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Alright, so today we're jumping back into the idea. Of what do you do when someone asks you questions? Because they've opened up the Old Testament and they just seem to have this distinction between the Jesus of the New Testament and then the God of the Old Testament. Jesus in the New Testament seems to be, uh.
Careful, he seems to be, uh, uh, docile. He seems to have this sense of, um, brotherly love towards everyone. And then, uh, as some of the critics might want to point out to you, you open up the Old Testament and God seems to be angry and we get this idea that he's jealous. And so maybe the idea is what kind of chill pill did God take between the old and the New Testament?
And we talked last week about the number one reason that people do that. Um, I'm thinking of some of the, the new atheists, the um. The Daniel Dennet, the Sam Harrises, the Christopher Hitchens, the Richard Dawkins is they just, they demonstrate, when they say those things, a very, uh, root uh, uh, surface level and rudimentary and cursory understanding of the old text testament text.
They, they haven't really studied it and they, they just seem pretty content with understanding at the most minimalistic level that enables them to be. Critical because, um, as you'll find, I think in this, uh, podcast today, if you even have a basic 1 0 1 understanding of biblical theology and understand and ex of Jesus, you'll recognize that 98% of all arguments made against God of the Old Testament can be subdued.
Just very simple, practical application of the rules of interpretation, which we talked about last week. So lemme give you this quote. Andrew Hess has this, uh, this critique of God and hears him kind of going after the idea that we'll talk about today, which is slavery in the Old Testament. Does the Old Testament condone slavery?
Does it promote slavery? Um, is, is God a fan of? Uh, this idea of grabbing people from another country, putting them in chains and enslaving them, because the Bible uses that term a lot and it talks about slavery and how to have slaves and how to treat them. So does it therefore follow that God promotes slavery.
Here's the critique of God by Andrew Hess. Just because human beings are from one blood doesn't mean that the Bible is anti-slavery. The Bible supports and regulates slave ownership and doesn't say that owning a slave is wrong. White Christians have used the Bible to convince themselves that owning slaves is okay, and the slave should obey their earthly masters.
In quotes, white Christians also owned white slaves during and after the fall of the Roman Empire, but to say that white Christians need to believe that their slaves are inferior to them in order to justify slave. Ownership is also false. A slave is slave in the mind of a white Christians that have owned them, and the Bible supports slave ownership.
Find me one verse in the Bible that condemns owning a slave. I dare you. I've already found several that support it. Your God should be destroyed. And then he goes on to continue his critique. Uh, citing at the end, Jesus Christ thinks that slaves should be beaten to. Now if you hear, heard that maybe you're new to faith or maybe you're old in faith and you go, wow, I didn't know those things, um, that, that would be a really great example of someone who's.
Breaking a lot of the rules we talked about last week, of what it means to do, uh, proper, proper analysis and ex of Jesus. When you're reading the scripture, once again, the word ex of Jesus just means we want to take outta the scripture what it's actually saying, not read into the scripture what we want it to say, so is of Jesus.
As we're reading our own opinion into the Text X of Jesus, as we're studying it, we're studying the historicity of it, we're studying the language, we're studying the context, the content, the word usage. And then after having a complete understanding of all those things, we're saying, this is what the author originally intended by what they wrote.
If you do proper ex of Jesus with everything in terms of Old Testament, um, references to slavery, what you'll find is a complete rejection. Of everything that Hess says in that critique, lemme just go through a few things. We, uh, there, there's an important idea, which we talked about last week, which is how do we use scripture?
Um, so the three things you have to use, the three mistakes you have to use in trying to make the Bible be a racist slave condoning book is you first must use. False appropriation, second anachronism. And third, you must mistake the idea of description from prescription. I'll walk through each of those, um, in this conversation.
But, uh, the first thing is to recognize when the Bible uses the word slavery, when become a anachronistic, when in the old testimony it says that, um. You should in Deuteronomy or in Exodus, that slaves are to be treated fairly if you are picturing it in your head. In the same way as the American South or an antebellum plantation owning, uh, plantation working slaves, that in the Old Testament, the picture of slavery we get is that the Israelites went to foreign nations, grabbed people of a different skin color away from their homes and away from their families, rode them on a boat across the Mediterranean.
And in Mediterranean into their homeland, shackled them and forced them to work brutally in conditions that are egregious with all little to no food to be worth a, a, probably the same thing as chattel or, uh, cattle or, um, owner to be owned like a piece of property. Then what you've done is you've created an anachronism.
