What does the New Testament really say about war and slavery—two of history’s most profound and controversial issues? In this episode of Seek Go Create, the conversation focused on how these ancient practices shaped empires like Rome and America, and why the New Testament’s response might not be what you expect—or want—to hear. The discussion explored uncomfortable truths, challenging assumptions about politics, kingdom ethics, and the relationship between faith and national identity. If you’re ready to dig deeper into how biblical text actually addresses these difficult subjects, you won’t want to miss this episode.

"The Bible doesn't take the side you want it to take, and it doesn't take the other side either. It offers something neither side has imagined." - Tim Winders

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Episode Resources:

• NT90 Hub – This is the central website for the 90-day New Testament reading plan, with downloadable, printable plans, background information, and links to all episodes and resources.

Episode Highlights:

00:00 War and Slavery Setup

01:11 Series Context and Reading Plan

02:29 America 250 and Hard Topics

05:46 Perspective and Disclaimers

08:29 America Is Not the Kingdom

11:43 Paul Letters and Onesimus

15:16 Tribes and False Frames

18:25 Three Kingdoms Framework

19:46 War as Empire Economy

24:56 What the NT Says on War

30:50 Blessing Versus Mandate

32:14 Canaan Conquest Misused

34:22 Doctrine of Discovery Fallout

35:28 Wars and Economic Expansion

36:50 Civil War Two Gears Collide

40:20 Ancient Slavery Context

43:56 New Testament on Slavery

48:41 America Slavery Adapts

51:29 Church War vs Slavery

53:17 Kingdom Over Politics

56:44 Final Takeaways and Next

War and slavery, two of the biggest moral questions in human history, and the New

Testament barely addresses either one.

Not because the writers were sheltered.

They lived inside an empire that ran on both.

War was the business model.

Slavery was the labor force.

Every apostle walked past both of them every single day, and they

chose to announce a kingdom instead.

Both of these are ancient.

Both of them are still running today, and the Civil War is where

the two collide on American soil.

Same machine, same operating word, ownership.

What does the New Testament actually say about war and slavery?

The answer is not what you expect, and it is not what most of us want it to say.

Welcome back to Seek Go Create.

This is Tim Winders.

All of what we're doing here is spinning off from me reading the entire New

Testament in 90 days in context, in the order it was written, not the

order in our Bibles, the order that the letters actually went out to

the audiences in the first century.

What I found surprised me, challenged me, changed the way I understand

scripture, and this series, this extra stuff that I'm doing, is where

I share those discoveries with you.

If you wanna do what I did, I really encourage you to.

The reading plan is free at k2m.foundation/mt90, k2m.foundation/mt90.

The download link should be down in the notes of wherever you're

either listening or watching this.

Download it.

Read along.

Try to go at the 90-day pace.

I've, I've gotten feedback from people that they say it's just too much

to do it at that pace, but try it.

The faster you read it, the more you compress it, the more powerful it becomes.

Just see what you think.

The link is down in the show notes.

All right.

This episode is dropping right around the week of America's 250th birthday,

and this is… I'm titling this, this is episode 13 in this series of all

that I found and learned as I read through the New Testament in context.

And I, I'm titling it War and Slavery: What the New Testament Actually Says.

And again, we are celebrating, for those of you listening to it in or

around the time it releases, this is probably a big celebration time.

In a few days, the nation's gonna be draped in flags.

There'll be speeches about freedom, about the American experiment, about

what makes this country great, and a lot of those speeches will reference God.

Some will call America a Christian nation.

Many will quote scripture, and I wanna honor that moment.

I love this country.

I'm so appreciative of where I've grown up and where I live.

But there are two big topics that are part of the United States and

really part of almost every country or empire that has ever existed, and

those topics are war and slavery.

Hot topics, right?

You know what?

Let's just start it off light and easy.

No, war and slavery, they've been running together for at least 3,000 years.

And what I wanna do in this episode today, and I'm not exactly su- sure

where it goes, or truthfully, I'm not exactly sure the point I'm trying to

make other than to have some dialogue about some serious issues and how

it relates to what the Bible says.

So here's the honest question that I wanna ask: What does the New

Testament actually say about them?

Over the last two episodes, we established … Please go back and listen to those.

We established that the kingdom of God arrived in the first century,

and that the New Testament gives clear instructions for living in it.

This episode takes that foundation into some of the toughest and hardest

territory that we see it go into.

The first half of this episode, we're gonna talk about war, and in the

second half we're gonna cover slavery.

And the Civil War is interesting.

I'm, I'm a big history guy.

I'm not saying I'm an expert, and I'm not also saying I'm a biblical expert.

I study both of them pretty extensively.

And as I was working on the notes for this, I actually saw that there was an

event in history where those two, war and slavery, collided like no other time.

And that was on American soil during the mid-1800s, and it was the Civil War.

It's where they two, the two of those collided.

And so we're gonna talk about that.

