“For when you were slaves of sin, you were free with regard to righteousness.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the truth claims of the Christian worldview is that God is the only source of goodness in the universe. Everything that is good comes from God. Apart from Him, there is only evil. Moral evil is any word, thought, or action that does not flow out of the character of God. This idea can lead to confusion when we set it against our own experience of meeting and interacting with people from other religions or even unbelievers who seem to us to be not only good people, but people who share many of our moral convictions. Or, to put that another way, should all non-Christians be insufferable jerks? Of course not! Paul here gives us a reason why.

We can explore this idea in pretty quick fashion today as it is a pretty simple one. The whole idea of slavery is that the slave has to do the will of his master. That’s what makes him a slave in the first place. If he had a choice with regard to his master’s will, he wouldn’t be slave. He would be a servant of some other kind. Even an indentured servitude is different from slavery. In that instance there is a debt to pay, but the servant is not wholly owned by the creditor.

Now, we should go on record here as noting that slavery is completely antithetical to the Gospel and the idea that God alone is sovereign over our lives. The idea that one person can own another to the extent of being able to command and control all of their lives is a direct challenge to the clear new covenant principle that God alone occupies such a position. Therefore no truly committed follower of Jesus could rationally give support or legitimacy to such a state of affairs, and those who did so in the past were entirely wrong in their exegesis and application, possibly even damnably so, although that extent of judgment is not ultimately mine (nor anyone else’s) to make.

This is why Christians were the first substantive, organized abolitionists in the history of the world. It’s why we have always been at the forefront of abolitionist movements across the last 2,000 years of human history. Even where professed Christians have been on the other side of the line advocating for the legitimacy and continuation of slavery, it was Christians on the other side of the line who were the loudest voices in opposition to them.

But just because slavery is entirely wrong in every instance, doesn’t mean it isn’t practiced, and doesn’t mean Christians haven’t found themselves in such a position at various times (including today) across church history. And in a day like Paul’s in which slavery was entirely ubiquitous, assumed, and in which Christians had no power or ability to change that particular aspect of their status quo, wise counsel was to strive to be faithful followers of Jesus from within their situations rather than necessarily working actively to change them, let alone to change the entire system.

This is because in the final analysis, being free in Christ is more important than being free in life. This life and the situations we face in it are temporary. As Christians, we believe (and live accordingly) that the next will be permanent…and perfect. Thus, if a Christian who happened to be a slave could live in such a way toward his master such that his master became a follower of Jesus, even if that master did not grasp the extent of the Gospel to the point of giving freedom to the brother he legally owned in the cultural system under which they were both operating, in the final analysis, both of them were free in the ways that mattered most. The enslaved brother could rest easy in that knowledge even if he wasn’t granted the temporary freedom he also desired and deserved as a bearer of God’s image. It is also why Paul could use slavery as an illustration for so many aspects of the Gospel. People understood it.

Getting back on track, the slave is entirely beholden to his master’s will. If the master wants something, the slave has to do it. If the master prohibits something, the slave cannot do it. But the master’s will doesn’t cover everything. There are things the slave might do or how a slave might do them on which his master doesn’t have an opinion. When it comes to this set of things, the slave actually has a degree of freedom. Depending on the extent of the master’s apathy toward them, the slave might have a great deal of freedom in regard to these matters. This by no means is to suggest that the slave is really free, because at the end of the day he still has to do his master’s will. But there are nonetheless pockets of freedom in the slave’s life. He unquestionably should have a great deal more, but life is too comprehensive a venture for one person to imagine that he can control every aspect of another person’s experience of it. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, liberty is an unalienable right. Try as a person might, he can’t take away all of another person’s liberty. When something is given by God, who are we to think we can take it away?

This same basic idea applies in our enslavement from sin when we are apart from Christ. Slaves to sin will sin at the end of the day. Their master’s will is for them to sin, and so sin they will. But how we go about sinning isn’t really sin’s concern. It is just as content with meek and mild sin as it is with violent and aggressive sin. You can be a total jerk when you sin, or you can appear to be kind and compassionate. Sin doesn’t care.

Being meek and mild, kind and compassionate, though, are all aspects of righteousness. Those are all reflections of God’s character. How could sin allow for those to exist if it is so diametrically opposed to God as a fundamental aspect of its very existence? Because and again, when our sinning is its only goal, how we go about that sinning isn’t its primary concern. It isn’t even its secondary concern. In fact, it’s not a concern that even registers for it.

Because of this, even when we are slaves of sin, we are “free with regard to righteousness.” Those whose are apart from Christ can do things that are consistent with the character of God because sin doesn’t care whether they do or not…as long as they sin at the end of the day. And again, this sin doesn’t have to be obvious. Someone who by all external appearances is an absolute paragon of righteousness, but who harbors a heart completely filled with hatred for another person or a consuming narcissism or lust or the bitterness of unforgiveness of some past wound or even just a cynical apathy for the people benefiting from their apparent righteousness because they recognize that this is the path that will bring them the acclaim or wealth or political power or whatever else it is they really want. Sin doesn’t care what lies on the surface of a person as long as it holds her heart.

So, yes, of course non-Christians can be what the world would identify as good people. They often are. To think otherwise is both a grotesque arrogance on the part of the believer or else an impoverished understanding of the nature of the imago Dei, the image of God we all bear by virtue of being human. But being a good person isn’t the thing that saves us. Being a good person doesn’t deal with the sin inside of us. It can even serve as a mask for it that successfully helps us avoid ever dealing with that sin because we become convinced of our own righteousness and give up a believe that sin is a problem for us at all. There is only one thing…one person…who can save us: Jesus. All other roads lead in a direction away from the God of life.