The boss & the bossed, Eph, 6:5-9

Now, into the passage here. This is a passage where Paul is writing to slaves and masters, and we'll be dividing it up into these kind of three sections here, just so you can stay in pace with us. And one of the things that's kind of a reminder is that starting with chapter 5, verse 18, kind of the last part of the verse, Paul is continuing a theme and a message of similar and singular content all the way to the end of the passage we're looking at here. So it's a lengthy passage. The pivotal and the hinging word here is this, be subject. And let's back up here.

He said, be subject, wives to your husbands, children obey your parents, slaves obedient to your masters. So those were the three areas in which he was saying, here's the example of what that looks like. And one of the things we pointed out here, just to kind of bring that together, is we had wives, children, and slaves were the ones who were to learn here. With the wives, he used the word hupotasa, that means to under-attach or submit under. And hupakua was what he used with the children and with the slaves, and it means to listen under. So rather than just outwardly or externally just obeying, it's a listen first, let it go in here, and then place yourself under that.

One of the other things we pointed out in the past, and it's certainly relevant here this morning, there's a pattern. The wives, to your husbands, as to the Lord. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. And now we see here for slaves, as to Christ. But there's a little modification to it. Interestingly, it's like there's a triple emphasis here. In order for the slaves to get the point, he says, as to the Christ, as slaves of Christ, and as to the Lord. Three times to get the point across. I think that's for emphasis, don't you?

All right. So there's a connection here too. He starts off with, as to the Lord with the wives, and finishes off with that same phrase for the slaves as well. So there's sort of a bookend pattern here. Now, we have a question. The question goes like this. If we don't have slaves and masters today, how is this passage relevant? How is it relevant? Well, let's answer that.

Paul's writing about a relationship in which there is someone who is in a position of authority and someone else under that authority. Isn't that what he's talking about? Now, how many of you have been in one or two of those circumstances? Right? So really, that's what he's doing, is he's pointing to a circumstance that fits their case.

Really, we look at it, there's broad application to this. We have differences of laws and things of that sort, but the truth is there's a lot of situations where this applies. Let me give you this for instance. Boston employee would certainly be one that would quickly pop into our minds, maybe.

A ranking military officer and one of lower rank would be another. A coach. or a ref to the player. There's a teacher-student relationship. So the truth is we walk daily in and out of different circumstances, don't we? Where we have perhaps positions of authority, we may be under someone else, and we may even have a mixture of those. Another one is a civic official, a citizen or a foreigner. There is a civic official who calls the shots, who maybe has to carry out policy. We can also say a civic or social organization that you step into.

A business manager customer. You walk into a store, you're playing by their rules. If the hot dog buns come with eight in a package, they are not going to like it if you walk out with just six, especially if you want to pay them three quarters. All right.

A church leader, a member of the body. Obviously, it's different, but there's still issues of authority and being subject to. And by the way, for this one and the last one, the prior list, we also gave some passages that apply there, so some additional insights.

Now, I'm going to ask the question, were there sitcoms in Ephesus? Okay? Sitcoms in Ephesus. For example, did they have Everybody Loves Rufus? Okay? Did they have regular programming and things like Desperate house flies. Would you go to the theater in Ephesus and see shows like Wool and Glass? Things like that. Anyway, they did have comedy theater and it wasn't quite like what we've got.

But the interesting thing is, just like we have kind of standard comedy lines, you know what I'm talking about, standard comedy lines, a common comedy line in the theater at Ephesus would be a threat from the master. Do you want to go work on the farm? Toward the slave. Or a statement, if you don't get to work, I'll send you to the mines, because the farm and the mines were the worst places for a slave to be put.

So now, we have a question. Do you know how they learned to laugh in those days? Do you know how they learned to laugh? It's really quite clear once you think of it. was taught laughing and grief. Everybody, there's no exceptions. Everybody learned it. No problem.

Now, with these sitcoms here, the slaves, however, in order to be comedic, were shown as two-faced. They would show themselves standing at attention and responding vigorously to the master until the master turned around and walked out of the room. upon which they would immediately have them lie down, sit down, or take on some alternate, more desirable activity. So this was the comedic back and forth between the master and the slave. And so what does Paul do? He says, essentially in this passage, don't make your Christian faith a public joke. That's really the message he's sending them.