You have made the Bible speak on a subject The Bible would've not understood whatsoever the notion of going over to Africa, putting people in shackles, and bringing them back over to the Americas to be sold because the color of their skin would've been a completely foreign concept to the Old Testament Bible.
So Ja, Ja Mortier writes Hebrew has no vocabulary of slavery. Only of servitude, J racist Hebrew. The Hebrew language doesn't even have a vocabulary of what we think of as slavery. Of course, it talks about servitude, but recognizing that the servitude was one of the primary ways that people in that culture would make a living.
And one of the safest things that you could do, again, you've, you've got a very, um, rocky landscape where you had foreign nations coming in and taking over other nations. And then if you read in the ancient Near East. The practices by the surrounding nations around Israel and the way that they treated slaves, sex, slavery, beat 'em to death.
Uh, make 'em do whatever you want. Don't need to feed 'em, treat 'em however you'd like to. Yes, absolutely. In the new t in the Old Testament, God permits going to another nation where they're abusing and murdering people and purchasing a slave from then to, from them to become your servant in your household.
And the crazy thing is, for so many of these. Servants that are being purchased now by Israelites. It was like they won the jackpot. They went from being, uh, some sort of prisoner of war and in, in that tor that, that type of torture and bondage to, if you were a servant in an Israelite camp, you were granted all of the same permissions and privileges, and you were underneath the same law as your master because God is your ultimate authority.
So when we look at those permissions and see those things, we have to remember, we are not talking about race-based slavery. Uh, master and owner in this context should be understood more like a sports player who contracts with the owner of a sports franchise. We might say that, uh, this player from the Utah Jazz got traded, or he was sold to the San Antonio Spurs because that owner paid a great price.
To purchase him, but you and I both know that has nothing to do with their intrinsic worth or the, the egregious three-fifths compromise of people being less human than other people. What we know is in that day and age, it was a, it was very self-serving. Some people, if you read the Old Testament, would enter into bond servitude or indentured servitude to sometimes to pay off a debt.
Maybe they owed something, and then when it was time for the. The payment to be made. They couldn't, so they would work for a certain period of time. And what you found a lot of the time is after that time was up, they would actually, the Bible gives them permission to become permanent. Um, uh, AEDs, that's that Hebrew word for slave and servant are actually used interchangeably, the word abed.
Um, in fact, there's some passages in the Old Testament, like in Leviticus, where it calls us as God's children, his AEDs, his servants, and so recognizing that. And seeing the difference between what we would think of as the word slave and what the Bible says is a very important concept. So. If you loved your master and in the Old Testament, you had this really cool, um, season and called the year of Jubilee, where after you worked for someone for six years, in the seventh year, all slaves, all servants got to go free again.
When you, when you try to compare race base, antebellum plantation slavery of the American South to Israelite. Servitude bond servitude, a bed. That word for servitude or slavery, you're making so many egregious historical and tactical errors, not the least of which is, have you ever heard of anything in the plantation era, slave owning trade, where people all got to go free after a period of six years?
Also, were any of them voluntarily working to pay off a debt? Likewise. When you think about Antebellum race-based slavery, were there limits on what you were allowed to do to a slave that was disobeying you or that wouldn't, um, perform any sort of task you wanted to perform? In the, in Israelite indentured servitude, there are protections against all sort.
If you smack your, uh. Servant in the Old Testament and you like hit 'em in the eye, they're free. If you make the mistake of lashing out an an anger and hurting your slave, you can be punished and the slave gets to go free. Not only that, but if you're, if you're trying to compare the two and you're saying that, well, the Old Testament teaches, um, that you can, uh, steal people and that they can be taken from a foreign country.
Uh, here's what you have to understand. The Old Testament actually says that if you ever kidnap someone and make them your slave, it is a crime punishable by death. So it just, with that one fact, you can get rid of every single idea that you could possibly imagine about the, the lack of distinction between the two.
If, if you were to say, this is Exodus 2116, anyone who kidnaps someone is to be put to death whether the victim has been sold or is still in a kidnapper's possession. So it's specifically talking about people who would think you're gonna kidnap someone from a foreign nation and then sell them into slavery, uh, or take them as a possession.
Exodus 2116, you will be put to death with just that one idea. It just seems like sometimes when you talk about Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and them who just spout out this idea about that, that one verse right there would go, hold on. So I, yes, slavery and servitude does need defining, but with that one we can go, oh, oh, we're not talking about the same thing.
