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Ephesians 6.4-end
December 15th 2019
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So we have talked about all of us submitting to each other, wives submitting to husbands, husbands loving wives, and children obeying parents.
Now, Paul moves to the next set of directives, and says:
4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
5 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;
6 Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;
7 With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:
8 Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.
9 And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.
Let’s cover these verses first and see where we end up on time – so go back to verse 4 where Paul writes:
4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
We see in this description automatically that mothers are not addressed here nor included – only Fathers.
It’s interesting.
Some think that this is because Paul distinguishes the husband as head of the house and therefore the lead. Could be. Theirs was a patriarchal order coming down from Genesis and Paul was not about to mess with that in light of everything else changing around him.
But I tend to think that Paul’s advice is generally sound – mothers, good mothers, are all about encouraging and helping and sustaining their children, and promoting them to excellence.
It’s not that fathers aren’t, but men (as fathers) often approach children with a little more toughness than they are ready to receive. Sometimes with sarcasm, sometimes with criticism, and anger, or dismissiveness or with tasks with a degree of difficulty that overwhelms a child.
And this can certainly lead to the child becoming angry inside.
Paul appears to be addressing this to Fathers as a means to help ensure that children are not tasked with commands that are impossible to obey or keep as a means to encourage them rather than discourage them.
I grew up with a very good dad in terms of providing for our family. He also tried hard to support his children in the things that interested them.
But He was a mans man and he was a firefighters in LA County, and those combined often make for fathers who constantly challenge and overtask their children – at least in my day. And what Paul says here true – this lead to anger inside both me and my younger brother.
When I was just a wee lad, my Dad had the bright idea to drain the backyard pool and give it what he called, “an acid bath” which was a process he concocted on his own where the entire pool needed to be hand sanded, and then washed with muric acid.
I had the task as a six or seven year old to sand the entire pool floor, the shallow end walls and up as far as I reach in the deep end.
It was summer and the sun was bright. I’m not sure how much time went by before everything around me went dark, and I was literally rendered blind by the reflection – so much so that I had to feel my way out of the pool, to the house and let myself in saying, “I’m blind! I’m blind!”
Of course, my mom was terrified and called the doctor who told her I had experienced snow blindness and with rest and time my sight would return.
What brought the anger out of me was the following day, when I was fully sighted, my Dad insisted that I return to the pool – this time wearing a floppy hat and oversized sunglasses provided by my mom, because “my weak eyes” weren’t going to stop the progress.”
I was down in that pool grumbling like the Christmas story kid at my old man.
Paul is telling Fathers not to discourage their children in this manner because the results will provoke them to wrath.
Yes, children are to obey their parents, but fathers must see to it that the commands they are given are reasonable.
Part of the provocation that comes from giving children unreasonable challenges is that when they fail, a parent might find it necessary to discipline them for the failure, or mock them for it.
Here is where the souring of a child’s disposition begins to take place. They receive the Fathers discipline as unjust anger toward their little person for failing to accomplish what’s been demanded, and they develop anger in return – for the ridiculous expectation being placed upon them in the first place.
So even if Father’s want to challenge their children to difficult tasks, its how they react when the child fails as to whether the child will respond in anger.
We will read in our up and coming study of Colossians that Paul will say:
“Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged.”
I had a friend in Junior High school named Allen. He was a nice kid and we were sort of good together. My natural badness abated around Allen and his natural straitness sort of loosened up around me.
I learned in time that his father was a relentless disciplinarian – something I wanted to stay away from.
When we reached highschool Allen and I sort of set our separate ways, I went to swimming, waterpolo and the beach and Allen went to drugs.
I couldn’t make much sense of it in that day but it makes total sense now looking back. Allen was broken with discouragement and believed he had no other escape.
This is not to say all people who abuse drugs have relentless fathers, but Allen did, and I often wonder what he would have been like if perhaps his dad would have approached him with less demands, and more encouragement.
Interestingly, we often discover the same reaction my friend Allen had in people when they are taught and believe that God has unrealistic demands of them and that He is angry and displeased when those commands are not met.
We see him as this crazy despot sending us into empty swimming pools with sand paper and then not only making fun of us when we go blind but demanding we keep going!
This is my fight against religious approaches that preach and teach such a God. I believe the presentation of such only serves to either discourage people or anger them or lead them into rebellion.
He is not such a God. He is gentle. His yoke is easy and His burden is light, and His spirit moves and encourages us all with love, patience, longsuffering, patience, kindness, meekness and care.
This is why Paul says in full:
4 And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”
There is such a fine balance in this that a father can provide – making God a trusted go to or a frightening monster.
Paul say train a child up to be acquainted with the Lord – this means introduce the children to His ways and existence – but never use Him as a being to justify anger or evil. That is the nurture part. But Paul add and “in the admonition of the Lord.”
