The Living God
February 13, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Exodus 20:1-2,13
1 And God spoke all these words, saying,
2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
13 “You shall not murder.
Years ago, I spent a summer working as a camp counselor, and all that summer long I watched the videographer carry around his fancy camera that looked so expensive and so delicate it made me thankful I didn’t have his job, you know, with all the ways to break a camera at a summer camp—the water, the sports, the games, the crazy activities. In the last week of camp, I finally asked how much the camera cost, and he said “$4,000,” which felt enormous to me at the time. Later that day the parents picked up their children from camp, and I thought, There’s not a parent here who, if they had to choose between a broken $4,000 camera and a broken child, wouldn’t consider their child priceless in comparison. And they weren’t wrong to do so. It’s how God feels about human life. But why? Why does God feel this way? And if God feels this way, how should it change the way you treat others? That’s what we’ll talk about this morning. Let’s begin in prayer. “Dear heavenly Father . . .”
Introduction: Why Does God Value Life?
If you’re new to our church or any church, I’ll mention that what we do here each week is teach through a section of the Bible so that we can better know what it means to walk with God and enjoy him. Normally the passage we teach from spans several verses, maybe six or seven or two dozen verses, or maybe even a chapter or two. I’ve never had a smaller passage to teach from than we have this morning.
If you’re holding a Bible, please turn to the book of Exodus. It’s the second book in the Bible, and our passage comes from Exodus 20, found on page 57 in the pew Bibles. We’ve been teaching through the book of Exodus for months and then spending several weeks on the ten commandments within the book of Exodus, and now we come to the sixth commandment, which we read in v. 13: “You shall not murder.” Just four words. But that’s in English. In Hebrew, it’s only two words: lo ratzah. But sometimes just a few words actually say a whole lot. And that’s the case with this commandment.
If you’re looking at the pew Bible, you might notice a footnote on the word murder that explains more. The footnote reads, “The Hebrew word also covers causing human death through carelessness or negligence.” The older version of the King James Bible says, “Thou shalt not kill.” Can you hear the difference? Kill and murder. Kill seems to be a sweeping prohibition, whereas murder seems far more specific. When you press into this a bit, you find out that the actual word used is, in fact, far more narrow than kill. The generic word for kill is used hundreds of times in all sorts of contexts, while the word that’s used here in the ten commandments means something more specific, something that implies premeditation or at least a responsibility (Num. 35:6; Jos. 20:3; 1 Kings 21:19; Ps. 94:6). This is why murder is probably a good word to use in the translation. One commentator suggested that You shall not “commit homicide” is an even better way for us to understand the word, that is, understanding the commandment as “you shall not unlawfully take human life.” This wording of “unlawful” tries to acknowledge there are lawful takings of human life, say, perhaps, in a just war or in self-defense.
Yet, all of this can feel rather academic. So, I’ll return to the question I asked at the start. It’s clear God values life, but why? Why does God value life? And if God values life, how should it change the way you treat others?
Let me answer the first question of Why? with an illustration. And I don’t mean to be crass for the sake of being crass. Let’s say you invite me to your house for dinner, and I use the restroom. Then I tell you, “Hey, instead of toilet paper I found a picture of your family and used that.” How do you feel? That okay? No, you’re mad. It doesn’t matter that you have the digital copy and can print a thousand more copies. Something about that piece of paper, because it had the image of those you love, requires that the piece of paper be held with a certain dignity and reverence. It’s just paper created from the same atoms as the mush of trees and flattened and colored in a certain pattern, but yet, because of the image, you’ll never have me over to your house again.