Because under God's law, if you kidnap someone, you're put to death, and that was the base. What you would have is you would have, uh, in the barbery slave trade or you had the African slave trade, you had people's African brothers and sisters cap capturing them and selling them over to white slave owners.
This is not at all what we see when we're reading the Old Testament. This is completely not okay. Beating was not okay. Keeping them for. Uh, treating 'em unjustly was not okay. Not letting them have all the rights of the law was not okay. It even says, when a foreigner comes into your territory, you need to treat 'em as if they were native born.
None of this even remotely compares to race-based antebellum slavery. Now, while both involve economics. Antebellum slavery forced Africans to immigrate to the Americas, and the social contract of racism was fed to enable the right morality to perform the forced immigration enslavement of black people by referring to them as chattel and not as humans.
They didn't have rights endowed by God. Okay, here, here's a, a great way of, lemme finish this. First, biblical servitude is almost always the voluntary practice of bond service. You do have situations. In the Old Testament where someone who is a servant is a servant, because Israel took over a foreign territory and their women and their children.
Where they're going. Can you please help us? We, we don't, we dunno what to do. We can't wander out in the desert. And so they would take them and they would bring them in and make them their servants, but that all of those same rights and rituals were permitted to them. And what again, what you found a lot of the time is after a season of.
Being taken care of by a good master. That's what is demanded of the scriptures, that as a master you must be loving and good and kind and fair treatment. Under the law. What you find is a lot of these people, after their debt was paid off or during the year of Jubilee, they would turn around and go, can I servant for life?
They would voluntarily ask to remain employed underneath that. The only difference that you would find from someone modern day who like goes to a retail store and works nine to five is your serve. Your, your, your master would actually feed you and you would sleep in that home and you would do all those things.
So. Not the least of which it's an anachronism to say, which is, um, it's outside of its context or it's a false appropriation. So when we say that's slavery, and they said slavery in the Old Testament, and we know what slavery is in the Old Testament. So the Old Testament or what slavery is in antebellum slavery.
So the Old Testament promotes antebellum slavery. You've made a huge egregious error. None of these things. None of the prohibitions against unfair treatment, against beating against sex trafficking, against none of those things. Were rights that an antebellum era slave had. Likewise, when it comes to privileges, the year of Jubilee, the servitude, the, the lack of, um, it of exposure to violence and brutality, all those are rights possessed by people at that time that no one in Antebellum era slavery had.
The Bible is fiercely protected, protective of indentured servants, and that's not just in the Old Testament. We find that likewise in the New Testament. Um, in one Timothy, one verse 10, there's a list. There is a, um, basically it's a list of vices, uh, in one Timothy chapter one. And beginning at verse eight.
Now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully. This is important. This is exactly what Frederick Douglass says, which I'll read for you here in a second. Um, the, we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully. The law is good if one uses it lawfully. Okay, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane.
So now begins to talk about everyone who uses the law unjustly, the disobedient, ungodly sinners, unholy, profane, those who strike their mom and dads for murder, sexually immoral men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine. So not only did we find.
A rejection in the Old Testament of race-based or, uh, power hungry, abusive slavery in the New Testament. Anyone who is a an enslave, a slave trader is found in Timothy's list of the most egregious. And contra biblical ideologies. And so we, we find the, the clear and consistent teaching of the full counsel of God's word is in opposition to the idea that race-based antebellum slavery is promoted in the Old Testament.
Here's what, here's what Frederick Douglas says, which I think is really important. Frederick Douglas, if you don't know, was one of the great, um, emancipators. He was a slave and then came and tried to move in the abolitionist movement. Here's what he says, which I think is very, very honest. Um, he says, between the Christianity of this land, when he says the Christianity of this land, he's obviously talking about, um, America.
So he says, when, uh, like during the time of the, the slave trade in America. Slaves were given the slave Bible. So it was basically a Bible that had huge sections of it redacted. Why? If the Bible promotes slavery, why would you go in and change parts of it? The slave Bible would leave out huge swaths of scripture, and this is the one that they would give to slaves in this Bible.
They would do things like, um, Joseph in the Old Testament when he's sold into slavery by his brothers. We know the story. If you read it in the end of the book of Genesis. Is he actually becomes a cut bearer for the or he through the A process of being trusted by the king, he's wrongfully accused, wrongfully imprisoned.
