Well, good morning to you. I'm not Jesse John, and we're not doing Proverbs this morning. Our brother, sort of at the end of the week, called me and said they were required to leave because of the hurricane. They live on Langley, and the government decided to evacuate Langley, so they had to leave town. Lord willing, they'll be back in the coming days. So I wanted to fill in this morning with something that didn't take too much time for me to put together. And so I was thinking about where we've been in Proverbs and a phrase in this early Christian document known as the Didache sounds a lot like what we've been dealing with in Proverbs. And we'll talk about this. But let me just read this phrase, pray, and then we're going to walk through the context within the first century and the household of the Christian family and why some of the things that we see in scripture perhaps are there contextually. And then we'll make some application points together. So this phrase, out of this work that was written in the late first century, we think, not a part of the scriptures, but I want to show you the phrase that you're used to. It says, the teaching of the Lord through the 12 apostles to the Gentiles. There are two paths, one of life and one of death. The difference between the two paths is great. This then is the path of life. In Proverbs, we've seen sort of this understanding of kind of two ways or two paths as our brothers walked us through that. And Lord willing, we'll finish in the next couple of weeks our series on Proverbs. What I want to do is take a break today and kind of talk about the first century and make some application to some of the texts that we see. So let's pray this morning and begin. Almighty God, we thank you for your grace. We ask your blessing upon this brief hour. We pray that you would encourage our hearts and give us the grace that we need and help our look this morning to understand, to be something that helps us to understand further some of the implications of the call of Christ in our lives, specifically as those who are gathered in families, whether it's single individuals Parents, grandparents, may we see the effects of the Gospel and of Christ's substitution in our place in these various avenues. In Jesus' name, Amen. Well, we're going to talk about this document towards the end of our time together this morning. Again, it is the Didache, and we'll talk about that. Many of you have probably heard of that. I would also argue that it's the Didache, this is a topic for another day, that gives us really the first indication of Christian baptism in the late 1st century, early 2nd century. And I'm biased, but it's slightly favorable to Baptists, but anyway, I digress. What I want to do this morning is take some time to look at a few things that we may not often think about when we read household passages in Colossians, Ephesians, and other places. There are a couple words I want you to remember. The first word is paterfamilias. You've never heard of that? Paterfamilias. I want you to remember this word. Exposito. And I'll give these words to you again. I want you to remember adoptio, and I want you to remember patria potestas. Now, I will review all of these words in just a moment. What do those things have to do with the Christian faith? Well, some of you know for the last four and a half to five years in my free time, I've been engaged in writing a dissertation on the family Specifically the Christian family in the first and second century so when our brother said to me I'm not going to be able to be there This is one where I could pretty easily kind of just put together some material for us But I think it is of immense value as we look at household If you have your copy of God's Word, turn to Colossians. We could have gone to Ephesians, because there's one there. You could also argue that there's one in 1 Peter. And when I say one, I mean some type of what was called household codes. Now, obviously, the Didache that you just saw is not Holy Scripture. It's valuable to us, but it is not something that we submit to as the Word of God. But a household code was a very common thing in the Greco-Roman Empire in the first, second century. In fact, we have writings where there are household codes that are not Christian. That doesn't make Colossians 3, verses 18 through 25 less special, but it does give us the indication that what Paul is doing when he writes to Colossae is borrowing a kind of writing structure, but he's writing it within the Christian endgame, the telos, the goal. You're familiar with this, let me read it to you. Colossians 3, 18 to the end of the chapter. Wives, submit to your own husbands. as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them. You see, I naturally almost wanted to quote Ephesians there, right? Love your wives and do not be bitter toward them. Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord. Fathers, do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged. Bondservants, you could translate that slaves, Obey in all things your masters according to the flesh, not with eye service, as men-pleasers, but in sincerity of heart, fearing God. And whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not to men. Knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance, for you serve the Lord. But he who does wrong will be repaid for what he has done, and there is no partiality. Masters, verse one, give your bondservants what is just and fair, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. Now, this is in early writings in the first and second century, right before it and slightly after it. This is what we call a household code. It is a code of behavior for various roles. Now, we have that, like I said, in Ephesians. We have that in Colossians. You could argue there's one in 1 Peter 3. There are older versions of kind of household codes in the Old Testament. But in these New Testament examples, there are some roles that occur here. And in the early 1st and 2nd century, there would have been a context to this kind of writing style. Now, what I want to do is just give you some background information to what the 1st and 2nd century look like. Now, you may say, this is very interesting to me, or you may say, this is not interesting to me at all. The context does not the interpretation make. However, The context helps us to understand more of the richness of what Paul is dealing with when he tells fathers, don't exasperate, or in the New King James here, don't discourage your children. Well, that is an overwhelming, like, that's a major statement. Because in the first and second century, not only could some fathers discourage their children, fathers could in some century, some decades, kill their children. So when Paul says to the Colossian Christians, don't even discourage them. That's huge if you really understand the background. When Paul says to the masters, and no, there is no overt call, a concrete call to end Greco-Roman slavery. If we have time, we'll talk about why that might be. Paul says in 4.1, masters, give your bondservants what is just and fair. Remember that phrase I told you, patria patestas? That was something that was eventually outlawed in the late 300s, early to mid to late 300s. And patria potestas, which you don't need to know that word, it basically means that the head of the household had the authority, the supreme authority over every member of the household to include, in some cases, life or death. And I'll give you a couple of examples of that in just a few moments. Now if we don't know that, we can still be students of the Bible. We can still understand the spiritual principles that are here. But if we know the immediate context to which Paul is writing when he writes those arguments, those God-inspired, God-breathed statements about how to conduct a household, then it shows you just how startling Christianity was in the first century. Now one of the things we need to know about is what the Greco-Roman household looked like. When I say Greco-Roman, you know that that's a mixture of Greece and Rome in the first century, right? So you had those famous big three philosophers, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, right? And actually they go in the order of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Aristotle's chief student, anybody know who his most famous student was? Alexander the Great, who conquered most of the known world by the time he was 30 to 35. I think he died when he was 33, so somewhere in there, right? And so guess what that did? That caused the Greek language and a love for philosophy to be kind of cast abroad to most of the West and parts of the East. What was the next major empire to come after the Greeks? It was Rome. Guess what Rome did, among other things? They built roads and shipways to everywhere. So by the time that Jesus of Nazareth is born, what do you have? You have a common language, and you have travel routes everywhere. I'm going to call that providence. Humanly speaking, that's just circumstantial. But providentially, the time is ripe for the quick spread of the gospel. And by the way, this is not our topic for today. The gospel did not spread quickly because Constantine became the emperor in the early 300s and made it legal. You will often hear people say that. Christianity just happened to win because, well, they got the king of Rome, so that had a massive impact. But Christianity spread like wildfire in the first two centuries prior to Constantine. That was either chance or a testament to the truth of God's sovereignty. And it spread largely among the slave population. There were rich individuals, but there were a lot of slaves. Now think about this. Patria Patestas. The head of a household in the first century Roman Empire was known as the paterfamilias, father of the family, head of the family, right? And the paterfamilias was not just head of his wife and children like we think about. A household, okay, a household was made up of children, wife, In some cases, other women with which you were engaged, slaves, and slave children. And so a paterfamilias would not have taken it It would not have been odd for a paterfamilias who had just converted to Christ to hear Paul's instruction in Colossians chapter three and four and say to himself, yes, this is a code for how I am a Christian brother and supposed to lead my wife, children, and slaves. Because that's what a household was made up of. That's what a paterfamilias was, the head of a household. It was almost always a male, although there are instances of female