No More a Servant

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day.

Tonight: the bondage of the law and the adoption of sons — how a slave becomes a child, and a child an heir.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

We begin where the idea is given whole, in Paul's letter to the Galatians.

From the epistle to the Galatians:

Now I say, That the heir, as long as he is a child, differeth nothing from a servant, though he be lord of all; but is under tutors and governors until the time appointed of the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: but when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

Six sentences, and the whole distance of the gospel is inside them. A servant. A son. And between the two words, everything.

To feel the force of the passage, it helps to stand for a moment where its first hearers stood. In the Roman world of Paul's readers, the household was a small kingdom, and the line between slave and son ran through the middle of it. The slave might be trusted, skilled, even loved — and remain, in law, a thing that could be sold. The son, however young, was heir of all. And Roman law knew a door between those two rooms: adoption. A man could take one who was not his son and make him a son entire — new name, new father, old debts dead, full inheritance. Adoption was not a kindness done to a child; it was a legal act that made an heir. Paul reached for the strongest word his world had.

And what was it to be a slave in such a house? A Roman Stoic left us a portrait. Seneca, writing to his friend Lucilius, had heard that Lucilius dined with his own slaves, and wrote to commend him.

From Seneca:

I am glad to learn, through those who come from you, that you live on friendly terms with your slaves. This befits a sensible and well-educated man like yourself. "They are slaves," people declare. Nay, rather they are men. "Slaves!" No, comrades. "Slaves!" No, they are unpretentious friends. "Slaves!" No, they are our fellow-slaves, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike.

He describes the house where it was otherwise:

All this time the poor slaves may not move their lips, even to speak. The slightest murmur is repressed by the rod; even a chance sound — a cough, a sneeze, or a hiccup — is visited with the lash. There is a grievous penalty for the slightest breach of silence. All night long they must stand about, hungry and dumb.

And then Seneca turns the knife toward the masters themselves:

"He is a slave." His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. "He is a slave." But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. I will name you an ex-consul who is slave to an old hag, a millionaire who is slave to a serving-maid. No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.

He tells of a great reversal he had witnessed himself — a slave named Callistus, once sold off by his master among the worthless lots, later grown so powerful that the old master waited at his door.

From the same letter:

I have seen standing in the line, before the door of Callistus, the former master of Callistus; I have seen the master himself shut out while others were welcomed — the master who once fastened the For Sale ticket on Callistus and put him in the market along with the good-for-nothing slaves. The slave, too, in his turn has cut his name from the list and in his turn has adjudged him unfit to enter his house. The master sold Callistus, but how much has Callistus made his master pay for!

Fortune's wheel could turn a slave into a patron and a master into a beggar at the gate. That much the Roman world knew. What it did not know was a turning that ran deeper than fortune.

He goes on:

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave. Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters. And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, remember that your master has just as much power over you. But I have no master, you say. You are still young; perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at what age Hecuba entered captivity, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?

And he remembers an older Rome:

Do you not see even this — how our ancestors removed from masters everything invidious, and from slaves everything insulting? They called the master father of the household, and the slaves members of the household. They established a holiday on which masters and slaves should eat together. They allowed the slaves to attain honours in the household and to pronounce judgment; they held that a household was a miniature commonwealth.

Even pagan Rome, at its best, groped toward the household as the shape mercy ought to take — the master as a father. But it remained a manner of speaking. The gospel will not leave it a metaphor.

Show me a man who is not a slave. The pagan moralist could diagnose the bondage; what he could not do was open the door. The best he could offer the slave was the counsel that his soul might be free within, and the best he could offer the master was the warning that he too served something. The Greek tragedian Euripides said one thing brings shame to slaves — the name; in everything else the slave is nothing worse than the free-born, if he be virtuous. And centuries of moralists after him agreed that the true chains are inward. From Gregory the Great: He enjoyeth the sweetest liberty that hath a quiet conscience.