He then becomes a slave in the household of Potiphar. He then goes into the dungeon and for a long time, and then he becomes second in command of Egypt and he's freed. He helps to free his brothers from the oppression of the drought, tax and all the other things that are happening. And he ends up being a historically heroic figure.
Well, in the slave Bible, they take out everything. They, they teach rather that Joseph loved being a slave. He was really good at it, and he stayed in there for the rest of his life. They take out whole sections of the Bible about, uh, like Philemon and Onesimus, where Philemon in the, in New Testament has a slave named Onesimus who runs away.
Onesimus meets Paul. Paul says, yo, you uncontracted with this guy and so you need to go back and fulfill. As Christians, you need to be faithful in whatever you've been put into. And now it's uh, I wish that no one had to live in bond servitude. I wish that everyone could afford to be on their own. But if you can't, you need to do your do.
You need to do what you said that you were going to do. And so he actually sends Onesimus to his master, Phil Leman, but he sends him with this decree. I want you to treat him no longer like a slave, but instead like your brother. Okay? Like, like a brother in Christ. And so Paul's, again, you're also, you're talking about the old and New Testament.
One of the key ways we mess it up is we treat it like a desc, like a prescription rather than a description. What does the Bible describe? It describes polygamy, but the Bible clearly teaches that marriage is between one man and woman. One woman. The Bible teaches. Um, I, it, it explains idolatry with Solomon and the worshiping in the high places.
Is it saying you should do that? No. It's explaining a story. It's narrative. The Old Testament's a narrative, and it's a narrative of really messed up people. Why does the Old Testament have a massive narrative of really messed up people? Why? Because when the New Testament comes and Jesus Christ is the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf, it wasn't because the Old Testament was full of great heroic figures.
And everyone who was doing what God said they needed salvation from their depravity, from their corruption, from their bad, uh, ideas, from their wicked thinking. So when the Bible's talking about these things, it's not saying it's a good thing. Right? In the same way, if I tell my story, I lost my wife to suicide in 2021, I'm not saying that that was.
Happy or that's what people should do. I'm just telling you what happened, and then I can point you to the cross where Jesus is the great freer of all things. So here's what Frederick Douglass says between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.
So he said, when people are trying to promote. The Bible says that you can have slaves, and they're talking about it being race-based indentured servitude. He goes, but when I read the Bible, I don't find this. I find people who don't know what they're talking about saying this. So between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference.
Here's what he says so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure and holy, it is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. So he says, if you're gonna understand and receive the Bible as pure and holy. You would have to hate the way that people are misusing the Bible in this culture. Here's what he writes.
I love the pure peaceable and impartial Christianity of Christ, so I have to hate the corrupt slave holding women whipping cradle plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one. For calling the religion of this land Christianity, I look upon it as the climax of misnomers.
That means, um, falsely naming things. I look at it as the climax of all the things that have ever been named incorrectly, calling slave based. Practice. Christian, he said, is the biggest mistake that humans can make, it is the boldest of all frauds. He writes, and in the, it is the grossest of all libels libel is, um, saying something false or writing something false about someone.
So Frederick Douglass, who both knew the scriptures, he was, he was a slave and then was an, uh, part of the abolitionist movement. He says, no, no, no, no. If someone is trying to say that you open up the Bible and you see that Jesus and that Christianity, and then you look at the way that people are misusing it, he said, I see the widest possible difference so wide that the only solution I can come up with is someone's trying to deceive someone.
And that's what I think when you're talking about these new atheists is what's happened. They've just been deceived by it. They don't wanna do the hard work that is required to do their due diligence. And so again. Gonna take someone's word for it. We're talking about a former slave who said, yeah, I know the book they gave me.
I know the slave Bible they gave me. I know how they redacted and changed things. So for instance. Uh, when it comes to the difference between these two things, there are these two characters, uh, fuller and Wayland, two men who wrote early about a Bible, the Bible's view of, of slavery. Kind of in response to this Frederick Douglass idea, fuller believed the Bible affirmed slavery in develop slavery.
While Wayland thought it was an aberration to the text, the text that Fuller used. Okay, so, uh, fuller believe the Bible Fuller is, uh, promote, is saying the Bible promotes slavery. So Fuller is saying the Bible's racist. Wayland is saying this is nuts. The text that Fuller used is an important example of is of Jesus.