heads of households. Some people like to guess that maybe Lydia in the Book of Acts might have sort of been a kind of paterfamilias. We have examples in non-Christian literature. But it's mainly male. And the paterfamilias had the right of something known as patria potestas. I mentioned this earlier. The right, the supreme right, to the rule of those under his house. So children as well as slaves. Now when you think of slavery, you often think in the American context of kind of the horrific chattel slavery that occurred in the late 1600s to the late 1800s in this country. Horrible kind of experience. Wrong. Greco-Roman slavery was a little bit like that, but it wasn't. Some slaves were given education. Some slaves were given quite a bit of exercising of authority within the household. In fact, what do we read in Galatians when Paul says that the law is like a pedagogue, right, like our teacher? Well, that often, not always, but that often was a slave who was entrusted with walking a child back and forth to school and tutoring a child. So, those kinds of roles were readily apparent in the first and second century. So, Potter Familias had supreme authority over all within his household to include the right of life or death. I told you to remember another word, and that was exposito. Does anybody know what exposito was? Exposito was, to translate it into English, it would be to expose, but not to expose a body part, right? Exposure of children was very common in the Roman Empire, and it went like this. We have at least one, the most famous record, I'm sure you've heard it, the most famous record is we have a letter from a Roman soldier in a similar time period, writing home to his wife, who must have been pregnant when he left, or he found out through letters that she's pregnant, and they're dialoguing, and he writes a letter, and he says, if it's a boy, keep it. If it's a girl, expose it. Now, exposing it means leave it out. Just cast it away. So, not only was abortion, as we'll see, a thing in the first and second century, but so was the exposure of babies. A lot of times deformed babies or female babies, because what did a paterfamilias want? Another paterfamilias to follow after him. And women, We're not regularly paterfamiliases. So, get rid of it. And that was legal. Now, the laws in Rome kind of shift back and forth depending on who's Caesar, okay? Eventually the killing of people within your family is definitively outlawed. I believe in the 300, as I mentioned earlier. So you have this window of the first and second century where Christianity is beginning to compete with other philosophies. And it's during that time that much of what they say sounds similar to what these other philosophies are saying. So let me give you an example. I don't have it to put on the screen, but I could show you a Stoic writer, Musonius Rufus in the first century, who writes boldly condemning basically adultery and homosexuality. He has nothing to do with Christ. This is a stoic philosopher, okay? But to a stoic, acting on your sexual passions was wrong, not because of a God-given moral code, as much as you couldn't be the best person that you could be if you were subject to all kinds of passions, right? That word passions means to be acted upon, right? So to be acted upon means you see something and it causes a change within you and you gravitate toward it. So if you were a person who's constantly gravitating towards all of these passions, guess what you're not gonna be able to do? You're not gonna be a good thinker and you're not gonna be a good citizen. So there were other Greco-Roman examples of seeming morality. But you know what the constant example in the early Christian writings are? The same prohibitions, but with a different goal. It's no longer don't be subject to your passions. It's don't be subject to your passions as unto the Lord. And so within this first and second century period of time, you have heads of households many of whom who are not Christians. But Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified one, is making his way throughout his apostles and those who would come after him, is making his way to various parts of the Greco-Roman Empire. And so now you have slaves converting. Now, think about this if you have any thoughts regarding pastoral ministry, or maybe you're a Sunday school teacher, or something of that nature. Imagine that your church is made up of the following individuals. You have a woman who's under the patria potestas, the rule of her husband, who is converted. And she's in your church, probably meeting in your house. Then you have maybe one or two men that are free born. They're not slaves. They're not real high on the economic or sociological standing, but they come without having to submit to a pater familias in the same way. Then you have some slave families. And you're shepherding them. They are Christians. They've trusted in Christ. They've been baptized. You are catechizing them. Most of them probably read because slave children were educated with non-slave children. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. So this is your church. Now what are you gonna do when regularly the pater familias sells slaves? topic for another day, but could it be one of the reasons that Christianity spread so fast was because slaves moved around against their will? Or because slave marriage was not legally recognized. A husband and wife who were slaves might be separated. Now, they may not be because a lot of times slave owners would invest in their children. They're slaves and they're slaves' children. So it's not quite like what you see in some of the modern movies regarding slavery in this country. But there was some of that. There's also another feature, which I will say, because you need to understand when you read what Paul says, what he means. Slave children also served another purpose. And that purpose was the regular abuse by the head of the household, regular sexual abuse. So when Paul writes to slave owners, and he writes to husbands, and he writes to children like he does in Ephesians 6, he may be writing to one person who has purview over all of those areas. We often think that, don't we? We think of the modern Christian family, father, mother, kids, right? But it could be that he's writing these instructions because there are some children. who are slave children. They're 13, 14, and they've converted to Christ, but their slave parents haven't, and they're there in the community. You have wives that are there, but their husbands aren't there. You have husbands who are there whose wife might still be connected to her father's kind of patria potestas, and she wants nothing to do with Christianity. So you have a church full of broken families. And on top of that, you now have the Apostle Paul saying, don't discourage your children. Do what is just and fair to your slaves. Now, we hear that and we think, okay, maybe pay them the best wage, that kind of thing. But Paul, in the back of his mind, in the 50s and 60s, first century, the idea that slave owners can legally utilize their slaves, male and female, for the regular sexual abuse that they dream up. And so when Paul says, don't discourage your children and do what is just to your slaves, there's more going on there than just Don't lose your temper. Be kind. Now, whether or not we know that background of the Greco-Roman culture, we can still read our Bibles. but it helps us to see just how radical Christianity was. Yes, it was radical because it refused to offer incense to Caesar. Yes, it was radical because it believed in one God versus many gods. Yes, it was radical because its philosophical claims were directed towards Christ and not towards the Stoic or Epicurean goal of life. But it was also radical because its family was to look radically different. Now let me give you a couple of examples. I told you to remember those phrases. Here's a little background regarding the family that I mentioned. We talked about the family having a general household. It was not uncommon for there to be slaves. It was not uncommon, as I mentioned, for a variety or different groups within that household to be saved and some not to be saved. And then to gather in little house churches. And the early rich families were often the families that converted one of their rooms in their house to the church gathering. We have one example of that in Syria provided. that doesn't get torn up by ISIS. And it's a big church, 200s, early 300s, and one of the rooms is clearly a Christian gathering place. with a baptistry, but I digress. Sorry to any Presbyterian brothers and sisters that are listening. So we have examples of that. So when Paul writes to Timothy in 1 Timothy 6, and he says, those of you that are rich, you have an increasing responsibility. The assumption is God has given you riches so that you can help to care for the church, right? Well, I want to go back in just a moment to this document that we looked at a moment ago called the Didache, because it was written right after some of the canonical books, books that we rightly recognize as scripture. And in the Didache, there are examples of some things that are perhaps startling to us. I'm going to keep this hopefully gentle because of the variety of audience that we have, but it was also not uncommon for slave children as well as non-slave children to become sexually active in the Greco-Roman Empire, about 13, 14, 15, and they would go to dinner parties The men would be wearing togas. The boy would don his new toga. And the expectation was, at that party, he was going to be initiated into the rights of manhood, which included not just eating and drinking, but participating in a whole host of sexual things with men and with women. So we often hear this argument in our culture. Boy, we're going to hell in a handbasket in America. And we are. But when Paul is writing to the church at Colossae or Ephesus or Thessalonica, most men are regularly and acceptedly so not faithful to their wives. It was illegal for a wife not to be faithful to her husband, but it was very much legal and expected for a husband to cheat on his wife all the time. It was very common for girls to marry about age 14 or 15, but for boys to marry kind of later in their 20s, after they had had the ability to test out all of their desires. And so, we have infants being left out, we have abortion regularly occurring, we have sexual immorality that goes beyond what we currently know in our country, and I'm not trying to diminish it. But we often look back and we think, wow, we