January 03, 2011
Earmarks
We’re hearing a lot about earmarks lately and there is some confusion about what that actually is. Politically speaking there are those pet projects that a lawmaker slips into a bill at the last minute – the quintessential earmark. Then there are also different ‘pots of money’ set aside in which all the states, counties and municipalities go through a competitive committee process for funding. Both situations give politicians boasting rights about what they have brought back to their constituents. Scripture too records an earmark of sorts. “But if the servant declares, ‘I love my master and my wife and children and do not want to go free,’ then his master must take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be his servant for life.” (Ex 21:5-6 NIV) Now that’s something to boast about.
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Gail;
-----I was baptized at fifteen. Late in my seventeenth year I finally began taking that commitment seriously. So I set myself to reading the Bible from cover to cover. The voluminous listing of the laws scattered throughout Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy were impossible for me to remember in detail, but the beauty of them in general never failed to strike me. I was particularly fascinated with the few laws regarding slavery. By my time in this country, slavery had become more than a dirty word. It was a concept which made more than evil anyone holding any regard for it at all. Yet here in the social system defined by God for His holy people was slavery. And for its presence in God’s system many have heaped ridicule and shame upon Judaism, Christianity, and the Holy Word.
-----But that God should have made room for slavery in the economic and social lives of His people should not be so perplexing to those who are able to bring a clearly thinking mind to the issue. This earmarking of a servant who does not wish to leave the service of his master or his family testifies to something of slavery in God’s nation different than the slavery we’ve experienced in the world these last few centuries. Slavery itself reflects the difficulty of survival brought upon mankind by its Fall. Every man is now subjected to the troubles of self-survival in the place of God’s complete providence. Man has become subjected to one another in a variety of economic arrangements recognizing the combinations of capital and labor required for man to make a go of life in a hostile environment. Slavery’s existence in the social system God prescribed for His people was not as much a blessing of one man owning another as it was an acknowledgment of the evil man chose in the beginning.
-----But amidst this acknowledgment was required the recognition of a slave’s humanity and the humane treatment of him or her accordingly. Yet it was not only the slave who was human. The slave must also recognize the humanity of his master. Each has issues within a life that is ultimately worthy of respect. Although the station of each life may weigh heavier or lighter in the economic balances, care and provision are due each from the other in the balances of justice that include economics as merely one of many elements. So it was that the Hebrew entering slavery single must leave it single as well, lest he desire to remain in slavery with whomever he married while a slave and the children they had. For these also belonged to the master. Maybe this slavery was an undignified station in which he found himself, but that in itself was only testimony to the undignified state of affairs Adam and Eve’s disobedience lowered upon mankind. The only dignity left is subjection to an inescapable situation into which one has come.
-----While in bondage to the Lord as servants, our lives build families and other complexities. We acknowledge them as being His, which they are, but we treat them as ours because we recognize His care for us from which they are given. He dignifies the situation of our bondage with His economy of love and justice.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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