Submit to One Another - Servants and Masters

Ephesians 6: 5 - 9

Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling, in the sincerity of your heart as to Christ, not like those who do their work only when someone is watching – as people-pleasers – but as slaves of Christ doing the will of God from the heart. Obey with enthusiasm, as though serving the Lord and not people, because you know that each person, whether slave or free, if he does something good, this will be rewarded by the Lord. Masters, treat your slaves the same way, giving up the use of threats, because you know that both you and they have the same master in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him.

I have begun almost all of the posts in this series on submission with a joke or two, and I thought it was only fitting to begin this last message of the series in the same way. So here goes: My boss told me, in order to focus better, I should leave my problems at the door. Now he’s mad at me because I locked him outside.

I know, kind of corny, but since I helpfully did not record in my notes the joke I used when I first prepared this message, I had to spend an hour or so combing through hundreds of corny jokes about work just to find this one! Which reminded me of what I discovered back when I was first writing this message: there are thousands of work related jokes out there. Apparently, we really like to make fun of our bosses or our employees.

And it struck me that a fair number of these jokes center around the underlying animosity that so frequently exists between employers and employees. There seems to be an unspoken assumption that workers come in grudgingly, because they must, and do as little work as possible, putting in their time until they can rush out the door at the moment the work day ends.

A perfect example of this is a Dilbert cartoon I found while searching joke sites. In it, Dilbert’s boss comes up to him and says, “This is urgent. Stop whatever you’re doing and work on it.” Dilbert replies, “Is it more important than what I’m currently doing?” His boss responds, “I don’t know. What are you doing?” Then Dilbert rebukes the boss for assuming that what the boss wants done is more important than what Dilbert is currently doing. They go back and forth a few times and finally, in disgust the boss says, “Never mind! I’ll get someone else to do it!” before walking away. And in the final frame, a coworker looks over the cubicle wall and asks Dilbert, “So what ARE you doing?” to which Dilbert responds, “Playing a video game.”

And on the other side, there is the assumption that bosses are cruel taskmasters, seeking to squeeze every ounce of work that they can from their employees while doing little or nothing themselves, frequently being more part of the problem than part of the solution.

Once again, we turn to Dilbert for an illustration of this. Dilbert’s evil boss is in a plane crash and presumed dead, and the first thing everyone at the office does is throw a party. After the party is over, they get back to work, and at the end of the day, they are surprised to discover that they have accomplished more in that one afternoon than they usually do in a month.

This is the kind of humor that I found all over the internet. Jokes about the drudgery and difficulty of work seem to be a ubiquitous source of humor. It seems to me that this would only be true if there was an underlying truth behind all of these jokes: that generally speaking, people do have the expectation that they will encounter drudgery and hostility at work.

Of course, the Apostle Paul has a very different view of work relationships. As is so often the case with Paul, he looks at this relationship from an entirely foreign perspective.

A Few Words About Slaves

But before I get into the specifics of his perspective, I wanted to mention a few points about slavery. Because, of course, Paul doesn’t specifically mention workers and employers in Ephesians 6; the words he chooses are slaves and masters. Though I’m pretty confident in saying that no one reading this today is a slave, and that none of us are very likely to ever own slaves, still I think it is worthwhile to talk for a moment about the historical context in which Paul wrote this command.

Slavery was universally accepted in the Roman world of the first century. According to the website BritishMuseum.org, there were anywhere between five and ten million slaves in the Roman empire in Paul’s day. This would represent between 10% to 20% of the entire population.[1] In fact, slavery had become so commonplace that, in the city of Rome itself, it was considered beneath a citizen’s dignity to actually do any work. Thus, almost all work of any kind that was done in the city was done by slaves.

What was it like to be a slave in first century Rome? The first thing you have to recognize is that, as a slave, your master held absolute power over you. There are stories of slaves who were killed or brutalized for what seem, to me, to be the most trivial of offenses. One was fed to lampreys[2] for breaking a crystal goblet. Another was crucified for accidentally killing a pet quail, and another was killed simply because their mistress was in a bad mood and wanted to be cruel to someone.