in America have gotten really far from the golden age. Paul is not writing to a golden age. He's writing to a depraved society. And guess what happens? Christianity spreads like wildfire. I mean like wildfire. And so then, what do the early Christian writings contain? All kinds of instructions about life to include family. So let me give you a couple of examples. We could look at a whole lot of examples, but I just want to look at one particular work that I put up there earlier, and that is a work known as the Didache. Okay, let me... give you a little bit of background. The Didache just means teaching, and it is likely a late 1st century to 2nd century manual of catechesis, catechism, and training for early Christians. And the date of this is anywhere from 50 to 150. So that's where it was dated. And we didn't have this work until the 1800s. We won't get into all that, but we have it. And listen to these kinds of familial instruction. And I'll put it up here for us. All right. This is a writing to Christians, catechizing them probably before their baptism. And now the second commandment of the teaching. So remember the Didache was written kind of like Proverbs, kind of two different paths, or at least part of Proverbs. Do not murder. Do not commit adultery. The Decalogue comes out in the Didache a lot. Do not engage in pederasty. the sexual abuse mainly of boys. Do not engage in sexual immorality. Do not steal. Do not practice magic. Do not use enchanted potions. Do not abort a fetus. or kill a child that is born. We often think of the Christian pro-life movement starting in about the early 70s with Roe v. Wade. I'm here to tell you the Christian pro-life movement has been around since the beginning. Because abortion has been around since the beginning. It was not uncommon in this period of time for surgical procedures or certain foods to be eaten in order to induce an abortion. But notice what he says next. Kill a child that is born. This is exposito. This is exposito. Do not kill a child that is born. Now, if we were to have a brother in our church who was one of our elders, who left us for a season and wrote us a letter, just encouraging us as a church, trying to help us to see the way forward, trying to encourage the elders that are here, We would be utterly shocked if one of the instructions was, do not kill a child that is born. Why in the world would you write that to us? It's illegal. Well, it wasn't illegal. And it was common. And the call to Christ meant looking different than the culture. So these are the kinds of things that are condemned. as it relates to the family and the household. And none of them were uncommon. Let's go forward just a little bit. If our computer will. The last time I was up here, the computer didn't work well. There were some comments from the peanut gallery. Look at section four, nine through 11. Do not remove your hand from your son or daughter. It could be translated, do not refrain from disciplining. Or do not shirk your responsibility towards. Now this is sounding Pauline, right? For from their youth, teach them the reverential fear of God. This sounds very much like what Paul says in Ephesians. when he talks about, in Colossians, and in those sections when he talks about training your children in the what? The nurture and admonition of the Lord. But then notice what is given here. This is another kind of household code. Do not give orders to your male slave or female slave who hope in the same God out of bitterness. Why not? Why not? It's legal. Not only am I allowed to give them orders, I can kill them. Lest they stop fearing the God who is over you both. For he does not come to call those of high status, but those whom the Spirit has prepared. I don't know, maybe if John Calvin got his hand in there. And you who are slaves, This sounds very Pauline, doesn't it? You must be subject to your masters as to a replica of God. The phrase there is actually type of God. And it doesn't mean worship them. They are like an authority figure over you, just like God is our ultimate authority figure. So in your role, treat them with respect and reverential fear. Now, here's an aside. more liberal and progressive antagonists toward Christianity, and even liberal and progressive Christians love to take Ephesians and Colossians, Philemon, and early Christian works like this, and say there's never a call to end slavery. And actually, that's technically true. In the New Testament, you don't really see a release all your slaves. In all of the early Christian writings, and I could put 10 to 15 of them up here alone, there's never really that call. And so, what that has led some people to do is to say, see how horribly patriarchal Christianity is or was. It's just, it's keeping people in subjection, and you probably heard all kinds of arguments. But I think what is often left out is that in the word of God, and then in the early Christian writings, again, which are not on par with scripture, by the way, the goal is not so much the change of external society by government. It's the change of the Christian life and household. That doesn't mean that there's not implicit in that a clear reordering of structure. I think Philemon can be read that way. I think Philemon can be read, look, this is a reordering of