biblical slavery is comparatively better than
others.
I don’t need to do any of these things, because my job as a
preacher is to put forward what God says through the Bible, and God does not
make any of these arguments. Instead, the Bible makes it clear that slavery is
a tool of oppressors, and that God stands against oppression. And yet it is true
that, when God is formulating the governance and laws for his redeemed people
as they move into his promised land, as we have just read in our Bible reading,
God includes laws about slavery.
These are not laws outright banning slavery, but laws restricting
slavery. And that is pretty confronting. It’s easy to think that if God allows
for something in his law, even in a restricted way, he is obviously condoning
it or even supporting it. But this is the exact argument that the Pharisees
make to Jesus about divorce in Matthew 19:7, when they asked him, ““Why, then,
did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send
her away?”” They are asking, "Why did God put divorce into the law if he
does not condone it?" In verse 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to
divorce your wives because your hearts were hard.”
Jesus spends that whole conversation explaining that God’s
plan for marriage is that it should be for life – one flesh that should not be
separated. But God knew that sin would wreck some marriages. He knew some
people would seek to break their marriage vows. It’s a terrible thing that
hurts families and put women especially in a very vulnerable position. But it's
going to happen, because people's hearts are hard. So God made laws to cover it
to ensure that, even in this situation that goes against his will, there will
be limits.
And in the laws related to slavery, there is a similar logic
at work. God’s plan does not require anyone being a slave. But God knows that
sin will wreck some people’s livelihoods. But the fact is wherever there are
desperate people capable of being oppressed, slavery lives and thrives. So God
set down some hard limits, not just to protect people, but so that we would
know that he stands against oppression.
But none of that means there is anything good about slavery.
So why is my talk entitled “The good, the bad and the ugly”? Because the
picture of God rescuing Israel out of slavery in Egypt is the defining picture
of his relationship with his people in the Old Testament – it gets mentioned
over and over again in the OT law; twice just in our passage today! And the
theme of slavery continues to play a huge role in our understanding of Jesus’
work on the cross for our salvation, and our relationship with God as
Christians. Now, I am not at all saying that God’s actual rescue of Israel from
slavery, or his use of slavery as a metaphor for our relationship with him,
somehow redeems slavery or makes it any less awful than it is. In fact,
slavery’s awfulness is the point! There may not be anything more comparable
than slavery to describe how oppressive sin is, how it traps us, how helpless
we are, and how we need to be rescued from it.
Not only that, but the language of master and slave helps to
illustrate the relationship that we have with God. We see that in Leviticus
25:43, “Because the Israelites are my servants, whom I brought out of Egypt,
they must not be sold as slaves.” The English translation uses two different
words – because they are my servants, they must not be sold as slaves – but in
the original Hebrew it’s the same word. God did not rescue the Israelites out
of slavery in Egypt to set them free to do whatever they wanted: he redeemed
them out of slavery so that they could now serve him only.
And the picture goes even further still. Did you know that
slaves could inherit the estate of their masters? Here in Leviticus 25:46, and
elsewhere in the OT law, we read about people volunteering to become “slaves
for life”. And you might wonder, why would anyone voluntarily become a slave to
another person for the rest of their lives? Well, one answer is that if you chose
to become a slave for life, you stood in the line of that family’s inheritance
if the head of the house had no children. You might recall that Abram
complained to God in Genesis 15:3, “You have given me no children; so a slave
in my household will be my heir.” This was one of the only ways that a
foreigner could inherit a parcel of Israel’s promised land.
And this practice of adopting lifelong slaves into the
family as heirs was also popular in the Roman culture of Jesus’ time. The New
Testament makes it clear that we are more than merely slaves of God – we have
been adopted into the line of inheritance. Romans 8:15 says, “The Spirit you
received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the
Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.” The word “adoption
to sonship” there refers to this adoption of an adult as the heir. Our story as
the people of God is one of redemption out of slavery to the oppression of sin,
and into the position of heirs of God.
How does this adoption happen? By God himself humbly taking
the place of a slave for us. Jesus told us in Mark 10:43: “Whoever wants to
become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wants to be first
must be slave of all. 45 For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but
to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” As Jesus, God became a
slave to each and every one of us; he served us; he gave up his life for us.
And he did it voluntarily – as if any of us have the power to force God to do
anything, much less to enslave him! So when God calls on us to be his faithful
servants, who he adopts as heirs, he is asking nothing more than what he has
already done for us first. There may not be anything good about slavery, but
the story that it tells about how God relates to us is definitely Good News.
So now let’s move from the good to the bad. You may think I
don’t need to explain to you why slavery is bad. But it’s worth looking at what
God has to say about slavery in the Law, because it serves to further show us
that God understands and does not condone the oppressive nature of slavery. We
can start with the first verse of our reading, Leviticus 25:39: “If any of your
fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to you”.
Let’s just pause there. No-one wants to become a slave. To
say that OT slavery was voluntary makes it sound like putting your hand up for
a church roster. No, slavery is a last resort: if slavery was one of your
options, that’s because your other options were poverty, starvation or death.
Straight out of the gate we’re seeing it's desperation and poverty that leads to
slavery.
