Sermon Tone Analysis

Commands Against Violence

Last week we entered into the commandments that have to do with human relationships.

We looked at the fact that while all of the ten Commandments have to do with our relationship with God, We honor God, we show our love for God, in the keeping of all His commands.

And how we treat others says something about how we normally treat God.

Or perhaps we could say that our reverence for God is seen in our reverence for people.

To put it yet another way, our love of God is reflected in our love for others.

Of course, in the New Testament, we learn that we are to love the church.

There are many passages we could choose, but let us look for a moment at something Paul said that indicates that we are to be good to everyone, but especially good to those in the church:

Do good to everyone, but especially to those who are of the household of faith.

We are supposed to be extra good to one another.

And we see that this love for one another is a reflection of our love for God.

If we would love God better, we would keep the commands better.

And if we would show our love to the community at large, and especially to those who are of the household of faith, then we would keep the commands better.

All of us at times look around at others and notice where we think they could be doing a better job at something.

It is human nature to do this.

But we are warned by the Lord that in our efforts to help someone else do a better job as a Christian, we had better take note of our own big failures.

Before we remove the speck from someone’s eye, we had better remove the log in our own eye.

Again and again I have mentioned church unity, and I will continue to do so without apology.

You see, what makes a particular church a great church is not the eloquence of its preacher, or the talent of the worship team, or the well maintained property it meets at.

What makes a church a great church is biblical living as reflected in the unity of the saints, and this happens best when those saints begin to realize that they demonstrate love for one another in the family of God through the keeping of the commandments of God; the commandments of Christ.

He said if you love me, you will keep my commands.

And many of His commands are very direct about how we are supposed to treat follow humans, and especially those in the household of faith.

Last week, we looked at the fifth commandment: Honor your father and mother.

I hope we all have seen the value in this, and how the keeping of this command demonstrates the love of God in us, and demonstrates the love of God to others who see how we honor our father and mother.

This morning, we look at the next two commands, that may seem unrelated; but as we wrap up the ten commandments next week, Lord willing, I hope you will have the eyes of your hearts enlightened to see how the keeping of all of these commands contributes to a healthy community, especially in the household of faith.

It is hard to get much more direct than the 6-9th commandments.

You shall not murder.

No caveats, no exceptions, no maybes, not what ifs.

And you shall not commit adultery.

No caveats, no exceptions, no maybes, no what ifs.

You shall not.

Let us look first at the command to not murder.

Some translations of the Bible, including the KJV, have translated this to say “You shall not kill.”

And unfortunately, over time, many have wrongly used this passage to say that therefore there should be no death penalty, or that a Christian can not go to war, or if he must, he must not carry a weapon, because of the commandment not to kill.

But the word translated here from Hebrew is not so broad as the word kill suggests in English.

For if we were to take this completely literally, that is the translation, you shall not kill, then we would have a conflict in scripture.

Actually more than one conflict.

For one, God often commanded His people to kill when He sent them to war against His enemies.

Joshua was commanded to kill 5 kings; When Israel came into the promised land, they came in as conquerers, commanded by God to kill off entire populations.

If God never changes, then we would have a major problem if we took you shall not kill to be a contradiction to this command.

However, we need not fear that there is a contradiction, because there is not.

I need not remind most of you that the Old Testament is translated from the ancient Hebrew language, and in their language, just as in ours, they had words that may be similar but these words had a specific meaning.

And the word translated to murder in most translations, and translated into kill in a few, has a specific meaning in the original Hebrew that means you shall not kill on a personal level.

What does that mean, to kill on a personal level?

Well, it means you killed based on your own judgment, either for revenge, or from anger, or even if you perceived that someone was committing a sin that deserved the death penalty.

You could not, on your own, act as judge, jury, and executioner.

For those sins that required the death penalty, it was up to the community, not the individual, to punish.

And this was through courts or a decision of the elders of the community.

And remember, from my sermon on the cities of refuge back in May, that there were strict rules regarding the proof needed, namely there had to be two or more eyewitnesses to the crime, and there had to be examination and cross examination of those witnesses.

But clearly God mandated the death penalty in cases of proven murder.

Yet even in a terrible case, you and others witnessed your neighbor commit murder, it was not up to you as an individual, or even you and your friends, to put him to death.