everything. But don't let the lack of a call for just release your slaves, you hear that and you think, man, maybe Christianity was just this horrible thing. For a Christian to write this, knowing what was happening in the culture of the day, was radical. This is radical. Let me give you a couple other examples. Alright. The path of death is this. First of all, it is evil and filled with a curse. Murders, adulteries, passions, sexual immoralities. You almost get the decalogue here, not verbatim. Idolatries, feats of magic, sorcerers, rapacious acts, all these kinds of things. And this whole work is, general and then it's specific. Look what he says here. and corruptors of what God has fashioned. Again, not to be overly gross this morning, but corruptors of what God has fashioned. That is the sexual abuse of children. The work continues. And when we read in Colossians what we read earlier, Fathers, do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged. And we read here, train them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, the reverential fear of God. Don't give orders to your slaves lest they lose hope, lest they stop hoping in Christ. Put all that together. And do you know what some scholars will argue? Well, all Paul is saying is, don't use your biological children for these things. But he probably would still let you use your slave children for these things. And I know that this morning is heavy. It's like, wow, all this stuff about Ryan. Why are you bringing up abortion and pederasty and all this kind of stuff? Because the gospel radically, radically changed the household. Do you know, I'm sure you do, who the number one caregiver for exposed children was in the late first century until the Constantine era? It was not the government. In fact, we have Greco-Roman rulers writing to other rulers complaining that the Christians are outdoing us in caring for those in the cities around them. It was the Christians. So now picture your church. You've got that woman whose husband is not converted, but she's a wealthy woman. but her husband kind of lets her go to church, but doesn't want anything to do with it. You've got slave children, you've got a couple of slave couples who at any week could be separated. The slave wife or child might be regularly forced into certain things that he or she does not want to be forced into, and they're in your church. And now, Bill and Bob, no, not Bill and Bob, Bill and Sue, This couple, who may or may not be legally married in the eyes of the law because they're slaves, have brought an infant female that's deformed to the assembly and said, we can't take care of this one because we're slaves. But we found it at the garbage dump. Can someone take it? This is the first and second century world and church that Paul and Peter and John are writing to. So when in the book of the Revelation, and we won't get into how you interpret that, we had a whole sermon series on that years ago. When you see John, and I think called Rome, Babylon, This is one of the reasons for it. This is one of the reasons for it. Because it was sin sick. And many of us think we're losing our government, our families are becoming under attack, and you just fill in the blank. I don't know what your blanks are. We don't do things like we did 50 years ago in this country. Just keep filling in the blanks. But don't, don't forget that this, this is the culture that the gospel went to and spread. And you know what? If the Lord tarries and we get to this, which quite frankly I don't think is much of a stretch. There are already people, and they're on the fringe, but there are already people who acceptably can say, we ought to be willing to discard deformed children. We'll do it in a humane way. We already have people on the fringe saying, Maybe the age limit for certain practices, relationally, should not be what we think it is. We're gonna get here. And just keep in mind that if and when we do, hopefully we won't, but if and when we do, the gospel penetrated it. The Holy Spirit had a prepared people, and those people spread like wildfire. But their lives were very, very different. But very few of them knew the Christian life that we knew, or we know. Because the spread of the gospel for them might mean my paterfamilias is separating me from my husband and selling me to his brother, who lives 100 miles that way. It may mean I'm a child growing up regularly abused And yet by God's grace, not, not losing hope that God is who he says that he is. It may mean like what Paul says in Corinthians, 1 Corinthians chapter six, when he says, don't engage in these activities. And such were some of you. We read that and we think, well, I guess there were a few people who probably did some bad things. This is the culture. So when Paul writes, but you were washed, this is the kind of stuff that they were washed from. So the context for me, and I've spent a little bit too much time over the last four and a half years reading this kind of stuff, digging into what did the family look like, the context for me helps me to see a couple of practical lessons. And I've already mentioned them to you, but let me just give a couple of them to you. Christianity radically reorders what human beings do with family. It radically reorders it. There's one word