As Caleb said so well on the video, when we read the Bible, we see that God has bestowed upon humans something special, namely his very own image. But I want to show this to you and not just say it. I’ll read from two places, both from the first book of the Bible. After making all that was made—stars and planets and oceans and land and mountains and waterfalls and towering trees and colorful sea coral and animals of beauty and animals of ferocious terror, after all these—God made humans. Which in some ways are just the same bunch of atoms and carbon arranged in different ways, and yet you are not merely collections of atoms at all. God says you are special. Even though you may have similar chemical compositions to other parts of nature, God put his image upon you. In Genesis 1:26–27 we read,
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
Okay, so people were God’s pictures. People were made in God’s image and likeness. But if they were made that way, are they still made that way? I mean Genesis 1 is before Adam messed up everything. Surely, now this image and likeness is lost. I mean, it’s like in a factory that used to make good widgets, but the ingredients got spoiled, so now every widget is so messed up we surely couldn’t say that the widgets still have the same image that the designer intended them to have.
But that’s not how the Bible speaks. A few pages later in Genesis we read God speak to this very issue. In chapter 9, after Noah and his family get off the ark, God says to Noah, and in a way to all subsequent generations, “And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth,’” (9:1). This language should sound familiar because it’s the same command he told Adam and Eve before they sinned as if to say to humans, keep going in my commands. Then we read God say,
“Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed,
for God made man in his own image.” (Gen. 9:6; cf. James 3:7)
Notice that phrase at the end. “For God made man in his own image.” The idea is that God is still, despite our sin, making people in his own image and likeness. This is why when a parent might say, “I could care less about a broken camera compared to my broken child,” they are not wrong.
And rather than experiencing this truth as a weight and hindrance and killjoy, the sixth commandment from God “You shall not murder” would have first been received as a tremendous blessing. The Israelites would have received God’s view of life as a tremendous blessing, which is how you should receive. Think about their context. We’re reminded of the context in the preface to the ten commandments.
And God spoke all these words, saying, “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” (Ex. 20:1–2)
Because of the cultural context the Israelites had, they may have been tempted to treat live as cheap. You may be tempted to treat life as cheap because of our cultural context. In Pharaoh’s house, just over a month before this day, the Israelites were in a culture where life was cheap. If you had the power, you could kill as you saw fit. Pharaoh did have the power, and he did kill as he saw fit, causing the groans of God’s people to go up. And as we said several times in the fall, when the groans of God’s people go up, God comes down (Ex. 2:23ff). When we said this—“that groans go up and God comes down”—we had in mind God’s special presence that came down among his people as he rescued his people from oppression through signs and wonders, through ten plagues, and the parting and closing of the Red Sea. But God has also come down in another way. God has come down to us through his good, gracious, and wise law: “You shall not murder,” he commands. “No matter how powerful you get or how reprehensible someone might become, you, as an individual, do not have the right to unlawfully take life because,” God says, “I have put my image on every human, and I am still putting my image on them.” Therefore, every person has dignity, value, and worth.
So what does that mean for you? I want to use the rest of our time to explore the second question I asked: if God feels that way, how should it change the way you treat others and value life? There are two brief answers I want to give you. I want to talk about some of what this means at the external level of how we relate to others and value life, and I want to then talk about the internal level of the heart at how we feel about other people.
External Ways We Must Value Life
It could be the case that we hear “You shall not murder,” you think that there couldn’t be a commandment less relevant to your lives because murder is something out there that might tragically happen, but no one really knows anyone who has been murdered. I’m not sure that’s true, though.
People used to talk of the game “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” where every movie actor could be connected back to Kevin Bacon in less than six actors. We can think of murder and homicide as something out there for that might have happened to someone, but it’s likely three or four, or even six or ten degrees away from us. But it’s not. As a pastor of this church, I’d tell you it’s not. Growing up, murder came to my own extended family, and that murder had abiding implications for how I grew up, which I don’t want to go into now, lest it come across as a cheap preacher trick to toss the story out there for shock value. And when you consider suicide, that’s not six degrees away either. This also came to my family in a turbulent way, which I also don’t want to go into right now, lest it also feel cheap.