Here he is telling fathers to literally put the Lord and His ways into the minds of the child.
Again, not using him as a tool for threat, but to put His goodness and love in their minds especially by example.
I can’t think of many worse combinations with which to raise children than for a parent to be mean and hurtful while invoking the name of God in their evil.
Moving on! In verses 5-8 Paul speaks to what the King James calls servants. Let’s read the four passages:
5 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;
6 Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;
7 With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:
8 Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.
We noted in the past weeks that when Paul address wives his wrote, “the wives!” And the husbands, The Husbands! Here he does the same thing with “The Servants!” or “The Slaves!” or “the Bondslave!”
Doo-los is the Greek and is means GENERALLY anyone “who is bound to render service to another, whether that service be forced, voluntary, free or paid.”
To be frank, in that day and age, slaves were a way of life though it cannot be demonstrated that the word here necessarily means slaves though slavery existed among this culture.
Paul is in all probability addressing them as a fact of life in that culture, day and age.
Now, we have to be clear here about a principle that I think is really important to understand – God, in what I believe is directly tied to His love of freewill and choice – allows, and does NOT prevent, human depredations to exist on earth.
To say otherwise is to genuinely put on blinders.
Here’s the deal – EVEN among His own – the Children of Israel and then Christians themselves, God appears to allow cultures and people groups to go as they wish, and he works in and around the choices made.
I am committed to this idea or some semblance of this idea from the heart and it stands face to face with the idea of God and humankind co-existing in a two-way exchange.
I reject the notion of a despotic God entirely and propose that as a good God he allows, in this realm, all people the right to govern themselves as they please.
In this light we discover human sacrifice among people, a polygamy, and sex-trafficking, and other deplorable environs like slavery.
And because He allows them to exist (and I emphasize that word ALLOWS) he also helps lead and guide those who are involved in the quagmire of our decisions.
This is what Paul is doing here – he is speaking as a Christian Apostle to a people in that day and age. He is not trying to right slavery, he is simply trying to address how Christian slaves and Christian masters are to be toward each other in the face of the abominable practice.
For Him to mandate (and therefore force) an end of the twins of barbarism (slavery or polygamy) he would, in my estimation, “go too far into the realm of the freewill of humankind stripping individual Christians of their right to choose how to live by the Spirit – which is love.
Where critics of our God mock Christian’s for essentially being the biggest promoters of slavery in the America’s, I am fascinated by the fact that God loves freedom of all so much he allowed it and by the fact it took so freaking long for Christians to turn from its clutches!
During the period of American slavery, just how did Christian slaveholders justify faith in Christ (who came to liberate and free all from bondage) and slavery?
Many if not most slaveholders in that day identified themselves as Christian and they had two favorite texts that they used out of the Bible to justify slavery:
Genesis 9:18–27 and these words by Paul in Ephesians chapter 6! (This is according to the research by writer Noel Rae found in his book, The Great Stain).
Genesis 9:18-27 recounts the story of Noah and his sons and says:
“And the sons of Noah that went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan. These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole world overspread. And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard: and he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without. And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness. And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him. And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. And Noah lived after the flood three hundred and fifty years.”
In its boiled-down revised version by many slave-holding Christians at the time, (known as “The Curse of Ham,”) Canaan was dropped from the story, Ham was made black, and his descendants were made Africans.
Joseph Smith from Mormonism’s fame picked right up on this and incorporated it right into his Book of Moses.
As stated, the other favorite came from our text here in Ephesians 6, which again says
“Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.”
(And again Paul repeats himself, almost word for word, in the third chapter of his Epistle to the Colossians.)
Christian slave-holders then minded the rest of the Old Testament to show that slavery among the Nation was common, and with the exception of this example in Ephesians and Colossians pretty much ignored using the New Testament at all except for the fact that the story of Philemon, the runaway who St. Paul returned to his master, was also often quoted.
Worst of all, some Christian leaders justified slavery as a means to bring blacks into the faith.
One Bishop Stephen Elliott, out of Georgia, said that critics of slavery should
“consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! “
He continues and says:
“At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”
Social Reformer and Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, had this to say:
“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked.
To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other.
I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.”
Herein lies part of the problem folks -the faith the Douglass calls “good, pure and holy,” was allowed – by God and other Christians – to become something that the faith is NOT.
It is NOT part of ANYTHING relative to the ways and means of this world other than the mindset of individual selfless love.
When it became and becomes something else, men take the Bible and use it for whatever diabolical justification that they can imagine.
But the Spirit, for nearly 2000 years, has always whispered to every Christian – love. Love. Love.
