treating ourselves as slaves

The readings today talk about slavery in the One Year Bible. The OT reading is from Leviticus 24:1 to 25:46. It tells the children of Israel who they can treat as slaves, and who they cannot.

But that brings up an interesting point. I was listening to a YouTube video today by Scott Hahn, and he was talking about the philosophy of William of Occam and Machiavelli. He said that these two men set the stage for the protestant reformation, by shifting the thinking from the Medieval period, when people believed that God gave us rules for good and reasonable purposes, to the more modern view that God's power enabled Him to make the rules arbitrary. If He had decided that murder was good and loving people was evil, then those would have been His rules instead of what we have now. Eventually this thinking led to the idea that the natural law was just a whim of God, and that we therefore had to learn His rules and obey them or He would arbitrarily throw us into hell. The idea of double predestination came from this - that God decides based on His whim who to send to heaven and who to send to hell, and they have no say in the matter.

That's a great deal of theological backstory to point to an important truth - that even though we don't accept these ideas today, we sometimes live like we do. As Christians, we are tempted to forget at times that God loves us and wants us to live happy, healthy lives. That He gave us the commandments so that we can live better lives, and those rules make sense. He doesn't want us to slavishly follow a set of arbitrary laws in fear that if we break one by accident a vengeful God is going to throw us into hell. He wants us to trust Him. To love Him. And to know that it's His desire that all of us be saved - He is willing that none should perish. He's doing everything to save us - and wants us to be with Him forever. He's not setting up a serious of obstacles that we have to leap or find ourselves plummeting into hell.

That's good news, right? That we need to put the slave mentality behind us, and realize that we're His children. The two biggest commandments bear this out. He commands us to love Him. And to love each other. Because we're children, and this is His family. We have to learn to get along. Our eternity together depends on it.

Jesus, in today's gospel, says that it's easier for a camel to go through a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. But, He reminds us, with God all things are possible.

God, thank You for making us Your children and not Your slaves. Please help us live like Your children.