That doesn't consider what we talked about last week, the analogy of scripture. This is the last thing I wanna talk about. For instance, fuller, who believes the Bible promotes slavery, said, uh. When Wayland came to texts regarding slavery, he knew that the passages couldn't contradict the cult to levels.
Here's so here's a, uh, j Packer writes it really well. I think I'll just go to this. Our methods of interpreting scripture j Packer, writes, must express faith in its truth and consistency as God's word. Our approach must be Harmon, for we know at the outset that God's utterance is not self-contradictory.
What does that mean for us? It means, imagine you pulled up, you found a note that I wrote and it was in my pen and it had my d the, the, my DNA was on the paper and it said, um, I, uh, it is so difficult for me to be a dad that I just want to quit. Okay. Let's say that you found that note and it was actually ripped out of a page, and you can tell that there was words before and after it, but you just grabbed that one thing and you said, whoa, Chris doesn't want to be a dad anymore.
Chris must be leaving his family and leaving his wife. This is so crazy. I can't believe Chris would do this. Anyone who knows me. And knows the full counsel of my life would go, uh, we're going to see the rest of that paper because if there's one thing that we know, Chris loves being a dad more than almost anything else on planet Earth, Chris would never quit on his family.
See, it's, it's the full counsel of who I am and just like any of you, if, if maybe you've had this happen before where you have a really bad day or a really difficult time. Or maybe you sent a text in sarcasm, but sarcasm wasn't picked up on it, and the way that you put it made everyone believe something that was completely untrue about you.
This is a little bit of what happens and, and it's slightly different. But when the Bible talks about, uh, slavery, you would have to close your eyes to massive sections of scripture that if you are arguing for the idea of race-based antebellum brutal slavery. The egregious treatment of people, but because of the color of their skin.
The problem with that is if you just keep reading before and after anything in the Old Testament that uses the word slave or a bed in the Hebrew or the word do loss, which is slave in the Greek, in the New Testament, what you'll find is really interesting language all over the text that totally disagrees with the ability to treat anyone like that, for example.
John 1335, they will know that you are my disciples, by the way, that you love one another. The problem with so many arguments that are made in saying, well, uh, the Bible promotes X, Y, and z, is if you read the whole Bible and you think that God has ever called for anyone to Lord over someone else, you've made a massive mistake.
For instance, in the New Testament book of Philippians, chapter two. It says, you should not, if you wanna have the attitude as, as that of Christ Jesus, don't look only to your own interest, but also to the interests of others. This is the clear teaching of scripture or what we call a scriptura. An alogia, which means if you ever come across a passage and you go, man.
Jesus is so loving. God is so welcoming. The, the Old Testament in, in Exodus 33 and 34, he's the Lord, Lord, compassionate and loving, forgiving. Those, he made everyone equal in his sight. We are all made with the image of God. Um, at the, at the end of all time, every nation, tribe, and tongue are gonna be worshiping him in their own native language.
Then what are we supposed to do with this idea of slavery? What you know is because the clear teaching of scripture. Teaches all of those things in spades that you would never be so foolish as to disregard all those clear passages of equal treatment and love and kindness, only to make a big ado about nothing.
When it comes to the term slavery, for instance, I. When Jesus comes on the scene, Paul writes this inside of Christ, there's no longer barbarian or sitan or slave or Greek or or free or man or woman or Jewish Gentile, but all are one in Christ Jesus. So you have to put blinders on over and over again to try to make your, the Old Testament promotes and condones slavery.
And I can tell you this, um, you, what you'll find is people will grab individual sections or individual verses, and I promise you, everything in the Old Testament that you raise an eyebrow to has a cultural context in which it continues to promote. The, the, the consistent idea that God is a God of love.
He's a God of mercy, he's a God of equality. He's a God of all these things. The Bible treats women in such a way. Particularly inside of their context and their culture. That is remarkable. Yeah, for sure. Um, there are things that God, uh, permits in the, in the old New Testament that he actually hates. You know, God permits, um, servitude, but he hates it.
Why? Because he wants everyone to be free, but he recognizes because of the brokenness of man and the fallen condition of everything else, that there will need to be special permissions made so that people can continue to coexist. God hates divorce and yet he gives parameters for divorce in the old New Testament, he even though the book of Proverbs Sellis, he hates divorce.
