A letter from an apostle to a slave owner; a letter brought to the owner through his runaway slave. The apostle never asks his friend to release the slave, only to receive him as a brother in Christ. But what does that request mean for the slave, for the owner, for the rest of us?

Hi, my name is Terence and I’m your host for Reading and Readers, a podcast where I review Christian books for you. Today I review “Philemon” from the MacArthur New Testament Commentary.

Serendipity

This book is actually sold as two commentaries in one, Colossians and Philemon, 256 pages, published by Moody in 1992. But the copy I got, read and reviewed is the Logos, Philemon only version. Available in Logos for USD7.59 and I got it for free in the free book of the month for March. I just love getting free books, don’t you?

It’s quite serendipitous how this book just so happened to be the Logos free book of the month. I had just read “Changing Normal” by Jolene Kinser, a unique book on reconciliation within the Chinese culture. But as I mentioned in my review, I wished it had more Biblical exposition on forgiveness.

Then Logos gives me exactly that! This commentary on Philemon is a great complement to Kinser’s book. Who knew that one letter to a slave owner, asking him to forgive his slave, would be such a treasure for all of us today?

Timeless Wisdom

Think about it. There are many, many letters written on slavery. These letters are useful for us to understand how people thought and acted in those times, but consider how many of these letters are useful to tell us how to live today and in the future.

All of those letters serve a narrow interest, but the letter of Philemon, uniquely is timeless. It is because this letter to Philemon is inspired by the Holy Spirit, given to us by God, through an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Before I launch into my own commentary, let us now move to the author of today’s commentary.

Johnny Mac

John MacArthur is a giant among Christians, a giant to look up to for some, a giant to cut down for others. His achievements include preaching through verse by verse the whole of the New Testament. I don’t care which denomination you belong to, I think all Christians should commend the faithful preaching of the entire New Testament, Sunday after Sunday, over a life time.

Some are uneasy with MacArthur because he wrote the book Strange Fire and held the Strange Fire conference. He suggested that what others consider as God-given spiritual gifts, gifts like speaking in tongues, come from a less divine, more nefarious source.

In addition, MacArthur is an articulate and passionate defender of Reformed theology. You can see this in a lifetime of sermons and books. If you are reformed, you love him. If not, well some hate him.

I mention the controversial teachings of MacArthur because they are notably absent in today’s book. Contrary to those who accuse MacArthur of an obsession with spiritual gifts and Calvinism, MacArthur has proven in this book that his true obsession, or rather passion, is to expound the Bible. Not a whiff or a sniff of an anti-charismatic or pro-Calvinist streak here.

Everyone can enjoy today’s book.

We Must Forgive

MacArthur starts his Introduction to Philemon with these words:

The book of Philemon is unique in many respects. The shortest of Paul’s inspired writings, it is the only one of the prison epistles addressed to an individual. Although it does not reach the lofty doctrinal heights of the others (Colossians, Philippians, and Ephesians), it does deal with a vitally important practical issue. Paul takes the truth that Christians are to forgive each other (cf. Eph. 4:32; Col. 3:13), first taught in the New Testament by our Lord Himself in the gospel of Matthew, and applies it to a specific situation.

You have heard the sermon. You wholeheartedly agree with forgiveness. We need it. We need to ask for it. We need to do it. But when it comes to your specific situation, you say it is impossible. Only you know that you must not say it’s impossible. A voice in you reprimands you, “Is the arm of the Lord too short? Is your situation greater than the Lord?”

What is so impossible? Your relationship with your spouse, children, parents, in-laws, employers, employees, neighbours?

You know what is impossible? Asking a slave owner to forgive a runaway slave.

When your slave runs away, but after some time has somehow appeared before you, you need to exact some punishment. If not to safeguard your reputation among better society, then, as a warning to the other slaves. And you should not fear of being too harsh. The law serves to preserve order and so it is not only legal, it is also right, for you to punish your run away slave.

It would have been better if he never came back. But now he stands before you, with a letter from the one you love most, the very same Paul who brought the light of Christ into your life. And he asks for what should never be asked of a master dealing with a runaway slave. Forgiveness.

Slavery: A Workable Social Institution

To give readers a good idea of what slavery meant in those Greco-Roman times, MacArthur dedicates a section in his introduction on “Christianity and Slavery”.

Here, MacArthur makes a critical point:

It is significant that the New Testament nowhere attacks slavery directly. Had Jesus and the apostles done so, the result would have been chaos. Any slave insurrection would have been brutally crushed, and the slaves massacred. The gospel would have been swallowed up by the message of social reform. Further, right relations between slaves and masters made it a workable social institution, if not an ideal one.

If that is all MacArthur wrote, imagine all the keyboard warriors calling for his head as a “pro-slavery pastor”.

“How dare he say that right relations between slaves and masters made it a workable social institution?”

In the very next line, MacArthur writes:

Christianity, however, sowed the seeds of the destruction of slavery. It would be destroyed not by social upheaval, but by changed hearts.