We're gonna build up to that, and that's gonna be kind of the halfway point.

So let's get into it.

Let's have … I don't wanna say let's have some fun.

Let's have some conversation and discussion.

But kind of before I … I don't know if this is a disclaimer.

I don't know if this is just putting my perspective out on the table,

but I need to tell you where I stand before we go any further But

politically, in all likelihood, I would lean more conservative.

Probably if I'm really truthful, more libertarian, if I'm being precise.

I've always been a fan of less government, and, I'm honored, like I

said earlier, and genuinely grateful that I live in the United States.

I've traveled all over the world.

I've been to places that made me really appreciate what we have here.

And there was a season in my life, truthfully, where Gloria and I, we

considered leaving the United States.

We traveled to some other countries with the intent of looking for somewhere

that we might want to go and relocate.

However, as we did that, we always came back to the same conclusion.

This is the best spot for us.

This is kinda where we've grown up.

It's where we have connections.

We have family.

Obviously, United States of America, it's a great, great place.

I do not want anything that I say in this episode to take away from that.

But I'm giving you my perspective, and that perspective is important because

what I have attempted to do, especially in the last few years, as I've taken

the time to really get into the first century, is I've tried to remove the

blinders and the scales that I may have with my, the way I was raised or where

I was raised or the country that I'm in or even my political leanings, because

I actually don't believe those interact with the Bible as much as I once did and

the way that many people think they do.

And I'm trying to establish maybe a bit of a disclaimer here to

let you know that's where I lean.

If you are on the other side of the political spectrum, that's fine.

I honor that.

If you're farther to the right or whatever than I am, I'm okay with that too.

I'm really wanting to have this discussion around the biblical narrative and

what the New Testament actually says.

Not politics, not where one stands on these issues politically.

That's what I'm trying to do.

But as many of us know, it's hard to purge our minds of certain ways

that we think or the fact that we were raised in a certain culture or

environment or atmosphere, whatever.

But I, I have to really be honest about what I read in the text, especially

when I've tried to do it in context.

I really do not see a mandate for America in the Bible I see kingdom principles

that produce real fruit wherever they're applied, and I see a nation

that's benefited from those principles.

But America, and this is, I guess if there's a point that I may

wanna get across in this episode, America is not the kingdom of God.

We are not necessarily holy.

We can give plenty examples where we claim that we are, but let me

just tell you there are plenty of examples where we are not.

We are not a replacement for what God is doing.

I also don't see anything that says we've got some special type

of covenant with God in the Bible.

Now, some may claim that they've got prophetic wisdom and some wisdom and

knowledge on that, and that's fine.

I am doing my best to stay with what's in the text, and it's not there.

Truthfully, there's just no real reference there.

So, but, uh, but, but what I wanna be clear on here, if I'm truthful and honest,

is that we, the United States, is really just another iteration of the empires that

have existed for three thousand years.

During my study and research on this episode, I actually listed out 17 what

would be considered empires or powers that go back to Egypt, to Syria, Mesopotamia,

the Greek, the Roman, which I've really been deep into studying, and then all

of them leading up to the British Empire and then the United States, all of those.

And listen There are differences between them, but most of them have what we're

gonna be talking about here in common.

The United States of America might be a little bit of a cleaner

version, maybe a little more modern.

Maybe we have a little more, I'm doing air quotes for those that are, that are,

um, listening versus watching, maybe a little more democratized, or at least

we appear as if we're democratized.

Just maybe a better looking, cleaned up, smell better, look better version.

But these empires, I'm telling you, as I'm studying the Roman Empire, I'm right

now in the decline of the Roman Empire.

Much of what is being discussed during the decline, we've got it going on right

now here in the United States of America.

So it's not like we are special, but we're not that special.

That might be what I'm saying here.

We still go to war for economic reasons.

We still go to war in certain areas of the world like the Middle

East because there's oil there.

We still exploit labor.

We still exert power and control that has nothing to do with the kingdom of God.

That is one of the messages that I'm wanting to get across here.

Now, I'm not saying that to be unpatriotic.

I'm saying it because the text says it.

That's what's in the New Testament, and I'd rather trust the text

than protect a narrative.

And I, I probably have shifted in that way over the course of

the last fifteen to twenty years.

The catalyst for this episode, I wanna go ahead and give y'all that,

was reading Paul's letters in order.

There were three letters specifically that I read,

Ephesians, Colossians, and Philemon.

They were written around the same time, and they were carried by the same people.

I think Paul was in prison in Rome during his first imprisonment, and

he had them carried to the people that those letters were written to.

And, it's interesting.

One of those carriers was a runaway slave named Onesimus.

In one of those three letters, Philemon, it's addressed directly to his owner

And then what's fascinating is when you read those in context back to

back to back in the order that they were sent, most likely the order they

were written, I, and possibly you, see something you miss when they're scattered

throughout the Bible, or you read one as kind of a standalone, or you don't

connect the three of them together.

