The belief that someone could be a true Christian while that person’s whole lifestyle, value system, speech, and attitude are marked by a stubborn refusal to surrender to Christ as Lord is a notion that shouldn’t even need to be refuted. It is an idea you will never find in any credible volume of Christian doctrine or devotion from the time of the earliest church fathers through the era of the P...rotestant Reformation and for at least three and a half centuries beyond that. The now-pervasive influence of the no-lordship doctrine among evangelicals reflects the shallowness and spiritual poverty of the contemporary evangelical movement. It is also doubtless one of the main causes for evangelicalism’s impoverishment. You cannot remove the lordship of Christ from the gospel message without undermining faith at its core. That is precisely what is happening in the church today. The expression most often translated “Lord” in the English New Testament is the Greek word kurios. It speaks of someone who has power, ownership, and an unquestionable right to command. A nearly synonymous Greek term also sometimes translated “Lord” in the New Testament is despotes. That word (the root of our English word despot) describes a ruler with absolute power over his subjects. Professor Murray J. Harris distinguishes the two terms this way: “Clearly despotes and kyrios largely overlap in meaning; both may be rendered ‘lord’ or ‘master.’ If we are to distinguish the two terms with regard to emphasis, kyrios signifies ‘sovereign Lord,’ and despotes ‘absolute Lord.’ ”1 Both words are used in reference to Christ as Lord in the New Testament. For example, in John 13:13, Jesus took the title kurios for Himself: “You call Me Teacher and Lord [kurios]; and you are right, for so I am.” And Jude 4, a text written by Jesus’ own earthly half brother, employs both words in parallel fashion: “For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master [despotes] and Lord [kurios], Jesus Christ.” Both words are extremely powerful. They were part of the vocabulary of slavery in New Testament times. They describe a master with absolute dominion over someone else — a slave owner. His subjects are duty-bound to obey their lord’s directives, not merely because they choose to do so but because they have no rightful liberty to do otherwise. Therefore, wherever there was a lord (kurios) or a master (despotes), there was always a slave (doulos). One idea necessarily and axiomatically implies the other. That explains Jesus’ incredulity at the practice of those who paid homage to Him with their lips but not with their lives: “Why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46). You may recognize the Greek word doulos because it is quite a common term in the New Testament. The word and its derivatives appear more than 130 times in the New Testament — frequently as a description of what it means to be a true Chris tian: “He who was called while free, is Christ’s slave [doulos]. You were bought with a price” (1 Cor. 7:22 – 23). Doulos is not an ambiguous term. It suggests a very specific concept, which — while repugnant to our culture and our natural minds — should not be toned down or backed away from. It is the main Greek word that was used to describe the lowest abject bond slave — a person who was literally owned by a master who could legally force him to work without wages. In other words, a doulos was a person without standing or rights. According to Kittel’s definitive dictionary of New Testament expressions, words in the doulos group serve either to describe the status of a slave or an attitude corresponding to that of a slave. . . . The meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfl uous to give examples of the individual terms or to trace the history of the group. Distinction from synonymous words and groups . . . is made possible by the fact that the emphasis here is always on “serving as a slave.” Hence we have a service which is not a matter of choice for the one who renders it, which he has to perform whether he likes or not, because he is subject as a slave to an alien will, to the will of his owner. [The term stresses] the slave’s dependence on his lord.2 Unfortunately, readers of the English Bible have long been shielded from the full force of the word doulos because of an ages-old tendency among Bible translators to tone down the literal sense of the word — translating it as “servant,” or “bond servant” rather than “slave.” Still, ser vice and slavery are not really the same thing, and it is extremely unfortunate that the full impact of the expression doulos has been obscured in our English translations for so long. There are at least six Greek words for “servant,” and doulos is not one of them. As Harris points out, “there is an important difference. A servant gives ser vice to someone, but a slave belongs to someone.”6 It is not merely a nuance. Scripture repeatedly and emphatically places Chris tians in the latter category: “Do you not know that . . . you are not your own? For you have been bought with a price” (1 Cor. 6:19 – 20). We have a Master who purchased us (2 Peter 2:1). To be specific, we were purchased for God with the precious blood of Christ (Rev. 5:9). This is the very essence of what it means to be a Chris tian: “For not one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom. 14:7 – 9). In that regard, Jesus’ portrayal of discipleship as slavery had no more appeal to the popular tastes or felt needs of His time than it does today. In fact, because most people in Jesus’ time were so familiar with real-life slavery, they surely had a much more vivid mental picture than we do of what Jesus was demanding when He called for absolute self-denial and surrender to His lordship. He was certainly not trying to appeal to a longing for self-esteem or make discipleship look enticing to the people of Galilee and Judea when He spoke about the cost of following Him. They understood far better than we do what a menial position He was calling them to. In fact, many people in the early church were slaves. That is why there are so many passages in the Epistles giving instructions about how slaves were to behave in order to reflect the character and holiness of Christ (Eph. 6:5 – 8; Col. 3:22; 1 Tim. 6:1 – 2; Titus 2:9 – 10; 1 Peter 2:18 – 21).
Posted on: Sat, 24 Aug 2013 02:00:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015