Most of us can hardly imagine the horrors of slavery. We’ve read of the inhuman treatment of men and women ripped from familiar surroundings, shackled in a long chain of human “properties,” and transported in the unspeakably filthy caverns of slave ships. Naked, each of those humans was sold on an auction block and added like animals to the properties of wealthy land-owners. Those and subsequent horrors
are unimaginable.


Israel experienced the inhuman treatment of slavery for four hundred years, until God graciously rescued them, broke the bars of their yoke, and gave them freedom.


Paul uses the picture of slavery to describe the life of sin from which Jesus rescued us. Romans 6 contrasts that slavery to sin with the glorious freedom of being “slaves to righteousness.” Sin was a cruel, demanding taskmaster. Sin bound you, took away your dignity, and controlled you. But you were “bought with a price.” Now you have a whole new master, one
ineffably gracious!