1 Corinthians 7:23 Commentary and Bible Study

You freemen are bought with a price, says the apostle, and so of course was the slave. He too was bought with a price, but nothing like the price that was paid for us. A slave in the time of the apostle Paul, cost about 500 days’ pay. If we could properly equate a day’s pay of biblical times, we would know the equivalent figure for today, but that is well-nigh impossible. We know that with a denarius for a day’s work, 500 would buy a slave. But then when Rome went conquering and took thousands and thousands of captives and brought them back and dispersed them around the empire in the slave markets to be sold, sometimes there was a glut of slaves, and you could get a slave for 50 denarii, 50 days’ pay. That was cheap. Christ took the eternal weight of punishment for our sin and offered up also his perfect righteousness for us. What a price! ‘Ye are bought with a price.’ ‘Be ye not the servants of men.’ Now the apostle is not contradicting himself. He has said, if you are a slave, a bondservant, or even a paid servant, do not worry about it. ‘Care not for it’: think nothing of it. You are free in Christ. So what does he mean when he promptly says, ‘Be ye not the servants of men’? Well he clearly means, ‘Do not be overmuch the servants of men.’ You are a slave, but do not be one hundred percent dedicated and enthusiastic for your earthly master. Do justice to him; do all that is required if it is moral and reasonable and right, but do not be absolutely beholden to him and almost worship him and devoted to him. You cannot be the servants or the slaves in that sense for men. Again, it is almost a metonym. It is as if Paul is saying, ‘Be not a slave of the world.’ The apostle Paul has taken an example of a very disadvantageous position in life, and he has poured encouragement into it. There were many who were converted who were slaves. Remember Paul's greeting to those in Caesar's household; they would have been slaves. As slaves they would find themselves spread throughout the Roman empire and sometimes, yes, even in Caesar's household, in the very seat of world government you might say. There they could testify, and they did, and through converted slaves the gospel was mightily spread without doubt. Now the subject changes.