So he starts off, slaves, and just to kind of get it fixed in our mind, roughly 20% of the Roman Empire consisted of slaves. by those that were disabled, retired, liberated for various reasons. They needed about a half million new slaves every year. 20% of the empire roughly was slaves, and in the urban areas like Ephesus, Rome, about 50% of the population was slaves. So when Paul is writing to slaves, he's not writing about some minuscule, obscure little group. Probably half the church is going to be composed of these people in Ephesus.

Now, the slave here had a variety of roles and ranks. If we immediately drop into thinking that it's just exactly like the slavery that was here in the United States in its earlier years, that's not quite the right picture because you would have people working in the mines or on farms that would be in tough circumstances, but some of them that you'd be captured as a lawyer or a doctor or an orator or a poet. And they would say, okay, I now own you, you go practice medicine here and you're going to do what I say. And you go here and you practice law and you're going to do what I tell you. And so you would have people that sometimes be very educated.

There was even one slave in the Roman Empire who was a slave of one of the Caesars and he was feared by the Roman senators because of his power and rank. So we shouldn't think that it's automatically, you know, you're low. But nonetheless, this relationship still stands. They still had to respond to and obey the master. There's a handout on slaves that is taken from the Philippians teaching that we did here a couple of years back.

So feel free to take advantage of that if you'd like. It's not just the idea of be obedient in some superficial way, but it means listen, let it sink in, and place yourself under it. That's the idea. When the Master tells you something, it isn't just superficially and externally pull it off, do it, but it is let it sink in, listen, truly listen, and place yourself under that command.

That's what He's saying to them. Masters according to the flesh. Now, he's not saying all the masters go around walking in the flesh. That's not his statement. His statement there has more to do, these are the ones who are masters after the earthly pattern of masters and slaves and earthly ownership. That's his statement there. The word there is kurios, and it's a word that's elsewhere translated lord.

Now, if you take verses 5 and 6, you can kind of make little bullets. Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh. And here we have these half-dozen items that kind of bullet points that he's making. The first couple, with fear and trembling and insincerity of your heart. These first two points have to do with, what's your heart condition about this? What are you thinking about it? What's your perspective? How do you feel about it? So it's interesting, he doesn't start off with just saying, hey, do it. He isn't being a Nike ad.

He is instead saying, it's your condition of heart and mind that counts here. It does matter. And so with fear and trembling, we would translate that in modern vernacular with full respect. Full respect. And he's going to underscore that because the next one is sincerity of heart, and he has the idea of singleness.

Not with split ideas. Yeah, I'll do it on the outside, but inside... So it's a very single perspective, is what he wants. Do it with sincerity, not just being very sincere, but a singleness, not a divided mind over this. Do it listening under, listening carefully, listening, be of single heart, and place yourself under that. That's what he's saying. Now, this verse doesn't have anything to do with Rodney Dangerfield. The full respect for the master, and this is key, does not depend on the master's behavior. Did you notice that? Obey your masters. Were they all nice? No, not.

They could be cruel. The Roman Empire did have certain minimums that they were required to give to the slaves. And in fact, some people would volunteer into slavery because they would think they'd be better off. So it'd be an improvement. How about that? But, so it didn't depend on the character of the master. They were still to do this, even if the master was a nasty guy. The full respect has to do with this. It's the authority which comes from God.

John 19.11, here is Jesus talking to Pilate, who is just a really fine fellow and a nice guy, right? And what does he say? You would have no authority if God had not given it to you. God is the one who grants authority. And it doesn't mean that because this person is a nasty fellow, that that person doesn't have authority from God. They do. God is the one who grants authority.

The believing slave is ultimately, and here's Paul's perspective, because he keeps underscoring it three times with the idea as to the Lord as a slave of Christ. as to Christ. The perspective is, you're not obeying the master, lowercase m, you're obeying the master, uppercase M. The one who is giving the authority, that's the one you're listening to.

