“Do not murder.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I want you to think for just a minute about the number of times you have said to another person, ‘I’m going to kill you.” My guess is that it’s a bunch. At the same time, if you’re like most people, I don’t suspect you’ve ever actually followed through on this threat. Then why have you said it so much? Because that expression has become a culturally acceptable way of (usually playfully) expressing your frustration with another person for whom you generally have a relatively high degree of affection. This context of love is what clues them in on the fact that you don’t really mean it. This is an interesting cultural development in light of the fact that our culture has been pretty thoroughly shaped by the Judeo-Christian worldview, and that God was pretty clear He’s not a big fan of murder. Let’s talk about the sixth commandment, what it means, and what we should do with it today.

There are a number of different reasons that one person might kill another. And, yes, that statement was as odd to write as it probably was for you to read just now. But it is true nonetheless. We know it is true too. We can quibble over the ultimate justification, but killing another person who is actively attempting to take your own life or the life of your spouse or children when it is clear that no amount of reason or persuasion will dissuade them from their efforts and willfully carrying out a premeditated plot to end the life of another person are not the same thing. In the same way, the state-sanctioned ending of the life of someone who has been sentenced to the death penalty and a soldier killing an enemy combatant are not the same thing. They aren’t the same thing legally, and they aren’t the same thing morally.

One of the challenges with this command is that before we say very much about it at all, we have to very carefully define what kind of killing is in view here. The use of the word “murder” is helpful. But even then, we have to define murder carefully and clearly. Let’s do that: Murder is the unjustified, premeditated, intentional killing of an innocent person. Each part of that is important. Murder is always an act taken without sufficient justification. Of course, the murderer feels justified, otherwise he wouldn’t take the action for which he has been charged. So, who determines whether or not he’s right? Well, ultimately God does, but we don’t have any access to that particular judgment. What we see in the Scriptures, though, is that He has extended to the state the authority to make this determination. This doesn’t mean the state as a representative of the will of the people always gets it right, but it is the one institution, Scripturally speaking, that has this authority.

Murder is premeditated. This means it is an action that was planned sometime before it was taken. This is different legally, but also morally, from an action decided upon and taken in the heat of a given moment. When two strangers get into a confrontation on the street – let’s say an incident of road rage – and one decides in the moment to kill the other, that action was not premeditated. In legal terms we call that manslaughter. Murder is not manslaughter. God speaks to the difference between the two actions and how to handle them in other places in the Law. He still takes manslaughter with the seriousness of murder, but He distinguishes between one and the other.

Murder is an intentional act. When someone has been charged with murder, this means that the state has determined that his actions were willful. He wanted to take the life of this other person and followed through on it. The intent was to kill. This distinguishes murder from an unintentional killing. God actually addresses that specifically with the people in chapter 21. We’ll talk about that section in a couple of weeks.

Finally, in the case of murder, the other person is innocent. This doesn’t mean he is without sin. It simply means that in this particular instance, his actions did not provide any kind of a justification for the murderer to take his life. Again, the murderer may not agree, but it is up to the state to make this distinction.

When God says, “Do not murder,” here, this is what He has in mind. And, as it turns out, this really wasn’t something He needed to clarify all that much. Murder is one of those things everybody knows is wrong. They always have. Different cultures across human history have not always agreed on what counts as murder, but they have all had a definition of murder of some sort, and when someone takes this action, it is universally considered wrong. People have always inherently understood that allowing the unjust, premeditated, intentional killing of innocent people is a recipe for social disaster. A culture that embraces murder as morally acceptable is a culture that is suicidal.

So, what are we supposed to do with this command today? While, no, this command in its present form does not apply to us, there is plenty of new covenant evidence that God hasn’t changed His mind on the matter. How should we understand this through the lens of the cross? What God was doing here was laying a foundation for building a worldview structure that would help us understand how much He values life. Suffice to say: He values it a lot. The reason for this is pretty clear. God is the source of all life. He created it. More specifically, He created us in His image. Murder is an attack not just on the victim, but on the very image of God. He takes both things with the utmost of seriousness.

This larger purpose is why we find Jesus elevating the standard of this command in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus made clear that what God had in mind with this command went beyond simply murder as an action. His concern is never merely with our actions. His ultimate goal was to get us thinking about what motivated our actions. Jesus said elsewhere that it is what is inside of us that determines what comes out of us. Murder exists first not as an action, but as a thought. It begins as our reducing the value of another person in our minds from fully human and made in God’s image to something less than that. If we are going to live consistently with the high value God places on life, we have to honor the life of the people around us, no matter who they are, with every action and every thought we have.

Meeting the standard of not murdering the people around us is pretty easy. Just don’t kill anyone you don’t have to (generally you should try to avoid killing anyone period, but for the purposes of our conversation here I set the bar pretty low). In Christ, though, that’s hardly the extent of our call. We are called to love one another after the pattern of His own love for us. This means honoring them and valuing them as a fellow creature made in the image of God in all of our thinking and behaving toward them. Show them respect. Treat them with kindness. Be patient with them. In a word: Love them. This is where this command was always pointing us.