Freedom is a wonderful ideal. But in
reality, none of us lives a life that is totally free. We all have restrictions
in life. Some of these restrictions arise from good things. The concrete
circumstances of our life—our relationships, our family, our work, our
commitments, our upbringing, our national status, and more, might all be good,
but they also place real constraints on us. For example, most of us must work
to earn a living; few of us can spend all day, every day, doing exactly what we
want. And for some people, economic constraints are particularly pressing and
severe. For some, life is so strongly controlled by economic constraints and
obligations that the ideal of freedom is simply a pipe dream.

In Ephesians 6:5–8, Paul is writing to people
in this kind of situation. He’s talking to “slaves”. But we need to be careful
here. For those of us who live in the modern Western world, the word “slaves”
conjures up particular images. The word “slave” today is commonly associated
with the transatlantic slave trade from the 16th-early 19th
centuries, during which traders captured people from Africa and sold them as
slaves to the Americas and the British Empire. Thankfully, this trade was
legally abolished in the early 19th century, due to the efforts of many—especially Evangelical
Christians in England such as Hannah More and William Wilberforce. Today, slavery
is still universally illegal. Yet tragically, this illegal slavery continues
to be a huge problem in our world. The wickedness of the modern criminal slave
trade, especially the sex-slave trade, is widespread even in modern Western
countries. The International Justice Mission,
a Christian organisation that is a leader in this field, currently works very
hard against slavery, and is worth supporting. The modern criminal slave trade
is supported by the pornography industry (and by the way, please realise that if
you are using pornography, you are actively supporting some of the most vicious
criminal slavery, abuse and human misery that has existed in history. It’s not
true that it doesn’t hurt anybody).

However, the slavery Paul is referring to
here was broader and more varied than either the transatlantic slave trade or
the modern criminal slave trade. “Slaves” in the ancient Roman Empire were very
common, because state-endorsed slavery was a fundamental building block in the Empire’s
economic and social fabric. As a result, “slaves” were everywhere, and they lived
in a wide variety of conditions. Some slaves were treated terribly; others were
looked after very well and had quite good prospects in life. And slavery was
not necessarily permanent: slaves could be freed or could buy their freedom. But
of course, not everyone got this opportunity. So slavery was a widespread and
varied phenomenon. Still, there was a common factor to all slavery: state-endorsed
restriction of economic and personal freedom. A slave was someone who
was legally tied to the household of a master, and so was not free to live
where and how he or she wanted to live. These “slaves” are the kind of people
Paul is addressing here, when he says:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, with whole-hearted sincerity, as obeying Christ, not just serving to be seen, as people-pleasers, but as slaves of Christ doing God’s will from within, serving with a good attitude, as rendering service to the Lord and not human beings, recognising that for each one of us, whatever good we have done,