The Conscientious Chrisitan Employee, Part 1
1 Timothy 5:1
Well, let's open our Bibles now to the study of God's Word, 1 Timothy chapter 6. We begin a look at 1 Timothy 6 verses 1 and 2. Paul in writing to Timothy and instructing him in matters related to the life of the church, particularly at the church at Ephesus where Timothy has been left to set things in order, spends two verses on the matter of employment...two verses on how Christian slaves are to behave in their responsibility to both their non‑Christian and their Christian masters. And while the terminology here is slaves and masters, doulos and despotes, the idea here extends beyond that to include us today who are in an employer/employee relationship. We've entitled this portion, "The Conscientious Christian Employee."
Now it wouldn't seem difficult to get through two verses.
You would think we could do that rather readily since they're brief and very obvious in terms of interpretation. But as often as the case with me, I didn't even get to these two verses in the first service because there was so much preliminary material that was necessary for a proper understanding. So let's begin with a little bit of a general insight.
U.S. News and World Report says that 70 percent of the people employed in our country don't like their job. Now I'm assuming that you're as normal as the rest of the nation so maybe there are 7 out of 10 of you employed people who don't like your job either. Ninety percent of the seventy percent who don't like their jobs don't feel like getting up in the morning to go to their job at all. So what we have is a very large group of people who are very unhappy. And unhappy people tend to be rather unproductive and not the choice of employers, to be sure.
As a result of that, the average work in America, according to Time magazine, wastes many, many hours a week to the tune of $100 billion of drain on the American economy to pay people for work every year which they don't do. It costs our economy $100 million dollars for indolence, for people who because they are unhappy or because they are lazy don't do work but are eager to collect pay for what they didn't do. The American worker, frankly, is consumed with creature comfort. He is consumed with leisure. He is consumed with materialism. He is consumed with, as I said a few months ago, financing his indulgences. He has little love for quality. He has little love for performance. He has little concern for excellence in the product which he produces. He really continually demands more and more money for less and less work and wants only to finance his major goal in life which is pleasure, his own.
And often employers find it hard to locate committed trustworthy diligent durable accountable productive quality type workers. And really many Christians fall into these areas as well as non‑Christians. Many of us need to be reminded of our responsibility as employees. And that's what the Apostle Paul is writing here to Timothy...encouraging those in the church at Ephesus and all others as well to take again a good look at the responsibility that we all have in the role of work. Now we are raising, I think, a generation of people who really don't understand work at all. In fact, somebody said that most of our teenagers think that manual labor is the president of Mexico. I don't know how true that is but it sounds just about reasonable.
We have indulged ourselves in our own pleasures to the point where we may find it difficult to be productive in the future.
Now I believe that as Christians we desperately need a work ethic. We need a biblical theology of work. And the Scripture does provide such a theology for us. And before we have finished with these two verses, we will expand our thinking to encompass Ephesians 6 and Colossians 3, both of which give us the most detailed theology or ethic of work in the New Testament.
But to look at our passage by way of at least a start this morning, I want you to listen to the two verses that begin this sixth chapter. Now remember, there is probably a corrective in this as there is in all the other instruction Paul gives to Timothy because in the church these areas are not being fulfilled as they ought to be and reminder is of great necessity. So Paul says to Timothy, in regard to the people in the church and their employment, "Let as many slaves...doulo, means slave...as many slaves as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor that the name of God and His doctrine be not blasphemed; and they that have believing masters, let them not undervalue them because they are brothers but rather do them service because they are faithful and beloved partakers of the benefit. These things teach and exhort."
Now the idea of teaching and exhorting indicates that Timothy has really got to make a major issue out of this because obviously it was of great need in the church. People were shirking their proper responsibility as slaves to the masters who were over them.
Now I want to give you an insight into the terminology, to start with. The word "servant" in verse 1 should be translated "slave." It is the word doulo in the plural, doulos in the singular. And it designates a person who is in submission, subjugation, subjection to someone else. And, in fact, a doulos had a long term submission, a long term sort of responsibility for obedience to a master. There are many uses of this word. In fact, I think there are about 125 uses of the word doulos and about 25 uses of the verb form douloo in the New Testament. So there is 150 times the term is referred to. That means that it is a very, very common familiar and useful term. Slaves, doulo, doulos, were literally a part of the fabric of New Testament culture. They were everywhere. In fact, the whole economic structure of the Middle East and the Roman world was based upon masters and slaves, or employers and employees. It's no different than today. There are those people who own companies and who own land and they are the ones who hire those who work for them. And that's the way it was then. The terminology today would be employee and employer, the terminology then was slave and master.