So “If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell
themselves to you, do not make them work as slaves. 40 They are to be treated
as hired workers or temporary residents among you”. The Old Testament laws make
it very clear that there is a delineation between “hired workers” and “slaves”.
What were the key differences between a hired worker and a
slave? There are two main differences. The first one is the kind of work slaves
do. Slaves could be a lot of things in ancient times – nursemaids, doctors,
business managers :Joseph was basically the prime minister of Egypt as a slave!
– but there were some jobs that only slaves did: chopping wood, carrying water,
brick-making, mining, working the oars in large ships. These jobs were menial,
back-breaking, often dangerous.
But God understands how bad slavery can be: he has already
redeemed his people from such back‑breaking labour in Egypt! Allowing
the Israelites to enslave each other in this way goes against that message of
redemption. So he commands that when an Israelite sells themselves into slavery
to a fellow Israelite, they must not be made to do such work. Instead, they
must be given the work of a hired worker. This would most usually be farm work
– which is still rigorous, hard work! But it is the work that any Israelite
with a plot of land would already be doing. It is work with dignity.
The second difference between a slave and a hired worker is
found in Lev 25:44: "Your male and female slaves are to come from the
nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. 45 You may also buy some of
the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in
your country, and they will become your property." Hired workers can come
and go as they please. Slaves are another person's property. And I could talk
about all the different things that this means from a legal perspective. But from
a slave’s perspective, it really only means one thing: someone can control what
you do using violence.
Again, the OT Laws have a whole bunch of limits on the use
of this violence - if someone beats a slave to death, they are a murderer; if
they cause a serious injury to a slave, the slave automatically gains their
freedom; if they treat a slave so badly that they run away, the slave cannot be
returned to them. But as a slave, you can still be beaten. Listen to this
chilling rule in Exodus 21: "Anyone who beats their male or female slave
with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are
not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is
their property."
As a slave, your physical wellbeing is in someone else's
hands. If your whole family is enslaved, that means they can beat your spouse;
they can beat your kids. This is what it means to be a slave. Being a slave is
terrible. Again, God understands this miserable reality, and so he puts in this
clause that the people he has freed from slavery shall not be ruled over so
ruthlessly by their own people.
Furthermore, the period of their servitude is limited. In
other places in the Law, it talks about becoming a slave for no more than six
years, and being released in the Sabbath year – so every seventh year was a
Sabbath year where fields were not worked anyway. This kind of slavery is
understood to be in repayment of smaller debts that could be worked off in a
shorter time.
But here in Leviticus 25 it talks about slaves working
“until the year of Jubilee”. The Jubilee happened every 50th year – after the
seventh of seven Sabbath years – and brings about a huge resetting of Israel’s
economy. In Australia, our economy is heavily reliant on the real estate and
construction industries. Since 2010, house sales were three times more likely
to be made to someone who already owned more than one home than to a first home
buyer. But in Israel, there were no land sales! Every family was assigned a
parcel of land when they first moved into the promised land. But fortunes
change, harvests are fickle, maybe not everyone is a great farm manager, and so
sometimes people got into financial difficulty and were forced to sell their
land to someone else.
But that is the land promised to them by God: how can they
sell it? And the answer is the year of Jubilee. Whenever an Israelite “sold”
their land, the price took into account how many years were left until the next
Jubilee, when they or their family would get their land back.
Of course, if you sold all your land, how could you feed
your family? The reason most people would sell their land is because some
terrible debt had befallen them, in which case they would find their whole
family in slavery – but for such a large amount, six years isn’t enough, so
they would become slaves up to the next jubilee, when slaves were freed and
land was returned to its rightful owners.
These debts could be paid off earlier - we read about that
from verses 47 to the end, where family members or even the slaves themselves
can pay a redemption price before the jubilee has come - but in the worst case
scenario, you always knew that, come the Sabbath year, or come jubilee, even if
you hadn't saved a cent, even if no relatives had come to your rescue, God
ensured that your land and your freedom would be returned to you. Can you
imagine everyone in Australia losing all their investment properties every 50
years to people who don’t have houses? That’s how revolutionary Jubilee was.
Jubilee shows us that God’s inheritance to us is eternal – it
cannot be traded away for a bowl of soup when you are in desperate times. It also
shows us that God's provision is full of compassion: he doesn’t want anyone to
be trapped in an endless cycle of generational poverty, desperation and oppression,
so he designs a model of governance which does not allow wealth to become
excessive, and does not allow poverty to remain entrenched. I wish I could do a
whole sermon just on the jubilee, because it is a revolutionary way of
rethinking how society can value its people above and beyond the bottom line of
profit at all costs, and especially at the cost of oppressing the poor and
desperate.
Because now we get to the ugly reality of slavery: it exists
wherever the poor and desperate can be oppressed - which means that it still
exists today.
In modern times we've made slavery illegal, and so we think
that we don't have slaves anymore. But making it illegal never made it go away
– it just drove it underground, into the hands of organised crime. Now we call
it human trafficking. Sometimes people are kidnapped off the street. But it’s
far more common that people are put into a cycle of ever-increasing debts they
can never repay; or they are tricked into forced labour with the offer of an
income to help feed their family; or they lured into remote areas with promises
of work, only to find they don’t get paid, but now they are beaten if they try
to escape. There are young women and young men who flee abuse at home, only to
find themselves seduced by pimps who use coercion and drugs to sell them into
prostitution.