I put the three of them together as I was reading.

They're fairly short, so I read them over the course of a few days, and I'm

sitting here going, "Hmm, I never saw some of the things that I'm sharing in this

episode that we're talking about today." He wasn't writing theology in a vacuum.

He was writing to real people living inside the system, the

system of Rome, the world system.

And one of those letters was hand-delivered by a slave

to the man who owned him.

That changed how I read everything else.

Now, we're gonna go into more detail, but I do have to say one more thing, kind

of in the form of a disclaimer As I was preparing these notes and writing this

out and I felt a nudge, let's say maybe it was the Lord nudging me to do this,

record this, I was saying to myself, "It seems as if I'm probably gonna make

almost everyone mad with this topic."

Which my personality is okay with that.

I mean, some people are kinda uniquely wired just to tick

everybody off, and maybe that's what the Lord wants me to do here.

But I'm sitting here reading through this, and this isn't a nice, neat

little, "If you believe this, this is what the Bible says. If you

believe this, this is what…"

It's not that clean.

And so if you've clicked on this and you've listened or watched this far,

I'm just gonna kinda warn you, this is getting uncomfortable for me, and I'm

comfortable with a bunch of this stuff.

So be prepared to be a little uncomfortable.

Just know that I'm warning you, this isn't nice and neat.

These are ugly topics.

They've been around forever, but I think they're worth discussing and

talking about, especially when we reference the Kingdom of God and what

the New Testament really shares with it.

That's really, when you get uncomfortable, that's how, that's how you know we're

reading the text instead of jumping into the Bible to try to defend our

position on war or anti-war or whatever.

So anyway, there's probably a few tribes, is what I'm gonna call it.

Let's call it sides, but I'm gonna call it tribes, that, were

probably gonna be divided up, that might be drawn to this episode.

Tribe one, the Bible is anti-war and anti-slavery, maybe

justice and things like that.

The progressive read, we'll call it.

I don't like labels, but that's probably the way most people

would fall in today's world.

It takes kingdom ethics like love your enemies and there is neither

slave nor free, and it builds them into a political platform.

The values are right.

I'm not gonna disagree with it.

The delivery system, though, is a little bit wrong.

We'll talk about that later.

The New Testament never organized a movement around those principles, and all

of the writers of the New Testament were in the middle of those topics probably

more so than we even see them today.

And so we have to keep that in mind.

Okay, that's tribe one.

The next tribe, this is the second tribe, and that is the, what I'm calling the

America is God's chosen nation tribe.

You know, those are the nationalists, I guess, that we would take a look at.

And probably over the course of my political life, I might be considered

more in that tribe than the other one.

But if y'all can't tell, I'm waffling on all of it right now, and I'm wanting

to kind of not be in either one of those tribes , and I, I'm going to encourage

you in that way too as we go through this.

But, anyway, it takes… This is what the nationalists do.

It takes the Old Testament, Israel's covenant, and transfers

it to a modern nation state.

The era is running the old covenant operating system after the cross.

These people will say they believe in Jesus and the cross, but they're

still trying to live by the old covenant that was fulfilled and

finalized during the first century.

And so you can't borrow Israel's war template, which was, go in and

kill everybody in the Promised Land.

That was the commandment from God.

You can't borrow that war template after we know that Jesus said, "It is finished."

Both tribes miss the same thing.

The kingdom doesn't operate through political power.

It never did, and I can't project the future, but I don't

believe that it ever will.

At least it hasn't for the last 2,000 years.

So here's the frame for the whole episode.

The Bible doesn't take the side you want it to take And it doesn't

take the other side either.

It offers something neither side has imagined, and that is what I believe

we should attempt to dig in on so that we, as many people as possible, are

operating from that frame of mind.

All right, so here is kind of the framework that we need to understand,

and I've talked about this before.

If you've been listening to this series, you know that even going back to the very

beginning of my NT90 Read the Bible in 90 Days reading plan, we talked about

the three kingdoms, the three kingdoms that existed in the first century.

Rome was one of those.

It ran on military dominance, fear, and economic exploitation.

The religious system, that was the, the old covenant religious system,

it ran on boundary enforcement and institutional control.

And then into those two systems came Jesus Christ, and he announced

the kingdom of God is at hand.

So this new kingdom came in.

The kingdom of God ran on something different: love, identity, and

presence, and a lot more that we discussed in other episodes.

The kingdom did not enter to compete with Rome or even reform religion.

It got inside the hearts and souls of the people and began

changing them from within.

That framework is underneath everything that we're going to be discussing

in this episode Okay, let's talk about the first word that's in the

title, and let's talk about war.

And I, I really am gonna title this The War Business or The Business of War.

And this, this is where it takes a bit of maturity in our ability to discuss

some hot topics in today's world and some degree of understanding of history.

War in the first century, let's go back to the first century.

War in the first century was not a moral question.

It actually was a civic identity.

