Sermons from Lone Rock Bible Church Thou Shalt Not … Why Not? Perhaps the most commonly misapplied of the Ten Commandments is the one often quoted as "Thou Shalt Not Kill." What is this really all about? In our journey through the Ten Commandments, we are at number six. The Sixth Commandment has been probably debated, confused, misapplied for various reasons. The Authorized Version gives it to us very simply as Thou Shalt Not Kill. There are seven words in the language for kill. Specifically the verse should read, "Thou shall not murder." Many understand the Bible to say "thou shall not kill." Then the Bible relates God ordained killing of people in the book of Exodus and Numbers and Joshua and Judges. There is no surprise that this Commandment lends itself to some confusion. We can expect that the world will be confused about the Bible. That is normal. But God’s people are confused at this point in many regards as well. Hopefully, we will be able, in the course of the next two Sundays, to offer some biblical foundation for where we go with what is, admittedly, a difficult commandment. I am going to read from Exodus and Leviticus.
Let me read to you from a book that I found fascinating if not somewhat morbid. It is entitled, "Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." It is fascinating. Let me relate to you basically the scenario here as the Nazi war machine was gaining momentum in the late 1930’s. The young and more suitable young men were mobilized and trained and motivated for war, leaving the older men to do other military/police actions in the name of the regime. Those fellows were career men. They were husbands and they were fathers, for the most part. They were organized into battalion strength and given designation as, in this case Police Battalion 101. There were a little over 500 in each one, individuals who were conscripted from their normal life and brought into this service. Their median was 36-˝ years. Almost all were married, most had children. Their job in eastern Poland and western Russia was to move systematically from town to town and to exterminate Jewish people. Only a third of the participants were actually members of the Nazi party. The rest were just folks. In the book many accounts are documented of rank and file, not 18 to 20-year-old rabid, let’s go, gung-ho, get ‘em types. No, they were farmers, merchants, folks from normal walks of life who were issued arms and ammunition, given orders and they lined up Jewish people by the thousands and shot them in the head. We look at that and say, that’s the point of the book. "Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust." How can it be? We are, I would think, horrified at something like that. Not that many years ago that sort of thing was going on and we take a look at that and say, "How could it be? How could they?" Because that action does not square with our notion of life and how precious it is, and death and how awful it is, and what the Bible says about thou shall not kill. But they are killing and we are confused. Yet I was a senior in high school in January 1973 when the Supreme Court passed Roe vs. Wade and I didn’t have a clue. I didn’t know what that was about, didn’t know what was going on. Now some 40 million deaths later, we are still engaging in debate. That’s confusing in a sophisticated, Christian land where life evidently is cheap. Snuffed out life on one hand in exchange for what we call quality of life on the other and I am wondering about that. As I have reflected on the implications of the Sixth Commandment, I believe that our culture, even our Christian culture, is more confused perhaps at this point than about any other. Let me continue to illustrate. There is a fellow on death row at Deerlodge who is convicted of torturing and murdering little boys. How long will he sit there making appeal after appeal after appeal. We say whose life is cheap here? Evidently the little boys’ lives are cheap and we decide they are but his is not. I am wondering about that. At the same time, you read the vigilante stories of 100 plus years ago in Montana and there is a side of us that goes "Yes!" Those guys were scoundrels and everybody knew what they did and who they were and the legal authorities were unwilling or unable to act, so vigilante law, let’s go. There is some appeal to that as well. Did you know they got Zarkawi? Special Forces painted his house, not literally, and a couple of F16’s delivered two 500 pounders and there he went. There was collateral damage there, that’s what they call it. One piece of collateral damage had tiny shoes. Some are celebrating and others are asking, "Is it worth it?" I heard a commentator say, "What about the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. What about this notion of a lesser evil for a greater eventual long-term good? I am for that, but I do not even like the lesser evil. Why? Because it involves killing and there is something about killing that is confusing. I am going to give you just a hint as to where this is going. I think the reason we are confused about the whole notion of killing and life and the tension and dynamic between the two is because we are gauging each by our own standards and we are not understanding God’s perspective, which we desperately need. Here is another one. In Florida, not that long ago, Terri Schiavo starved to death. No. Terri Schiavo was starved to death by court order. About 100 miles away terrorists go on a hunger strike and that gets sympathy. Isn’t that interesting? There is something about it that is pathetic