Honor Life: The sixth command is, “You shall not murder.” What does it look like to keep this commandment? If God is the author, sustainer, and savior of life, then we must work for and protect flourishing life, being especially attentive to the most vulnerable lives among us. Recorded on Mar 5, 2023, on Exodus 20:13 by Pastor David Parks.
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Ten Commandments: Learning the Law of Love is a sermon series on the most influential legal code in human history. Why should we learn about the Ten Commandments today? Because they reveal God’s will for how human beings ought to live: to love God with all our heart and love our neighbor as ourselves. Ultimately, the law of love points us directly to Jesus.
Sermon Transcript
So all year, the theme of our preaching ministry is Learning the way of Jesus. And today, we’re continuing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments. And we’ve said that the Ten Commandments reveal how God wants people to live. And ultimately, this way of life can be summed up as learning to love the Lord your God, heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love your neighbor as yourself. The Ten Commandments are really a law of love. Just a quick reminder, God’s moral law is not the way of salvation. We are not saved because of our obedience to the law. Remember, God saved the ancient Israelites by his grace from slavery in Egypt, and then he gave them the law. God’s law is the way to follow him once you have a relationship with him by his saving grace. So today, we are considering the sixth command, a command to honor life. But why does God care so much about life? And does this command simply mean we should avoid murder, or does it have deeper implications? Once again, we have much to unpack here. If you have a Bible/app, please open to Exodus 20:12. We’ll read through the second half of the Ten Commandments and then unpack the sixth together today.
Exodus 20:12-17 (NIV), “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Now, the book of Exodus was written about 4,300 years ago by Moses, the great prophet and leader of ancient Israel. And Exodus describes a key turning point in history when God rescued the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and entered into a covenant relationship with them, which included giving them the Law. The first four commands are focused on how we are to love the Lord our God, while the remaining six are about how to love our neighbor as ourselves. We saw last week that our neighbor includes even the neighbors in our own home/family. And we were instructed to honor our fathers and our mothers. We saw that this was because parents are supposed to instruct their children in the faith and pass along any wisdom they have in how to live, both of which matter greatly to God. Well, today, we’re focusing on the sixth command, which reads simply, “You shall not murder.” Sounds simple enough, right? Not quite. You see, every negative command, a “thou shalt not,” if you will, also has a positive side. And the positive side is rooted in God’s character/nature and his heart for how this world ought to work. So, for example, the prohibition of the first command, “You shall have no other gods before me.” (Ex 20:3) also means that God positively intends for us to have a relationship with him. It’s not only about what we cannot or should not do; it’s also positively what that type of life we are called into. So here, the prohibition against murder also means that God intends positively for us to do what? To honor life, to work for flourishing life, and to protect human life when it is threatened. It’s often in the positive intention of God behind his commands that we see God’s incredible vision for what his world was supposed to be like before the corruption from sin and what it will be once again in the new heavens and the new earth in the age to come.
So what does it look like to honor life according to this beautiful vision of God? Well, first, let’s consider why God cares so much about life in the first place. In a world with so much death, does God really care that much about life? This is a fair question. Well, first, let’s consider the case study of life and death in the story of Cain and Abel in Genesis chapter 4. Cain and Abel are brothers who both make offerings to the Lord. But for reasons that remain a little unclear, the Lord accepts the offering of Abel, but not Cain. Out of his anger and jealousy, Cain confronts his brother and winds up killing him. Genesis 4:9–10 (NIV), “Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The Lord said, “What have you done? Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” The Lord then went on to articulate the judgment against Cain for this murder. I find the language the Lord uses here interesting. “Listen! Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the ground.” The unjust killing of Abel cried out to the Lord. It’s almost as if creation itself was interceding on his behalf. In fact, murder could rightly be called an unmaking of creation or anti-creation because when God works as the Creator, he brings light into darkness, order into chaos, and what? Life where there is no life. God is the author of life, and he is the one who sustains all life and breath, so it only makes sense that the destruction of life would be absolutely against his will/way.
Now, this is a broken world. So death is part of our reality. Sometimes death comes “naturally” at the end of a normal span of a human life (perhaps 70, 80, or 90 some years). Of course, someone might die at a younger age as a result of an illness, such as cancer, for example. This is tragically part of the brokenness of the fall to sin. Everything, including our biology, has been distorted/corrupted in some ways by sin — not necessarily the sin of the person who gets sick, but the result of sin throughout creation. As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans 8, creation is now in “bondage to decay” and is “groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” But other times, death comes not from old age, or from a severe illness, or because of murder like Cain and Abel, but because of an accident. In the US alone, almost 36,000 people die every year from car accidents. But this is not what the sixth command is about. Now, it doesn’t say this explicitly here in Ex 20, but later, in Dt 19, the Lord provides Israel with cities of refuge where someone who accidentally kills someone could go and be protected from acts of vengeance by their friends or family members. Of course, they didn’t have car accidents back in their time, but from time to time, people were accidentally killed. If that happened, you could flee to one of these cities of refuge, so long the death was truly an accident, meaning without premeditation or evil intent, what we would call manslaughter today. This shows the goodness and wisdom of God and his law. Life can be complicated, and even though an accidental death is a tragedy, it should not lead to a cycle of more violence and destruction of life. In some ways, this is similar to the case of the military or law enforcement of having to take a life in the line of duty in order to prevent even more destruction of life. However, if there is premeditation or evil intent, even by someone with authority over life and death, and someone is murdered, the Lord is very clear; you are not to let that person walk free. Their blood is crying out to the Lord, demanding that justice be done.