I was talking with someone last week who mentioned the sparse nature of this command—it’s just four words in English and only two in Hebrew—and he sympathized with me at how to get 30 minutes out of the command. He was just teasing, but I hope you can see the way that this command has implications for so many issues. We could talk about murder, of course. We could talk about war and pacifism. We could talk about genocide and other national atrocities and why people might righty be raising serious questions about China and the treatment of the Uyghur people and how they are being killed and mistreated in China and how so few are paying attention. We could talk about capital punishment. We can talk about abortion and euthanasia, that is, killing the weakest of the weak at their weakest. We could talk about how movies, media, and video games desensitize us to violence. We can talk about suicide. We can talk about end-of-life questions for the terminally and acutely ill. And I haven’t even touched on birth control and abortifacients, which are chemical that actually cause abortions and shouldn’t be considered birth control. And we could talk about the way we, as a church, should shovel the sidewalks and the way we should put salt down to prevent people from slipping on ice, which are all extensions of this commandment and two Hebrew words. I could fill 30 minutes, that’s for sure. But fill the 30 minutes with what comments? That’s the hard part. Because I feel like I only get the passage “You shall not murder” every so often as a pastor, so here in the middle of the sermon, where we’re talking about what this commandment requires of you, would you let me just pick three of these issues and share one paragraph small about each? I know that’s selective, but I’ll try to touch on three issues that feel relevant to us.
With respect to abortion, Christians believe it is wrong. Christians believe cells in a womb are not just cells. Those cells have a heartbeat at just three or four weeks old, and they have the image of God upon them far before even their heart beats. We have a new member at our church who spends time counseling women in unexpected pregnancies and nudging these women toward life. What a wonderful calling. As a church, small as it is, we have the baby bottle’s on the table out there that our members can pick up and fill with money and bring back. What a wonderful way to help. I know several people here involved in foster care and adoption, as an extension of caring for life. We’re trying. And praise God for that.
When it comes to suicide, it almost feels like malpractice to only say a tiny bit—but to not say anything feels worse. I guess I would just say suicide is neither an unforgivable sin nor is it good (obviously). Suicide is not an unforgivable sin. There will be Christians in heaven who took own their life; there is nothing in the Bible that teaches suicide is unforgivable. But neither does that make suicide good. Even when it feels like the only option, it’s neither the only option nor a good choice. Perhaps because of the pandemic or perhaps for other reasons, we’ve all heard suicide rates are up. But statical rates don’t mean much to me. But you do. You mean a lot to me. And if you’re struggling, please come tell us. Or tell someone. Your life matters. We have help here for you.
This commandment also speaks to terminal illness. Because God values life, it’s really really really good to fight for life. Life matters. We also know that God walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death and holds our hands to the other side of death. He holds our hands to glory. I’ll put it like this. Imagine someone hanging for their life from monkey bars. The fight to hang on as long as possible preaches something true: life matters. And the letting go of the monkey bars, when the time comes, also preaches something true: God will catch me and carry me home.
These are complicated issues, and there’s so much more to say. But everything I have said, I have said as a Christian pastor. Most of you are not also Christian pastors, and some of you are not Christians. This is why I’ve tried to show you my work, so to speak. You know that thing in math class where you don’t just put the answer, but you have to put down how you got the answer. So many times in our conversations with people both inside and outside the church we leap to the conclusions: this is how you must feel about abortion, this is how you should feel about capital punishment or just war or something else. But so often we don’t show our work. So if you’re new to our church, and you don’t feel the same way about abortion that we do, the real conversation I want to have with you—the first conversation I’d want to have with you—is about Jesus: who he is and why he matters and why his word is good for us and why we all need him and how he loves us.
Internal Ways We Must Value Life
Speaking of Jesus, let’s look at words he spoke about murder and how he expects you to internalize the commandment about murder. In your Bible, flip over to Matthew 5, which is on page 760. The verses we’ll look at come from one of Jesus’s most famous sermons, and what we’ll see is that Jesus does not have a thin view of this commandment but rather a thick view of commandment.
You have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, “You fool!” will be liable to the hell of fire. (Matt. 5:21–22 cf. 1 John 3:15)
I’ll read it again.