Love for wives. Love for children. Love for neighbor. Love for people of every color, every clime, every culture, every way.
And God is calling, and has been calling to all, from the death and resurrection of His Son, to let such love shine, and reign.
But His children have to let it in – He will not force it, He will not. He patiently waits for us to make the choice – first for ourselves, and second as a community.
Apparently one man, William Wilberforce, a member of British Parliament in the late 1700’s, made the choice in his political role and repeatedly introduced anti-slavery motions to put an end to it.
I think that was noble and good, but my question is what took so long? And where were the Christian Wilberforces in America? In the face of all of this I think we have a living example of just HOW long real lasting change takes in this fallen world even among Christians when the Holy Spirit is a work in individuals and to see these passages we are studying today in the light that they were given – to a culture that saw slavery as normative, and so Paul addresses the participants – slaves and masters – as exactly that – Christian participants.
And he says, as a means to keep the bride spotless and without wrinkle then and there:
“Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.”
I want you to notice the repeated line Paul uses here, “as unto Christ,” “but as servants of Christ,” doing the will of God” “as to the Lord,” and “the same shall be received of the Lord.”
We note that Paul does NOT say:
“As Christian SLAVES IN BONDAGE TO YOUR MASTERS you have rights to rise up in His name and demand emancipation. Any more than he tells wives that they have a right, in the face of their failing husbands, to rise up against them.
The DAY and the AGE under Paul’s leadership was to keep peace, and to encourage all believes to behave as if they were doing it AS UNTO CHRIST!
Now, if these passages do not speak to you by the spirit in the way that Paul issues them here, that is between you and God – nobody else. We are learning how Paul and the others kept the Bride without Spot in that day and age – and so even slaves were subject to His submissive advice. Actually, more than submissive because Paul actually commands them to conform, and does not give them the choice like he gives wives.
His justification for this advice to slaves was that as they obeyed “as unto Christ and not as unto men,” that Christ “would reward them for assuming this humble attitude, saying, ”the same will receive of the Lord, whether bond or free.”
Perhaps the best parallel, if you will receive it, in our day, is between employees and employers.
Paul says at verse 6 that they should obey their masters
6 Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart;
And AGAIN (verse 7)
7 With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men:
Since our lives are not our own as we have been bought with a price, the question becomes, “Whom do we serve, what do we serve and how do we serve?
Paul says here
7 “With good- will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men.”
Why? It seems that it presents the attitude God wants from His children. It is not for our benefit and well-being, its for the benefit of the Kingdom.
But Paul does reassure his reader, and us, if we are so led, saying
8 Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.
This is the basis behind the walk of faith we have with the Lord – His children trust that whatever good thing anyone does God will bless them and/or God will make all things right.
We trust this.
It’s the principle behind not taking revenge on those who abuse and hurt us, in submitting to bad governments, bosses, and loving and respecting spouses who do not deserve it.
It is trusting that in and through suffering for His cause and purposes He will bless those who choose faith and love.
The whole New Testament is threaded with these promises.
At this point Paul turns to Christian masters – employers in our day, slaveholders who had converted in his, and says:
9 And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.
There is always two sides to Christian directives – to the child Paul tells to obey parents, Paul counsels fathers; to the wives Paul advises husbands, to the slaves, we have him turning to the masters.
His objective, of course, is to try and secure proper treatment of all believers all the time – no matter the social status.
Let’s not mince words – this is pretty sound evidence that in the early Christian church there were slave holders.
We also note that Paul received them into the Church as such, not refusing admittance, not withholding baptism, or anything of the sort. WHY?
Because it is LOVE by the SPIRIT than will move a true believer and follower of Christ to let slaves go, that’s why. This is why the faith is not materially based. It is open to all who materially fail – all – because within the confines of His light and love and goodness, all people have the opportunity to grow, and learn to love, as He loves.
His advice to masters was for them to do the same to their slaves – which automatically is a marked improvement over what the secular world would have advised. Because he says be the same we can say that Paul says:
Masters . . .
be obedient to them that are your slaves according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free.”
Paul also add that they ought to “forbear threatening,” “knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him.”
Meaning that they ought to withhold harsh threats – relax or loosen them and approach their slaves with a disposition of love – which is the constant in all of Paul’s advice here in Ephesians 5 and 6.
And at this point Paul delivers the penultimate section of this epistle, which contain some of the most insightful admonitions to the believers of that day – and perhaps to us today.
And he says
Ephesians 6:10 Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might.
11 Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.
12 For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
13 Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.
14 Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness;
15 And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace;
16 Above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked.
17 And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God:
18 Praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with all perseverance and supplication for all saints;
And we will begin to cover these verses next week. Looks like we are going to begin the new year with Philppians, a fantastic Epistle.
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