Rome had been running this system for centuries by the time

the New Testament was written.

Military service was the path to citizenship, honor, and political power.

But underneath the glory, war was actually the economy.

It actually ran the entire economy.

Rome's treasury depended on conquest.

The legions were not a necessary evil, they were the national business model.

I listened a while back to some things on Alexander the Great, and this is obviously

when the Greeks conquered the world.

Alexander, his parallel dating back to earlier than this, it sharpens this.

In 336 BC, Philip, Alexander's father, was killed.

Alexander was 20 years old at the time.

He inherited the most disciplined army in the Greek world and

unfortunately, a nearly empty treasury.

Had a great vehicle, had a great tool, great product, no money.

The only thing that he felt that he can do was conquer.

Take this machine and go out and use it.

Conquest was the only startup that can service the debt.

And so he took that army and he used it to overtake everybody

and everything that he could.

And he would get people, he would get money and gold, he

would get resources and food.

Persia was not just an enemy, it was a balance sheet.

By 323 BC, Alexander was dead at 32, and he had conquered in just about

10 plus years most of the known world, because all he did was go.

He used that army, they were in startup mode, and they conquered the world.

Rome later ran the same playbook at scale.

From roughly 264 BC through the Punic Wars, Rome built an empire that by

the time of Jesus Rome controlled the entire Mediterranean world.

Now, the other part of that machine, not just money and resources, slavery.

It was the other gear in the same machine.

War produced captives.

Captives became the labor force.

The labor force powered the economy that funded more war.

One system, two outputs.

We're gonna come back to slavery in the second half of this, but

I wanted to put them together.

Here is the loop.

War produces slaves.

Slaves produce wealth.

Wealth funds more war.

More war, the only thing to do is conquer more and stay at war.

That is not a cynical view.

That is not me saying something that's anti-whatever's going on currently.

Just read the current headlines.

That's me looking at history.

That's the reality of empires for the last three thousand years.

The operating word that I want us to focus on here, and this is where

we're gonna start comparing it to the kingdom, the operating word is ownership.

Rome owned territory.

Rome owned people.

Rome, Rome owned the output of both.

The war business is what happens when ownership replaces stewardship.

We talked about stewardship in some previous episodes.

We're not going to dive into it much here, but I want you to mentally

right now just think about the contrast between this world system,

Rome, and the kingdom Of God.

Ownership, stewardship.

Ownership, stewardship.

That is one of the significant differences you'll see when we

read the New Testament in context.

We'll get to that shortly.

All right.

Let's look at what the New Testament says or doesn't say about war.

People come to the Bible, myself included, expecting a clear position on war.

Actually, let me back up.

We go to the Bible many times.

I did this for thirty-plus years.

Only until recently did I, did I attempt to change this perspective.

I would go to the Bible with a political view or, something that

was going on in my life or something, and I was looking to the Bible for

something that would prove me right, that would justify my thoughts or my

belief system or my political beliefs.

And I can tell you, you could usually find something that works because you

can take that scripture and you can twist it around or pull it out of context.

You can do that.

But and you can do that with this topic of war.

You can find something for or against it, a policy statement that you can quote.

But here's the deal.

The text really doesn't give us a clear stance.

And when it doesn't match our expectations, we either force the

text into a position it never took or we decide it has nothing to say.

It's kind of the same pattern we see in Acts one six, looking for

what they expected instead of seeing what is actually there.

So here is what happens.

We do a search what the text actually says about war or fighting, and

some of this is possibly doing what I just warned you against, taking

things slightly out of context.

But this is me looking for something that we could hang our

hats on related to this topic.

Jesus, we know, told Peter in Matthew twenty-six fifty-two

to put the sword away.

Peter lashed out when the guards came to take Jesus away, he cut off a guard.

In one of the accounts, we hear that he cut off a guard's ear.

Jesus healed the guard, and he told Peter, "Put the sword away." Never organized

a peace movement or anything like that.

Never organized a battle against it.

Does that war necessarily?

No, but it's sort of anti-violence might be what we could look at in that one.

And we know that Jesus told his followers to love their enemies.

That's a tough one.

It's kinda hard to fight people that you're loving.

And to pray for persecutors, to turn the other cheek, some tough things all

throughout the Sermon on the Mount.

Those items are specifically in Matthew 5:38-48.

And then this one's fascinating to me.

Listen to this.

A centurion came to Jesus And he asked Jesus to heal.

And Jesus praised his faith without telling him to quit.

In other words, Jesus didn't say, "You know what? I'll take care of

this healing, but you've got to quit the military and stop fighting."

Jesus never said that.

That was in Matthew eight, five through 13.

And we also know that John the Baptist told soldiers to be

honest and fair, not to resign.

That's in Luke 3:14.

Paul often used military metaphors in Second Timothy two, three through four,

and also in Ephesians six, 10 through 17.

And he also describes spiritual weapons, not physical ones, of course.