And he had to keep underscoring that with the slaves, because it was real easy to get focused on that fellow who's coming into the room and lowering threats on you. Notice here, it's interesting, this is a Roman slave tag, it says, if found, please return to, Just like you see various tags on things now. A piece of property the slaves were often thought of. Then comes the comparison in these verses as to Christ, as slaves of Christ.

The point here, the slave is to put into his mind he's obeying the Lord. Ultimately, that's the one he's responding to, not the master. It's the master behind the master. is who he is responding to, and he's continued to think about this. Think about this for a second. If Paul is continuing to urge these slaves three times to think of the Lord as your master, what is he asking them to do? He wants them to behold the Lord. He wants them to look at the Lord through this and to see the command coming through this earthly master as coming from the Lord Himself.

Not by way of eye service. I thought this was interesting. That word, eye service, can actually convey the idea of eye slave. Not as slavery to the other person's eyes. You're not owned by their eyes. You're not just trying to work according to whatever suits their eyes. This isn't eye wash.

This isn't just, please him on the outside. Instead, it's a deeper thing, isn't it? He's looking for that. He doesn't want outward gamesmanship, and so he discourages both the slave and the master from the outward gamesmanship that was typical of the day, and about which the comedic writers just took to extremes. Ever seen this one? Bumper sticker? Jesus is coming, look busy.

I was very interested. I found this, and I also found they have t-shirts about this. You can even get coffee cups if you like that. And what was very curious to me is I could find these items, and they're identical, on Christian marketing websites and on the ones for the atheists and the agnostics. Both. They both thought it was funny. But here's the interesting thing.

Really, no matter how you look at it, if Jesus is coming, is looking busy going to do any good at all? I think as believers, what's going to happen, if Jesus is coming, I'm not going to look busy. I'm going to look gone. But nonetheless, it kind of underscores the world easily looks at, well, the Lord isn't seeing me until I'm here.

Well, this is really dumb. The point here he has instead is do the will of God from the heart because the Lord sees that anyway all the time. All the time. People often look, oh, I've got to find God's will. I don't know God's will. I've got to find it. How come God doesn't tell me? I need a blanket to come out of the sky with words on it. I need the clouds to spell the letters up in the sky. And we're looking for God's will, and guess what He does?

If your Master told you to do it, that's God's will. Okay? Isn't that something? If the Master says do it, that's God's will. The other thing that was brought out here is obedience comes from the heart. It's not just the outside. My body did it. No. Obedience comes from the heart. That's the source. Isn't that cool and isn't that keen? He says, this is not about doing what's on the outside that your master wants to see. This is about the heart. This is about the will of God. This is about who you're doing it for.

Verse 7 there, and 8 starts a different section. Verse 7 is extending the theme that we saw in verses 5 and 6. However, verse 8 is an appeal to the slaves on the basis of a larger truth. Ever notice that? Sometimes the Lord will, in Scripture, lay out a larger truth and then make a narrower application. That's what He's doing here. First, he says in verse 7, he talks about goodwill.

Now, isn't that interesting? Have you ever heard somebody talk about vindictive obedience? Maybe you've even seen that little cartoon that shows some boss grinding his teeth and pulling his hair out and says, oh no, you did exactly what I told you to. It is easy for us to fall into some kind of externalism or, yeah, I'll do exactly what he said and he won't like it. It is easy to fall into the externalism. Everything he has here warns against it, from the heart, and here, goodwill. Wanting good for that guy, and it doesn't matter if he's nasty. Rendering service from goodwill gets to the condition of the heart.

It's not just, what does my body do? Did I follow through on the outside? but what's the heart condition? That's what the Lord's looking at, right? And if the Lord is going to work through the believer, He's going to work through more than just your body, He's going to work through our hearts.

He's going to work in us and through us. So that's the focus that Paul's making here. Now, as to the Lord and not to men, now here's a negative or a contrary statement, as to Christ, as slaves of Christ, and now as to the Lord. This is the third emphasis. Really critical, because you and I can get into the same situation.

We have different kinds of authorities. You ever go into a store and their store policy stinks? Okay? Gets you really ticked off. Or, you get in some situation maybe with an employer and you say, boy, this person I just have no respect for. as to the Lord.