Now to understand best the definition of a slave, let me take you to two passages. We don't have time to cover anywhere near all the ones there are. But in Matthew we get a good insight in chapter 8 and verse 9. Jesus here comes into contact with a centurion...that's a Roman soldier who commands a hundred men. And He is concerned because his servant, his doulos, his slave is at home, sick of the palsy...verse 6 says...and tormented in a grievous way. Now this is, no doubt, a domesticate servant. This is a man who would be very much like a butler, an adjutant, a personal escort for this man who took care of his personal duties. And to get a little definition of the function of a doulos, we come down into verse 9 and the man describes this doulos. The centurion says, "I'm a man under authority," that is the authority of Caesar in Rome. "I have soldiers under me," a hundred of them to be exact, as centurion indicates that. "And I say to this man, Go, and he goes. And to another, Come, and he comes. And to my doulos, Do this, and he does it." Now there is the best definition of a doulos in all of Scripture. A doulos is a person to whom you say, "Do this," and he does it. That's his duty. He is a person in the role of a servant. He is a slave in the terminology of the Middle East and the terminology of Rome.
Now let me show you another passage that will help to enrich your understanding. Luke chapter 17...first thing we now is he's a man to whom you say "Do" and he does it. In Luke 17, we start by seeing verse 7. He says there, the Lord does, "If you have a doulos, a slave plowing or feeding cattle," he's out there plowing furrow to plant grain or he's out in your field feeding cattle, and now we are getting our picture of doulos stretched a little bit, primarily they were domestic servants in the household, like the man in Matthew 8. But also they would from time to time plow a field or work with the animals. So if you have a doulos doing that, when he comes in from the field, do you say to him, "Go and sit down to eat?" In other words, do you say..."Well, boy, it's been so wonderful that you worked all day, thank you very much, sit down and I'll get your dinner." No.
"Will you not rather say to him, Make ready that with which I may eat and gird yourself and serve me till I have eaten and drunk and afterward you will eat and drink."
In other words, he is a servant. He is employed and paid to do a duty. You don't thank him and bend over backwards to serve him, you expect him to do his duty. And until his duty is done, he must continue to do it. So he comes in from working in the field. He prepares your dinner and when he has fully done his duty, then he can eat himself. Verse 9, "Does he thank that doulos because he did the things that were commanded him? I think not, Jesus says." You don't thank him, that was his duty.
When you've worked your eight hours, at the end of the day your boss doesn't come in and say, "Oh, thank you...thank you, I cannot express how deeply grateful I am. May I prepare your dinner?" Not on your life...not on your life. Why? Because you are being properly compensated for what you have done. It is your duty to do that. If you stay three or four hours late and you do what is beyond the call of duty, then you merit a thanksgiving. But you are properly compensated for the duty as defined.
"So you also when you shall have done all those things which are commanded you by God...implied...you should say, We are unprofitable servants, we have done that which was our duty to do." Now there's another definition of a doulos. He is one who does his duty. He functions within the framework of a prescribed duty assigned to him by someone else and he is to do his duty.
You say to him, "Go," and he goes. You say to him, "Come" and he comes. You say to him, "Do this," and he does it.
Now what we see also and we should note is that primarily the doulos was a household domestic employee. He functioned in the family in the house. Sometimes would work in the field.
Sometimes work with the animals. But that was not the normal way that that kind of work was carried out. Field work and farm work was mostly carried out by hired day laborers, such as we see in the parable of Matthew 20 where a man goes into the marketplace, you remember, and wanting to harvest his vineyard, he begins the sequence of hiring day laborers to work so many hours in his field. Field work and animal work was carried on, for the most part, by day laborers because you could pay them less, you had less liability, you didn't have to house them, feed them, take care of their wives and all their kids. A domestic servant, you had to do all of that for. He lived in your family and so there were not as numerous domestic servants as there were hired day laborers.
So you have then this doulos who basically would be in the norm a domestic family member servant, living in the household doing exactly what he was told to do.
