In Allen Levi’s best-selling novel Theo of Golden, there’s a scene when the town vagrant shows up late to church on Sunday morning. Adding to the disruption, this woman, named Ellen, wants to bring her bicycle into the sanctuary. When the ushers try to stop her, Ellen accosts them, using colorful language to name what she sees as their religious blindness and spiritual adultery. This causes such a stir that some parishioners pull out their phones to call the police. Ellen’s boldness in that scene carries with it echoes of Jesus confronting the moneychangers (Matt. 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–18; Luke 19:45–47; John 2:14–16). With her loud arrival, the kingdom draws near.

We rejoice in the Bible’s steadfast testimony to God’s faithfulness and unchanging redemptive plan. But in the Scriptures, we also find startling disruptions. Perhaps nowhere is this more significant than when it comes to the Bible’s passages about slavery.

On Juneteenth, TGC published two articles on this topic. Kyle Tucker took on Alex O’Conner’s contention that Scripture supports slavery. Tucker shows how O’Conner’s view downplays the image of God, decontextualizes the exodus, and limits the cross’s liberation. Cyril Chavis Jr. expanded on Tucker’s final point, showing how the advent of God’s kingdom in Christ radically disrupts this present evil age. He writes, “God doesn’t want to abolish only slavery but also the whole world order in which slavery exists.”

It might bother us when we open our Bibles and see Paul telling the enslaved who can’t get their freedom, “Do not be concerned” (1 Cor. 7:21). It might bother when he elsewhere tells slaves to obey their masters (Eph. 6:5–8) or when Peter also tells servants to be subject to unjust masters as a way of practicing subversive goodness (1 Pet. 2:18). But as Chavis Jr. observes, the New Testament also “forbids entering slavery, commands people to work toward freedom, and lifts those stuck in it.” With Christ’s first advent, the old worldly order hasn’t fully passed, but because he has arrived, the new creation has dawned. So we can be assured that worldly injustice won’t endure.

This is good news because apart from Christ, we’re all slaves to sin (see John 8:34). We need God’s Spirit to regenerate us and set us free. We need Jesus the abolitionist to ride his bicycle as it were through our own sinful hearts. May his disruptive work of setting captives free continue today, and may it begin in you and me.