Slaves again

All right. Slaves again. We'll be taking a look at slaves. What's interesting is when we think of slaves, a lot of times our inclination as Americans is to think of American slavery the way it was in the 1800s. I almost said last century, but that isn't right. In the 1800s.

Slavery during Bible times had some comparisons, but an awful lot was different. The other thing is, during Bible times, there was lots of variability, and we'll take a look at what that variability is. Now, the understanding of slavery, if you understand the words and the principles that go along with it, it'll give tremendous insight to Scripture, because I was thinking of You know how you see these red letter Bibles and usually they'll be the words of Christ. If you were to do a red letter Bible and to put in red the words that relate to slavery, you would see multiple words jumping out of every page turn because there are lots and lots of places where it shows up. And if you understand what it means in that context, tremendous insights, much more richness in the text. Let's take a look here.

The chart on the following page will compare and contrast features of slavery under the Mosaic Law and under Roman Law. The Law of Moses had one arrangement for slavery and the Romans had a different arrangement for slavery and there were some other arrangements too depending on which culture was enforced. The biggest impact is going to be the Mosaic Law and the Roman Law in terms of the words that you see jump out at you. We're going to focus mostly on that under Roman law, as in the New Testament, but where it's different, we'll let you know.

Alright, on the Mosaic Law, one of the things that was really interesting in the Mosaic Law, because they had the Law of Moses, there were lots of rights given to slaves, and there were minimum requirements, and you had to treat them well, and things of that sort. One of the things, for example, the Law of Moses says is, you were a slave in Egypt.

Therefore, treat your slaves well. So, being a slave didn't mean, at the very bottom level, it meant that you had to be treated pretty well. And in some cases, the slave was treated better than the poor person who was free and lived better. The slave often lived at the same standard of living as the master. The other thing is, at the end of the sixth year, in the seventh year, the sabbatical year, the slave was given the option of going free.

If the slave said, no, I want to remain a slave, they were to pierce the ear and put a ring. And so today it's kind of a decorative thing that people do to their bodies. In those days, it was simply a symbol of, I'm a slave. In the Jewish culture, that was the one law instance where they were granted to do piercings, to mark themselves as a voluntary slave.

So it's very different from a lot of our concepts of slavery. The legal exit then was automatic and early, as you look at it. And the social status was not bad, because basically they lived much at the same level as their master. Same socioeconomic level, oftentimes ate with them. Similar kind of thing. It wasn't a beaten down kind of social status.

They had legal recourse. If a slave was being mistreated according to anything in the Law of Moses, the slave could go to the elders of the city and the elders were to enforce the law, whatever it was. And sometimes the punishment for the owner would be So it depends on what the violation was. So there was legal recourse for a slave. And by the way, this is something else, we won't go into it extensively, but you may have heard, for example, that women during Bible times were treated horribly.

Yes, there were examples of it. The Mosaic Law, however, granted rights of recourse, rights of standard of living, and things of that sort. The rest of the cultures around them did not. So, real interesting. Okay. Economic status versus the poor free labor. Under the Mosaic law was always much better than the poor free labor. Better to much better under the Roman law. Those who were exceedingly poor were typically worse off than the slaves. Alright, here's an example where in Philippians, and we'll have several examples from Philippians here, Paul and Timothy said they were bondservants of Christ Jesus.

And one of the things you see, Romans 1.1, Galatians 1.10, on through the list, even including 2 Peter, Jude, and Revelation. So several New Testament authors calling themselves bond servants are slaves, doulos.

And so that has meaning. My son Randy said his little trick for remembering the Greek word for slave, doulots. Doulots. So anyway, if that helps you, great. Why so much focus on bond servants? The most common Greek word for bond servants, doulos, occurs 127 times in the New Testament. 21 out of the 27 books have that plus other related words. In some cases, other related slave-type words occur in books where the word doulos or slave doesn't occur.

Doulos is pivotal in correctly understanding what's being said. Someone who was a doulos, their will was entirely subject to that of the master. So for Paul and Timothy in Philippians, to say, I'm a slave, a doulos of Jesus Christ, was to say, my will is entirely subject to His.