but I can’t quite put my finger on what it is. Do we humans live in double standards? Oh my, yes. I have heard this before; perhaps you have as well. People who are politically liberal take a look at people who are politically conservative and say, "How can you be at the same time anti-abortion and pro-war?" They scratch their liberal heads while the conservatives scratch their conservative heads and say just basically opposite, "How can you be pro-abortion on the one hand, where people are killed, and against war on the other, where people are killed?" Maybe we are trying to be too simplistic. It is kind of like the notion of humanism. Humanism is an odd, odd philosophy because the roots of humanism basically state that the end of all being is the happiness of mankind, more or less. Yet the roots of humanism are time plus chance plus impersonal who knows what and we end up with some thing, living, crawling, 4.5 billion years ago out of a gob of goo and that becomes a human being that is supposed to have self-esteem? With roots in the goo? Human dignity based on what? How do we end it? Well, death with dignity of course and ultimately that leads to such things as Terri Schiavo’s situation and euthanasia and those types of things. So what is supposed to make people grand has no grand roots and certainly has no grand ending. I think that is confusing too. I also am pondering this notion of hate crime -- as opposed to what, a love crime? Don’t they say if you do the crime, you do the time. Or, "he didn’t show remorse," as though that makes the dead person alive. If you are just sorry, it fixes it? Someone once rightly said we do not have a system of justice, we have a system of laws. There is a difference between the two. Let’s move away from the killing thing to the other side of thou shall not kill, which really stated positive, should say something like, "you shall respect human life." How many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence which states that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights -- how many signers, including the author, were slaveholders. And by the way, of the nine U.S. presidents who were slaveholders, only one freed his slaves. That was George Washington. I am convinced we need the Bible. I am convinced we need God’s perspective. I remember a number of years ago a little girl fell in a well in Texas. At the same time a mudslide in South America, I believe Columbia, claimed ten thousand lives. We’re digging a little girl out of a well in Texas and she is getting more press coverage (and they got her out, I’m glad) but what a difference. We are confused and this is why I believe we are confused. These are thorny issues. These are ethical issues. These are difficult dilemmas. All the facts, of course, I have not stated with regard to each of these alternatives. Clearly that is the case. Any position certainly could be argued, but we are confused because we are naturally man-centered, human-centered, and we process through a humanistic grid naturally. We want to see it all and evaluate all of these issues through our experience or our interpretation of something. We need to move away from that. We are naturally humanists, which is why I, for one, am delighted that God has given us His Bible and His Law because His Law will never change. His Law reflects His character and His character will never change. I am really glad of that. We can deal with these issues because He is weighed in on them. I am going to turn this around and then move into point number one of ultimately three points. Only one today. The verse says you shall not murder. That is fairly self-evident. Murder means intentionally taking the life of another person who does not have it coming (my paraphrase). Let’s turn that around and say this: God’s people are to hold human life in highest regard. I believe that this particular Commandment, the sixth one, begs us to begin with God. We absolutely must or it is anyone’s ballgame. We will begin with God. We must do that, with His Person, with His worth, and with His will. God’s position are first, His people are special and His point of view is best. I want to talk this morning about the first one -- God’s position is first. He always has first position and He must. Otherwise we will ever be unable to make sense, particularly of the thorny and ethical issues. The nature of the Ten Commandments shows us that God’s position is first. The Ten Commandments, as we are working through them slowly, need to be seen and understood as a whole, in the order in which they are given, in context, or else we have problems. Let me list for you a few problems that we have if the Ten Commandments are not understood correctly as a whole. First, this is not an uncommon charge made against the Scriptures -- if all we do is take the Ten Commandments in our limited understanding at their face value, we come away with an angry God. The God of the Old Testament, some say, is the angry God. It is like He has an axe to grind or He is trying to make people’s lives miserable and He is into oppression. So the Commandments are accordingly restrictive. They are oppressive, and oh, I can hardly wait to get to the New Testament where God gets a little nicer. God of the Old Testament is angry, oppressive and restrictive. Besides, the New Testament is for us. It’s relevant. The Old Testament truly is not. We are not sure the Old Testament really matters anyway, except of course for the Psalms, when we need one. I caricature, don’t I? But let’s notice something. The Commandments