And there are many other stories of various indignities and tortures that slaves endured at the whims of their masters. Some were branded for losing towels. Female slaves often had their hair torn out or their faces scratched by their mistress, as punishment for a multitude of minor infractions. They could be flogged, bound in chains, or basically anything that their masters wished to inflict on them, for basically any reason at all.

Because essentially, Roman law looked at slaves as possessions; not as people but as things. Varro, a Roman writer, identified three types or classes of agricultural tools. They were: the mute, which would be the plows or other farm vehicles; the inarticulate, which were the cattle or oxen; and finally, the articulate, which were the slaves.[3] In the Roman mind, a slave was simply a beast that happened to be able to talk. Aristotle went so far as to claim that there could be no true affection between a slave and their master. His reason: they had nothing in common because, as he put it, “The slave is a living tool, just as a tool is an inanimate slave.”[4]

Gaius, a famous Roman lawyer, summarizes the legal view in this way: “We may note that it is universally accepted that the master possesses the power of life and death over the slave.”[5]

So how were slaves treated in first century Rome? Well, strangely enough, in one sense they were very well protected, though that isn’t as positive as it sounds. Let me explain this by example. I spend a fair bit of time and energy to protect my computer, because it is a necessary tool for my work and it would be expensive and difficult to replace. In the same way, slaves were expensive, and you could never be sure how well a new slave would behave. So generally, masters tried to avoid killing their slaves without cause, though they were perfectly happy to punish them cruelly for the most insignificant or imaginary offenses.

In another sense, however, their lives were terrible and held in a precarious balance. They were given the tasks that no one else wanted, dirty, menial and dangerous jobs. And, if they got sick or managed to live long enough to get too old to continue working, the common practice was to simply throw them out, to literally throw them onto the garbage heap and starve them until they died. Because, though they were expensive to replace, it was considered sheer extravagance to waste food on a slave who might die anyway. Better to cut your losses and just throw it out, then go buy a new one that isn’t sick or old. I have done the same thing with my computer when it gets too old or has a problem that it is not cost effective to repair; I throw it out and go buy a new one.

It was in this culture, this historical context, that Paul wrote the words of Ephesians 6: 5 – 9. And I think the historical context of Paul’s writing is vitally important to understand here. Today, we enjoy complaining so much about our work that it is easy to simply write off or ignore the commands Paul is giving here. I am not a slave, we think, nor do I own slaves, so these verses just don’t apply to me anymore. And even if we accept that the principles outlined here apply to the modern relationships between employees and employers, we still tend to write them off. Sure, we think, Paul says I should sincerely obey my boss, but he never met my boss!

I think it is safe to say that none of us face in our workplace the kind of life that slaves faced in Paul’s day. And yet, it was to them, to slaves who did face that kind of life, that Paul wrote these words. In my mind, if God expects a slave to submit to their master, how much more must He expect me to submit to my supervisor!

The Worker’s Part

But before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s look for a bit at what Paul commands in this final submission relationship. He spends most of this section describing the expectations for the slave, for the worker, but perhaps what is most striking is what he does not say to them. He does not tell them to seek freedom. Though elsewhere, such as 1 Corinthians 7:21, he does counsel slaves to gain their freedom if they can, here Paul doesn’t mention freedom at all. He tells them, not how to get out of difficult circumstances but rather how to serve Christ effectively no matter what circumstances God has placed them in.

That was a good reminder to me. Generally speaking, we need to be less eager in asking God to change what is unpleasant in our lives, and more willing to understand how He wants us to serve Him where we are.

So what does Paul say to workers? His command to slaves can be summarized in one word: obey. And he uses the same word here that he used in the section just before this one, concerning children and parents, the word implying that hearing and obeying are the same thing. As we discovered in that post, Paul is implying that if the slave hears the command, that command should be immediately obeyed.