But a quiet conscience is not a father. The idea Paul announces — that the God who made all things takes slaves and makes them sons — did not appear from nowhere. It runs through the older Scriptures like a watermark. When God sends Moses to Pharaoh, the word he puts in his mouth is not about subjects or servants.

From the book of Exodus:

And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: and I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.

The exodus itself, the great deliverance from the house of bondage, is announced as a father coming for his boy.

From the song of Moses, the question put to a forgetful people: is not he thy father that hath bought thee?

From the prophet Hosea:

When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt.

From the second book of Samuel, the promise given to David's house: I will be his father, and he shall be my son.

From the book of Deuteronomy: Ye are the children of the Lord your God. And again: The Lord hath avouched thee this day to be his peculiar people, as he hath promised thee.

From the prophet Jeremiah, the Lord speaking over his wayward people: Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child?

And from the prophet Isaiah:

Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not: thou, O Lord, art our Father, our Redeemer; thy name is from everlasting.

A nation called a son. A people bought by a father. The whole account of redemption, from Egypt onward, is told in the language of the household, not the courtroom only. And it waits, all of it, for the sentence Paul writes: when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son — that we might receive the adoption of sons.

The old commentators lingered over these verses. Matthew Henry, working through Galatians, saw in them first the condition of the church before Christ, and then the wonder of what changed.

From Matthew Henry, on the church before Christ, like the heir in his minority:

As the heir, in his minority, is under tutors and governors till the time appointed of his father, by whom he is educated and instructed in those things which at present he knows little of the meaning of, though afterwards they are likely to be of great use to him, so it was with the Old-Testament church. And as that was a dispensation of darkness, so of bondage too; for they were in bondage under the elements of the world, being tied to a great number of burdensome rites and observances. The time appointed of the Father having come, when the church was to arrive at its full age, the darkness and bondage under which it before lay are removed, and we are under a dispensation of greater light and liberty.

He goes on:

He who was truly God for our sakes became man; and he who was Lord of all consented to come into a state of subjection and to take upon him the form of a servant; and one great end of all this was to redeem those that were under the law — to save us from that intolerable yoke and to appoint gospel ordinances more rational and easy.

Further:

He was sent to redeem us, that we might receive the adoption of sons — that we might no longer be accounted and treated as servants, but as sons grown up to maturity, who are allowed greater freedoms, and admitted to larger privileges, than while they were under tutors and governors.

And he draws the sum:

It is the great privilege which believers have through Christ that they are adopted children of the God of heaven. We who by nature are children of wrath and disobedience have become by grace children of love. If we are his sons, then his heirs. It is not so among men, with whom the eldest son is heir; but all God's children are heirs. Those who have the nature of sons shall have the inheritance of sons.

Mark that last stroke. In every earthly great house, one child inherits. In this house, every child is the firstborn's co-heir. It is a kind of arithmetic that does not occur in nature.

Jesus told the whole doctrine as a story. A son who chose slavery; a father who refused to accept the trade.

From the Gospel of Luke:

And he said, A certain man had two sons: and the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want. And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat: and no man gave unto him. And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.

The reading continues:

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: and bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.

Notice what the son rehearses in the pig-field: make me as one of thy hired servants. He has a servant's speech prepared. He is ready to negotiate for a place in the household staff. And the father does not let him finish the sentence. Robe, ring, shoes, feast — every item is the insignia of a son. The boy asks for wages; he is given inheritance. The far country had taught him to think like a slave — to reckon his worth in labor and his father's house as an economy. The father's running, which no dignified man of that world would do, is the fulness of the time come small: the household's honor spent gladly to bring a servant-minded child back in as a son.

The Puritans took this doctrine and warmed their hands at it. Thomas Watson, preaching on the poor in spirit, kept returning to the astonishment of it — that heaven's kingdom is not earned by the strong but entailed on the children.