are first of all about God. You shall have none other. There are no other Gods. Do not try to represent Me with an image. You will fail. Guard My Name and hold it reverant and keep My day. This is God beginning with God. I am unique. I am exclusive. I am in a class by Myself. I am holy. Those first four Commandments - - start there. They give us truth about the character of God. Then we transition with the fifth one. Honor your father and your mother. Now we are moving to God’s authority by proxy, if you will. Then on into the realm of human relationships with "you shall not murder." But we start with God. That is not by accident. That is not because an editor somewhere along the line thought it would be nice. We start with God because God starts with God, but that’s not where it ends. Do you realize what the Ten Commandments really constitute? They record God’s expression, not of wrath, not of restriction, not of oppression, but of His grace and His kindness to people. Remember, He has brought them out of the land of Egypt by His strong hand and outstretched arm. He dumped Pharaoh’s armies into the Red Sea which He parted for His people. He saved them by virtue of the blood over the lintel of their door, the Passover lamb. He brought them by His grace and by His mercy and according to His promise. He brought them into relationship with Himself and then He says this is how to live in relationship with Me. That’s the Ten Commandments. You think that’s bad, that’s cruel, that’s oppressive? That’s nuts! It really is nuts to think that way. The Commandments are good and Jesus said so, and it say so elsewhere in the Scriptures. Not only that, but do you realize what the terms were should God’s people keep those Commandments? What then was He going to do? He was going to so bless them so that they would look peaceful and prosperous and wonderful in the eyes of the world that all would do as the Queen of Sheba did. They would come from all over the place just to see that there was a living God. They realized that through the instrument of these Commandments He is reaching the world. That is bad? That is restrictive? That is oppressive? Not at all. Not if understood in context. At this point we have not specifically addressed the Sixth Commandment, but whatever we do with the Sixth, we need to understand it is about God and it is about mercy and kindness and His great plan. That is where it is going. Secondly, consider the nature of creation. I am talking about the creation in Genesis 1 and the creation in Genesis 2. Christian people love to talk about creation, don’t we? It is a wonderful thing. Oh, we can get distracted from time to time because some people want to say there was creation over a long period of time and others want to say creation was as described in the Scripture. There was evening and there was morning. That sounds like one day to me. But we can get distracted at that point. And that is sort of a bad kind of distraction, that time frame thing, but a good sort of distraction goes like this. What about the natural wonders God has made? I love reading and hearing about these things, the big stuff, the distance between earth and moon and earth and sun and earth and Alpha Centauri. Speaking in terms of light years, stuff that is understandable only when reduced to mathematics and it boggles our minds that we could have a God so vast. We look out at the valley and we see these mountains and we realize they are puny next to Everest and He is huge and powerful and all things work as He wants them to work on a grand scale. We think that’s cool and then we remember that a hummingbird can fly backwards and that a blueprint for life is reducible to the molecular level. We marvel at the God of creation in His detail and His beauty and His symmetry and we think yes, creation. It is good stuff. We get theological and we look at the Bible and say notice God’s creative order, how He started with, if you will, a foundational step and He culminated with the creation of people. We say yes, people -- the pinnacle of God’s creative work, created in His image, after His likeness, given responsibility, given all things and we say we like that. All of it is true about God’s creative work, the big and the small, and people being the pinnacle, but it’s not the highest truth. We need to keep this in mind -- it’s not the highest truth. First, we forget what God actually did. In other words, we may get so distracted by the details or the results we think God enters the scene. There was nothing! Imagine that. And God spoke worlds into being. He spoke them! And as wonderful as it is that He created people, I think that’s child’s play compared to speaking whole worlds and world systems into existence. That is tremendous! We start with God and with what He did, what He accomplished. Furthermore, with regard to creation, we think of heaven, earth, lights, people, stuff. He creates people, dust, breath, rib. One other thing we tend to forget because it is His creation -- how does it end? Let’s go to I Peter 3 and let’s be reminded that God’s position is first in creation too. Peter anticipates in I Peter 3, naysayers, those who say nah, nah, nah. All things continue as they were from beginning of creation, so where is the promise of His coming? Peter writes in verse 5 that they forget that the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water. Then he says it was judged by water too. God exercised executive privilege over His creation at the flood. He is not going to flood it again. He is going to burn it next time.