It's not because the person is deserving of the full respect and the singleness of heart. They may not be, but as to the Lord. And that is not suggesting, but it is God's will. Now, the slave isn't to look to the master as the ultimate authority at this point here. It's the Lord Himself. Remember this little connection we made here? He started off the beginning of this passage as to the Lord, and now he's going to finish it that way, as to the Lord, with a triple emphasis for the slaves, because they need it.

And then here's the part we said was a general principle, verse 8. As we noted before, this is the truth about rewards applicable to every believer in Christ, and how does he make that general statement? Whether slave or free. So that's everybody. whether you're owned or not.

So the questions arise in our minds, what else do we know about this general truth? What is this? What's he talking about? What's the motivation here? Now, it also comes to another question, doing the good thing. Should I go around and make a list of the good things to do and then just do that as much as I can? I mean, I could pour it on. I could come up with a long list. I could do it a whole bunch. It turns out that Scripture in the New Testament does describe for church believers five crowns and three rewards. And you have these on your handout. We won't have time to go into them in detail by any means. These are all, however, and we'll make this observation, a Stephanos crown, not a diadem as in royalty.

This was a crown that would be given to an athletic victor, someone who had won an athletic competition. And so, these are crowns that are promised. Interesting, here's one, a rapture lover's crown. This is a crown from the Lord for looking for His coming. How about that? Just as simple as that, for looking for His coming. This is a Stephanos crown, just to give you an idea of what he's talking about here.

It's not the diadem thing that's more rigid. This is instead something more decorative. There are also three rewards that are mentioned as well. And again, we won't have time to go into those. I would just suggest a perspective here. We aren't given a lot of insight into what these rewards will be like. Isn't that interesting? Here they are listed, you get the references, you get the names, all that. Not a lot of detail, but I would suggest this.

As we studied through Revelation 4.10, these 24 elders will worship Him who lives forever and ever and will continually, as the Greek is continual and repeatedly, cast their crowns before the throne.

Our crown is a capacity to glorify the Lord. continually, not just once. It's not like a firework or firecracker, boom, that's it, you're done. But continuously to be able to glorify the Lord. And how long will we have that opportunity? Forever. I also suggest one other perspective. When we look through Ephesians 2, especially verse 7 there, so that in the ages to come he might show the surpassing riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. One of the reasons I believe the Scripture doesn't lay down lots of detail about these crowns and rewards is it's so massive, it's going to take forever for us to understand how great they are. We'll walk through heaven's gates and He'll say, here's your reward, and we will continue to learn the magnitude of how wonderful they are. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that a good thing? In 2 John 8, Watch yourselves that you do not lose what you've accomplished, but that you may receive a full reward. Isn't it interesting?

Expressing a desire. The Lord wants you to have a full reward. He says, I can't wait, because at the end of Revelation, these are the last things that are quoted of Christ. It says, Behold, I am coming quickly, and my reward is with me. He says, I'm coming, and I can't wait to give you your reward.

Boy, am I excited about that. Now, how about this list of good things to do? For the first 15 years of our marriage, Nancy had to put up with me having a list of good things to do. And boy, did I have a long list. And I freely let other people add to it. Boy, was I mistaken.

The reason we don't have to be a slave to just a list of good things to do is God has already prepared all the good works He wants for us. It's only those that He cares about. Secondly, God is the one doing the energizing and the empowering, and He's going to do that beyond our thinking.

Take a look there at Ephesians 3.20. All right.

Now, as we look at this passage, we noted here, be filled with Christ by means of the Spirit. He started off the passage, this is things to do not just off a superficial list, now get out there and do as many as you can, but instead, this is a result, a consequence, an outcome of being filled with Christ and submitted to Him. All the actions that he talked about here, including all the submitting, were all being based on being filled with Christ by means of the Spirit. Now we get this word, masters.

Do the same things to them. Now, that doesn't mean do the same nasty, vindictive things back. What it means is, look, I just got through telling the slaves, don't live superficially. I just got through telling the slaves, Don't do things from the outside, but do it from the heart. Do it as to the Lord. You masters need to deal with your own slaves with that same perspective, with that same understanding. Don't jump to the superficial solution. They're not outwardly behaving like I want, so I'm going to give them some kind of a baseless threat, and we're going to up the decibel level back and forth. He's saying, just don't go down that road.

