Hey everybody it's Matt. It's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour

podcast and it's very rare that I sit here and restart the recording several times.

I mean normally I just read the text and think about it a little bit

and think something like a little funny thing that I want to talk about.

That kind of ties in and then we turn on the mic and I don't know it just goes to plan I want it to feel like an actual

conversation that we're having like the actual civilized people I don't want it to

feel too fancy Mike's all polished and perfect because it's not and I'm not and one of the goals of this whole thing is to make sure everybody who's listening knows and

you can do this for yourself you're smart you can read a book you can think this through this is meant to be understood you don't actually need me though it's cool that we get to hang out together

But this one has been really hard and it's been very difficult all week because we're talking about a super challenging subject.

We're talking about slavery in the ancient world.

We're talking about slavery in more modern times.

And we're talking about what the Bible says about slavery.

Look, there's no way around it. The Bible, Old Testament and New, just

assumes that slavery is a thing, that it's part of life. And in that, the Bible was very accurate.

It was a part of life. There was no escaping it. Pretty much no one in the ancient world, the classical world, the bronze age, the iron age, anywhere in there, is like, well, maybe we shouldn't do slavery at all. Maybe better if we just canceled that. In some ways, slavery provided a function in society

for people who otherwise in a less developed time

would have been off the bottom rung and just left for dead.

But then in a lot of other ways, it was exactly what you think of slavery as being.

Awful, torturous, violent, stripping people of dignity and rights.

But the Bible, it never really comes out and has like whole books that are like,

we got to get rid of slavery.

Christians later looked at the stuff and figured out like, man, the values of the kingdom

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