The early church, if we go to early church history and kind of see how things

transpired, the early church was largely pacifist for their first 300 years.

In many ways, they were still… I'm, I'm just reading that right now in my history

of Rome that I'm going through, and in many ways, they were still persecuted,

they were ostracized, they were still outsiders trying to get into the system.

Then in the fourth century, Constantine made Christianity

the favored religion of Rome.

So things changed.

They went from the outsiders to the insiders, and Constantine even

put the cross on the shields of the military, and the church then

became part of the world system.

That's probably a topic to discuss 'cause there's some rabbit holes there

that we could look at on another day, but, uh, that was very significant.

So that's where all of a sudden Christianity and war kind of

merged together with Constantine.

But here's what's not in the Bible.

There's really no systematic position on war.

There's no just war theory.

There's no holy war doctrine that we'll see later in history.

There's no command to fight or a command to refuse to fight.

Augustine built just war theory in the fourth and fifth century,

but it's not in the text.

It was something that was sort of developed and made up at that time.

The New Testament writers lived inside the war business every day, and they

chose not to build a political position on war That silence, I don't believe

is, I, I don't think it's approval.

It's a statement about what the kingdom, the kingdom of God actually came to do.

And I believe that it's significant that it wasn't discussed more because that was

something that was going on in the world system at that time, and it's continued

on in the world system since that time.

The Kingdom of God has grown and developed within those scopes

for the last few thousand years.

I believe that is significant.

All right, let's talk about the pattern across history and, and, and

we're gonna … I, I kinda titled this section Blessing versus Mandate.

Every empire that tasted kingdom blessing eventually claimed

the mandate from the kingdom or biblical or scriptural mandates.

Let's look at the list here Israel, we know they confuse a word

I'm making up here, chosenness, being chosen, with immunity.

We see that often in the Old Testament.

I'm not gonna take time to get into it.

Constantine just mentioned this, put the cross on shields, one

of the first ones to do that.

That was in the 300s.

Spain sanctified mass killing, justified it through the doctrine of discovery.

Britain sent colonialism and missionaries on the same ships.

Nazi Germany would stamped Gott mit uns on every belt buckle.

Apartheid South Africa used theology to justify racial separation.

Same pattern every time.

Blessing becomes mandate.

Stewardship becomes ownership.

And all of a sudden, war becomes holy.

Now, let's look back at what we called earlier the kill them all command,

the conquest of Canaan problem.

There's one Old Testament passage that gets used more than any

other to justify all of this.

The Old Testament records God commanding Israel to enter the promised

land and destroy the inhabitants, not just beat them militarily.

The command is to kill all of them.

Joshua 6 through 12.

Do not, this is in Deuteronomy also 20, 16 through 17.

I quote, do not leave alive anything that breathes.

That is in our Bibles.

Now, one thing we do know is that Israel didn't obey, and that

also led to some issues later.

We don't have to get into trying to figure out exactly what happened there.

But this passage, I'm just kind of looking at, at that passage as

how it's been used and misused.

This passage has been used to justify American expansion, the treatment of

native peoples, and manifest destiny.

The logic, God gave Israel a land and told them to take it by force.

America is God's new project.

Therefore, American expansion is divinely sanctioned.

Big problem with this, it's the covenant.

That command was given to a specific people in a specific covenant for

a specific land at a specific time.

There's nothing that indicates that it was a transferable template.

The old covenant was fulfilled.

It was done.

It was finished in the first century.

You cannot take a command given to Joshua and hand it to George

Washington, but people did exactly that.

The Doctrine of Discovery, which came from Pope Nicholas V in 1455, yep,

1455, a long time ago, it declared that Christian nations had divine authority to

claim lands inhabited by non-Christians.

The US Supreme Court cited it in Johnson versus M'Intosh in 1823, and that

ruling has never been fully overturned.

Native removal was theologized, and the theology came from reading the conquest

of Canaan as a transferable pattern instead of a completed covenant event.

Even if you believe God commanded Israel to take that land, the

new covenant closed that chapter.

The cross ended that template

And there is so much more we could say on that, but I've got to move

on, and I want to move to the thing that just kept popping up for me as

I was looking at these two topics.

And that is moving to what I believe is a very pivotal event in United States

history, and that is war on American soil.

Just a few examples, but we'll get to the big one here.

The American Revolution had kingdom principles in its DNA: liberty,

human dignity, self-governance.

But it also had an economic engine underneath the rhetoric.

Taxation and trade restrictions drove the break from Britain

as much as philosophy did.

The language was freedom.

That's kind of the message that we use today, but it was very economic.

There was economics going on.

The balance sheet was commerce.

Westward expansion made it explicit.

Manifest destiny was the doctrine of discovery in American English.

Native peoples were removed, relocated, and killed so the

economic frontier could advance.

The same model that Alexander ran, the same model that Rome scaled,

new uniforms, same spreadsheet.

the Mexican-American War of 1846 to 1848 added territory.