From Thomas Watson:

It is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. It is not for any desert in us — but the free grace in God. The papists say we merit the kingdom — but we disclaim the title of merit. Heaven is a gift of God's grace. There is a price paid. Jesus Christ has shed his blood for it. All saints come to the kingdom, through blood. Christ's hanging upon the cross was to bring us to the crown. As the kingdom of heaven is a gift in regard of the Father — so it is a purchase in regard of the Son.

He goes on:

See here the mercy and bounty of God, who has prepared a kingdom for his people. It is a favor that we poor worms and no men should be allowed to live. But that worms should be made kings — this is divine bounty! It is mercy to pardon us — but it is rich mercy to crown us! Behold, what manner of love is this! Earthly princes may bestow great gifts on their subjects — but they keep the kingdom to themselves. But God gives a kingdom to his people, he sets them upon the throne!

And for the child of God who owns nothing:

Here is comfort to the people of God in case of poverty. A child of God is often so low in the world, that he has not a foot of land to inherit. He is poor in purse — as well as in spirit. But here is a fountain of consolation opened. The poorest saint who has lost all his golden fleece, is heir to a kingdom — a kingdom which excels all the kingdoms and principalities of the world, more than diamond excels dirt!

Why would God do such a thing? Adoption is not a wage; nothing in the adopted one commands it. On this, a later writer on the attributes of God pressed the point until it shone. Arthur Pink, on the love of God:

There are many today who talk about the love of God, who are total strangers to the God of love. The Divine love is commonly regarded as a species of amiable weakness, a sort of good-natured indulgence; it is reduced to a mere sickly sentiment, patterned after human emotion. Now the truth is that on this, as on everything else, our thoughts need to be formed and regulated by what is revealed thereon in Holy Scripture.

He goes on:

The love which one creature has for another is because of something in the object; but the love of God is free, spontaneous, uncaused. The only reason why God loves any is found in His own sovereign will. God has loved His people from everlasting, and therefore nothing about the creature can be the cause of what is found in God from eternity. He loves from Himself.

He goes on:

God did not love us because we loved Him, but He loved us before we had a particle of love for Him. God's love for me and for each of His own was entirely unmoved by anything in us. What was there in me to attract the heart of God? Absolutely nothing. But, to the contrary, there was everything to repel Him.

And on its endlessness:

God Himself is eternal, and God is love; therefore, as God Himself had no beginning, His love had none. How clear is the testimony: I have loved thee with an everlasting love, therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. How blessed to know that the great and holy God loved His people before heaven and earth were called into existence. Since God's love toward me had no beginning, it can have no ending.

And on its freedom:

Because God is God, He does as He pleases; because God is love, He loves whom He pleases. Suppose God's love were regulated by anything else than His will: in such a case He would love by rule, and loving by rule He would be under a law of love, and then so far from being free, God would Himself be ruled by law.

Pink then reaches for the very verse where love and adoption meet: In love having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself — according to what? Some excellency which He foresaw in them? No! According to the good pleasure of His will.

The strange thing — Paul found it strange, and said so — is that a freed slave can grow homesick for his chains. The Galatians, adopted out of paganism, were being talked back toward bondage.

From the epistle to the Galatians:

Howbeit then, when ye knew not God, ye did service unto them which by nature are no gods. But now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage?

From Henry, on that question:

How is it that you, who have been taught to worship God in the gospel way, should now submit to a dispensation of darkness, and bondage, and terror? What they suffered themselves to be brought into bondage to were but weak and beggarly elements, such things as had no power in them to cleanse the soul, nor to afford any solid satisfaction to the mind.

And Paul was not done with the figure of the two households. Later in the same chapter he reaches back to the oldest of family stories — Abraham's two sons.

From the epistle to the Galatians:

Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law? For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.

From Henry:

We Christians, who have accepted Christ, and rely upon him, and look for justification and salvation by him alone, hereby become the spiritual, though we are not the natural, seed of Abraham; so we are entitled to the promised inheritance and interested in the blessings of it.

