“The United States didn’t inherit slavery from anybody. We created it.” So said Democratic Senator Tim Kaine on the Senate floor.
Talk about rewriting history. The Romans and Greeks were deep into slavery. Long before them, the Israelites were kept in captivity by the Egyptians as slaves. They were under the authority of “taskmasters” who afflicted “them with hard labor” (Ex. 1:11). As the Israelites multiplied, “the Egyptians compelled the sons of Israel to labor rigorously” (1:13).
Blacks sold other blacks into slavery. Muslims sold white Christians into slavery. “According to Robert Davis, between 1 million and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire between the 16th and 19th centuries.” While some dispute the number of captured British, there is no denying that Muslims practiced slavery. Tribute was paid to Muslim leaders for the release of captured Americans.
Payments in ransom and tribute to the Barbary states had amounted to 20% of United States government annual revenues in 1800. It was not until 1815 that naval victories ended tribute payments by the United States. Some European nations continued annual payments until the 1830s. The white slave trade and markets in the Mediterranean declined and eventual disappeared after the European occupations.......
Recently I addressed the Texas legislature…. I told them that the only answer to the crime problem is to take nonviolent criminals out of our prisons and make them pay back their victims with restitution. This is how we can solve the prison crowding problem.
The amazing thing was that afterwards they [the legislators] came up to me one after another and said things like, “That’s a tremendous idea. Why hasn’t anyone thought of that?” I had the privilege of saying to them, “Read Exodus 22. It is only what God said to Moses on Mount Sinai thousands of years ago.”[4]
The history of the enslavement of African blacks has impeded the gospel. Gary North writes: “Slavery as a system came to North America in the early eighteenth century, and it was grounded in the racist prejudices that increased with every shipload of victimized blacks. Racism seems to have been the foundation of slavery rather than the reverse.” [5]
With the coming of Christ, Christians are to preach the gospel to make disciples of the nations, making them, as well as everyone, “slaves to Christ,” not slaves to other men.
