Pray the Word with David Platt is a resource from Radical.net.

Exodus chapter 21, verse 16.

Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him shall be put to death.

So this verse comes in the middle of a list of laws that we start to see at this point in the

book of Exodus.

And the reason I read this one, and want to lead us to pray according to it, is because

in Exodus chapter 21, you start to see a lot of mention of slaves and slavery.

There's a ton we could talk about here that we don't have time to go into in just a couple

a minute podcast episode that's mainly prayer.

But I do want to point out that whenever we see the word slave or slavery in the Bible,

we always need to make sure to look at the context of what that

slavery involved in the picture of Old Testament slavery among God's people. So again, we don't

have time to go into the details of it, but I would just suffice to say for now that the picture

of slavery in the Old

Testament, while not ideal and not according to God's original design, while it was a product

of the fall in the world, was still very different from the picture of slavery in the history

of the United States, which was more akin to what God

clearly speaks against down in verse 16, whoever steals a man and sells him and anyone found

in possession of him, this kind of trafficking, of buying and purchasing people who you steal in order to

make a profit, was clearly, without question, unequivocally commanded against in the Old Testament

and reiterated in the New Testament.

This is, after all, one of the core commands in Exodus chapter 20,

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