God has a "let it burn" policy on a grand scale. One day creation will experience it because He is going to do a new one. The point is that it is His to do. It is His. He made it. He keeps it, sustains it, and He will wrap it up because it is His to do. We must put God’s position first. Furthermore, please keep in mind that God did not wake up one morning, lonely, and say, "I need people." (No, John 1:1, John 17:5) From a social standpoint, all was just fine in heaven before you or I were. Before there was a creation as we know it. God was fine and He will be fine for all eternity, with us or without us. You see, as important as we deem ourselves to be, and we can even find some verses for proof, He did not have to create us. He owes us nothing. When we come to Commandment Six, let’s realize that whatever the specific application of you shall not murder, it is fully in keeping with His lordship over everything. He is not threatened by it. He is not intimidated by it, nor does He apologize for it. It is all in His grand economy. God’s position is first also in history. Those who would believe in reincarnation that is to say you come back and do it again, then you come back and you do it again, and for thousands and thousands, probably millions of years, that continuum just keeps on going but where does that get us? Nowhere. It pretty much leaves us right where we started. That is reincarnation -- sort of a mystical thing that some folks embrace that has no support in Scripture. Others would suggest random chance. Here we are with our glob of primordial goo and something happened electrically or ionically or aliens, and suddenly we have life. Life just sort of happened and sort of continues to happen and gets more and more complex and more and more sophisticated despite the evident laws of mutation. The impersonal plus time plus chance takes us to where we are today where we are just on the brink. Did you know that we are walking a tightrope, sort of, between nuclear winter and global warming and we are not sure which way it is going to go? Because when God is dialed out, when God is not specifically the orchestrator of history, we are on our own. Those who say we have the capacity to exterminate human life as we know it, they are correct. Sure we do. If God is not in it, then I would say do not buy any green bananas. We have to get away from history being what man is doing and understand history more from the standpoint of what God is doing. That is pretty important. It is God who wrote the script. It is God who oversees. It is God who orchestrates. It is God who animates all things to His appointed end at His precise time. It is God’s to do.
That is great! That is so reassuring. God’s position is first when it comes to redemption also. It is about this whole business of being saved. In VBS last week we talked about sharing the gospel and encouraging young people to make a commitment, make a profession, put all their trust in Jesus only. We can actually come to the position as Christians that this salvation thing is ultimately about us. I am here to tell you it is not. It is ultimately about Him. We have to be very careful how it is we encourage people to become Christians. We need to beware of a misplaced emphasis. If we offer man-centered reasons to come to faith, it opens the door to man-centered alternatives and reasons to reject. When we think "You are special"or "God really wants," like God is wringing His hands. If we look in the mirror, are honest with ourselves, we say, "No, I am not," Almost as if we deserve the grace of God? If we are honest, no we do not. Don’t you want peace in your heart? Look, you can get that with medication and meditation if you really want it. If that is all it is, we will make you a happy family. I will send you to a church that will not be evangelical that will make the very same claim and I can show you a fairly well-balanced family there. Is that what you want? Furthermore, when we are humanistic in our evangelism, we will come against things like "I thought when you were a Christian you are supposed to love one another and that guy, who claims to be a Christian, has done me dirt. He claims to be a Christian so I don’t think I want to be a Christian." Have you ever heard that? Even said that? But it is not about that guy and it is not about me. I heard this great remark: "Did that guy treat you like Jesus would treat you?" "Well no, he did not." "Then why would you let someone who is not acting like Jesus keep you from Jesus?" The reason that we evangelize is not because we deserve or need heaven. That is a by-product. We evangelize because Jesus went to the cross and shed His blood and bought our way to heaven. He deserves that we come because He paid the price. Do we get to live forever? Yes. Do we get grace in our home lives and in our personal lives and in our relationships? Yes, we get all that. Do we get peace in our hearts? Most of the time. But the main thing is He gets what He bought because He deserves it. The Lamb that was slain deserves the reward of His sufferings. It is an unhealthy notion, to say the least, that Christianity is all about me. Rather it is all about the work and worth of the Lamb who designed me, created me, sustains me, bought my soul on the Cross and who one day will be judge. It is about Him. This is all preparatory, because we are going to hit some difficult stuff when we talk about killing and penalties for killing, murdering. We are going to have to stop and think, wait a minute, who is this about? This is about Him. I am going to close with a passage from I Corinthians, where the apostle takes us into the future. The nature of redemption puts God’s position first too. I used to think and taught and said that I am so glad when we go to heaven, it is not just going to be a harp and a cloud. We will have responsibilities and relationships. That’s true. I am glad of that. But if I get to stand before God and I know I am saved and He is going to let me into heaven and He hands me a harp and puts me on a cloud, that’s where I am going. Because it is not about me; it is about Him.
We can wade through that if we wish. The point is at the end. Whomever "Him" is and doing the subjecting and being the subjected. It is that He may be all in all.
"Scripture
taken from the NEW AMERICAN STANDARD BIBLE®, Jim Carlson 2006, Lone Rock Bible Church, Stevensville Montana, USA |