And this is good and right and true, not to allow a culture of death to flourish. But we must take this discussion down one more level to address the heart implications of this command. Where in the Bible do we see this? From none other than Jesus himself in his famous Sermon on the Mount. Matthew 5:21–22 (NIV), “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister, will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” Ok! Jesus teaches that the sixth command was right (referring to what the people had heard long ago in the Ten Commandments) but that it goes deeper than just making sure to avoid murder. Jesus says that angrily dismissing or disrespecting, or dehumanizing someone is the seed of murder in your heart and is a violation of the spirit of the sixth command. And this is so critical for us to understand! Because far too many people have successfully avoided murdering someone in the flesh and feel that they are obedient to God’s will/way but regularly murder others in their heart/mind and in their angry and dismissive attitude toward them. Brothers and sisters, this is not right. God doesn’t want a person or a society where the value of human life is so low that we think all God wants from us is to avoid murdering each other. God has a positive intent! And he wants us to love all people and value every human life in thought, word, and deed. Even how Jesus talks about his mission/work versus the devil’s work reveals this divine priority of life. In John 10, Jesus says, “The thief [meaning Satan] comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” (Jn 10:10). The work of Christ is bound up with life. Paul writes, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Ro 6:23). And how did Jesus deal with our great problem of death? He gave up his own life on the cross for the sins of the world. Jesus was crucified, died, and was buried — but on the third day, he rose from the dead; he is the firstborn from among the dead, the first man to be resurrected. Jesus wasn’t simply revived only to die again later. He was resurrected to eternal life. And his life, his eternal life, a life beyond death, this resurrection life is given to all who believe in him and trust in his person and work for salvation. As John famously writes, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16). The life of Jesus was given for us so that the eternal life of Jesus might be given to us. And this is true, even though we have not all been perfectly faithful to obey the sixth command, to honor every human life in thought, word, and deed. Isn’t that incredible? But this is what the grace of God looks like. This is just one reason why the gospel is such good news.
So what does this look like for us today? What might it look like to obey this command in our day-to-day lives? There are so many applications for this law, but I’ll leave you with two thoughts. First, that to obey the sixth command means to be especially attentive to the most vulnerable lives among us. I think especially of the lives of the unborn, the poor, the elderly, and people who have some sort of disability in our society. These are people who often cannot properly defend themselves or advocate for their needs or ensure that justice is done to them. They might have far fewer resources than others and be far more vulnerable to being taken advantage of or abused, or even killed. In Francis Schaeffer’s classic book, How Should We Then Live? Francis writes about the modern value of personal peace saying, “Personal peace means just to be let alone, not to be troubled by the troubles of other people, whether across the world or across the city to live one’s life with minimal possibilities of being personally disturbed. Personal peace means wanting to have my personal life pattern undisturbed in my lifetime, regardless of what the result will be in the lifetimes of my children and grandchildren.” Of course, no one wants extra trouble in life. Life has enough trouble of its own! But the point he is making is that Christians must be very clear-eyed in recognizing this modern value might influence us to ignore the plight or the needs of the most vulnerable among us. This would be a clear violation of the sixth command, a sin of omission, not commission, meaning a failure to do what we know is right. Now, I know there are very difficult situations around the issue of abortion, where there are legitimate concerns over the life/health of the mother, but how many abortions have been done from the motive of personal peace? I can’t have this baby now because I’m not done with school, or I’m not established in my career, or I don’t have enough money saved up. This is a great evil but happens far too often in our country. Depending on the studies you look at, somewhere between 600,000 and 900,000 legal abortions were performed in 2020, the most recent year we have data. Now, this represents a huge decline in annual numbers from the 1980s and 90’s, but still, if abortion was included in the list of causes of death, which it never is because of political reasons, it would be right at the top next to or maybe even more than heart disease, cancer, and so on. Now, I’m not saying Christians should only focus on the unborn and ignore the needs of people for the rest of life, that, too would be a violation of this command. So, first, obeying the sixth command means being especially attentive to the most vulnerable lives among us.
Second, and finally, to obey this command means we must see our vocation/calling/work through the lens of working to contribute to the flourishing life of all people. This is what God the Father does in his work of creation. This is what the Lord Jesus does in his work of salvation. And this is what the Holy Spirit does in his work of sustaining life and breath and applying the saving work of Christ to us by faith. The result of God’s work is life and life eternally and abundantly. No matter what we do for work, whether we are paid or unpaid, whether we work in or outside of the home, every one of us can use our time, talent, and treasure to contribute in some way to the flourishing life of all people. Teachers teach so that their students can have a better life by growing in knowledge and wisdom, and maturity. People in healthcare work to bring healing and care for people suffering from many illnesses and afflictions. People in finance work so that people can be wise and fruitful with their financial resources. People in ministry work so that others might hear the gospel and come to faith in Jesus and grow in their faith in Jesus by the grace of God. And on and on. Now, certainly, some jobs and maybe even whole industries do not contribute to flourishing life. If, as a follower of Jesus you realize that that could describe your job or your industry, it might be time to find a new job. You shall not murder. God commands this because life greatly matters to God. Therefore, may we be people who are especially attentive to the most vulnerable people among us. May we be people who see our work as a way to glorify God by working to contribute to the flourishing life of all people in thought, word, and deed. And may we be people who exude the life of God’s kingdom, life eternally and abundantly good in Jesus. Let us pray.