Okay, what's the next thing on the slide list there? Let me take a look here. Ah, okay, New Testament words relating to slaves. That, by the way, is only a partial listing, okay? So much you can fit on a page, there's additional words. Redemption, by the way, doesn't have anything to do with blue chip stamps. Some of you, that may be a piece of history that's unfamiliar. Okay.

Bought, agorazzo. The agora was the marketplace, right? So if you have been bought, you've been bought in the marketplace, in the slave market. Another one there is redeemed. Now this is ex-agorazzo, very similar, but ex means what? Out. out of the marketplace. Basically, instead of just kind of, okay, I bought you out of the marketplace, but you could go back, this is completely taking you out. You're no longer in the slave market, okay? So this word was used to communicate not only buying you out of the market, but completely out, taken out, taken off the market, okay? No longer for sale. Next one, redeemed, is also lutro, okay? one that is used, and there's a more complicated word that is used along with it, but we've been bought out of a captive condition.

And then there's another one here, a tutor or schoolmaster. Paul draws on that in Galatians, he says, in making a comparison to the law, we're no longer under the law, he says the law is like a schoolmaster, and he says So this word is saying we're no longer under this slave that has been committed to taking us through our education. The special word there is pedagogos, and you might recognize the kind of word that we carry on to our pediatrics, like for kids. This was a slave who was typically more intelligent and trained, and this kind of a slave, they would assign the slave to a kid and say, okay, your job until that kid has grown is to make sure that kid gets a good education.

You're going to take them to school. Somebody else is going to do the teaching, but you're going to sit there in the room, hear what that kid has been taught, and drill them. And you're going to hold their hand on the way back home, and you're going to drill them. And when they get home from school, you're going to drill them. So that's the pedagogos, It's not truly a schoolmaster in our sense, it's a slave who is stuck with that kid, holding on to them, drilling things into them until they are of age.

Now, here's a captive, syllogal gale, often times means kidnapped or captured by pirates or thugs, sometimes used in military capture. Let me pull up the next one as well. Let's say that you are walking along some path somewhere between cities and there's nobody out there to protect you. There was very little police protection in those days anyway. Somebody might come along and capture you, haul you off to some other part of the empire or even to another place and sell you. That's this word.

The next one down is used more specifically for a military capture What the Romans would do is they'd go on, here'd be the lineup of the Roman soldiers and they'd have sometimes one or several contracted slave traders right behind the Roman lines ready to take the captives in. Because the Romans privatized their slave capture and marketing, they privatized their tax system.

And so they had these private slave trader contractors right behind the soldier lines So as soon as they captured any of the enemy, they'd hand them off to the slave traders and be done with them. 130,000 Jews were handed off that way during the Jewish revolt from 66 to 70. The Romans only kept 700 to haul off to Rome for the victory procession. The rest of them all went immediately into the hands of slave traders and right behind the lines.

That's what this is. Words like this are used to say, don't let these false teachers take you captive like a thug or possibly a military capture. Don't get taken captive by these guys. You'll get sold off. See the warning? It has some particular potency and power then. Okay, here's another one. Freed. This is the word that's used in Romans 6 several times. Translated freed. And finally, master. It's the word that is literally used for a slave master. It's also the word where you see Lord Jesus Christ, that word.

Oh, one other thing I didn't get in here, got to tell you about. One of the customs that they had to free a slave, one of the customs that they had is you could, of your own money, if a slave got a hold of money, or by friends, or even sometimes a master, deposit money in an account under your name at the local pagan temple. When the sale price has been accumulated, then they would have a ritual down at the temple where the slave would be freed and owned by the god of the temple. So Paul at certain times will use that analogy to say your freedom has been bought. you are now under the God. So he'll use that terminology as well in places and I don't have it on here.

Okay, here's for example a sale document for a couple of slaves. It was written in Greek in the first century. So they'd write this thing out, take a piece of papyrus, write it out, say okay here's this document that says this guy's been sold. Here's a property disposition.

