Doulos
So, John MacArthur came and spoke at my church tonight. It was soo good to see it packed. On top of that a lot of people who have been out of the town/state/country are back and that makes my heart happy to see them again.
Tonight, MacArthur talked about his book, “Slave,” and that we are slaves to Christ. One thing that I found SUPER interesting is that in the 16th century (I think) when they were translating the Bible to English they chose to translate the Greek word ‘doulos,’ which literally means slave, to what we see in our Bibles today, which is 'servant.’ If you know your American history then you know about American slavery and they did not want to offend people or scare people away with the word slave in the Bible. Throughout the whole night as we looked at passages that contained the Greek word doulos, it said servant. At the bottom of each page it translated servant as 'bondservant,’ which is another way of saying slave.
When you see slave in the Bible today it literally means slave. For example, like being a slave to sin.
Now when you think of a servant, they serve and do their duties, but when the day is over they have to tend to their needs and purchase their own food and whatnot. For a slave, you are owned by someone and that person provides your meals, your housing, and basically all of your needs. Think about it, the American church has it wrong. We say that we are servants of Jesus, but no we’re not. We’re slaves of Jesus. Slaves are purchased by their masters. Well whudda ya know? We were purchased by the BLOOD of Jesus Christ! This means that we are slaves to him. He provides our every need.
If you look at, let’s say, a Bible in Russian, where we see servant, they see slave. I find it a little skeptical of the English language. Think about this. When we go through the Bible and we see the word 'love’ we see love. If we were to look at it in Hebrew and Greek we would see different kinds of love. From agape to philia to eros to storge. You get the point. The English language is exactly like the American way. Lazy. Instead of creating different words to describe different kinds of love we have created one word and just add adjectives before it, which really mean nothing in all honesty.
I urge you. Take an adventure through the Bible. Look for every place where it says 'servant’ and, dependent on your Bible, look to see if the bottom of the page translates servant as 'bondservant.’ To start, take a look at just at some of the introductions in the books in the New Testament.
We are slave of Christ. If you want to know and read more go and buy Slave by John MacArthur
