"No Murder!"

Exodus 20:13

 

¹³ "You shall not murder.

      Dear Friends in Christ,  

   I came across a true story recently about a 19 year old fellow from Washington, D.C. who was driving in his car around our nation’s capital one day and according to his own testimony, he was bored.  So when he saw a 36 year old woman sitting in a car next to his, I guess to add some excitement to his otherwise boring day, he pulled out a gun and shot her at point blank range.  He then put the gun back down in the seat and continued to drive around the city.  He was later apprehended by the police who asked him, “Why did you do that?  Did you know the lady?  Did you have a grudge against her?  Was there a traffic situation that developed?”  He said, “No, I was just bored, so I decided to kill someone.”

   Another situation: a gang member was on one of those reality TV talk shows and he was talking about what it was like to be part of a gang.  They even showed video footage of him holding up a beer to the nationwide audience and saying with a big grin on his face, “Human life means nothing to me.”  The next day he proved that as he and 5 of his friends attacked two young teenage girls who were about 14 or 15, raped them multiple times, and then strangled and killed them.  All 6 of those men were found guilty. 

   Consider the following statistics.  Every 22 minutes in America someone is stabbed, shot, strangled, raped, or bludgeoned to death.  The United States now has the highest violent crime rate of any country in the world which makes me think of the scary times that I spoke of in my sermon a few weeks ago when we looked at Romans 1 where it says that the farther a nation distances itself from God, the more he will hand that nation over to its sin and allow sin to run its full course and the people of that land to reap the full consequences of what they have sown.  By the 6^th grade the average child in America has witnessed 8000 murders on TV and 100,000 acts of violence.  The 20^th century was the most violent murderous generation in the history of all mankind.  There were an estimated 125 million people killed in revolutions alone.  Stalin, it is believed, killed approximately 60 million of his own people; Hitler 6 million Jews. 

   And into this modern day carnage God proclaims loudly and clearly in our text for today: “You shall not murder.”  Into this day of technological sophistication but moral disintegration God places a boundary, a hedge of protection around the most precious commodity on this planet.  And to him that most precious commodity is human life.  So this morning we want to spend our time examining this 5^th Commandment and seeing how it applies to us who may have never murdered anyone in cold blood but who have still been guilty of breaking it over and over again.

   Now when we examine this commandment in the original Hebrew language it was written in, it consists of only 2 words.  A literal rendering of those words would be: “No murder.”  In the Hebrew language there are actually 7 different words for the idea or concept of killing.  The word that is used here carries with it the idea of premeditation and intent to take another person’s life.  I make that point to help you understand that the Bible does not prohibit all forms of killing.  For example, this word is not used in reference to the killing of animals.  It’s not used in reference to accidental death or manslaughter.  It is not used in reference to killing someone in self-defense.  It is not used in reference to capital punishment or the killings that occur in a just war.  God does not forbid all killing.  But the 5^th Commandment makes it very clear that he forbids all murder. 

   So what really is behind this commandment?  Why is God so opposed to the killing of another human being?  I think the answer can be found in Gen. 9:6 where it says: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.”  Did you catch that, my friends?  Every human being from the strongest to the weakest, from the wealthiest to the poorest, from the oldest to the youngest, from the most virile to the most feeble, the born and the unborn – every human being has been made in the image of God.  Every human being bears the thumbprint of his or her Creator.  So if you can imagine what it would be like if you received a phone call one day telling you that some 19 year old kid got bored and shot your child point blank, a child that bore your image, if you can imagine the anger and rage, the sadness and hurt, you would feel under those circumstances, that’s how God feels when any one of his precious human children dies in a senseless killing. 

   In Job 14:5 we’re told: “Man's days are determined; you have decreed the number of his months and have set limits he cannot exceed.”  That’s just Job’s way of saying that God is the one who calls the shots.  He’s the one who determines the length of a man’s days and no human being has the right to tamper with that.  No human being has the right to say, “You know, that life isn’t worth as much as others.  That life is old and decrepit and doesn’t contribute anything to society anymore.  That life is going to be a major inconvenience to its parents if it is allowed to be born.  That life is mentally handicapped and will never develop to its full potential, so why have it around?”  No one has the right to pirate God’s plans and purposes and end a life prematurely.  

   Now there are some very obvious applications of this commandment that we need to take a look at.  For example, homicide which is the willful, malicious, premeditated killing of another human being.  Now I know most of you fairly well and I’m pretty confident and pretty hopeful that there’s not a lot of that going on among the people who are here today, but it happens.  Everyday it happens.  Just read your newspaper. 

