Masters Who Are Slaves

After several days, Felix returned with his wife Drusilla, who was a Jewess. He sent for Paul and listened to him speak about faith in Christ Jesus. As Paul expounded on righteousness, self-control, and the coming judgment, Felix became frightened and said, “You may go for now. When I find the time, I will call for you” (Acts 24:24–25).

There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know. — Dubois

Felix was such a man. Perhaps he hoped to find shelter in the Cave of Ignorance. It offers no real refuge, and there are many in Hell who can attest to the fact. It takes courage to hear the Truth, not just to speak it. Felix refused to hear because he was unwilling to be convicted. When faced with the Truth—the rigid, unchanging reality of coming judgment and faith in Christ for salvation—it was easier to close his eyes and pretend God’s wrath isn't real. As the fear swelled in his heart it seized his tongue—“You may go…until it’s convenient for me.” Now just wasn't a good time, you see. I suspect he used the excuse like most people—as code for "I just don't really want to..." And, like most of us, he assumed he would have more time. Tomorrow is never a guarantee. Our cowardice must be overcome now.

We might be offended, afraid, or indifferent, but the realities of final judgment, a risen Savior, and the call to obedience don’t change.

To make matters worse, Felix “was well informed about the Way” (Acts 24:22), though it seems he needed crucial details about personal application. Paul filled him in. Perhaps Felix, like Herod, would listen to a prophet gladly, right up until until he gave the order for him to be killed (Mk. 6:20, 27). As it turns out, the personal application of “it is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife” proved too hard to hear (Mk. 6:18), but the Truth wouldn’t budge and the Truth-teller wouldn’t cease, so he had to be silenced. Ironically, his words still ring out as loud as they ever did. Felix and Herod were cut from the same cloth—both sought to suppress the Message of their salvation because it indicted and demanded "too much" from them.

It’s like Luther Blackmon once said, “Excited brethren tell me, ‘Preach it right down the line, preacher!’ They’re excited right up until ‘the line’ runs right through their lives or through their families.”

We might be offended, afraid, or indifferent, but the realities of final judgment, a risen Savior, and the call to obedience don’t change.

So why refuse? Because we want control, and we’re terrified of losing it. It was total control that Eve sought—to “be like God, knowing good and evil”—this was not mere awareness of good and evil (she already knew the difference, Gen. 3:2-3). No, this was about power. She and her husband would seize the power to decide good and evil for themselves—have control apart from the God who made them, loved them, and gave them everything.

They would forsake Him and His paradise to be “true” masters of their domain. I guess we know how that experiment has gone thus far. All sin is rebellion born from a desire to be our own master, but therein is the great deception and irony. Satan makes us believe such rebellion is possible with impunity—“you will not surely die…” (Gen. 3:4), but no such domain actually exists. We all submit to something or someone every moment—“For a man is a slave to whatever has mastered him” (2 Pet. 2:19). Scripture just assumes every man is under the control of another master, and it divides all people into two kingdoms: “He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Col. 1:13).

The deception is you can be your own master; the irony is in seizing the reins from God, you give yourself to a new master—not self—but Satan. Freedom apart from God does not exist, it’s an illusion…worse, actually, it’s enslavement. Because the first people refused to live in the perfect peace of paradise, they became prisoners of the Devil. So the whole world followed, down to every last accountable man—“all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). In the vain hope of having perfect control, we allow our passion for power to forge our fetters. All the miseries and evils of humanity’s pain-ridden history—crime, injustice, war, disease, oppression, and torture stem from one root—an entitlement so grossly untethered, it refused perfection. This entitlement persists to this day in every neglect of God’s Word.

Every sin is rooted in the prideful assumption that we not only know better than the Almighty, but that we deserve better than the blessings and limitations He’s given.

As a rule, we see God as the unfair, unreasonable One—“Who is He to make such demands of us?” Yet, He has poured Himself out from the beginning in love for us, to provide for us, and gave His Son to die on our behalf. We demanded His death, and God allowed it, not for His own sake, but for ours, so that we might be free of the very thing that separated us from Him in Eden:

For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross. Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now He has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in His sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the Gospel (Col. 1:19-23).

How does one save and set free rebels entrenched in the demands of their rebellion?

By using their own rebellion against them—using their rejection of you as the very means of their salvation. God did this knowing most of us would still choose sin until our last breath in defiance of His rule.

I think all one needs to do is take a long, hard and honest look at the world around him—take in the overwhelmingly vile history of mankind—to see what an utterly stupid choice it is to reject Christ. “I know, O LORD, that the way of man is not in himself, that it is not in man who walks to direct his steps” (Jer. 10:23). This will always be true.

Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie. — Miyamoto

All sin is deceit (Heb. 3:13). Every sin is rooted in the assumption that we not only know better than the Almighty, but that we deserve better than the blessings and limitations He’s given. To so think and act and live at any moment from that assumption is to live a lie. It is to live apart from the only One who loves you perfectly with an undying love, who carried your sins to the cross in His body and killed them there. Satan made a world of slaves for himself who live under the illusion they've snatched real freedom from the hand of their Creator…as they march defiantly toward death (1 Jn. 5:19).

Jesus came and shared in our humanity, “so that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death” (Heb. 2:14-15). He used Satan’s greatest trophy (the death of man) to redeem all men from his grip.

We all try to be masters. In doing so, we prove we’re slaves.

We are a stubborn bunch. Having lived so long under the illusion of sin—that we are our own masters, we kick against the goads that would lead us to true freedom. Maybe that’s what scares us (as it did Felix) so much—the Gospel of Christ removes the blinders and we’re horrified to discover we were duped. We thought we were our own masters, but Jesus reveals we’ve been in captivity all along.

And surrendering to Him means owning up to the humiliating fact of our deception and the awful certainty of our doom. For in the cross our noble rebellion is unmasked for what it is—the violent, murderous pursuit of the One who truly rules. The cross reveals our utter hatred for the loving Master who established moral boundaries for our good. What is more, the cross is where God’s love and mercy for rebellious man is clearly seen. Knowing our lust for control, and our violent hatred toward anyone who is a threat to it, He lowered Himself to become a mortal target of our wrath so that He might save us from His. There is no greater love in the universe.

We all try to be masters. In doing so, we prove we’re slaves. Like Felix, you can send that Truth away. Pretend you’re not accountable. You can silence conviction and cling to your illusion of control in the Cave of Willful Ignorance. Or you can submit to the One who died to set you free; who rose to intercede for you at the right hand of God (Rom. 8:34).

Don’t wait for a convenient time that may never come. “He who believes and is baptized will be saved. He who does not believe shall be condemned” (Mk. 16:16).