There has to be a trial, just like Wyatt Earp holding off the lynch mob, and they shouted “he just killed a man”, to which Wyatt Earp answered, “And he’ll stand trial for it!”.

You see, Israel was not to be like the wild west, nor was it to be like the Hatfields and the McCoys, where families more or less sent assassins out, each revenge killing ramping up the war.

The people of Israel were to have an ordered community, and this is in part why the book of Deuteronomy exists.

It sets down the rules for the people to live by, which are also found in the other books of the Pentateuch.

You were not to commit any personal killing.

No taking the law into your own hands.

However, if a crime was committed, there were crimes for which there was a death penalty.

The two commands we are looking at this morning both were death penalty commandments.

If you violated either one, you were subject to the death penalty.

But let me stress again that the standards of proof were high, and the charge to the community to get justice right is also high.

And next week we will look at the commandment about bearing false witness, which ties into these commands as well.

You shall not murder does not apply to someone who, in the act of defending himself or others from violence, killed someone.

The Bible is very clear about the right of people not only to defend themselves from violence, but actually lays out the obligation to defend others.

If someone came into this church to commit violence, I hope every man in here would stand to defend the family of God.

I certainly would not stand by and let someone commit violence to my family, which all of you are part of.

So self-defense or defending others from violence is not violating this command.

But some Christians have pointed out that Jesus, in commanding our love for our enemies, also said to turn the other cheek.

But does this mean we are not to defend ourselves or others?

Just a few weeks ago, Focus on the family had a brief blog about this, and in part they said: “Christ is telling His followers that they need to let go of the desire to “get back” at others who have wronged them in some way.

Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other great thinkers in the history of Christian theology have explained this verse as follows.

Disciples of Jesus should be willing to suffer personal injustices (see 1 Corinthians 6:6, 7).

But they should also realize that loving one’s neighbor sometimes implies a willingness to use force.

In other words, we should always be prepared to defend others who are being abused and mistreated in some way.

Complete non-resistance, then, is not necessarily an absolute standard for the Christian life.”

Others have pointed out that when you stand by and allow the abuse of others, that you are guilty of the abuse, since you did nothing to stop it.

We all have a responsibility to stand up to abuse, violence, bullying, and other cruel crimes.

We do not tell a woman in an abusive relationship to turn the other cheek.

We don’t tell a kid being bullied that he is a missionary in his school, so he should think about the mission over his personal safety or well-being.

This sort of false piety has no place among believers.

We must not be complicit in the mistreatment of others because we are going to take scripture to mean that Christians are supposed to be the type who just stand around letting themselves and others be mistreated.

It is also not a violation of this command for the soldier, who serves under proper authority, in a time of war, who must kill an enemy.

However, it is incumbent on those who are sending the soldiers to war to be sure that the cause is just that they would send others to way for.

Certainly world leaders at many times in human history have stood guilty of murder for conducting a war or battle that was unjust.

But soldiers they commanded do not bear that same guilt, so long as they were following lawfully given orders.

This can get messy, though.

What does a private do when his captain tells him to leave none alive when there are unarmed civilians in the line of fire?

And this is in part why the military has its own court system, to try and ensure that those fighting obey not only the law and conventions of war, but their code of conduct as well.

Remember that these commandments, and the keeping of them, reflect our love for God as well as our love for people.

The vast majority of people are not guilty of actually murdering someone.

Not only that, this is not only a biblical command, it is enshrined in the laws of just about every human civilization.

Murder is not only against God’s law, it is against the law of the land as well.

So at this point, it is possible that you may be thinking, then get on with it pastor, we know we are not supposed to kill people, this is hardly worth a sermon about it.

And probably there were Jewish people in the days when Jesus was preaching who did not spend much time reflecting on this commandment, since it was so clear and so universal, and the vast majority of the population would certainly be able to say, “Of course, I never have, and never will, murder someone.”

So when Jesus came onto the scene he skipped over this commandment because it was already so well known and understood that it would have been a waste of time for him to talk about it, right?

Well, no, that isn’t the case.

In fact, what Jesus did, was he took a command that most people probably thought they had nothing to worry about, and he made it something we all had to worry about.

I’m sure many people listening to the sermon on the mount were taken aback by this statement.

Anger equals murder?

Yet where does murder start?