Galatians 1:10 For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. The title which the apostle gives himself, "the servant, or the slave, of Christ," expresses, we may be sure, no mere acquiescence in some current fashion of Eastern speech, but the aspect of his life and conduct which he desires to keep before himself and others. St. Paul belonged to two worlds, the Jewish and the Greek, and in this title he has both worlds in view. In the language of the Psalter, and of the Hebrew prophets, every Israelite is, as such, a servant of the Lord, and to the collective people, viewed in its separate and its consecrated life, it is said, "Thou, Israel, art My servant, thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, thou art My servant, I have chosen thee." But besides this general and ethical meaning, the title had a technical, official force. Any man who was marked out from among his fellows as having a special work to do for the Lord, was regarded as taken into the service of the invisible King, whose livery he thus wore by the force of events, and by his acts, and by the tenour of his life, in the eyes of his countrymen. In this sense, too, every member of the prophetic order came in time to be termed a "servant of the Lord;" and the title reached its highest significance when, in the later group of Isaiah's writings, it was used of the King Messiah, whose future humiliation and glory there mingled indistinctly with the nearer, although still distant, suffering and deliverance of the martyred people in Babylon. When, then, St. Peter and St. Jude, writing to Churches mainly or entirely of Jewish origin, styled themselves servants of Jesus Christ, they probably understood the title, chiefly if not exclusively, in the traditional and narrower Hebrew sense. But when St. Paul, writing to the Roman or Philippian Church, calls himself a servant of Christ, it is difficult to suppose that he does not read into the title the meaning which his readers would naturally find there, In these Churches, consisting altogether or predominantly of converts from heathendom, the phrase would rather suggest the ordinary slave of the GreekRoman world, than an inspired or distinguished servant of the Hebrew theocracy. That unseen, that immense population of human beings which worked, which suffered in silence, which tilled the fields, which manned the fleets, which constructed the palaces and the bridges of the world, which supplied to those who had property and power their cooks, their carpenters, their painters, their astronomers, their doctors, their poets, their copyists, their gladiators, their buffoons; which ministered to the refinement, intelligence, luxury, passions of the wealthy; which by its ceaseless and almost unnoticed waste of unregarded life satisfied the requirements, and helped to fill the coffers of the State. The slave class was almost the most prominent, as it was certainly the most mournful feature in "the ancient society." In the view of antiquity, the slave was but an animated instrument, a mere body which chanced to be endowed with certain mental capacities. In the eye of the law, the slave was not a person: he was classed by the jurists with goods and with animals; he was sold, he was bequeathed by will, he was lent to a friend, he was shut up, he was banished, until the day of the later legislation he was killed — quite at the discretion of his owner. And St. Paul calls himself this — the slave of Jesus Christ! He was not merely a servant holding an honourable post in the kingdom of heaven, which he might relinquish at pleasure; he was consciously a slave. And in this abandonment of all human liberty at the feet of the Redeemer rain this utter surrender of the right to his intelligence, his affections, the employment of his time and his property, his movements from place to place, except as his Master might command, St. Paul found the true dignity and happiness of his being as a man. He belonged to Jesus Christ not by any original or solitary act of his own, but because, as he could not but acknowledge, Jesus Christ had paid for him, had bought him at an incalculable cost, out of slavery which was misery and degradation, into a service, which was freedom indeed. (Canon Liddon.) Parallel Verses KJV: For do I now persuade men, or God? or do I seek to please men? for if I yet pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. |
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