Articles
Coping with Life 38 – Slavery
Coping with Life 38 – Slavery
Mike Willis
In a list of sins, Paul includes the word “enslavers.” The word refers to “one who acquires persons for use by others, slave-dealer, kidnapper” (BDAG, 76).
Both the New Testament and the Old Testament condemn slave trafficking. “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death” (Exod. 21:16). The prohibition is repeated again in Deuteronomy: “If a man is found stealing one of his brothers of the people of Israel, and if he treats him as a slave or sells him, then that thief shall die. So you shall purge the evil from your midst” (24:7). These passages show that the Bible condemns the 18-19th century slavery practices of European and American traders.
The best known form of modern “enslavers” is sex trafficking, although modern slavery also includes forced labor or debt bondage. Children (under 18, primarily females) are recruited and enticed, harbored, and transported to perform commercial sex acts.
Typically, one feels moral repugnance toward the perpetrator (pimp) who controls the person in sexual bondage when he thinks of sex trafficking but, in fact, the people who use those who are held in sexual bondage (regardless of their age or gender) are equally guilty of perpetuating sex trafficking, whether or not civil law chooses to acknowledge that fact or to prosecute them. If people were not using those enslaved by the pimp, the practice would die a natural death. The proliferation of sex trafficking occurs because wicked men know it is lucrative, and their greed motivates them to participate in sex trafficking. But, in the same manner as early American plantation owners who bought and owned slaves were as guilty of slavery as the man who kidnapped free men in Africa and sold them into European and American slavery, so also is it true that those who pay for sex with children are as guilty of modern sex trafficking as those who kidnap young Hispanic girls and force them into a life of prostitution.
The second form of modern slavery is forced labor or debt bondage. Debt bondage “is the pledge of a person’s services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services’ duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely” (Wikipedia). Because the victim’s earned income is so low and the interest rate is so high, the victim has no hope of ever being free. Such exploitation of one human being over another person, a person created in the image of God, is sinful. Sometimes one unknowingly supports the debt bondage system by purchasing the products manufactured by those in debt slavery.
The Bible forbids such exploitation of human beings and announces God’s condemnation and judgment against those who are guilty.
