A Return To Civility: 6 Do Not Murder Series

A Sunday school teacher was discussing the Ten Commandments with her five and six-year-olds. After explaining the commandment to "honour thy father and thy mother," she asked, "Is there a commandment that teaches us how to treat our brothers and sisters?" Without missing a beat, one little boy (the eldest child of a family) answered, "Thou shall not kill."

Having grown up the baby of the family, I’m sure that my older sister would have to agree with the little fellow.

This is week six of our A Return to Civility series, and we’ve been looking at the Ten Commandments. This came about after I wondered back in the spring how we, as a society, had lost our civility and public respect. Maybe the civility was fake, it was all an act and a persona that we adopted, but it certainly seemed that there was a time when people could agree to disagree, and public discourse didn’t have to devolve into name-calling and demonizing people we didn’t necessarily agree with.

And I wondered if we had come to this place when we lost our common morality, a shared sense of what is right and what is wrong. And for many that common morality was summed up in the short little moral code called the Ten Commandments.

Now if you’ve been keeping track then you know that this week I should be speaking on the fifth Commandment, which is found in Exodus 20:12 Honour your father and mother. Then you will live a long, full life in the land the LORD your God is giving you.

And next week, I should be speaking on the sixth commandment, which is Exodus 20:13 You must not murder.

And that was the plan until I realized that next week is one of our summer family Sundays, and the kids will be joining us. And realized that talking about murder might not be super kid-friendly, whereas all the parents were asking that their kids be present when I spoke about honouring your parents. So, here we are at commandment number six.

Now just to recap where we’ve been, you may have noticed that the first four commandments dealt with our relationship with God. They were vertical commands, and now they have become horizontal commands in that they deal with our relationships with one another.

You might remember the first commandment was to not replace God, the second command was to not reduce God, the third was to not belittle God, and the fourth was to honour God by celebrating the Sabbath. But then we get to commandment number five, and it takes a different direction. It’s as if God was saying, “now that you’ve got our relationship straight let’s work on your relationship with others”. And so, we went from the vertical to the horizontal. And so, next week we will discuss honouring our parents which is the fifth commandment.

So here we are at number six, a commandment which most of us, I’m sure, figure that we are pretty safe on. It says: Exodus 20:13 You must not murder.

I’m aware that most of us grew up hearing the commandment as “Thou shalt not kill” but it’s a little narrower than that. First, regardless of what the International Vegetarian Union and Peta might say this commandment had nothing to do with animals. It is not talking about us swearing off meat and becoming vegetarians. Did I hear a collective sigh of relief? This commandment deals exclusively with people, with human beings. Nor was it given in relation to war, or to self-defence.

Without trying to get into a deep study of the original language the Hebrew word used here refers to the intentional and conscious act of taking the life of another. It is deliberate and calculated.

And so, the first thing we need to look at this morning is Physical Murder. In its purest sense this commandment relates to:

• Murder, taking the life of another

When we were first married, we lived in Truro and murder was not something you thought about. If you did it was in relation to what had happened in the city. During our five years in Truro, I can’t remember one single pre-meditated murder happening.

Maybe there was but I don’t remember them. And then we moved to Brisbane, a city of 1.7 million people. It seemed that every other day someone was killing somebody else. Two weeks after we arrived a murderer was arrested less than a kilometre from our house, Angela wanted to move home.

And people seemed pretty nonchalant about it. It was about the same time, Marion Barry, the Mayor of Washington, DC said, “Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country.”

And so, we begin with this prohibition of physical murder. And there wouldn’t be anyone here who would challenge that commandment, but let’s make it a little more difficult, I believe by implication it also deals with