Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.
- Jude 1:3
Then the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah: “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: I made a covenant with your ancestors when I brought them out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. I said, ‘Every seventh year each of you must free any fellow Hebrews who have sold themselves to you. After they have served you six years, you must let them go free.’ Your ancestors, however, did not listen to me or pay attention to me. Recently you repented and did what is right in my sight: Each of you proclaimed freedom to your own people. You even made a covenant before me in the house that bears my Name. But now you have turned around and profaned my name; each of you has taken back the male and female slaves you had set free to go where they wished. You have forced them to become your slaves again.
“Therefore this is what the Lord says: You have not obeyed me; you have not proclaimed freedom to your own people. So I now proclaim ‘freedom’ for you, declares the Lord—‘freedom’ to fall by the sword, plague and famine. I will make you abhorrent to all the kingdoms of the earth. Those who have violated my covenant and have not fulfilled the terms of the covenant they made before me, I will treat like the calf they cut in two and then walked between its pieces. The leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the court officials, the priests and all the people of the land who walked between the pieces of the calf, I will deliver into the hands of their enemies who want to kill them. Their dead bodies will become food for the birds and the wild animals.
- Jeremiah 34:12-20
This is what the Lord Almighty says:
“The people of Israel are oppressed,
and the people of Judah as well.
All their captors hold them fast,
refusing to let them go.
- Jeremiah 50:33
“Lovejoy understood the message of the book of Jude-that not every opinion in the world is equally valid. Objective truth exists because God exists. There is, therefore, a basis for objective truth and moral absolutes. False teachers are to be judged by biblical truth, and Lovejoy’s dedication to journalism stemmed from this commitment to truth.
“He added, ‘Opinions honestly entertained will be fearlessly declared.’ The Observer became a vehicle for teaching Scripture, relating the news of the day, and interpreting the latter by the former. His editorials were must-reads, and sparks began to fly when he set forth the biblical facts and brutal truths about slavery.
“On April 16, 1835, he wrote prophetically:
“While Christians have been slumbering over it, the eye of God has not slumbered, nor has His Justice been an indifferent spectator of the scene. The groans, and sighs, and tears, and blood of the poor slave have gone up as a memorial before the throne of Heaven. In due time they will descend in awful curses upon this land, unless averted by the speedy repentance of us all.”
- Robert J. Morgan, 100 Bible Verses That Made America
In my recent trip to visit the grandchildren, the oldest of them went with me to Nashville, to sell used books and games. One of the books that I purchased in return was 100 Bible Verses That Made America by Robert J. Morgan. As we approach the 250th anniversary of the birth of the USA, I thought I would do a condensed mini-series on some of these verses, four posts per week for a few weeks – maybe not all 100 verses.
Elijah Lovejoy was a pastor as well as a newspaper publisher. When he spoke of the need for a speedy repentance, he had read the Bible and he understood how God felt.
But you might say that God instituted slavery in the Mosaic Law.
No, slavery was already around. God limited slavery to indentured servitude, which has also been abolished. If you are in great debt, you could sell yourself to another Hebrew. You would work for that slave owner until the Sabbatical Year, every seventh year. All slaves that have completed six years of service will be set free. This service cancels the debt. In addition, regardless of the years of service, in the year of Jubilee (once each 50 years) all Hebrew slaves are released.
Note that when Babylon captured and transported people to Babylon on three occasions, Jeremiah sent a letter to the exiles to inform them that they would remain captive for seventy years because the people of Judah had never released any slaves over the previous 490 years, or there abouts. Then the Scripture from Jeremiah 34 comes up. They free their Hebrew slaves with the left hand and then enslave them again with the right hand. God dealt with them harshly, as seen in Jeremiah 50:33.
I wish I had read this in an intellectual tome, but those people get on their high horse and condemn slavery as evil. But I read a mystery novel by James Lee Burke, probably one with Dave Robicheaux. He breaks his narrative to be the voice of common sense. Note: Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic, is the common man’s common man – invariably pitting himself against the rich of Cajun country in Louisiana.
Burke says this, not a quote. Most slave owners treated their slaves fairly and took care of them. It was the stupid slave owners, maybe with more money than they were smart enough to handle, who mistreated their slaves. Let’s look at this logically. Slaves came at a high price in the slave markets. They ate a lot of food if you wanted them to do a lot of hard labor. Then, the occasional poisonous spider or snake will send you back to the slave market, usually after you invested many hours, and time is money, just training the slave to do the job correctly. So, if you beat your slave, they will either do minimal work with no quality or they will find a way to escape. Either way, you get little for the investment. So, treating your slaves like proper people makes business sense.
Burke went on to say that if the war of the 1860s in the USA had not ended slavery, slavery would have gone away soon. With inventions like McCormick’s Reaper and Whitney’s Cotton Gin, those machines were cheaper than the slaves they replaced and when bitten by spiders and snakes, the machines did not die.
I was not looking forward to this topic, so I spent some time giving a view that you rarely get in the history books. And I prayed a lot. My great-grandfather, one of them, had worked in the fields next to a slave that was within one year of the same age. The slave ran from Yankee raiders – the raiders were out to kill him – and my great-grandfather spent the rest of his life trying to find his “brother.” But those stories never make it into the history books.
But before we get off the idea of biblically condoned slavery, the biblical slavery was one cousin enslaving another cousin so that the slave cousin could be freed of a debt. The slave was not captured against his will. In the seventh year, the slave was supposed to go free, and you would see him at the next family reunion. You did not mistreat your cousin under those circumstances.
And while many quoted the curse of the tribe of Ham to state that these people should be enslaved under the curse, there was never any proof that black people were all from Noah’s son Ham. But the curse was on Canaan, brown-skinned people, and they were virtually wiped out over time. As for black people, DNA testing and comparison of the Y-chromosome proves that black people were equally from the tribes of Ham, Shem, and Japheth. We are all of one race – humans. But a lot of us do not live like it. And the division of people at the Tower of Babel was not by skin color, but by language barriers. The cousins had probably intermarried by then.
But to the story of Elijah Lovejoy. The people did not like what he wrote. He refused to retract it. They threatened, they pressured him.
Time out: Missouri was called the Missouri Compromise. They were not a slave state, only having about 10,000 slaves over the entire state. They were made a slave state when Maine entered the Union as a non-slave state. So, why would the people get so upset? Some were making money off the slave trade, but probably the biggest fear was that as the “compromise” state, they did not want to lose their statehood because they did not act like a slave state.
Well, the rioters tore down the press when Lovejoy was moving to a nearby town. He bought a second press and the same thing happened. When he ordered and received the third press, 30 men, an angry mob who had been drinking a lot, showed up with weapons. Lovejoy was shot five times. He was buried on his 35th birthday, as the author put it, the first white martyr of the cause of abolition.
We have the rights established in the Constitution, but sometimes some of those rights can lead to consequences. But Jesus said that he who denies me will be denied themselves. Are we brave enough to stand on the Rock of Salvation and take a stand?
Soli Deo Gloria. Only to God be the Glory.
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