You have heard that it was said to those of old, “You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, “You fool!” will be liable to the hell of fire. (Matt. 5:21–22; cf. 1 John 3:15)
Do you see what’s happening here? Jesus is fighting against murder upstream, so to speak. If you have a pollution problem downstream, to fix the problem you can install a water treatment facility where pollution occurs, but another way to fight the pollution problem would be to go upstream and remove the pollution before it contaminates the water. This is what Jesus is doing here. Jesus wants you in your heart not to hate people. So, I’ll ask: Right now, who do you despise such that if they were not in your life, you’d be happy? You may not want to murder them, or maybe you do, but at a minimum, you just want them out of your life. What are these words of Jesus saying to you? To us?
But it gets even harder. It’s not just that we are not to hate. When you look at other words from Jesus about this commandment (Matt. 22:34–40), and you look at the words that other writers of the New Testament wrote (Gal. 5:14; Rom. 13:8–10) the commandment gets even more intense. Not only are we not to hate our neighbors, but we are to love them. Listen to these words from the apostle Paul in Romans 13:9,
For the commandments, “You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,” and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
And if love for neighbor is what God requires of you in our fallen world, then he must also be requiring you to forgive. We talk about forgiveness a lot, but we don’t often explain what it means. To forgive someone is not to say that what happened didn’t matter. Instead, forgiveness says that you have given the person over to God to be dealt with, and you have chosen not to be the one to crucify them for their actions. Forgiveness only takes one person forgiving another person.
But to be reconciled takes more than one person. Reconciliation takes two people repenting and forgiving each other. This means you might forgive someone who you are never reconciled with because they never say sorry. And certainly forgiveness doesn’t mean trust. To trust someone means both people are repenting and forgiving for a length of time. Pastor David told me this week that forgiveness might be likened to absorbing a financial debt. But to absorb someone’s financial debt doesn’t mean you loan them more money. Which is a way to say God calls us to forgive people who have hurt us, but that doesn’t mean those people must still be in our lives, in the case of abuse, it means they probably shouldn’t be in our lives.
And if all this is true, there’s really only one place we can end the sermon: God’s forgiveness for us. That’s really it. If, as Jesus says, we are in danger of the fires of hell because of unjust anger in our hearts and our failures to love not our neighbors, that means all of us deserve judgement. And if all of us deserve judgment, then you really only have one place to turn: God’s forgiveness offered to you because of Jesus, dying in your place and rising again and offering you forgiveness.
Think with me for a moment of the apostle Peter. After Jesus lived and died and rose and ascended to heaven, Peter preached a famous sermon. He actually preached several famous sermons, but this was his first. We read about it in Acts 2. Peter is speaking to an audience that was made up of some of the very people responsible for murdering Jesus. Peter looks them in the eye and says, “this Jesus . . . you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men” (Acts 2:23).
You might think, well, that’s the end of the sermon. And if it was a sermon preached by some of the pundits in our culture, that’s all Peter’s sermon would be. “You failed, you failed, you failed; now go home and sit in your shame and shut up.” That’s the preaching of our culture. But that’s not Christian preaching. Peter follows his comments about their murder with the promise of forgiveness for all who turn to God. When the crowd feels sorry for their sins and asks what they should do, Peter responds,
Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself. (Acts 2:38–39)
In in doing this, Peter is not being more gracious than God, more gracious than Jesus. Peter can extend the promise of forgiveness from God to those who killed his friend because this is what Jesus does for others, and it’s what Jesus did for Peter. While Jesus was being murdered on the cross, Jesus says, “Father, forgive them” (Luke 23:34).
If Peter can extend forgiveness to the very people who murdered Jesus, and Jesus can extend forgiveness to the very people who were murdering him, then I can offer you this same forgiveness no matter what you’ve done. God can forgive you. And he want you to forgive others.
Next week we will take up the seventh commandment. The seventh commandment has to do with something that should only be shared between a husband and a wife. I’ll be preaching. I don’t intend at all to be unnecessarily provocative or jarring in that sermon, but I did want to give those of you who are parents a heads up in case you want to make decisions about your children and Sunday school options. Let’s pray . . .