Now on the other hand, the other term to note is the term "masters" in verse 1 and 2. That is the word despotes, we get the word despot. We talk about a despotic ruler, and we mean someone who may be harsh and overbearing and cruel and abusive and so forth. But in the New Testament time, the word did not necessarily carry that connotation. A despotes referred to one who had unrestricted, unrestrained sovereign authority. It's a bit stronger even than the word kurios which is translated so often "lord," sometimes master. Kurios is a bit softer than despotes. Despotes emphasizes the unrestrained and unrestricted character, the unlimited and absolute domination of authority bound up in the master. And despotes went with doulos. In Greek terminology it was doulos‑despotes. The strong word for slavery and the strong word for mastery went together. By the way, despotes is never used of a husband, though kurios is. It is a softer authority. Despotes is never used of a father, though kurios is. Kurios is most commonly used of Christ because there was a graciousness in His rulership, however, there are at least three occasions in the New Testament where He is referred to as despotes, that is 2 Timothy 2:21, 2 Peter 2:1, and Jude verse 4 where He is called the only despotes.
So, the word emphasizes the absolute unrestricted, unlimited domination. Now what you have then an employment situation, is you have one who is a doulos who does his duty, you tell him what to do and he does it. And then you have the employer who is the despotes who has an unlimited control over those who are under him. That basically was the economic setup for the functioning of work in the economy of the Middle East and of the Roman Empire.
Now somebody's going to say, "Well, what in the world does this have to do with us? Here we are in twentieth century America, we liberated the slaves a long time ago, thanks to the work of God in the heart of people like Abraham Lincoln and so forth. We have freed the slaves. We're not into slavery. What relevance does this have to us?"
Well, I want to show you that. I want to show you that and I think you'll be fascinated by it. In fact, I got so wound up in this, I've been doing so much reading on it, that I never really got back to the text. But I think it's fascinating to understand. Now listen, if you go to the Bible and read the word "slave" and think of the word slave in an American culturized context, you're going to get confused. If you think of the word "master" in American cultural context, you're going to get confused. So we need to strip away our cultural understanding of slavery which is all bound up in the horrifying racial discrimination of the South, of the whites against the blacks, we need to set that kind of thing aside because that was not the characteristic of the slavery of the New Testament era.
Let me give you a little bit of background. Slavery by this time is woven into the fabric of the New Testament culture. It is woven into the soil, as it were, of Palestine and the Roman world. It is an accepted format for social life. It is an accepted economic system. In fact, it was even an honored system. Paul himself is proud to be identified as a doulos of Jesus Christ. Peter also says he is a doulos of Jesus Christ, as does James, as does Jude. Even Jesus was a doulos of God. So there was something inherent in being a doulos that was dignified, that was analogous to something very good and very right and very holy and very righteous. And so there was...there was a flavor to the slavery of the New Testament era that was good enough to make it analogous to spiritual bondage to the living God and the Lord Jesus Christ. And furthermore, at no time do any of the Apostles or the Lord Himself ever attack slavery as an existing social entity. They never do that because in and of itself it was a very workable economic system. There were abuses but there are abuses in any kind of social system and the abuses are the issue, not the definition of the system itself. And we need to understand that. And I trust to be able to help you to understand that.
We have to strip ourselves of the wrong notions. For example, the utterly unacceptable slavery of American history based upon a terrible racial discrimination, abusive in many, many cases, creating artificial social strata that still generates conflict in our nation, that kind of thing we need to set aside. That kind of terrible national blight was not the kind of situation in slavery in the Middle East in Palestine or in the Roman world at this time.
Now I know a little bit about the American past from my experiences of ministry over about a six‑year period in the South where I was preaching and teaching among the black folks right at the time of all the civil rights action and the hey‑day of Martin Luther King and even the birth of the black power movement under Stokley Carmichael, Rap Browne and others, and we were very involved there in the South...in high schools, in colleges doing assemblies, teaching the Word of God and having a tremendous ministry among these people. I learned a lot. I sat down for one whole evening, the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated and spent that entire evening with Charles Evers who was the first black mayor in Fayetteville, Mississippi, a very insightful conversation, one I will never forget.
But in all of that I learned some very interesting things.