MacArthur quotes Donald Guthrie:

It is clearly incongruous for a Christian master to “own” a brother in Christ in the contemporary sense of the word, and although the existing order of society could not be immediately changed by Christianity without a political revolution (Which was clearly contrary to Christian principles), the Christian master-slave relationship was so transformed from within that it was bound to lead ultimately to the abolition of the system.

Let us pause here to consider the implications.

When I was younger, what I understood of Christianity and slavery was what I saw on TV. I saw the burning cross of the Ku Klux Klan. I thought Christianity must be fundamentally flawed if Christians, even pastors, would fight to preserve slavery.

Only much later, I realised that many of the abolitionists were Christians who arrived at their convictions by drawing on Scriptural truths.

While the epistle to Philemon has been used by slave masters to justify their evil practises, after all, the slave owners argue that Paul never sought for the release of Onesimus. Paul assumed that Onesimus would continue to be Philemon’s slave. In fact, even today, some still interpret Christianity as a pro-slavery religion.

But as MacArthur points out here if Philemon verse 16 was studied and preached in its fullness, when Paul asks Philemon to receive his servant, “no longer as a bondservant but more than a bondservant, as a beloved brother”, then how could slavery co-exist with salvation?

Just as God used the smallest, the weakest, to achieve his great purpose, God has used the shortest of Paul’s letter, a letter to a slave master, to free all slaves forever more.

But this commentary deals not with the abolishment of slavery; Paul never broaches the subject; it’s about Forgiveness.

Unwillingness to Forgive is Unthinkable

After the introduction, MacArthur’s commentary is divided into three chapters:

1. The Spiritual Character of One Who Forgives
2. The Actions of One Who Forgives
3. The Motives of One Who Forgives

In the first chapter, MacArthur puts forth God’s command in the clearest terms. I quote:

For a Christian, unwillingness to forgive is unthinkable. It is a rebellious, blatant, open act of disobedience to God. We are to forgive others as God has forgiven us (Eph 4:32; Col 3:13).

MacArthur observes that just by the way Paul writes to Philemon, Paul must have regarded Philemon in the highest esteem. I quote:

There is no threatening language that might assume Paul felt forgiving Onesimus would be difficult for Philemon, but rather a spirit that expected he would.

From the verses, MacArthur shows us that Philemon, and hence any who would forgive others, has a deep concern for the Lord, for People, for Fellowship, for Knowledge, for Glory and a concern to be a Blessing.

Let’s see how MacArthur does this with one verse as an example.

The verse reads, “… I pray that the fellowship of your faith may become effective through the knowledge of every good thing which is in you.”

It is easier to understand forgiveness relates with fellowship, it’s hard to make friends if you have a grudge, but what does forgiveness have to do with knowledge? What does Paul mean by “faith may become effective through the knowledge of every good thing which is in you”?

Experiential Knowledge

MacArthur explains:

Epignōsis (knowledge) refers to deep, rich, full, experiential knowledge. It is the knowledge that comes through personal acquaintance with the truth. Philemon could read of forgiveness, or hear a sermon about it. But until he forgave, he could have no experiential knowledge of it.

From here, MacArthur then invites all believers to experience that knowledge, to not just agree that forgiveness is good but to actually forgive.

All this is what readers should expect from this book. MacArthur gives you the verse. He breaks it down. He may highlight a particular word and tell us what it means in Greek. He puts it in context to show us what Philemon understood from Paul’s words. We get some insight that we may not have gotten from a quick or casual reading of the verse.

Then, MacArthur shows us how this personal letter between two men, an apostle to a slave owner, offers practical lessons for us today. We are prompted to be doers of the Word.

Charge It To My Account

Let’s take another verse, Philemon verses 17 to 18.

If then you regard me a partner, accept him as you would me. But if he has wronged you in any way, or owes you anything, charge that to my account.

Here, it seems that Onesimus the slave may have wronged Philemon the owner. Perhaps he stole something to finance his get away. If so, restitution must be made. But how could Onesimus pay that debt? Paul says, “I will pay. Charge what he owes you to my account.”

Wow. That is mighty generous of Paul. I admit that I would think twice about paying someone’s debt. My mind would race to give a thousand and one reasons why I should not pay that debt. The biggest reason being, it is not my debt to pay. But Paul does the counter-cultural move.

And MacArthur pushes the awesome up one level. He writes:

Paul’s willingness to meet Onesimus’s debt to restore his relationship with Philemon is a marvelous picture of Christ’s work. Philemon, like God, had been wronged. Onesimus, like the sinner, stood in need of reconciliation. Paul offered to pay the price to bring about that reconciliation. That is the same role Jesus plays in the relationship between the sinner and God. Paul, like Christ, was willing to pay the price of reconciliation.

And MacArthur continues:

Never are we more like God than when we forgive. Never are we more like Christ than when we pay someone else’s debt so that reconciliation can take place. Paul’s willingness to suffer the temporal consequences of Onesimus’s sin mirrors Christ’s willingness to suffer the eternal consequences of our sin.

