Slavery and the trafficking of slaves is, alas, a modern problem as much as ever it was. In 2004, 23 cockle pickers drowned in Morecambe Bay; they had been trafficked and lured by the promise of good jobs in Britain, but were forced to work seven days a week for just £10 a day. There are many more shocking tales of such injustices and it is thought that worldwide, slavery affects between 25 and 45 million people. Human trafficking involves the use of force, fraud, or coercion to obtain some type of labour or commercial sex act; this includes forced marriages, sex trafficking, forced labour and child labour.
Though we may not be aware of it, we may be profiting from slavery in the services we use (e.g. in retail, in the clothes we buy and so on); we need to be aware and to buy aware. This problem is not something that is only relevant from a historical point of view; it is of stark relevance to our everyday lives.
We may well feel, however, that we are free people and this topic has little relevance for us in the UK, but the past year has shown us how easily freedoms can be removed from us (e.g. what we can do, where we can go, whom we can see, whether we can go to work or not.) The Government and psychologists in SAGE have used social and behavioural interventions to control and direct behaviour, playing on feelings of duty, guilt and fear to inculcate the ‘acceptable’ level of behaviour in people. We can easily become slaves to fear; people are finding it increasingly difficult to ‘go back to normal’, even when restrictions are eased, because of the fear aroused by these methods.
We can also be slaves to our desires, again often exacerbated by advertising and the media. The idea of personal liberation can, if we are not careful, be used by those skilled in manipulation to captivate – an age-old problem as Genesis 3:4-5 makes plain.
Paul reminds us in Rom 6:16 that when we offer ourselves to someone as obedient slaves, we are slaves of the one we obey – whether we are slaves to sin or to obedience. Christ has died to set us free (Gal 5:1); as Christians, we are freed from the penalty of sin (1 Cor 5:21) and freed from a fear of death (Heb 2:14-15). Life is precious and valuable (euthanasia and abortion are wrong because both treat life as disposable), but Jesus made it plain that we must lose our lives to find them (Matt 10:39, Mark 8:35, Luke 9:24). We have to understand that Jesus laid down His life for us and that we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. (1 John 3:16)
To live in fear, guilt, shame or bondage to our desires is to be enslaved. Jesus came to set us free not only from the penalty of sin but from the power of sin, so that now we can choose who rules us. Rom 6:13 reminds us that we have a choice now to offer ourselves to God; 1 Cor 6:19-20 reminds us that we are not our own but have been bought by God. Just as the slave could choose to continue to serve their master out of love (Ex 21:5-6), so too we can choose to be a slave of God and therefore know true freedom.
