Slavery was never black and white, involving only Whites enslaving Blacks. It was multiracial just as most evils existent today are multiracial. It’s time to correct America’s history. It’s also time to cease promoting racial division based on the falsehood of America’s “original sin” and its selective omission of facts about all the oppressors and practitioners. If we fail to correct how we teach history, we will reap untold and potentially horrific consequences. 

We’re experiencing an increasing racial divide when there should be a remarkable decrease. What is the basis for this historical anomaly, given that American has no more prejudicial race-based laws? No race currently faces legal obstacles to equal justice and opportunity. The most likely culprit for the divide is the simplistic, inaccurate approach to American history in our schools.
When people try to explain the racial divide, they offer many reasons: Critical Race Theory, which divides everyone into oppressed/oppressor categories; the Black Lives Matter movement; politicians pandering to receive ethnic-based votes; or the emphasis on police actions involving race. Something deeper is involved.
Americans are taught that slavery is America’s original sin.” Wrong. Slavery was not America’s “original sin.” It existed before any White or Black person arrived. Native Americans practiced it before they ever came along—but even then, it wasn’t their “original sin.” Slavery is humankind’s sin.
In elementary and secondary schools, slavery is now and has long been taught very simply: American slave owners were White and slaves Black—period. Students learn slaves were shipped from Africa, without any focus on who caught them, enslaved them, or sold them to Europeans to be shipped to Europe or the Americas.
Only after school ends do some learn the whole story. I broadened my knowledge by reading “Unspoken Reality: Black Slaveholders Prior to the Civil War,” co-written by Yulia Tikhomirova and Lucia Desir at Mercy College. Tikhomirova is Russian and Desir is Black. They draw upon and include information from Black historians and scholars (e.g., John Hope Franklin, Larry Koger, and Carter G. Woodson, et al.). The truth is Blacks were also slaveholders.
American slavery begins in Africa. Black Africans, chieftains, and Arabs were the main participants and oppressors of the enslaved. They captured, kidnapped, enslaved, and sold millions of Black Africans into slavery. Millions were sent to Europe and the Americas and millions more to the Middle East and North Africa.
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When we lose sight of the fact that common grace is grace and not our due, we become like travelers who bemoan poor overnight travel accommodations and forget the paradise that is our final destination. 

Few people would disagree that a sense of entitlement permeates our culture. But as the Preacher said, “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9). While shifts in worldview over the past few decades may have poured gasoline on the fire, a sinful sense of entitlement was sparked for the first time in the garden of Eden, and since that day, this tendency to sinful entitlement has been embedded in our fallen DNA.
Entitlement can be defined as the belief that one is deserving of certain privileges. The belief itself may be true or false. People might believe that they have a certain right when they do in fact possess an actual right, or people can believe that they have a certain right when no such right exists. Thus, there are times when entitlement is not, strictly speaking, a sin but rather a legal right in a well-ordered society. For example, if I purchase a car, it is legally my property. I hold the legal title to the vehicle. I believe that I possess the right to that car, and my belief is in line with reality.
However, this legitimate entitlement can turn into a sinful expression of an entitlement mentality if my five-year-old niece spills a drink in the back seat and ruins the interior, or if I am the victim of a parking lot hit-and-run. It’s at those points of pressure that my sinful response to God’s providence can expose a more insidious entitlement mentality in which I think I am owed pristine automobile upholstery or a risk-free parking lot.
In the Reformed world, we (hopefully) embrace wholeheartedly the belief that we are by nature children of wrath, dead in our trespasses, unable to save ourselves, and completely dependent on the righteous life and substitutionary death of Jesus Christ to be reconciled to God and made His children. We extol the grace of God in salvation and would never say that we are owed the right to become children of God or that we are entitled to His saving grace. Therefore, the problem with our sinful entitlement mentality usually lies not in our understanding of special grace but rather in our understanding of common grace.
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Written by Jonathan E. Swan |
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
John Gill’s biblical vision and example of marital masculinity stands as a needed corrective to the disorderly egalitarian, destructively passive, and disastrously macho versions of masculinity that our confused culture has put forth in recent decades.

A short time before his death, eighteenth-century London Baptist pastor John Gill (1697–1771) put the finishing touches on his monumental Body of Doctrinal and Practical Divinity. Near the end of this work—which comprised a summary of the doctrine he had taught over the course of his fifty-one year ministry to the same congregation—Gill turned his attention to practical theology, the study of theology that concerns itself with the proper worship of God.[1]
Drawing from Ephesians 5:33, Gill summed up the duties of husbands and wives to one another as love and reverence.[2] Husbands, he instructed, are called to love their wives while wives are called to revere (that is, respect) their husbands.
Gill then outlined how husbands should love their wives in four points, articulating characteristics of what complementarians have recognized as biblical masculinity. These four points can be summarized in four words: provide, protect, pastor, and please.
According to Gill, the husband has a particular responsibility to provide for his wife. The husband is to “nourish” and “cherish” his wife as his own body (Eph 5:29), which includes “food and raiment, and all the necessaries of life.” Those who do not, Gill noted, are worse than unbelievers (1 Tim. 5:8).[3]
The husband not only provides, but protects his wife “from all abuses and injuries” as she is the weaker vessel (1 Pet. 3:7). The husband’s responsibility may call him “to expose himself to danger, and even risk his life in her defense, and for her rescue” (1 Sam. 30:5, 18).[4]
Faithful husbandry also demands that each husband seeks the spiritual welfare of his wife. In other words, he should be the spiritual leader—the pastor—of the marriage. The Christian husband should be active in seeking the salvation of an unconverted wife, and the “spiritual peace, comfort, and edification” of a believing spouse. The Christian husband, according to Gill, should lead his wife as a fellow “heir with him of the grace of life” in all forms of spiritual devotion.[5]
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