I learned that when the blacks were brought to America...and by the way, if you want some interesting reading on this, get the book Slavery, Segregation and the Scripture by Oliver Buswell III who was an outstanding evangelical anthropologist. But I learned that when blacks were brought into America as slaves, initially they began to teach them to read and when they learned to read, the first thing they read was the Bible and when they read the Bible they got saved, and when they got saved they wanted to come to the church. And wanting them to come to the church...not wanting them to come to the church posed a great conflict. Now they had black Christian brothers and sisters that they didn't want in their church and they had a tremendous conflict with the Word of God which says in Christ there's neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, or bond or free, so in order to deal with that they stopped teaching them how to read. If they couldn't read, they couldn't read the Bible. If they couldn't read the Bible, they couldn't read the gospel. If they couldn't read the gospel, they couldn't be saved and that would keep them out of the church.
The net effect of that in many areas was that they had a smattering of biblical Christianity tied in with a whole lot of culture and so what generated was the black church movement which is sort of a highbred syncretism of their culture under slavery and a little bit of Christianity mixed in. And that highbred is a living testimony to the withdrawing of the revelation of God from the black people. And many of them, of course, by God's wonderful grace have come out of the caricature into the reality of Jesus Christ, for which we praise God.
I remember hearing when I was there with my own ears a white preacher saying that black people had a smaller brain than white people. I remember hearing with my own ears that they were cursed with a curse of Ham and needed to be kept in a cursed situation. I was dragged into a...into a jail in a city down there and my life was threatened. They threatened to strip my clothes off and beat me with a whip if I continued to go around preaching the Word of God and meeting with black people. My..I had no social agenda, I was just giving them the gospel.
That kind of thing, that kind of abusive attitude which was a sort of a hold over from the slavery days is a frightening thing. I remember a pastor in one town that I knew personally, pastored the First Baptist Church who decided to start a Bible study with black people in his city. And the result of it was he couldn't buy gas, he couldn't buy groceries. They canceled his insurance policy. Had a nervous breakdown, they took him into the hospital in Jackson, Mississippi and about the third day he was he dove out of the sixth story and killed himself. The tremendous pressure of that whole situation was the residue of the kind of slavery that we knew in early America.
But somehow in understanding the biblical teaching about slavery and masters, we need to divorce ourselves from that kind of thing which is racially discriminatory and which is, for the most part, abusive and structures itself into social stratas that are wrong and not pleasing to God at all. And we need to get a whole new understanding of the social structure of servants and masters that we find in the New Testament. So that's what I want you to do, put that other stuff aside and try to understand it in its proper biblical frame of reference. All right?
Now slavery in the biblical sense has its roots deep in the Old Testament, deep in the Middle East. And I want to just talk about that for a moment. Slaves were primarily domestic employees of a family. And they worked sometimes, as I said, out in the field but for the most part they belonged to the household. They were, for example, cooks and household managers.
You would have a doulos who managed your household. He was your bookkeeper. He was your inventory controller. He was the one who decided how to use your resources. And he would be one who contracted to come into your service and in exchange for his long‑ term submission to you, you gave him his housing, his clothing, his food and the proper amount of money for living expenses and personal things.
You might be interested to know that in the ancient times in the Middle East, artisans were...were doulos, were slaves or servants. Teachers were slaves. When you wanted someone to come and teach your children and raise them in the things of wisdom and knowledge, you would bring in a servant to do that. Not unlike early America, you remember in the colonization of America the term "indentured servant." People in Europe were literally contracting to sell their services to a family over here in the New World for say seven, ten, fifteen years, they would come over based upon the fact that they were guaranteed employment, they would be cared for by the family. And when those years ran out, they would be free to then pursue their own career and their own objectives in the New World.
Now slaves in those ancient times were acquired in many different ways. One was they were the captives from conquest.
In fact, the people of Israel knew what it was to be servants to conquering nations. They were servants to the Phoenicians, the Philistines, the Syrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans. And there were other nations who in being conquered by Israel were servants to them as well. In fact, in ancient times, it was thought to be a very humanitarian option to conquer a people and them make them servants. In effect, that's what the Babylonians did with Daniel and his friends, right? And Daniel in the role of being a servant rose to become the prime minister of the whole Babylonian Empire and even the Medo‑Persian Empire that succeeded it.
So rather than killing the enemy you conquered, you would keep them and put them in the role of serving you. That solved a lot of problems. One, it provided for you servants. Two, it provided for them their needs. Three, it brought them into your culture. And four, if it was Jewish, it brought them into the knowledge of your God and your religion and the truth of revelation. So you find an illustration of this, for example, Numbers chapter 31, Deuteronomy chapter 20 and 2 Chronicles chapter 28. All three of those show how a conquered people are brought in to serve the conqueror with a view to teaching them, to providing for them, to showing humanitarianism to them and to, in the case of Israel, exposing them to the truth of their God.