And everything having to do with it. So not everything that God permits does he love, and him permitting people to have indentured servants is against what he originally intended. In the Garden of Eden. There was no such thing as people who couldn't pay their rent, and so they gave themselves as indentured servant servants or in the, in the time of the Romans, you know, one in every, I think it's one in every three people.
We're a servant in that culture, but the Bible certainly does not. I. Remote race based slavery, but instead it should be seen in its proper understanding, which is indentured servitude, equal treatment under the law, fairness and equality of all things. And the, the clear teaching of the entirety of scripture, looking outside of just those few nitpicked passages will show you that the only way that people have ever used scripture to promote slavery or to promote, uh, race-based interactions is to, as Frederick says, make a massive mistake in misnomer fraud and libel.
You have to clearly reject everything. The Bible teaches clearly to make a big deal of certain verses taken out of context. To make your point, this is what the Bible has always taught. The Bible has not had to be revised. Sure it's been translated, but we have the. Uh, a lot of the original manuscripts and those texts dating back thousands of years, it hasn't been revised.
It hasn't, um, changed because of cultural context. It remains the same as it was originally. Um, just a couple more of these verses as we wrap up. Deuteronomy 23, 15 and 16 forbids returning a runaway slave to his master. This contrast to former slavery laws in America, or even an ancient law code of the Babylonian King Hammurabi.
So if, if a runaway slave comes over to Israel, I. God says, don't send them back to the place where they're being abused. You keep them and make them a citizen of Israel because he knew that underneath his kingship as God and in Israel was the safest place for someone who could not make ends meet to be because they were protected under the law.
Exodus 21, 18 through 27. Is a whole bunch of laws on how to treat the servants that you had. Uh, it deals with guidance in cases of industry, the, the consequences of injuring your slaves. Verse 21 seemed to suggest that, um, the slave is someone's money, but this does not indicate that the master owns the slave and can do what he wants.
As the rest of the Old Testament clearly shows the analogy of scripture, but indicates the reason that slave is not being is, is not to be avenged. It's because, uh, the master benefits from the slave being alive, it is to be presumed that when he struck the slave, he did not intend to kill the slave. So it was an accident.
So the consequence of striking and injuring a slave though are clearly given in verses 26 and 27. So as a slave master, you had all these rules and regulations on what you couldn't, couldn't do, and you were held to God's code. I'll end with this. The people of Exodus from e uh, and their exodus from Egypt.
Is a great word. Picture of God redeeming us in the New Testament. One of the most common ways that Paul refers to himself is as a slave to Christ. So it wouldn't make sense if God wants to use this analogy for the way that he loves and takes care of us. If we were to assume when talks about God being our master curiosity in the Greek and we being his servants, do loss in the Greek.
If we were to picture race-based antebellum slavery and the, or the barbery slave trade, or the, uh, African slave trade across the ocean, this doesn't make sense with the analogy of God loving us. What does make sense is all who come to Christ. I. Can be set free by their master and will choose servitude to a good master.
Because that master has their best interest in mind, not the least of which is when you become a permanent servant to a good master, you then you are an heir to his, um, inheritance. You become a member of his family, you get your last name changed. It comes with all this. And in order for someone to.
Permanently adopt you as a servant. They have to pay off all the debts that you owe. This is a beautiful picture of how God loves us and wouldn't make any sense if you're trying to use this analogy to make sense of the race-based slave trade. That is not what God did for us. God didn't kidnap us from a foreign, from a town where we were comfortable with our family, brought us somewhere where we didn't understand anything and then sold this to somebody else that wouldn't.
Makes sense, but the analogy that the scripture gives us of indentured servitude and how God is a good master and calls us to good things and then frees us. This is what Isaiah 61 says. We'll know that Jesus is Messiah because he will set He, he will proclaim freedom for the captive. This is all so against what we think of when we think of a race-based slavery.
So you can just rest secure. In knowing that when that, uh, accusation is made, along with Frederick Douglass and the other great thinkers of the past and theologians of modern day, with a cursory, a little more than cursory understanding of the Bible, the analogy of scripture, prescription and description differences, um, uh, false teachings and false appropriation and anachronisms that we can do away with this idea.
That our God is possibly a race a, a racist or bigoted slave traitor, or that the Bible condones slavery. Next time we'll talk about what is it? What do we do with the passages where God seems to be killing whole groups of people, these supposed genocides? We'll take a look at that as we continue to ask the question, how do we make sense of the God and the morality of the God of the Old Testament?