   But not only do you not have the right to end someone else’s life prematurely, you also don’t have the right to end your own.  In other words, suicide is forbidden in this commandment.  Of course, some people would say, “But it’s my life and I can do with it as I please.”  I’m sorry, but that’s not true.  It’s not your life.  I Cor. 6:20 says: “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.”  And that price consisted of the holy precious blood of Jesus who died on the cross so that you could have hope in even the most hopeless of situations.  If you ever contemplate suicide, my friends, if the devil ever manages to plant that thought in your brain and he makes it look like it’s the only solution to all your problems, please think again.  Think of the impact that that act will have upon your family.  I’ve walked with families who have all of a sudden found themselves reeling from a loved one’s suicide and there is so much sorrow, so much pain, so much guilt, and so many unanswered questions.  Please don’t ever do that to those who love you most.  They deserve better than that.

   Then a third type of killing that is forbidden by this commandment is feticide, which is the killing of the unborn.  In other words, abortion is a direct violation of the 5^th Commandment.  And yet we have allowed the legal killing of the unborn in our country since 1973, resulting in approximately 50 million children being denied the most basic and fundamental right of all, the right to life.  Now back in 1973 when the Supreme Court handed down its famous Roe v. Wade decision we did not have the technology that we have today which allows us to look inside a mother’s womb and see what is really in there.  In fact, recently my daughter Bethany, who is expecting in early August, had a 4-D ultrasound done which gives incredibly clear color pictures of the baby in the womb, much better than the fuzzy images you see on standard ultrasounds.  So there is no doubt about it.  What is destroyed in abortion is not some formless blob of tissue or mass of cells, but rather a living, growing human being.  And if you think that that’s just my opinion, please listen to one who is much more qualified than I to make that judgment.  His name is Dr. Michelin Matthews Roth and he is the principal researcher in the Dept. of Medicine at Harvard University.  He says: “It is an accepted fact that life of any individual organism reproducing by sexual reproduction begins at conception, or fertilization.”  So to kill the pre-born is to take a human life.  It is a breaking of the 5^th Commandment.

   As is infanticide, which is killing babies shortly after they have been born.  Now you might be thinking, “But how could that happen?  Who would ever do something like that?”  And yet it does happen.  It happens when children are born alive following a botched abortion.  It happens when babies are born with severe handicaps, not in all cases because infanticide is not yet legal in our country, but it does occur on rare occasions.  I’ve heard testimonies of nurses on Focus on the Family programs who have witnessed it with their own eyes.  It happens with great regularity in countries like China and India, especially with female infants because male babies are favored much more highly than females.  It has happened in our own country through the heinous abortion procedure known as partial birth abortion where the baby is delivered feet first until only its head remains inside the mother.  The doctor then creates a hole in the back of the baby’s neck and inserts a suction catheter to extract the baby’s brains and cause its skull to collapse.  Though this procedure was outlawed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003, there are still plenty of politicians who are fighting to have it made legal again.  By the way, I looked up the Supreme Court’s decision in this matter and it said that under this law, "Any physician who…knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both."  Now what’s so strange about that decision is that a human fetus is killed in any other type of abortion that is performed, but then it’s ok.  It’s a double standard that exists.  Very similar to what happens when a pregnant woman gets shot in the abdomen and both she and her unborn baby die.  In that case, the killer can be charged with 2 murders.  And yet a doctor can perform multiple abortions each day in his clinic and there’s nothing wrong with it.  I’m sorry.  I just don’t get it.

   And that takes us to one more obvious application of the 5^th Commandment and that would do with the other end of the age spectrum and what is called euthanasia.  Now I’m not talking here about passive euthanasia which would be like removing a person from life support who is already brain dead.  Rather I’m talking about active euthanasia, about people who have difficult medical problems and who don’t want to deal with them anymore.  So they request to be euthanized, to be put out of their misery.  Sometimes this is referred to as physician assisted suicide.  Currently there are 2 states in our nation that allow it, Oregon and Washington.  But I will go out on a limb here and say that over the next few years we will see more and more states legalizing this practice because as somebody once said many years ago, “When you open the door to death (which we have done in our culture), it does not close easily.”  The moment we start saying “This life deserves to live and this one doesn’t.  This life has value and this one doesn’t,” we find ourselves on a very slippery slope that will lead to more and more lack of respect for human life. 

   So homicide, suicide, feticide, infanticide, and euthanasia – these are the obvious applications of the 5^th Commandment to our lives today.  Stated positively, we are to cherish our neighbor’s life as much as we cherish our own.  That’s really the heart of the 5^th Commandment.  And I would say as I did earlier that most of us have done pretty well in this area.  I don’t know of anyone here today who is wanting to break the murder habit.  But there are some not-so-obvious applications to this commandment that we need to look at before we leave it.  So next week when we get together, we’ll devote our time to those and discover that we are guilty of breaking this commandment as much as any of the others, so we stand in dire need of the forgiveness and pardon that was purchased and won for us by Jesus when he shed his blood and gave his life on that old rugged cross so long ago.

            Amen.