Spanish-American War in the late 1800s, 1898, added overseas reach.

Each war expanded the economic footprint and wrapped it in the flag.

Underneath all of it, there was another gear that was turning.

The Southern economy, and I'm from the South, so I, boy, have some thoughts

when it comes to the Civil War and all that, all that went on there.

But the Southern economy, we cannot deny, ran on slave labor, very similar

to the way Rome did and other empires.

Cotton and tobacco were the revenue model.

For 80 years after the nation was founded, the nation tried to hold war

and slavery as separate conversations.

The war business does not allow its gears to separate.

The Civil War is what happens when the war business eats itself.

A nation built on the two-gear system, war for expansion, slavery for labor, finally

turned the machine inward, and the South fought to preserve the economic engine.

The North fought to hold the union together.

Both sides wrapped it in higher language, but the balance sheet at

its foundation was still slavery.

And listen, I used to love to talk about states' rights and what was going on.

Let's be blunt.

That war was about slavery.

Best we can tell, six hundred and twenty thousand people dead.

People in the same country, people that should be on the same team.

The costliest, deadliest war in American history fought over the

same economic loop that powered Rome, Alexander, Spain, and Britain.

And listen, I have studied the Civil War extensively.

Leaders on both sides claimed to have God's mandate on their side.

Some of the most, air quotes again, Christian men were the leaders of the

Southern side that were fighting to protect that states' right and slavery.

Northern, same way.

They were claiming that they had God on their side.

Those gears that had been turning together for 3,000 years finally locked together

against each other on American soil.

And so the two topics that I'm talking about, to me, they came to a head then.

I'm not sure what I'm trying to make with that point other than just showing

almost Kind of the tragedy of those world systems and how even when they use each

other time and time again, they can often come against each other as they did.

Here's why it matters for this episode.

The Emancipation Proclamation was partly a military and economic

strategy, not only a moral statement.

Lincoln freed enslaved people in Confederate states to weaken

the Southern war economy.

The war machine was used to break the slavery machine.

One gear was used to strip the other.

The war ended, slavery was abolished, but the war business does not stop.

It adapts, and that is where we're gonna move in the second half of this episode.

First half, trace war from Rome to the Civil War.

Now we're gonna turn to the other gear in the machine, slavery, and we're

not gonna start at the Civil War.

We're gonna go backwards again.

We're gonna go back to where it started in the ancient world.

This is kind of the truth that many of us hate to admit.

Slavery didn't start with the Atlantic slave trade.

It had been around forever, since almost the beginning of known history and time.

But let's look at what did the New Testament actually say about it?

First, again, I, I love some history here, and I love things… I think

we can put things in context when we go back and look at history.

Slavery, like I said just a second ago, get-- it did not begin with America.

It did not begin with the Atlantic slave trade.

It is one of the oldest human institutions on Earth.

Mesopotamia had slave markets before Abraham.

Egypt built its economy on forced labor.

Greece ran its households and its silver mines on enslaved people.

Aristotle called slavery natural It was background noise in the

ancient world, not a controversy.

It's just the way things worked.

Rarely do we see anybody speaking out against it in the ancient world.

Rome then scaled it to an industry.

There are estimates that in Italy, during most of the Roman Empire,

one in three people were enslaved.

It wasn't race-based.

They were war captives, debt slaves, born into it, every

ethnicity, no legal personhood.

They were property.

They could be beaten, sold, killed, sexually used.

That happened time and time again.

There's accounts of that.

It's manumission is what it's called.

It existed, but was a privilege granted by the owner, not a right.

That loop from the first half, war, slaves, wealth, more war.

Slavery was the labor force that made the whole machine profitable,

and in many ways, it was the goal.

They were often, as they were taking, taking over new areas and lands

and, you know, doing conquests, they were looking to get resources, and

part of those resources were humans.

Every New Testament writer, we're getting back to the New Testament

here, every New Testament writer lived inside that system every single day.

You could not hide from it in the Roman Empire.

And here's what most people miss Slavery did not disappear

between Rome and then America.

I could list out a ton of things here.

Let's try to be quick about it.

Medieval serfdom, just a different name.

The Arab slave trade, the Viking slave economy, the Atlantic trade that began

in the 15th century and then transported 12 million Africans across the oceans.

The machine never stopped.

It changed uniforms, changed the justification, changed the skin

color of the people inside it, but the operating world never changed.

It was about ownership, taking advantage of others, not stewarding,

not taking a stewardship, taking care of, overseeing role.

Now that we've looked at all that, let's take a look at what the New Testament

says or does not say about slavery.

I believe that we would expect the Bible to give a clear for or against slavery.

Here's the problem.

The text gives us something else.

Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon but called him a brother in Philemon

16.

Paul never said, "Let's start an abolitionist movement."

He didn't say that, but he planted someone that destroys ownership from the inside.