So you might have something, maybe it's related to an estate settlement And so here's some real estate and a 12-year-old slave, written in Greek, 59 AD, so this was just a few years before Paul wrote Philippians, Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Timothy. Here is a slave collar, so they'd have like a tag, and this particular collar is metal. How would you like a metal collar with a metal tag? If found, please return to, isn't that something? Amazing. Here's another one. I have escaped. Hold me. If you return me to my master, and the name was given in there, you shall receive a solidus, which is a gold coin. It's a reward if you turn me back in.

So the slave would have that strapped around her neck. In the Roman Empire, slaves were entirely subject to the will of their owners, in some cases abused, and in some cases well cared for. In some cases the slaves lived very well and some people would sell themselves into slavery or even volunteer for slavery because it would be a standard of living better than what they had. You just had to get somebody to agree to it. Lots of different educational levels and occupations. You might have a doctor or a lawyer or a scholar of some particular area of expertise who was a slave One of the things that was commonly done is a slave who had business capability would be put in charge of a business and he'd be told, okay, you've got to run this, run this business. Slaves were allowed to own other slaves. Real interesting.

Sometimes given great responsibility, here's an example that's given Matthew 24, 45. At one point in time in the history of the Roman Empire, there was a slave who was of such high status in the Roman Empire, he was right underneath the Caesar, and the Senate was fearful of him. He was so powerful, and yet he was a slave. It's real interesting, our concept of slavery is maybe a little bit too narrow, or a little different anyway.

Without much in the way of civil rights, typically, because they were considered property, the Mosaic Law gave more rights in terms of written, established rights and recourse than the Roman law. But the Roman law did have some minimums that were laid in there.

1 Corinthians 6.20, you are not your own, you have been bought with a price.

And 7.23 says the same thing. Sometimes given the option to be freed by payment or by a generous owner. The Roman law eventually put in a limit, you may not free any more than 100 slaves at a time.

Why? It was difficult getting slaves. They had to get about, and we'll see a little bit later, half a million, during the New Testament era, about a half a million slaves a year was necessary to replace those who would die, become disabled, get freed, etc. And so freeing too many at once was a problem. It also was difficult because you'd typically free them in one area and all of a sudden you've got these freed slaves and how are we going to absorb all this? So in order to avoid social and economic disruption, They limited the number of slaves you could free at once.

Another reason for doing that was freeing a slave was sort of a social statement to the rest of your Roman friends. I'm such a big-hearted fellow. I'll free my slaves. And so if people got carried away with that, it would cause problems. And so they were limited. They could only free up to 100 at once. Able at the slave owner's option to have money and property, even owning, as we mentioned, other slaves. Okay, governments own slaves.

We mentioned the fellow who was high up even to the point of being right under the Caesar and to the point where the Senate was afraid of him. Serving in the household of Caesar. Remember, at one point in time, Paul writes, you know, those of Caesar's household send you greeting. Would have included some slaves likely, okay? owned by districts, cities, and towns.

See, right now we've got people who work for cities and counties and things like that. Very commonly, those people in Roman Empire would be owned by the government entity because that was a way that you could maintain the government fairly inexpensively. How'd you like that? If you work for a city or county government, you may feel like that now. Okay. All right.

Theophilus, to whom Dr. Luke wrote, may have been such a government slave. The indications are that it's possible that he may have been a government slave. We don't have the name Theophilus anywhere else in the Bible, right? No other literature points to it. But given how Luke addressed him, he may well have been a high-level government slave that did legal review prior to passing things on to Caesar.

In the Roman Empire, slaves were the brunt of many jokes. We have in our comedies today kind of standard humor lines. A lot of times it'll be a dig or it'll be some play on words or something. Making fun of slaves was standard humor in the theater of those days. They'd have all sorts of themes with slaves and masters and the slaves talking behind the master's back. and the slaves looking busy when the master's there and then sloughing off when the master turns his back. Stuff like that. Real common.