The motivation is to the Lord. I've just told the slaves, he said, that they're to do everything as unto the Lord. You be a master knowing that your authority comes from Him. That's where it comes from. Now, we're talking kurios, not kurios. Kurios, not curious, as in this camel or this buffalo, okay? So, kurios is the word Lord or Master. That's the word. By the way, I wouldn't volunteer for this. Okay.

Anyway, so this word master often translated is where we see like the Lord Jesus Christ, same word. And the point being here is he says, knowing that both their master, uppercase, this is the Lord himself, and yours is in heaven. Here is the slave, and here you are the earthly master. Your master, Mr. Slave Owner, and their master are the same.

Remember that. Remember that. These earthly perspectives are not all that count. Do these same things. Don't rely on the superficial gains. Don't live on earth as if this is all there is. Give up the threatening. Now, notice something here. We talk about this being the theater joke. They're constantly threatening. Do you want to go work on the farm? What he laid out here, give it up.

Did you notice he said, try to cut down the percentage? Is that what he said? Just try to cut down the percentage. One of the things you'll notice about the imperatives that Paul gave, none of them are percentage deals. You who are stealing, try to steal 26% less. You who are lying to one another, just kind of reduce the magnitude.

Is that what he said? No. It's not characteristic of the life of Christ. So he's saying here, give up the threatening. Why? It is not from the life of Christ that you're threatening. That's not where it comes from. Get back to the sitcom. Don't make your relationship with the slave a public joke. Give it up altogether. Not less often, give it up entirely. knowing that both their Master and yours is in heaven. This is a recognition. Look, he's saying, you know this fact. You know that your Master is in heaven. You know that their Master is in heaven. Give it up.

Here's Pontius Pilate, ruled as governor from 26 to 36 AD, faded from the Roman scene after that period of time. Here's Jesus Christ, the King of kings stood before Him, ready to give His life for us. And at that moment, here in Manifacture, here's the pavement where Christ stood. Pontius Pilate says, I have the authority to release you, as if that was some great thing. Jesus comes back.

You would have no authority at all if God hadn't given it to you. There's no human being that has final and permanent authority. And that's a good thing. There is no human being that has final and permanent authority. Nobody here on planet Earth has the last word.

It just doesn't happen. And this is in heaven. And notice these earthly positions of authority. They're given for a time. We have them for a while. But they're not an end in themselves. They're granted for a certain period. The Lord is our rewarder for eternity. The reward, that's forever. That's forever. But not this master-slave relationship, or any other earthly authority. There's no partiality with him.

One of the things that's disgusting, and we find it disgusting, is when we see someone in authority who abuses it. This is a plate that shows, and it's interesting, they make a plate out of it, It's an ancient Greek plate. It shows one fellow, and what you see, it may be a little hard to see it, he's got a money bag and he's offering it to the other fellow as a bribe. And they made a silver plate out of that. We have similar things going on in our own day and age.

There are also other kinds of biases that people have. Human beings easily have biases. There's, with the Lord, no sin nature to warp and distort things. The Lord doesn't suffer any of those limitations. Injustice is something that can cause any of us to become angry. You ever have trouble with anger? I got to a point where my anger just scared me a few times. And when you look at it, a lot of what gets us angry, not always, but a lot of what gets us angry is a perceived injustice involving others, And there may be even some truth to the perception of injustice there.

But there are a couple of things for us to keep in mind. And the first one is no human being sees the whole picture, sees all of time, just doesn't happen. No human being is able to see things objectively. And the second thing, everything that is not addressed here on planet Earth And you know, we can get easily disgusted when we find justice has not been carried out. You probably can think of circumstances where you say, that wasn't just. That wasn't the right decision.

But really, there is no injustice that the Lord has not or will not deal with. The injustices that are from me, because I'm a believer, are dealt with on the cross. Any injustice that is not dealt with on the cross, or here on planet Earth, will eventually be dealt with by the Lord. There will be nothing, absolutely nothing, that will not be addressed.