Two mothers, two covenants, two households — and every soul born into one or the other. There is no third estate, no respectable middle station between the bondwoman's house and the free.

And the adopted are not left to wonder whether the papers went through. Paul says the Spirit himself is the witness, and gives the family its cry.

From the epistle to the Romans:

For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God. For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God: and if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

Henry, on that witness of the Spirit:

All who have the privilege of adoption have the Spirit of adoption — all who are received into the number partake of the nature of the children of God; for he will have all his children to resemble him. The Spirit of adoption is always the Spirit of prayer, and it is our duty in prayer to eye God as a Father. Christ has taught us in prayer to eye God as our Father in heaven.

Abba — the child's word for father, the syllable of the nursery, put into grown men's mouths by the Spirit of God. And it is the word of the darkest hour as well as the brightest. Spurgeon, meditating on the psalm of the cross, marked how the Son himself, in his agony, would not let go of that relation.

From Spurgeon:

Our Lord's faith beams forth and deserves our reverent imitation; he keeps his hold upon his God with both hands and cries twice, My God, my God! The spirit of adoption was strong within the suffering Son of Man, and he felt no doubt about his interest in his God. Oh that we could imitate this cleaving to an afflicting God!

The elder Brother cleaving to the Father in the dark — and joint-heirs with him, all the adopted, if so be that we suffer with him.

What does adoption purchase, in the end? A house. The moralists knew what a home is worth even when they did not know the Father who keeps one. From Doctor Johnson: To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which all enterprise and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution. From F. W. Robertson: Home is the one place in all this world where hearts are sure of each other; it is the place of confidence; it is the place where we tear off that mask of guarded and suspicious coldness which the world forces us to wear in self-defense. And from Richter, on the voice that presides there: The words that a father speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not heard by the world, but, as in whispering-galleries, they are clearly heard at the end and by posterity.

The poet Goldsmith weighed the world's remedies against the hearth and found them light:

How small, of all that human hearts endure, That part which laws or kings can cause or cure! Still to ourselves in every place consigned, Our own felicity we make or find.

Every longing in those sentences is answered, and outbid, in the adoption of sons. Hearts sure of each other; a father's words heard at the end; happiness at home as the last result of all ambition — this is what the gospel says has been thrown open to slaves. The adoption does not merely change a man's standing; it changes his address. He is brought home. And the proof that the papers are real is not a feeling of improvement but a word rising in the dark — the family word, spoken by the Spirit before the child has learned to spell it.

So the survey comes round to where it began. Seneca could say, show me a man who is not a slave — and he was right; the bondage is universal, and much of it, as he saw, is self-imposed. The tragedians could say the slave's shame is only the name. The prophets could say more: that there is a Father who buys back his children. But only the gospel says the ransom has been paid — God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law. Not counsel from the outside; a payment, and a Spirit sent into the heart, and a cry that no rod can repress: Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.

We close tonight with Charles Wesley's great hymn of the freed prisoner, written in the year of his own release.

And Can It Be That I Should Gain, by Charles Wesley.

And can it be that I should gain An interest in the Savior's blood? Died He for me, who caused His pain? For me, who Him to death pursued? Amazing love! how can it be That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

'Tis mystery all! The Immortal dies! Who can explore His strange design? In vain the firstborn seraph tries To sound the depths of love divine! 'Tis mercy all! let earth adore, Let angel minds inquire no more.

He left His Father's throne above, So free, so infinite His grace; Emptied Himself of all but love, And bled for Adam's helpless race; 'Tis mercy all, immense and free; For, O my God, it found out me.

Long my imprisoned spirit lay Fast bound in sin and nature's night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free; I rose, went forth and followed Thee.

No condemnation now I dread; Jesus, and all in Him is mine! Alive in Him, my living Head, And clothed in righteousness divine, Bold I approach the eternal throne, And claim the crown, through Christ my own.

Good night.