Slaves were often portrayed as giving their masters lip service but speaking ill of them and stealing from them behind their backs. The comedies often show the slave's master threatening to send the slave to work on a farm. Two places that were typically lower the standard of living for slaves were working on farms and working in mines. And so kind of a standard line in these comedies of the New Testament time would be to threaten them that we're going to send you back to the farm or we're going to send you to the farm. You know, that would be the thing that you're going to do to them.

These are exactly what Paul warns against in Ephesians 6, 5 through 9. Don't make your Christian faith into a sarcastic comedy. He doesn't use that word, but the point is his descriptions of warnings to the slaves and the masters is exactly the sort of things they made fun of in the theaters. So Paul's saying, don't make Christian faith into something they joke about. Here's a Roman relief. This was, by the way, a part of a larger relief, and this was on a stone coffin box. but it shows a couple of slaves pouring wine.

A lot of the slaves who lived in households oftentimes had fairly good standard of living, frequently getting to eat a lot of the same food and, of course, being in the same house as the master, things of that sort. All right, how did one become a slave? You could be born of slaves.

Averna is what they were called. How about that? You could be born into slavery, And by the way, the Verna was more expensive. They'd say, hey, this one here is a Verna. Oh, that's a premium price. Why? Can you think of why? Versus one, say, that was captured. Yeah, that's all they've known, see? So you're going to get someone who's, you know, that's what they know, they'll be cooperative with. Yeah, exactly. So the Verna was more expensive. You get a premium price for a Verna, okay?

And then one could be found as a legally abandoned child. Remember one of the things we pointed out before, in the Roman Empire, it was legal for parents, if they didn't want a child, to just leave them out in the woods. To us that just seems, you know, boy, you know, and of course today you would be charged with something if you did that. In those days, perfectly normal behavior. I mean, it's unbelievable, but yeah. To leave a kid you didn't want out in the woods, either when they're born or later on. Just take them out in the woods and leave them. tie them up to a tree or if they can't walk then that's fine and they'd just leave them.

If somebody found that child while they're still alive, they could take that child then as a slave. So that was one of the ways that people became slaves. One could be captured in military conquests or by pirates or thugs. And then one could volunteer to be a slave. They could say, you know, my standard of living is pretty lousy. And some of them really were barely survivable. And I said, if I volunteer to be a household slave for this guy, I'm going to be better off. So some people would volunteer into slavery. I'd say, please, take me as a slave. I won't even charge you. Just take me as a slave.

Or sell yourself into slavery because of indebtedness. Or you could sell family members. It wasn't something, obviously, fathers were wanting to do, but that was legal in those days. You could sell one or more family members if you had, say, some ominous debt.

How many were slaves in New Testament times? This is surprising. Here's Galen, who was a medical doctor in Pergamum. That's one of the seven cities in Revelation. In the second century, an estimated one-third of the population of Pergamum consisted of slaves. To give you some kind of an idea.

Many scholars contend The fraction of the population consisting of slaves was higher in cities like Ephesus, which is like the third largest city in the Roman Empire. Athens and Rome. Rome was the largest. Alexandria was the second largest. Probably closer to half the population of those cities was slaves. Can you imagine you walk into the city and just every other person you saw was likely a slave?

That's kind of amazing, isn't it? since slave ownership in rural areas was typically much less than urban areas over the whole Roman Empire, about 20%. So what you'd find is out in farming areas or mines and rural areas, things like that, much lower, they did have slaves, much lower percentage, most people, farmers couldn't afford one, right? So much lower percentage, so overall about one in five throughout the Roman Empire. So substantially more in the cities.

About a half million new slaves were needed each year. Think of it this way, an awful lot of the people in the times of the Roman Empire would live to somewhere between 40 and 50 years and then they're done. I'd be a real oldie. It would be pretty common for people to die in their 40s or early 50s. And so you'd have slaves, of course, would die off and you'd need to replace those. You get those that were freed, those that were maybe disabled, so you have to replace them. A half million would be needed every year. I mean, that's a lot. Half a million every year to replace those that left the slave market, if you will. Okay?