Justice will be found for every slightest thing. It's interesting, if we get angry, it's like this. Human anger wants to solve everything based on this little line right here, right now. The Lord looks at the big picture and He says, I've got the cross, I've got the life that we all live, and I've got judgments at the end, principle one being the white throne judgment. I have places to deal with injustice. All of it will be dealt with, not one thread untouched. Think about it.

Here we are in this Milky Way galaxy. It's not the biggest galaxy. See that one on the left? It's big. So we're not on a really big galaxy. That's the wrong Milky Way. Anyway, okay. We're about this far out. You're about here in the Milky Way galaxy, which is actually one of the smaller in terms of the range of magnitude. You're here, okay? About 26 light years across or something like that. Okay. You're here on that planet out of these various planets. You're right there. Let's get a little closer. There we go.

Okay. Now, I still don't see anybody. Andriana, could you wave? That's it. Okay. See that? All right. There she is. Okay. Thank you. We appreciate that. Okay. Think of it, here we want to sit on planet Earth having been around for just a few decades. Okay.

And there's been over 600 of them, but we've been around for a few decades. We're here not of our own creation, not because we're geniuses and somehow made ourselves. We're on a tiny portion of a small planet in a small solar system in a small galaxy, a tiny portion of this galaxy, one of some billion plus known galaxies in the known universe. And in that short period of time, in this slight, tiny little involvement that we have, we want to see justice right then and now, and we're going to do it.

Isn't that amazing? God, who created it all, and sees it all, and has the cross, and all of the duration of this earth, and all of eternity to reckon with it, doesn't need our advice. Doesn't need us to override. and insist on justice based on our tiny, tiny perspective. So, what happens if we get angry is we're convinced beyond doubt that God's sense of justice just isn't going to cut it.

We're really ticked because it hasn't been resolved in our way in our time right now, right? And so the right thing to do is to explode, get volcanic about it, right? That's easily done. And like I say, my own expressions in that direction just scared the tar out of me.

The truth is that both masters and slaves had a lot of injustice and hypocrisy both ways. Here's the master, he's looking, yeah, I paid a bunch of money for these slaves, they're not doing anything. So they were exasperated. Here's the slave saying, look, I work all the time and do this and do that, I never get to choose what I want to do. And so there was injustice both ways.

From a purely human perspective, there was a lot of good reason for just a build-up of resentment on both sides. But Paul is saying here in this passage that coming to have an eternal and spiritual perspective is the only thing that makes any sense. Everything else is just nuts. Everything else is bananas. We come back to this question, how is this relevant? By the way, this is an atheist restaurant owner, 29 years old, in Bangalore, India.

We have lots and lots of different kinds of authority. We may be in positions of authority. We may also be under authority. There's lots of different kinds. And there's lots of different Situations, we'll step in and out of them many times during a day. We will go into one store and they've got their policy, we'll step into another and they've got their policy. And if you go too fast down the street, there's some other people that have a policy for you too. And if you look at it, we step in and out of authority relationships, either being in authority or being under authority constantly through the day. Many of us will hold through our lifetimes a number of these different positions.

And he's given us the principles for understanding all of those. So even though we say we don't have slaves and masters, and I think it's a good thing we don't, the key thing though is we learn what is God's principle about those authorities, whether we are the ones who have the authority or we are the ones who are under authority. We've gotten a perspective here that's really good, because you know exactly what God's will is, and you know where He wants the obedience to come from, from the heart. He wants us to be under those authorities as the Lord Himself. Those are really good things to know. It's an urging to behold the Lord. Keep looking to Him. Let's pray. Lord, thank you.

As we look at this, At first glance, we can say, well, that doesn't fit me. And yet, when we start looking a little more closely, it most certainly does. It fits me whether I'm in a position of authority. It fits me whether I'm under authority. And I may be several of those at once.

Thank you that as we look here, we know exactly what your will is. We know that it is a heart matter and that we can be single about it and not torn inside about it. We thank you, Lord, for the marvelous crews that you laid out before us. In Jesus' name, amen.