Word of Salvation – Vol. 35 No. 45 – December 1990

 

Murder

 

Sermon by Rev. M. P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 40 (Ex. 20:13)

Readings: Genesis 4:1-12; 1 John 3:11-16

 

The three alcoholics sat together in the park sometimes.  Their mutual enslavement to liquor, and the many problems that come with it, had forged a common bond between them.  But each one of them also lived in a world of personal loneliness and misery.

They had no fixed address.  When the nights were cold and wet they would sometimes stay overnight at a nearby hostel that took in men like themselves.  When they felt really bad, they went to the hospital where there was a special ward for alcoholics.  But most of the time they slept outdoors, for their pension money was usually all spent on booze.  Quite often they wouldn’t see each other for weeks, but on the day they met with tragedy, they were sitting together on the park bench.

Four boys, aged about thirteen and fourteen, had suddenly come running towards them.  Before the men knew what was happening, the boys had thrown petrol, all over them and then one of them lit a match.  There was a loud whoosh and in no time at all they were on fire.  The boys ran away laughing, leaving the men to desperately kill the flames and tear off their ragged clothing, all by themselves.

All suffered severe burns.  One man died two days later and the other two took months to recover.

In Court, the boys, who were now murderers, testified that they had seen a film on television wherein a tramp had been doused with petrol and set on fire.  They thought it was funny and decided to try it out.  The boys said they were now sorry for what they had done.

This terrible happening was reported in Newsweek magazine some time ago.  The article said that such things were not isolated.  Similar cases have happened in many cities around the world.

People are killed for no reason at all, except for the sake of a thrill, or to steal a few dollars, or out of revenge.  The Newsweek article said that most researchers agreed that the average child will view at least 15,000 murders on television before the age of fifteen.  It is commonly agreed that some of these youngsters will be inclined to kill someone at some time during their lives.  Many more will become passive and unconcerned at killings.  If in real life they see someone getting assaulted and killed, they most likely will not be bothered enough to do anything to help.  Those not affected in some way by television violence are very few.

Today we hear the Word of God about the sixth commandment and we see that it deals with murder.

1. It is a terrible fact.

2. The roots of murder are inside the human heart.

3. The solution to all forms of murder is to love your neighbour.

1.

First of all then we see that murder is a terrible fact.  It is terrible because life is from God.  When people kill someone for the wrong reasons, then they are sinning against God who is the Creator of life.

This is true even when animals are killed needlessly.  God has given animals for food but when they are killed just for the fun of it, or out of cruelty, or to satisfy some sadistic pleasure, then such people are wilfully destroying life and they sin against God who gave life.

But killing is most terrible when man takes the life of another person.  For unlike the animals, the human person was created in the image of God.  Premeditated murder, therefore, is a blow struck against God’s most precious possession.  The creation of man, that is, male and female, was God’s crowning achievement and when one human being wilfully murders another, then a savage blow is struck at a form of life that most resembles God Himself.

The terribleness of murder is not only there in the killing of harmless old tramps but it’s also present in underworld killings, or the murder of people who know too much, or the taking of policemen’s lives as happens from time to time.  Almost everyday the news reports a vicious murder somewhere.

The terribleness of all this, however, is nothing new.  The Bible itself presents a graphic witness to this sin.  Cain murdered his brother Abel because he could not stand it that his brother’s actions were more righteous.  Pharaoh murdered hundreds of baby boys born to the Israelites, simply because he feared they would become too many to handle.  King Saul ordered a brutal killer by the name of Doeg to slaughter the Lord’s priests, their wives and children, and the whole town of Nob, for no reason other than that they gave shelter to David and his men.  Even David, when he was king, engineered the death of Uriah, one of his faithful soldiers, only because David wanted his wife whom he had already made pregnant.  Queen Jezebel had Naboth murdered so that the man’s vineyard could fall into the hands of her husband Ahab who could not get it by legal means.  King Herod coolly murdered all the male infants of Bethlehem and surrounding area in the off-chance that Jesus might be amongst them.  And the Jewish Sanhedrin, normally working very hard to see that their precious law and traditions were meticulously upheld, bent over backwards to have first Jesus and then Stephen killed, under the flimsy pretence that these deaths were according to law and therefore not really murders.

Indeed, that Word of God that speaks of God’s saving acts in Jesus Christ, also speaks of corruption and murder.  The Bible is certainly not a nice, sweet story about people who never put a foot wrong.  On the contrary, sin is shown up from every angle, revealing its terrible power.  It had to be done, for otherwise none would be serious about God and salvation.

In the Bible, murder is portrayed as a terrible crime against God, for He made man in order to have him rule over the whole creation.  God, therefore, gave man a mind, intelligence, feelings, emotions, skill and knowledge.  Under God’s rule man was meant to live in harmony with other human beings in justice and holiness.