This was a picture we showed of Philippi, and this was the marketplace, and they would just typically not have a special slave market particularly, but just take a place out of the marketplace and sell slaves there, just along with everything else that was being bought and sold. Here's a Greek papyrus containing the legal release of slaves to freedom.

Acts 13, 38 and 39 uses some language like that. Let's take a look at it. Therefore let it be known to you... Now Acts 13 is what? Here's Paul and his companions bringing the gospel, right? And so how are they doing it? Therefore let it be known to you, brethren, that through him forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to you.

Forgiveness of sins is using the analogy your sins are holding you captive. And the release from those sins is a release from slavery. So we say forgiveness of sins, and we think one thing. When they said that, it was in the context of slavery. You're being held captive by your sins. you are a slave to them and everything about them, and your release from that, the forgiveness of those sins, what's holding you captive, is being proclaimed. Through him, everyone that believes is freed, remember that reference to freedom, is freed from all things from which you could not be freed through the Law of Moses. The Law of Moses will not solve your slavery problem. So, as you see this, he's giving the Gospel, But as he's doing so, he uses multiple terms for slavery. To tell them, you want to be freed from this slavery to sin? Believe. Everyone who believes is freed. Okay. Paul and Timothy, of course, as we mentioned in Philippians, call themselves bondservants.

Christ is a bondservant in Philippians 2.7. Obedient to the point of death, his will is subject to The fathers, right?

Doing without grumbling or disputing. This is one of the problems, of course, with slaves is the grumbling and disputing thing. So again, that was the area of joking. So this grumbling and disputing is even one of those points. Timothy is called the doulos, the servant. Caesar's household. Many of those, as we pointed out, were slaves. A good many of those in the household would be slaves. Here's in Philippians all these references to Lord, kurios, that would be seen in the people of the time as a slave master.

Here's Colossians 4.1 that we'll be getting to some weeks ahead of us here. Masters, plural of kurios, grant to your slaves justice and fairness, knowing that you too have a master, kurios, in heaven. So he says you're a slave master, you are owned by, You own these slaves whose will is entirely subject to you. And that master has a master in heaven who bought him, who paid the price for him.

Add to the slave themes in Philippians. We've got overseers and deacons. He says, you know, greetings to the overseers and deacons early in the book. Those are words, episkopos and diakonois, those are two words that were often used of slaves. How about that? So being an elder or a deacon isn't necessarily being some high-level person. It's a slave. How about that? Masters in the New Testament. Sin.

We know that the law is spiritual, but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. In Romans, he continues to make reference to this slave ownership and slave-owner relationship, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed, the words that he writes to Titus. In reference to the law, Christ redeemed us, bought us, from the curse of the law. He bought us out from underneath that slavery to the law. in order that he might redeem those who are under the law and that we might receive the adoption of sons. We pointed out some time back, when one was adopted as sons in the Roman Empire, that doesn't have the meaning that we hold in our culture. We think of adoption, we think of little kids.

They adopted adults and the idea was to have somebody who would be an heir, somebody who would take, especially like in the place, this was carried out with Caesars. A Caesar would adopt somebody if they didn't have an heir. He said, here's an adult that I know can handle this when I'm gone and they'll be my heir to the throne. So I'm going to do an adoption.

The adoptions were high-level legal events and it would typically require an approval of like the Roman Senate or some high-level local council to approve it. Anyone who was adopted was freed from any slavery commitment and all past debts were forgiven. So adoption of sons is not, you know, I've got this little baby and now I'm going to give him a name and a home. It's instead a very high level position, complete release from any past issues, problems, anything of the sort. So it's a big thing when Paul writes adoption of sons.

Big thing. that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay. See the slave word there? Bondage to decay. Completely under the will of the master decay. The creation is entirely subject to that. And brought into the glorious freedom, see the word freedom, versus slavery, of the children of God. A family relationship. Free. no longer under bondage to decay. False gods. Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.

Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? That's Paul's appeal with regards to going back under the law. He's making an additional appeal now to this idea of slavery. Here's Satan. so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by the fear of death."

