'Denying the Lord that bought them.'--2 Peter ii. 1.
The institution of slavery was one of the greatest blots on ancient
civilisation. It was twice cursed, cursing both parties, degrading each,
turning the slave into a chattel, and the master, in many cases, into a
brute. Christianity, as represented in the New Testament, never says a
word to condemn it, but Christianity has killed it. 'Make the tree good
and its fruit good.' Do not aim at institutions, change the people that
live under them and you change _them_. Girdle the tree and it will die,
and save you the trouble of felling it. But not only does Christianity
never condemn slavery, though it was in dead antagonism to all its
principles, and could not possibly survive where its principles were
accepted, but it also takes this essentially immoral relation and finds
a soul of goodness in the evil thing, which serves to illustrate the
relation between God and man, between Christ and us. It does with
slavery as it does with war, uses what is good in it as illustrating
higher truths, and trusts to the operation, the slow operation of its
deepest principles for its destruction.
So, then, we have one Apostle, in his letters, binding on his forehead
as a crown the designation, 'Paul,' a _slave_ of 'Jesus Christ,' and we
have in my text an expanded allusion to slavery. The word that is here
rendered rightly enough, 'Lord,' is the word which has been transferred
into English as 'despot,' and it carries with it some suggestion of the
roughness and absoluteness of authority which that word suggests to us.
It does not mean merely 'master,' it means 'owner,' and it suggests an
unconditional authority, to which the only thing in us that corresponds
is abject and unconditional submission. That is what Christ is to you
and me; the Lord, the Despot, the Owner.
But we have not only owner and slave here; we have one of the ugliest
features of the institution referred to. You have the slave-market, 'the
Lord that _bought_ them,' and because He purchased them, owns them.
Think of the hell of miseries that are connected with that practice of
buying and selling human flesh, and then estimate the magnificent
boldness of the metaphor which Peter does not scruple to take from it
here, speaking of the owner who acquired them by a price. And not only
that, but slaves will run away, and when they are stopped, and asked who
they belong to, will say they know nothing about him. And so here is the
runaway's denial, 'denying the Lord that bought them.' Now I ask you to
think of these three points.