With God, therefore, life is much more than just breathing and getting ahead of the other fellow.  God meant life to consist of fellowship with Him and with others.  Without God, and without having the qualities God gave to life, life becomes mere existing.

Murder, therefore is much more serious than just killing someone.  Murder is preventing God from carrying out His plan for individual lives.  Murder is striking a blow at God Himself.  But how, then, must we see capital punishment and war?  To many the sixth commandment would also condemn those governments that have the death penalty for murder.  And if God says that killing is wrong, then how can anyone justify war?  Indeed, the push for pacifism and unilateral disarmament often comes from those who take the New Testament seriously.  That God in the Old Testament ordered Israel to wage war against the thoroughly corrupt pagan tribes in Canaan is a bit of a problem to those who see God as always loving and being nice.  But even in the New Testament where some people think God is presented in a more friendly manner, one finds the teaching that has God giving the sword to the ruling authorities with which to punish the wrong-doers.  And the sword was meant to kill.

It is naive, therefore, to just take the sixth commandment by itself.  We must put it alongside other things God has said.  With capital punishment and war, we must not just reject them out of hand because they seem to treat human life so cheaply, but we ought first of all to realise that God speaks of them for the very reason that life is seen by God as being so very precious, for people are His image-bearers.

But we must go further with the sixth commandment and see that in its light, abortion is a terrible sin that must be stopped.  And the reason is again that for God human life is precious.  That the foetus is new life from the moment of conception needs no longer to be defended.  What God’s Word has always been saying is now upheld by modern science as well.  Why do abortions then still go on?  Well, it would seem that people think it is a lesser crime when the child is killed in the womb than if it were killed sometime after birth.  All sorts of reasons are used to justify that type of thinking.  Why, the world could become so dangerously over-populated that everyone else will suffer.  Or why allow a child to come into the world when its existence will be just plain miserable?  Or why burden a teenage girl with all the problems of single motherhood and married women with another child when there is a risk of that child being physically deformed or mentally handicapped, or when yet another baby would make life too difficult for the mother?

That these problems are all very serious, no one would want to deny.  But none justify the killing of the unborn.  The unborn child is one of us and destroying it is a murderous act.

But now human life has not only become cheap at its beginning in the womb, it has also become cheap at the other end.  Here we refer to the so-called mercy-killing of the elderly who are incurably ill.  Here too is a situation where people take it upon themselves to decide when it is best for all concerned to terminate life.  But that decision is not for man to make.  It belongs to God.  He is the Giver of life and He reserves the right to end it.  We must not take that right out of His hands.

The responsibility we have been given is to help reduce suffering, to comfort the afflicted and to give meaning and purpose to lives stricken by disease and pain.

Yes, we may certainly ask God to take home to heaven one of His saved children in Christ, whose earthly life is beyond hope of recovery, in order to end suffering.  There will be times when an informed decision needs to be made whether or not to continue with life-support systems.  But we may not put an end to life ourselves, whether that life be someone else’s or our own.

So even suicide is a sin, for it is committing murder on your own life.  But we should realise that when a Christian commits suicide (and that has happened, for even Christians can become ill with severe depression,) then the act of ending one’s earthly life cannot undo the saving work of God in Christ.  When sinners are saved then God forgives all their sins, past, present and future.  The fact, of course, still remains that Christians ought always to place their lives in God’s hands, and not take it out of His hands, which is what suicide does.

The last form of murder we want to mention is racism.  Racism involves a lot more than people getting killed in murderous riots between people of different skin colours.  The peculiarities of the race we belong to is not only the colour of the skin but also the texture of our hair, the set of our eyes, the structure of our bones and even includes hereditary characteristics plus customs and traditions.  The sin of racism occurs when people of one race think that they are naturally superior to another race.  It’s not just a matter of education and development.  A person is racist when he believes that another race is inferior by nature.  With such an attitude the beginnings of murder are already in his heart.

2.

That brings us to our second point, namely, the roots of murder are deep inside the human heart.  We spent a bit of time on the various forms of murder in order to show that our times are violent and murderous.  It’s not just happening in some primitive culture far away, but it’s right amongst us, in our own society.  In fact, the real problem is not the actual, physical murder.  That horrible act is nothing more than the final outcome of an attitude that has its beginnings in the human heart or mind.

You see, all those murderous acts we mentioned before all began with feelings of hate, suspicion, anger and selfishness.  And if these be considered as small sins when compared to the full-grown sin of actual murder, then nonetheless these small sins of the heart are still very lethal and vicious.  For example, think of someone you can’t seem to like very much.  May be it’s someone down the street or at work who, in your thinking looks and acts a bit funny or strange.  Such a person may even be in the same church or family.  In fact, it could be your brother or sister, maybe your wife or husband.  No, nothing unusual about that!  The majority of murders are probably the domestic ones.

