The Bible Study Podcast, episode 224. Today, the Bible Study podcast continues the study of freedom and talks about slavery.

Welcome to the Bible study podcast. I'm your host, Chris Christensen. As we talk about freedom, there are some verses

that I want to talk about in the Bible that talk about slavery. And these are probably the

verses that have been most taken out of context and most misused of any verses I can think of in the

Bible. If you go back in American history to the South before the

Civil War, it was clear that part of the reason why slavery existed was people were able to

justify to themselves that slavery was something that was acceptable. Slavery was something that

was good and right, possibly even. And one of the

things they did is they looked in the Bible and found verses, for instance, that tell slaves to be

obedient to their masters and that don't say anything about freeing slaves. And so it would appear

from just looking at the Bible briefly that the Bible is pro-slavery.

So let's look at these verses and then think about what the context is of these and what they

have to do with freedom.

So the first verse that I would look at here is from Colossians 3.

The end of Colossians 3 has instructions for Christian

households, tells what wives should do, husbands, childrens, and fathers. And then in verse 22, it says,

slaves obey your earthly masters in everything, and do it not only when their eyes on you and to

curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the

Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with your whole heart as working for the Lord, not for human

masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord

Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong will be repaid for the wrongs. There is no favoritism. And then we're going to look

at two other verses. We're also going to look at Ephesians, and Ephesians has a similar sort of

...