Today is Human Trafficking Awareness Day and if you’re like me at all your mind and your prayers have been all over the issue of how to be personally involved in putting an end to human trafficking.
[quick fact: Florida, where I live, is number three in the country for human trafficking]
As I considered this issue, something I read on the Resurgence a while back on the topic kept coming back to my mind.
“If we rescued every victim today, we’d wake up to a demand for 100+ million new slaves tomorrow.”
It’s the idea of supply and demand: we have to get to the root of the problem. Finding all the victims, rescuing them, prosecuting the traffickers, all of that does nothing for the ultimate issue: the demand is still there.
The tragedy of human slavery is the tragedy of human hearts.
At the root of the human trafficking is human wickedness, demands from an insatiable imagination of evil. Ending human trafficking won’t end human wickedness. What has to happen is a change of the heart.
Not surprisingly the Bible deals extensively with slavery. But the Bible, unlike social activism alone, gets the bigger picture. The Bible tells us we all start as slaves. We’ll either die that way, as slaves to sin in our hearts, or we’ll be freed by the power of Christ to become His slaves.
At the heart of anti-slavery is the Gospel. Romans six tells us, “We know that our old self was crucified with him (Jesus) in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin.” What the Gospel does for us is it gives us a new heart. It stops perverted desires and gives us new ones. It ends the demand for human trafficking.
Jesus died for freedom.
We’ve got a choice. We can either remain in the chains of slavery to our passions, the payment of which is death, or we can be bound by cords of love to the one who died for us.
“But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.”
- Romans 6.17-18
Should Christians take a stand against slavery and human trafficking? Absolutely. But don’t stop there. Don’t settle for physical liberation. Press toward the higher, more important, liberation of the soul to freedom in Christ. Don’t settle for activism that leaves out the greatest remedy: Jesus.
The pendulum of the church has swung from one extreme (Don’t give ‘em nothin’ but the Gospel) dangerously towards another (just love them and they’ll see Jesus through your deeds, that’s enough). We have to be engaged in both; but never at the expense of the other.
There’s two things that has to come into play in a Christian’s understanding of fighting human trafficking: first, our primary tool is the Gospel and our primary purpose is propagating it. Secondly, the greatest need isn’t for physical freedom, but spiritual freedom.