Slavery might be illegal in every country on earth, but
today it’s bigger than ever: more people are thought to be in modern slavery
today than at any time in history. And it doesn’t just exist somewhere else:
every single person who is listening to this talk owns things that were made
with the profits of slave labour. Cobalt is a key ingredient in the batteries
of phones, laptops, electric cars and home storage batteries: the majority of cobalt
is mined by slaves. Much of the charcoal used in the forging of steel is made
by slaves. The bricks used to build the sweatshop that our cheap clothes are
made in were made by slaves. Imported seafood is 17 times more likely to have
been caught by slave fishermen. One study estimates that up to 89% of women in
prostitution are trafficked. The list goes on, but the truth is always the
same: anywhere poor, desperate people are able to be oppressed, slavery lives
on.
If you don’t believe me, then go to the website
slaveryfootprint.org and take their survey to find out how many slaves work for
you. You will be shocked.
This problem is so big. What can we possibly do? Let me
break it down into three simple points: Remember, Rethink, Renounce.
It’s easy to feel powerless. Human trafficking is a huge,
international problem, and the governments and law enforcement agencies of the
world don’t even fully understand it, let alone have the power to swiftly end
it. What can one person, one church do? We can remember. Remember that our God
is the God who brought his people out of slavery in Egypt – a whole nation of
people all at once! Our God is the God who detests oppression, who stands up
for the cause of the poor and the desperate. We can remember the work of
Christians before us like William Wilberforce, who fought slavery once before,
and succeeded in making it illegal. We can remember those who are suffering in
our prayers. I can recommend joining the prayer network of International
Justice Mission – IJM. They will send you a weekly prayer update about their
work in helping free people who have been enslaved across the world.
It’s also easy to feel like nothing will ever change. Our
society is built on supplying us with whatever we want, on companies racing to
the bottom in terms of prices, on not asking questions about how anyone can
afford to produce things so cheaply, on people having the freedom to make as
much money as they want and to spend it in any way that they want, so much so
that we now have billionaires racing each other to see who can fly into space
first. But we can change how we think. We need to rethink how we see the world,
and make sure it aligns with God’s principles of Jubilee. How does this plan or
policy or practice reflect God’s desire that everyone is given what they need
to sustainably provide for their families, and that the sources of wealth
should not become excessively stored up with one person or group of people? How
might these plans, policies or practices be threatening the welfare of the poor
and desperate, and how can they be changed to protect their interests?
A really simple example of how our church is already doing
this is our food pantry. It’s only a small thing, but if it allows a family to
keep food on their table and removes one element of financial stress, that
contributes to reducing that feeling of desperation which can so easily lead to
someone being in a position where they can be oppressed. Even just being a
member of a church community has been shown to reduce the likelihood of someone
becoming a victim of human trafficking.
It’s easy to just keep on living the lives we are, because
that’s what we were doing yesterday, and it’s what everyone else is doing, and
it’s how our whole society is set up to run. But we actually can’t do that. We
are called by God to renounce – to voluntarily give up – those things in our
lives and in our society that are contributing to the oppression of the poor
and the desperate. And that is not going to be easy, and it’s not going to
happen overnight. We can’t just give up electronic devices, especially when
doing so would make us unable to work, unable to study, and in the midst of COVID
unable to even connect with each other.
But at the same time, when our remembering and rethinking
points out to us places in our own lives that are polluted by human
trafficking, we must renounce them. And that most usually means making more
ethical purchasing choices, buying from those who can guarantee that their
supply chains are free of human trafficking and oppression. Which means buying
less, and buying things that are more expensive. Which is hard, because it
actually means paying the real cost of the products we use, not an artificially
low price that is reduced at the expense of other people’s freedom. That is a
real, concrete way of ensuring that the poor and desperate have ways of sustainably
providing for their families, and reducing the risk of intergenerational
poverty preventing their families from ever being able to escape that desperation.
In all the history of humanity, slavery still has not
disappeared. Nor will it, because there will always be poor and desperate
people, and those willing to oppress them. But at least the Israelites knew
that even if they had to sell their house and their land, and even sell
themselves, the year of jubilee ensured that their slavery and poverty would
come to an end.
These are huge, society-wide, nation-wide, international
problems. But the law of jubilee in Leviticus 25 relied on each of God’s
people following his laws to make sure that in their homes people were not
being oppressed. So let’s start with that. According to my slavery footprint, I
have 13 modern day slaves working for me. How many of those can I set free in
seven years, by my next Sabbath year? How many can I set free in 50 years, when
it is my Jubilee?
CT Studd, who played on the English cricket team in 1882 in
the first Ashes match and was also a missionary in China, India and Africa, put
it like this: “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be
too great for me to make for Him.” These are sacrifices God calls us to make,
not just today, but every day and throughout our lives. Jesus gave up
everything to become a slave for us; so no sacrifice can be too great for us to
make for Him.