When I was in college, the college I went to required you must take a P.E. class, and actually I was glad to. I had one of the P.E. coaches, Coach Noonan, I remember his name, and we were out there running, I just got through running and other people were heading to the showers and I talked to him and I said, are you afraid of dying?

And he was deathly afraid of dying. Boy, his face just turned gray and he said, oh man, I don't want to die. And so this fear of death just gripped him. In New Testament times, death was something, boy, it was real uncertain. You didn't know what was going to happen. And once a person died, the people who were there left on earth had to do everything just right so that he ended up in the right place and didn't spend eternity getting tortured according to their thinking of things. So there's lots of fear.

He's saying that's an enslavement. Appetites and desires. For such people are not serving, there's a slave word, our Lord Christ, but their own appetites. Serving as the appetites or the master. Not everyone would necessarily fall into this category, but we have a lot of people in our culture dealing with addictions. Are those not a master? They're a master. They call the shots. The will is entirely subject to that master, the addiction. Enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures. That's the way he writes to Titus. So this slavery idea keeps coming up again and again. Here's another. Popped ahead there. Alright.

Salvation verses with slavery terms. Mark 10.45b, For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom, a payment to buy back. The word ransom was used in this way. The military captors who would come in and capture a number at once, would sometimes be bought those slaves, people who were made slaves by captivity, would be bought back by those whom they had previously served. Give you for instance, Alexander the Great fought against Darius III of Persia. Darius lost 10,000 men. So what did Darius do? He came and offered Alexander the Great gold in payment for those people to buy them back, to ransom them.

There's the word. John 8.36, If there the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed, no longer enslaved. No longer under slave ownership. There's a sanctification verse with slavery terms underneath it.

Galatians 5.1, It was for freedom that Christ set us free, therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to the yoke of slavery. You are freed. Stay there. Don't go volunteer to go back under the slavery. Don't go back to that slavery that once called the shots, that controlled your will 100%. That's the appeal. He says you're believers now.

Imagine what might happen Suppose you were in a town where you were sold from one slave owner to another, but you had served one owner for maybe 20 years. Imagine if that old owner, even though you'd been sold, came and told you you've got to do something.

Wouldn't there be a heart tug? Oh, I've always had to listen. For 20 years I had to listen to this person. They called the shots in my life. And so there would be this tugging appeal. Now, would there be legal authority for the old slave owner to call the shots? No. Not at all. But the heart tug would be there, wouldn't it? Oh, that's a familiar voice. I always obeyed that voice. Now, no. There's a recognition. You're no longer under that master. That's Paul's appeal. Don't go back under it. Don't take his tag back and stick it on your neck. There's no place for that.

There's Galatians 3, 26-28. He makes a distinction. There's positionally no difference between Jew and Greek. There's positionally neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you're all one in Christ Jesus. Positionally, no distinction. Slave or free doesn't matter. Our position in Christ does not depend upon earthly status or distinction, slavery free being one of those.

The characteristics of the prominent system of slavery in the New Testament world are used repeatedly to teach about our position in Christ. Frequent appeals, when you see the word serve, when you see freedom, when you see redeemed, these are all words that have to do with the slave market. That's why I say if we had a red letter edition that was not the words of Jesus, but just all the words relating to slavery, red, would just pop up in practically every page of the New Testament, some pages substantially. Some impact of slavery comes through almost every page of the New Testament.

All right, next time, I've been working on, we previously looked, it's a family tradition, at kind of home life. And we said that the women, the wives and mothers, worked really hard. Well, most other people worked real hard too. And so we'll take a look at kind of that second hand, what were some of the occupational characteristics that we think about. So we'll take a look at that next time.

All right? Questions? Yes? No? Yeah. Yes. Not necessarily. It's at the option of the owner. And see, that's the thing. If you're a slave, your owner can, I mean, you can put tattoos on your forehead. He can put, you know, some chain around your neck. He can strip a metal He can do whatever he wants within legal limits. So it's up to the owner. The owner can decide to do that or not.