He says, "You never owned him. You were entrusted with a relationship,

now manage it as a brother." Stewardship, not ownership.

And here's kind of a special aside I wanna mention.

As I was reading through Philemon, and I was picturing standing at the door

Onesimus and him, him with Ty- Tychicus handing that letter over to, uh, Philemon.

It's probably in a house setting.

It could've been private that they handed it to him, I'm not sure.

But most often, those letters were read out loud.

It was something from Paul.

So I can picture it being read either by Philemon or Ty- Tychicus,

I may not be pronouncing that right, with Onesimus standing there.

I don't know that Onesimus would've been allowed to read it.

But I am pretty confident.

It was very rare that people that had slaves only had one.

I was reading through it and I was picturing what the other slaves that may

have been sitting in the room or may, could've been able to hear this, what

they were thinking as this was being read.

Just got my mind wondering.

We don't know, and I'm not gonna sit here and claim anything,

but something to think about.

But the bottom line, stewardship, not ownership.

There were also household codes that told slaves and masters

that they serve the same Lord.

They're on the same team.

We see that in Ephesians 6:5-9 and in Colossians 3:22-4:1.

Both of those letters that were sent with Philemon, and that's why I'm

fascinated by those all being written, all being carried at the same time.

I don't think it's an endorsement of slavery.

maybe a subversion from within.

Both are stewards.

Both answer to the same king.

The ownership model cannot really survive that reframe, at least not long term.

Then Paul also said in Galatians 3:28, "There is neither slave nor free." The

category is dissolved inside the kingdom.

The implication is that all of us are slaves or enslaved to the king, whether

you are a quote-unquote owner-steward or whether you are in that slave category

in that world system, that in the kingdom we are neither slave nor free.

We are servants to the king.

And then here's some things that are not there.

We do not see Paul stating some kind of abolitionist manifesto

that all slaves should be free.

That's not what Paul said.

It's not there.

There's no political campaign, no condemnation of the

institution as a system.

And again, that's something that might bother some people that I'm

bringing it up, but it's not there.

We don't see that.

Jesus and Paul never spoke against slavery.

They planted kingdom principles.

That's kind of the point I'm trying to make.

They planted kingdom principles inside the people that were living in the

midst of those systems and said things like, "There is neither slave nor

free." It's not a political statement.

It is the leaven that we heard Jesus talk about.

And, it is that mustard seed that's planted inside people,

inside their hearts, that begins to take hold and take root.

Once that identity takes hold inside a slave owner's heart or inside a slave,

the system cannot function the same way

All right, now let's look at slavery on American soil and the machine that adapts.

American slavery was the war business at full maturity.

We talked about that earlier.

The Atlantic slave trade fed the Southern economy.

Cotton and tobacco were the revenue model.

Enslaved people were the labor force.

The economic loop that Rome perfected was running on American soil For 250

years before the Civil War broke it open.

So for those of us celebrating 250 years of American history going back to 1776,

prior to the American Civil War, America had existed for 250 years prior to that.

So when I say 250 years, it's kind of interesting.

The first half of this episode ended at the Civil War.

Slavery was abolished, but the war business does not die.

It changes uniforms.

Listen to this.

The 13th Amendment abolished slavery, except as punishment for crime.

We just kind of see this starting to change.

that exception clause became the bridge.

Convict leasing put formerly enslaved people back into forced

labor within years of emancipation.

The ownership changed hands from plantations to prisons.

The labor continued.

Sharecropping replaced the plantation model with debt bondage.

Formerly enslaved families worked the same land.

They didn't even change where they were located or anything else.

For the same owners, they were just trapped by the debts

they could never pay off.

Debt was a big part of the Roman slave trade also.

They had legal freedom, but still economic captivity or economic slavery.

Jim Crow codified the hierarchy into law.

Separate and unequal was the war business running on legislation instead of change,

and the war machine kept adapting, redlining, wage suppression, corporate

structures that extract maximum output for minimum investment and call it efficiency.

And I'm a business guy.

I love free enterprise.

I love business.

But we have to be truthful and honest.

Some of these things kind of look like modifications of enslavement.

The uniform is a polo shirt now, but the operating word never changed.

Ownership still seems to be the driver, not stewardship, in many situations.

The machine did not stop at Civil War.

It did not stop at Jim Crow.

It changed uniforms.

It usually does, and it has throughout time.

Let's talk about the modern church and how it fits in.

The church took war and slavery, those two gears, and they dealt

with them in opposite ways.

Slavery eventually became an abolitionist cause.

Churches were the ones that sort of got rid of slavery back in the 1800s.

Part of the church, centuries later, used kingdom ethics to

dismantle that institution.

That was the leaven working That's probably the way it was designed.

Slow from the inside over centuries, that dough rose within that system.

War, however, oddly enough, is-- seems to have gone the other direction.

Instead of the three centuries of pacifism that marked the early church, Christianity

has merged with the empire under Constantine, and war has became holy.