But, just as he has throughout this section on submission, Paul spends a fair bit of time explaining why slaves ought to obey their masters in this way. Or, to bring it close to home, he gives us three reasons why we ought to obey our employers.

First, and probably most importantly, when we serve our employers, we are really serving Christ. This illustrates an important concept that Paul took for granted. For him, there was no sense of the sacred and secular dichotomy that the modern world has created. For Paul, life belonged to Jesus, and everything he did was done for Jesus, even though the actual deeds may have been performed for people. Jesus Himself affirms this idea as well. Remember the parable of the sheep and the goats?[6] Everything that the sheep did (or that the goats failed to do) that Jesus counted as service for Himself, was actually rendered to the least of these. In the same way, everything that we do is really service offered to Jesus. Whether it be keeping accounting books or arguing cases in court, grading papers or sweeping floors, serving as a missionary or driving a bus, or even just doing the laundry and cooking for your family, we are serving not the one who laid the work on us, but Christ, Who is our true Master.

And it is this perspective, I think, that clarifies the rest of what Paul says in verses 5 – 7. We should obey with enthusiasm and in the sincerity of your heart. The word Paul uses here for sincerity implies generosity or sincere giving. We should always give our best effort, no matter what the task is. And we should work consistently, not just when we are being watched. The King James renders this phrase, “Not with eyeservice,” which is rather a literal translation of the made-up word Paul uses, formed from two Greek other words: ophthalmos (meaning “the eyes” or “sight”) and douleia (meaning “slavery” or “bondage”). It is worth noting that douleia is the same word Paul uses when addressing slaves in the start of verse five. And the implication of this compound word is that any labor or work that requires watching, or that only happens when the workers are supervised is the kind of labor given to please people; as Paul puts it, people-pleasing labor. We, as believers, should work the same way no matter who is watching, because our true Master is always watching.

Warren Weirsbe suggests that this attitude of serving Christ will lead Christians to always do a good day’s work,[7] which is one of the best witnesses we can have to our unbelieving co-workers. Seeing us working not for people around us, our bosses, but for the Lord is one of the best ways we can introduce them to the Lord. Unfortunately, the reverse is true as well. Working only for other people, merely doing eyeservice, is one of the best ways to show them that we aren’t any different from them, and thus that the Lord must not really make much of a difference in someone’s life.

Paul’s second reason for obeying our employers is that it is God’s will for us to always do our best. I like the way Albert Barnes explains this concept. He says, “We render acceptable service to God when, from regard to his will, we perform the services which are demanded of us in the situation in life where we may be placed, however humble that may be.”[8] The idea, as I understand it, is this. God requires obedience from us, but He is pleased when we do what He asks wholeheartedly, without reservation, without complaint, but rather working from the heart.

It is important to note, I think, how much emphasis Paul places on the worker’s attitude. Just doing the job is not primarily what Paul is aiming at. He wants our obedience to be submission: obedience rendered freely, out of a desire to please Jesus.

And finally, we should obey our employers because our good deeds will be rewarded by God. To me, this idea connects to Christ’s teaching in Matthew 6. Concerning people who only give to the needy or who only pray so that others can see how righteous they are, Jesus says they have their reward. But for those whose acts of righteousness are done in secret, Jesus proclaims, your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you. If we are doing our work for God, consciously serving Jesus rather than people, then it doesn’t matter if no one recognizes what we do, or if we gain no reward for our labor, because God sees our work as service rendered to Him. And He will reward us.

So Paul gives us these three reasons to justify his command that slaves, workers, should submit to their masters: because we are really serving Jesus, because God’s will is for us to always do our best, and because God will reward our good deeds. I think the companion passage in Colossians 3 sums up pretty clearly what Paul is aiming at: Whatever you are doing, work at it with enthusiasm, as to the Lord and not for people.[9]

The Master’s Part

So if that is the worker’s half of this submission relationship, what does Paul require of the employer, the master?

