Exodus 21:1-6; Deuteronomy 15:12-17
This is a profound judgment that God sets forth. The bible presents a very different concept of slavery from that which has disgraced humanity in modern times. God’s judgments concerning the insane inhumaneness of slavery was made on purpose to repress it, to confine it within very narrow bounds, and ultimately to put an end to it. The fact that God gave legislation concerning slavery does not mean that He approved it. He was only protecting the civil rights of the enslaved. Why piercing? Why a door? Why an ear? There are all manner of truth treasures to be found in the bible. Precepts and parallels help us to come to truth.
Psalms 40:6-8
A prophecy personifying our Lord...Jesus Christ is here speaking of himself as being forever, for our sakes, the willing servant of God. Jesus entered into covenant with his Father that he would become the servant of servants for our sakes. All through the long ages he never started back from that compact. Though the Savior knew the price of pardon was his blood, his pity never withdrew, for his ear had been pierced. He became for our sakes the lifelong servant of God. He loved his betrothed, the church. He loved his dear sons, his children whom he foresaw when he looked through the ages, and he would not go out free. Our insolvency had made us slaves, and Christ became a servant in our stead. “A body hast thou prepared me.” He was bound to God’s service when he was found in fashion as a man, for then he “became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.” Jesus stood upon the word against Satan in the wilderness as the arch-fiend offered to him all the kingdoms of this world, and why did he not accept them? Because he preferred a cross to a crown, for his ear was bored. Afterwards the people, in the height of his popularity, offered him a crown, but he hid himself away from them. And why? Because he came to suffer, not to reign; his ear was bored for redemption’s work, and he was straitened until he had accomplished it. In the Garden, when the bloody sweat fell from his face, and he said, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me,” why did he not put away that cup? If it had pleased him, he might have called for twelve legions of angels, and they would have come to the rescue; why did he not summon that celestial bodyguard? It was because he had wholly surrendered himself to the service of our salvation. God will hold none to unwilling servitude. The Lord’s service involves peculiar trials. God’s grace is given to us. The Holy Ghost abides in us. We desire to follow the Lamb whithersoever he goes. His was a life of supreme sacrifice.
We long to abide faithful though all should forsake the truth. We desire perpetual servitude to Christ, and to bear whatever that involves. Bore the ear! Think how in our innermost soul we desire to plunge deeper into this blessed bondage, and to bear in our body the marks of the Lord Jesus, and to be his marked slaves forever. Is not this the perfect freedom we desire? What a blessed Master we have. We look at his wounds, and we must love him. We have been redeemed. We look at the great gash which reached his heart, from which flowed the water and the blood to be of our sin the double cure. Could we ever fail to love him? He who died for us and bought us, not with silver and gold, but with his own pangs and griefs and blood and sweat and death. Let us not be such devils as to apostatize from such a God.
The aul of the ear saves us from the miseries of hell. Change Masters? By no means! Let none talk for us, we shall talk for ourselves, to our friends and kinsfolk, and answer for ourselves their various questions. There is no fault with Jesus, and we will tell them of his name and our being forever bound to him by cords of love. Bore the ear...we cannot but love our Master. How could I leave my wife’s God? How could I leave my son’s God? My brother, my friend, how could I leave your God, to be separated from you whom I love? We love Jesus for the sake of those who will come into a right relationship with him. We could not leave because there are dear ones who first learned of Christ from us. Our ear is bored with the sharp aul of the Savior’s sufferings. No story wrings a true believer’s heart with such anguish as the griefs and woes of Christ. Let our ear be fastened by the truth, so that we are determined to hear only the gospel. We must have discernment...his sheep hear his voice in their ear. To be Christ’s forever, we must not allow that ear of ours to hear bad doctrine, to hear error. We must take care that, knowing the truth, we hold to it, and renounce every false way. When we really give ourself to Christ, we must have our ear opened to hear and obey the whispers of the Spirit of God, so that we yield to his teaching, and to his teaching only.
This is a sign of voluntary servitude. An allusion to the piercing of the ear of the servant as mentioned in the law takes on an even more profound truth. In place of "mine ears hast thou opened" we read "a body hast thou prepared me." God is teaching us something. The opening or piercing of the ear is an act of voluntary surrender to full servitude. When Jesus came to earth and was born as a baby in the manger, thus taking on him a body that had been prepared for him, this was also a supreme act of surrender to servitude. He came to do the will of the Father. In his act of taking the body prepared for Him, Jesus Christ took the form of a servant. That is, He put His ears to the door post and allowed the Father to open them with His aul.
God prescribed a significant ceremony which evoked memories of a powerful event going back to that fateful night when the Hebrews first tasted freedom after four hundred years of slavery in Egypt.
Exodus 12:7
Let us meditate on the significance of each Hebrew door in the land of Goshen. Until that night, when the blood was applied on the doorposts, the door was just another door. The people went out and re-entered as slaves in the land of Egypt. Now, for the first time in four hundred years, each Hebrew knew that once they exited through the bloodstained doorposts, their status would change forever – they would be free children of Jehovah. In addition, no one re-entered into those houses because re-entrance would make them slaves to Egypt again. It was a one-way exit with no incentives to re-enter.
Deuteronomy 17:16
By this we understand the profound message in the ceremony of the ear nailed to the doorpost. The blood represents the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. In addition, Jesus is the door himself. “I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture”. The slave is the believer who recognizes that unlike the door in Egypt, Jesus is the door with blood on the inside and outside – the life and blood of God is in his body. This means, as the Lord says, the slave can go in and out, back and forth, and still be free in Christ. This explains why a faithful slave does not want to leave his master because he understands that only Jesus Christ has complete and eternal freedom. We must come in by Jesus Christ as the door. By faith in him, as the great Mediator between God and man, we come into covenant and communion with God. We enter by the door of faith.
We shall have our witness in the world by the grace of Christ, and we shall be in his fold, where we have free ingress, egress, and regress. True believers are at home in Christ; when we go out, we are not shut out as strangers, but have liberty to come in again; when we come in, we are not shut in as trespassers, but have liberty to go out. Aul our ear to the doorpost with the blood of my Jesus! We reject the world’s freedom. Let him who has an ear and faith come by hearing...the ear is the first contact point of the words of Jesus’ witnesses. To save a soul first command the attention of the ear. This is why Moses shouted in the desert, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD”. Jesus voluntarily took upon his body the boring of nails in his hands and feet, piercing in his side and head for us. Why would we hesitate to receive the invisible boring of the Lord through the auling of our ear. We choose to continue to serve God.
Galatians 6:17
Jesus willingly gave up His life to redeem us, how much more should we serve Him who we could never repay and who purchased the soul of the believer forever? We were all enslaved to sin. The virtuous would think of the book of Exodus as an inspiring story of freedom from slavery but a greater reality is that in the life of a believer they are no longer a slave to sin but a servant of the Lord.
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