So, the first way that people became servants was through being captive in war. Secondly, people were brought into this role of doulos through purchase. You could be a foreigner, for example, and you could be purchased. For example, let's say a guy from another country comes into Israel and he's looking for employment, a land owner can buy his services. And he can take him in. He then sells himself to that individual. By the way, there was a death penalty, according to Exodus 21:16 and Deuteronomy 24:7, for kidnapping and selling a free man. But a man who was already a doulos or a slave or who sought to be, could be bought and sold, according to Leviticus 25:44 to 46.
Furthermore, a father might sell his daughter. In Exodus 21:7 and Nehemiah 5, a father can sell his daughter to work in a home. It wasn't a bad thing or an evil thing to do, you literally contracted with someone to employ your daughter over a period of time. And your daughter went to work for that family.
Not uncommonly, when she reached marriage age, she would marry the master of the house or one of the sons of the master of the house. So in that sense it was a very good thing for both families.
A widow, according to 2 Kings 4:1, might sell her children into the employment of someone in order to pay off her husband's debts which he being dead could no longer pay. And in Leviticus 25:39 and following and Deuteronomy 15:12 to 17, people sold themselves into employment. Literally went and contracted for their services with someone and became slaves in that sense.
Children were also sold under conditional contracts, according to Exodus 21. A very interesting case in Nehemiah 5, the first part of the chapter, apparently a father had used his children as collateral for a loan. And when he defaulted on the loan, he had to put his children into service in order to pay back what he had borrowed.
So self‑sale was not uncommon. And people could employ people who were willing to be bought and there were people whom one owner would sell to another owner, there were people who desired to serve life‑long with a master and there were people who desired to serve short time. And there was within the slavery system the ability to contract and negotiate whatever it was that you both agreed on.
According to Leviticus 25, interestingly enough, the Old Testament said fifty years is maximum for any service...50 years.
That's for any non‑Jew, any of the Gentile people that came into service, 50 year limit. For a Jew, get this, 6 years. And the reason, I think, is very obvious. When a Gentile come into the service of a Jew, he was exposed to all the truth of God and so God wanted them to remain there as long as possible and so made the 50 year limit. It could be negotiated shorter than that, but that would be the limit. For a Jew, it was only six years. And that way the Jew had less time forced upon him, perhaps, in any individual or given contract situation. By the way, you can find that in Exodus 21:2 to 4 and Deuteronomy 15:12, the limit of six years was set upon a Jew.
Now another way that people went into slavery was through debt. If you incurred a debt you couldn't pay back, you might have to go to work for someone to work off the debt. And you became the slave until the debt was eliminated. A thief, for example, a thief who could not pay what he had taken was placed into slavery to the one he had robbed, or the court would put him in slavery with someone else and he would work off all that he needed to work off or he would earn enough in his work to give back to someone that he had stolen from.
Some slaves were received as gifts. In Genesis chapter 29, Leah received her slave, Zilpah, as a gift. Her personal attendant, this other young lady, was given her as a gift.
And then non‑Hebrew slaves were passed on from generation to generation within a family so that you could actually inherit a slave or a servant, according to Leviticus 25:46. There was the more prolonged contract for those who were the original inhabitants of Canaan rather than the short six years for the Jews. And then you could be born into that situation if your parents were under contract as slaves to someone.
So, you get a little picture. There were a lot of people who were moving in and out of this kind of relationship in the society of the Middle East. Now listen, there is never in the Old Testament any statement "abolish slavery." There is never a statement in the Old Testament telling masters to let their slaves go and there is a never a statement telling slaves to seek their freedom. The system was fine. It worked fine. The only abuses were abuses in attitude. The system worked fine. In fact, I thought to myself it's very little different than people today who sign long‑term contracts with any employer. I think about that every time I see one of these high‑priced athletes sign a five‑year contract. What he's basically doing is becoming an indentured servant. What he's doing is becoming a slave under contract in bondage to the one with whom he covenanted that contract.
Now there was no abuse in the system itself. The abuse came in the evil of the hearts of the people in the system. And I hasten to add that you have evil hearted people abusing any and every system of employment. And so you can't escape it by changing the for