that I said we needed to talk about that we haven't talked about yet, and that's the word adoptio. Remember I said the Christian families were the ones taking in all these exposed children? But adoption was actually very common. We hear that and we think, oh man, adoption must have started with the Christians creating orphanages, which they did. But adoption was actually a regular Roman practice. And guess what? You would do it to try to further your own domain. So it was not uncommon for, let's say, a 40 to 60-year-old man, should have been old, I feel old sometimes. It would have been old. It would not have been uncommon for him to adopt someone else's son, who might have been 20 or 30, so that that person could become an heir. Have we ever heard of any Christian literature where someone uses adoption as a description of the gospel? Two weeks, Keech Conference, whole day, adoption. It's spirit-breathed scripture. And yet, Paul is borrowing from the constructs of his day. But guess what? Adoption in the Greco-Roman Empire was taking something that was gonna further you. Guess what the Christians did with it? And guess what God does with it in the gospel? He doesn't take something that is going to further him, more riches, more of a name, spread my kingdom, because an adopted son, if you made them a particular kind of adopted son, would be higher than your biological children. What do the Christians do? They turned adoption into, we're going to bring you up, right? And so it radically changed the family, number one, including the structure of the family. Families looked different. Church looked different. How many times have we shared prayer requests and our prayer requests, we often kind of keep them close to the vest. Some of us are better than others about really sharing our prayer. Maybe it's in a small group or whatever. Can you imagine the prayer meetings in late first, early second century Colossi? Yes, I'm praying that my owner doesn't sell me. I'm praying that my owner will come to Christ so he'll stop abusing all of us. You see, it radically changed the family and the structure. But number two, a lesson that I think is helpful for us is no matter how bad it gets in the new Rome, America, if God wills it, the gospel will radically transform it. I mean radically. And then lastly, this whole thing I think teaches us a little bit about suffering. When Paul writes to a church like the one I described and he says, it's been granted to you not only to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, but to suffer. There probably were very few people in the pews of First Baptist Church Colossae meeting in the house of rich member so and so. There were probably very few people who didn't read that and think, okay, my suffering means something for the sake of the gospel. Me being sold. me having all of my children taken away from me. I mean, all of these kinds of things. It meant something different to those ears. So, there were two ways that this writer says, don't do these things, do these things. And in it all, I think we see just how radical the gospel is, both in its claims over us, and by the Spirit through God's grace, it's transforming power in us. What leader, what sinner, what person can this gospel not change? No matter how bad at family or like ruling or master-slave they are, It changes. Well, we need to pray, but are there any questions? It could be that down the road we'll do a couple week series and I can lay out some of this stuff to you in more detail, but yeah, Doug? Yeah, there are many arguments as to why the early Christian literature doesn't call for it. It was a high population. I couldn't put my finger on it, but the average household would be majority slaves and minority freed-born. So at least 50, depending on the area, the region. Yeah, Judy? No, this document was written 50 AD to 150 AD. I'm going to go with in the middle, about 100, 90s to 100, somewhere in there. So depending on how you date the Book of the Revelation, very quickly written after that. Yeah. In your studies, have you looked at population density in the Mediterranean around the time of Christ, before and after the time of Christ? Only as it relates to the household, so no. Yeah, that would be news to me, but it'd be interesting to see. Yeah. I mean. Yeah, yeah. Transient. Transient culture. Anybody else? All right, let's pray. God, we ask your grace as we think about the gospel, as we read passages of scripture, help us to realize just how earth-shattering some of these instructions are for us. Even though we, thankfully by your grace, are living in a time where we don't have to deal with many of these overt kinds of sins, they do seem to be on the peripheral edges of our society. But help us not to lose heart, to remember that things have been horrific before. And you, by your grace, have transformed even whole societies because of the gospel. Lord, we pray for that kind of revival again. Lord, we pray that you would cause us to be faithful in our own lives and our own households. That we might see the call is first and foremost to live Christ-centered lives and then to have that exist in our homes. And that we pray you would use that as salt and light into the world around us. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.