Honestly, at first glance, not much. Compared to the first two sections of this passage, where Paul addresses husbands and parents, Paul’s comments to masters seem pretty brief. He tells masters treat your slaves the same way, giving up the use of threats. In other words, treat them the way I’ve told them to treat you and don’t threaten them. Comparatively speaking, masters seem to get off pretty easy in their submission relationship.

But I think the implication of what Paul tells them is this. Workers are commanded to obey, to give wholehearted service in whatever tasks they are asked to accomplish. And employers need to do the same thing. As Wiersbe puts it, “If the employer expects the workers to do their best for him, he must do his best for them. The master must serve the Lord from his heart if he expects his servants to do the same.”[10]

Because, as Paul says in verse nine, you know that both you and they have the same master in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him. In other words, those who now enjoy positions of rank and privilege will one day stand before God simply as human beings, equal to all others. So employers ought to use their position, their earthly power, to work for the good of those under them rather than to exploit them, because one day, they will have to answer for their deeds before One Who won’t be impressed by their resumé or their bank account.

Final Thoughts

There are basically two general points that I want to leave you with, as a kind of conclusion to these Musings today.

First, I think it is important to recognize how redundant Paul is being in the start of chapter 6. Everything that I’ve written today concerning this submission relationship between workers and employers is equally true of the last submission relationship we examined: children and parents. Kids (if any kids happen to be reading this right now), your job right now is to work for your parents. So do it wholeheartedly, as if you were working for the Lord. Because guess what! You are! And parents, whatever you ask of your kids, be willing to do the same for them. If you expect them to work, then work alongside them. Don’t ask them to work so that you don’t have to. If you ask them to respect you, show them what you mean by respecting them. And above all, show them what it means to serve the Lord with all their hearts, by doing it yourself.

Secondly, some of you may be thinking that this post isn’t really all that necessary. As believers, aren’t we already knowingly serving Jesus with our lives? I suspect some of you are even in ministry, where your jobs are actually, specifically working full-time for the Kingdom of God. Wouldn’t someone who has given their whole life to Jesus already be doing all of these things?

That may be true, but I think it is important to recognize that any job, even a job working directly for the Kingdom of God, can contain elements of drudgery, tasks that we dislike, requirements that we would rather shirk. And the temptation to do just the bare minimum, or to ignore what we can get away with, will always exist.

And that is why I think the underlying concept that Paul highlights in this section is one that we all need to remember. Everything we do, no matter what our circumstances, should be service to Jesus. We must consciously offer up our every action to Christ, as service to Him. And we must seek to perform all we are asked to do as if it was Jesus asking us to do it, so that we might receive the reward that He has planned for all who seek to serve Him.

And so that He might receive all the glory for all that we do. That is how we show true submission, as employees and as employers.

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[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/nero-man-behind-myth/slavery-ancient-rome. However, it is worth noting that other scholars have placed the number much higher; one estimate suggested that up to 50% of the people living in the Roman Empire of the first century were slaves.

[2] Lampreys are a kind of parasitic eel that acts like a leech

[3] Ephesians: The Glory of God in the Church, chapter 25: Submission and Slavery (Ephesians 6:5 – 9). Bible.org. https://bible.org/seriespage/25-submission-and-slavery-ephesians-65-9

[4] Ibid

[5] Ibid

[6] Matthew 25: 31 – 46

[7] Wiersbe, Warren. The Wiersbe Bible Commentary: New Testament. David C. Cook publishing, 2007. P. 621, electronic edition.

[8] Commentary on Ephesians 6:6. Albert Barnes’ New Testament Commentary, accessed in The Power Bible software.

[9] Colossians 3:23

[10] Wiersbe, Warren. The Wiersbe Bible Commentary: New Testament. David C. Cook publishing, 2007. P. 621, electronic edition.