Now at some point in time, and you can’t remember exactly when, your attitude towards the other person underwent a change.  Prejudice came in.  You began to think that the other person was a bit dumb or stupid, stuck-up or arrogant.  You started to look down at them, or there were feelings of hate and contempt creeping in.  And even now, you are still feeling like that towards that other person.

These feelings start to show in the way you speak to this other person.  You look at him or her differently.  You may even avoid that other person as much as you can.  You may protest and say that it is not so, but you really do think yourself smarter, more intelligent, more important.  That in itself may be true of course.  But the point is that you look down your nose at the other person.  What’s happening is that you have begun loving yourself more than you love the other person.  What’s more, you both know it.

Now, do you know what that makes us – killers, murderers?  You might be offended at this but that does not change the fact.  Loving oneself more than the other is a form of hating the other person.  Loving oneself in the sense of caring and looking after yourself, is of course not wrong.  We all should be doing that.  But the Lord Jesus did not say: Love yourself more than you love others.  What He said was: Love your neighbour as you love yourself.  Loving the other less than yourself always means a form of hate.  And God says that anyone who hates his brother is a murderer.

There will always be times when the other person does something that annoys and irritates us.  We have to expect this to happen.  The other person is not perfect, and neither are we.  So there are bound to be all sorts of little things that can, if we let them, drive us up the wall.  But here is the rub.  Do we allow them to upset us?  Don’t forget that each one of us has a sinful nature where anger, hate, suspicion, and whatever else, can be ignited into a raging inferno.  Yes, there is a killer within each of us.  Jesus has said, ‘Out of the heart come evil thoughts, and murder…!’

The question is, are you going to allow the killer within to be on the loose?  No doubt, there are situations where it is the other person’s fault.  But the question still is, are you also going on the rampage just like the other person?  Your heart can be like a seed- bed that has those lethal and vicious roots in it.  If you allow them to grow then the full- grown sin of murder will destroy others and yourself as well.

How then do you stop that killer within?  How do you get rid of those sinful roots?

3.

The answer is to love your neighbour.  This is our third and final point.  We will be brief because you have heard of this commandment many times.  Yes, God commands us to love the other person.  How else will you get around to loving the other person if you can’t stand the sight of him, or her?  If you wait for the inclination to love, the feeling, then many of us will be waiting a long time.

So God says: love your neighbour!  He is commanding us.  Therefore, you start doing things for the other person that aim for his well-being.  Yes, do it, even when you don’t feel like it.

For isn’t that how God loves us?  Do we deserve God’s love?  Are we so loveable?  Of course not.  Yet, it is the clear witness of Scripture that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  Christ loved us while we were still His enemies, while we were disobedient and against Him.  But in His perfect love He came to us and went to the cross for us.  And by His resurrected life we might now have a new life; a life in which our hearts are changed from hate to love.  An attitude is born within us in which we see the other person’s need more than we see their faults and sins.  That new attitude is the work of God’s Spirit.  By the strength of the Spirit we are able to obey God’s command, and love the other person even when he or she is still like an enemy.  Through His Word and Spirit then, Christ puts His kind of love within us and we become like Him.  We now look upon the other person in the same way as Christ looks upon us.

The other person can’t keep on hating when we keep on loving.  Just as much as Christ’s love for us overcame our resistance to Him, so also can His love, working through us, overcome the resistance in others.

And who is our neighbour?  It is your brother and your sister; it is your father and mother, your children, your wife, your husband.  Can you now see in this whole context why in difficult marriages God aims for reconciliation and not for separation or divorce?  With the latter, partners agree to keep on hating.  With reconciliation they are prepared to be obedient to God’s command to love.

An old man who was a Christian was once asked if he had ever thought of divorcing his wife.  ‘No’, he said, and then added, ‘but I have sometimes thought of murdering her’.  It sounded terrible but what he meant was that the person he loved a great deal also at times irritated and annoyed him.  Even to the point where he found himself thinking of life without her.  Thoughts of her being dead sometimes entered into his head.

Of course, he was terribly selfish.  Maybe she had even better reasons to think the same about him.  The fact is, however, God could have felt the same towards each one of us many times.  And He would have been fully justified had He killed us, on account of our sins.  We would have deserved it.

But God has not killed us in His justice.  At least, not yet!  He still reaches out to us in His love through Jesus Christ.  And when we are Christian then we believe that to be true.  That old man I just spoke about, also believed God loved him for the sake of Christ.  And because he knew that, he kept on loving his wife.

AMEN