But as you saw from some of those tags, sometimes they did. Sometimes they said, yeah, you're going to wear this and go to the blacksmith shop and have them strap up this metal thing on you and you're going to wear this metal thing. And sometimes they may not be distinguishable. You couldn't necessarily tell, depending on, again, what does the owner dictate.

If the owner says, you know, you're going to be identifiable as a slave and I don't want you getting loose, that would be one thing. Some of them had fairly high-level positions. We have instances of a slave who owned as many as 100 other slaves. You can imagine that. I mean, you think, wait a minute, I'm a slave. But yeah, slaves could own other slaves. You could have a slave who, for example, ran a business and had quite a bit of latitude, even traveled from city to city being a trader and a merchant and still be a slave. So real interesting. Lots of variety in what we think of as a slave. It wasn't always just breaking rocks and busting up clods. It was a very variable institution in the Roman Empire. Thank you. That's a good question. Others? Yeah, Dave?

You had that slide about the one third of the population were slaves and one half? Yeah, Galen said a third of Pergamum, he estimated, were slaves. And then scholars have written variously, but about one half in the bigger cities is what it comes to. Pretty much all the bigger cities? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. It seemed to be the habit. And then, again, you'd have different things, lots of variety in what they did. Were the owners ever...

What's interesting, slave uprisings were quite rare. And one of the reasons that they were quite rare is, of course, it was hard to get organized because you get your masters telling you what to do and where to go. But another is because a number of the slaves lived better off than people who were poor. And so that's one reason. Another reason was because there were means of slaves getting free. Sometimes it was easier than others. There were means for slaves to get free. If you really wanted to be free, that was an opportunity. Paul writes, I think it's 1 Corinthians 7, he advises the believers, if you have the opportunity for freedom, take it. If not, don't worry about it. God can use you either way.

It was an institution that because people could own other slaves, you could live at a higher standard of living. Some people volunteered or sold themselves into slavery for that higher standard of living. It was not something where slave revolts were stimulated. It was actually an advantage to enough people to being a slave.

It was like, fight to get out of this? You're kidding. I want to eat. I want to be warm and have clothing. Yeah, it just wasn't there. The ones out in the farm and the mining areas were the ones who had it the worst, typically. But the flip side of that was that they were kind of sparse in terms of being spread around. They were a lower percentage of the population, so it was tough for them to get control there. So it never worked out.

Probably one of the more famed ones that you if you ever hear the movie Spartacus You know that would be one of the more famous ones I think in that one there were several thousand slaves who are crucified for their uprising But but that would be very exceptional that what's interesting is is that's probably the worst case and it was unusual Yeah Yeah, this was particularly in Rome.

Rome went through a rise and then a decline and one of the things that happened is Rome's population swelled as they had more and more just freebies. that were handed out to people if you move to Rome and go there because the emperor is constantly doing entertainment and free food. It accumulated more and more people that were a drag on the system. Plus, if you're some soldier fighting your heart out in some remote frozen place and you're hearing stories of these people back in Rome getting a bunch of free food and having a party life, you know, based on your work, and you're going to be dismotivated to be a Roma soldier, right? And that's what happened. After a while, the Roma Empire fell apart because Rome turned into a big party town. More and more and more money going to that. And it's not the only reason, but it was one of the things that contributed to Rome's decline. The soldiers said, hey, why should I be out here beating my brains out, you know, and living on this frozen lake, or wherever it is they've got me, when those people back in Rome are just having a party all the time? for free.

So, yeah, it contributed to the decline. Yeah. And, of course, if you were a slave, you may still be even a slave, but you get to participate in a lot of this stuff because you're helping with it and you can help yourself to the food and all that. So, it just furthered the decline. Yeah. Other questions? That's enough? We're done? Okay. Let's pray.

Lord, thank you. As we look at this here, we see that you have indeed freed us. You have indeed taken us out of a bondage from which we could not have gotten ourselves. We have been captured as by thugs under sin, and yet you paid the price to release us when we were still enemies. How wonderful and loving and gracious, Lord. Thank you for that. In Jesus' name, Amen.