Crusades, Manifest Destiny, ch- chaplains blessing troops, the

church did not just fail to oppose war, it sort of baptized it.

Meanwhile, the things Paul actually hammered on, unity across ethnic

and social lines, caring for the poor, rejecting the old covenant

boundary system, mutual submission, identity in Christ over identity in

the empire, those things were there, but they really barely register in

modern Christian, let's go ahead and throw this word in here, politics.

The church started using political power, political stances, political views and

sides, Rome's tool actually, to fight battles that the apostles never picked up.

Not-- They were not in the New Testament.

So here's the bottom line on, we'll say, war.

If you're a fan of war history, which I actually sort of am, if you

love the strategy and the battles, that's okay, I think, hopefully.

That's not necessarily anti-biblical because there's wars throughout

the Bible and in biblical times.

But if you are anti-war, I, I can understand too.

Thou shalt not kill, and some translations say, "Thou shalt not murder," that

actually probably fits wartime situations.

That changes the argument, and I believe it's valid.

Turn the other cheek, that's a tough one, that if we really did that,

how many wars could be avoided?

I can see how those verses could justify an anti-war position, but

here's what I need to say plainly.

If it is your politics, that's fine.

But do not, and I'm guilty of this, so I'm speaking to myself, but do

not try to justify your political view on war with the Bible.

It's not that clear.

You're gonna struggle with it if you're really gonna read it in context.

We cannot say that the New Testament is pro-war, but we

cannot say it is anti-war either.

It was pro Kingdom of God.

The world systems run on the war machine, on slavery.

That is part of their business model.

And the kingdom doesn't even address that.

It doesn't even play that game.

It operates at another level entirely.

Here's the bottom line on slavery.

Let's look at that.

This is something we should all be able to agree on.

Slavery is not right.

It's wrong.

There is absolutely nothing that could be justified in the slavery model.

But we can also agree that it has always been around.

Historically, we know that.

That doesn't mean it's good or that we can just say, "Yeah,

that's awesome." No, we can't say that, but it's always been around.

Every empire we covered in this episode was feeding its business model with

slave labor, every single one of them, and slavery still exists today.

It's really just changed uniforms.

We did see the war model and the slavery model converge in one odd and devastating

historical event, the Civil War.

We looked at that earlier.

Both sides, as we said, thought God was on their side, and what did the

New Testament really say about slavery?

Oddly Very little.

Paul never said abolish it.

In fact, some of the most poignant letters were written in the midst of that system,

Carried by a slave, addressed to an owner, and what Paul wrote

was not a political strategy.

It was kingdom identity planted inside the people living in the system, very similar

to us living within those systems today.

The kingdom did not attempt to abolish the systems of the world.

It operated at another level, another realm, and that is

what makes it so hard for us.

We want the Bible to take our side.

It does not.

It offers a kingdom, which is truthfully the side that we should be on.

It offers a kingdom that outlasts every side we have ever built.

Just so y'all know, I'm still processing a lot of stuff I

talked about in this episode.

You might be sitting there saying, "Okay, so what's the simple answer?

The one, two, three step." I'm not sure it is any of that with these type topics.

War and slavery feel like ancient problems until you trace the economic logic forward

and realize the machine never stopped.

It just changed uniforms.

The New Testament writers lived inside all of it.

They didn't fight it.

They didn't endorse it.

They planted those kingdom principles inside the people living in it and let

the leaven work quiet, very quietly, very persistently, until the system

could not function the same way.

Most people listening in, I'm sure there are people in other areas,

but America is a great country.

Is it perfect?

No.

Is it God's country?

A Christian nation?

No, not really.

There's really not much that can point to that.

Some people confuse that, but it's not.

It is a country that confuses empire builders, which the United States

definitely is, with the kingdom of God, which the United States definitely is not.

We can celebrate this country without confusing it with the

kingdom and the true king.

Let that be a lesson for all of us.

So if there's anything simple that I wanna say, is that for those of us

that claim to be citizens of God's kingdom, let's don't confuse that with

country or nationality or politics.

we're Kingdom of God citizens.

We've got a code.

We've got a way to live, and that is listed out in the New Testament, and

that is the code that we should follow.

Next episode, we're gonna tackle a few other things.

We're gonna take the same lens and look at sex and abortion.

What does the New Testament actually say?

You might be surprised how little it says, how different it sounds

from what the modern church seems to be the loudest about.

Thanks for joining in here.

Remember the reading plan, k2m.foundation/nt90.

Go get it.

Just read.

I'm telling you, dig in to the New Testament in context, in order.

That's what this plan does.

I challenge you.

Don't take my word on all this stuff.

Some of this stuff gets off in the weeds.

Go study the scripture.

That's what I want you to do, study the scripture for yourself.

If what you were taught doesn't match what you read, trust the text.

I am Tim Winders.

Keep digging, keep studying, keep seeking.

I'll see you on the next episode