Again, when we consider what Paul was willing to do for a thieving runaway slave, and what Paul is asking Philemon to do, to not just refrain from punishing him, but to embrace the slave as a brother, wow… how could any Christian in the past be pro-slavery after reading this?

And before we pat ourselves for being better than slave masters, we consider the main thrust of this commentary, after understanding what Paul is telling Philemon about forgiveness, how could any Christian today not be moved to forgive?

The Bible’s Only Graffiti Artist

Before we conclude the review, I just want to share two problems I found with the book.

Problems that really annoyed me because I have high respect for MacArthur as a careful expositor of the Bible.

The first has to do with a reference he quotes.

Listen to this. MacArthur writes:

The importance of forgiveness is a constant theme of Scripture. There are no less than seventy-five different word pictures about forgiveness in the Bible. They help us grasp the importance, the nature, and the effects of forgiveness.

Then he gives us this list which he extracted from a book by John Nieder and Thomas Thompson, titled “Forgive and Love Again”.

The first item in the list is “To forgive is to turn the key, open the cell door and let the prisoner walk free.”

This is supposed to be a word picture from the Bible.

But I don’t remember anything in the Old Testament or New Testament about turning a key to open the cell door, but perhaps it’s an allusion to Isaiah 61:1-2 which Jesus also referenced in Luke 4:18-21.

The second item in the list is “To forgive is to write in large letters across a debt, “Nothing owed”. Okay, that sounds like Colossians 2:14, where Jesus cancelled the record of debt that stood against us by nailing it to the cross.

What almost made me threw the book at the wall, which I can’t because I am reading it on my phone, is this: “To forgive is to sandblast a wall of graffiti, leaving it looking like new.” Where is this word picture coming from? White washed tombs? No, that is a picture of hypocrisy not forgiveness. Where does graffiti appear in the Bible?

Is it the finger that wrote on the wall in Belshazzar’s court, which needed Daniel to interpret? That might be the only case of graffiti in the Bible, but it was done by God.

Are these really word pictures from the Bible? If not, then MacArthur is guilty of sloppy scholarship.

But quoting a bad source is not as bad as what I have next.

Forced Into An Outline

The outline of chapter 3: “The Motives of One Who Forgives” is terribly flawed.

Verses 23 to 24 reads, “Epaphras, my fellow prisoner in Christ Jesus, greets you, as do Mark, Aristarchus, Demas, Luke, my fellow workers.”

This is the end of the letter. Paul is saying goodbye and in his final remarks, he tells Philemon that the rest of the guys send their regards.

MacArthur is right in this section to explain who these guys are.

Mark wrote the gospel of Mark.
Demas was a fellow worker but later left Paul and the faith.
Luke wrote the gospel of Luke.

The brief descriptions of Paul’s companions are helpful because not everyone knows how these people have popped up in other parts of Scripture. The bone I have to pick with MacArthur has to do with the final paragraph.

MacArthur writes:

These five men were well known to Philemon. He had the opportunity to set a good example for them by forgiving Onesimus. On the other hand, failing to forgive would fracture the bond of fellowship Philemon enjoyed with them.

I contend that MacArthur has done a disservice to the text by putting these verses under the heading “The Motives of One Who Forgives.”

When Paul writes, “the guys send their regards”, that is not code for “Hey Philemon, if you don’t forgive Onesimus, I don’t think we can be friends.”

I think the farewell remarks should be dealt with in a separate chapter or in a separate section.

MacArthur did exactly this for the introductory parts of Paul’s letter. He did force those verses to be part of his outline on the “Spiritual Character of One Who Forgives”.

What MacArthur has done here is forcing verses to fit into a outline. He has interpreted the earlier verses to be about motives. But I cannot see how “the guys send their regards” can justifiably fit into that motive outline.

Am I over-reacting? If his outline is valid, then how are we to interpret Romans 16, with its long greeting? How do we interpret his other letters when he writes, “the people who are with me greet you.” I think he is setting a bad example when he lumps what is clearly, distinctively, the farewell remarks with the earlier body of the letter.

In his defence, he might have preached Philemon over three sermons. So, he can’t do a fourth sermon just on the concluding remarks. So, he might have thought, it would be okay to make final part of the letter fit with the overall theme of the sermon.

I still don’t think that’s a good reason, for the sermon, much less for a commentary.

It’s Still Solid

This is a bit disappointing coming from someone who is supposed to be a trusted expositor who has on the record said his outline follows the outline of the text. However, I must emphasise that although disappointed, these mistakes do not undermine what is otherwise a solid commentary.

In this commentary, MacArthur successfully shows the reader what a remarkable relationship there is between the Apostle Paul and his dear friend Philemon, and we end up imagining what must have been a profound reception between Onesimus and Philemon. Master and slave, and as Paul declared, more! Brothers in Christ!

This letter puts forth a specific situation of Christ’s teaching on forgiveness. A letter given to the church to spur us to forgive. And so we must.

Outro

This is a Reading and Reader’s review of “Philemon” from the MacArthur New Testament Commentary. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.