Prayer for the oppressed

by James A. Thome

2. There is another class who have been taught from infancy by their parents, teachers, and pastors, that slavery is a divine institution; they see no wrong in it, and consider all the evils as incidental, and not as legitimate consequences of the system. They are the most powerful upholders of it, because they believe it to be right, and are conscious of no other than kind sentiments towards their slaves. To such men and their sentiments the oppressor triumphantly appeals as an evidence that slaveholding is not injurious to character, nor repulsive to the feelings of good men.

3. Then there is the oppressor—the man in whom slaveholding is a sin per se. He holds his brother as property. He denies to man, for selfish ends, the rights and prerogatives of manhood. He denies that the possession of life, liberty and happiness, or the unobstructed pursuit of them, is the right of every man unconvicted of crime.—But not to rest in general statements, let us place side by side some facts, and some passages of the word of God.

The facts are that slavery robs a man of his humanity. He is made a thing, a chattel, merchandise. The African has no right on earth but to do the will, and promote the comfort of the Caucasian. He can not choose his residence, his employer, his work. He can not receive wages or the fruits of his industry. He can not defend his wife against insult. He can not protect his children from violence. He can not live with his family if it does not suit the interests of another man. He can not educate his children. He can not choose an employment for them. He can not hope for anything but slavery. He can not worship God when he pleases. He can not testify in a court of justice.—Now what does God think of all this? “I hate oppression,” is his reply. “Remove not the landmarks of the widow,” he says, “their cry will come before him; their Redeemer is mighty.” “Go to, now, ye rich men, weep and howl; the hire of the laborers who have reaped down your fields which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth; and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth.” Not a day, not an hour probably passes in which some oppressed petitioner is not filing his petition in the chancery of heaven against the slave-owners of our land.

We have probably had more indignation than sympathy for these men. And yet they are to be pitied. Probably none of us have been as deeply indignant at the sins of oppressors as Moses was at the idolatry of his people at the very base of Sinai. And yet when the Lord threatened to cut off Israel and raise up the promised nation from him, he prayed thus for them: “Forgive their sin;—and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written!”

We can not then have exhausted the duty of prayer for the overthrow of oppression till our sympathies and intercessions have embraced the slave-owners as well as the slaves.

And there are peculiar encouragements for seeking the abolition of slavery by prayer.

1. God’s special readiness to hear prayer when his people are in straits. Notice the sketches of personal and national history in the Bible. How many of them are recorded in order to show how ready God is to deliver his people when in their perplexities they cry unto him. Jacob, Moses, David, Hezekiah, Mordecai, Nehemiah, the church in Jerusalem when Peter was in prison. “Now these things were for our ensamples.”

2. The time of terminating an infliction has come when it has produced an humble and hearty return to God.

3. The mode of deliverance thus secured will be the best. An end might be put to slavery by a civil war; but the remedy would be unspeakably worse than the disease. But suppose the church of God to take up this matter with an humble, united heart; and before the world and God become, like Moses, an intercessor, and ready to employ other means subsequently and subordinately, we can not doubt that slavery would come to an end; and then observe with what blessed results:

What glory to God! He will be acknowledged as holy, as gracious, as powerful, as a hearer of prayer.