Exodus 20:1-13 | The 6th Commandment

Good morning.

Today's text is from the book of Exodus, chapter 20, verses 1 through 13.

Exodus 20:1–13

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.

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.

On it you shall not do any work, you or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in him, in them, and rested on the seventh day.

Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land, and that the Lord your God is giving you.

You shall not murder.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

So let's pray.

Holy Father, thank you for uh drawing us together as your church, Lord.

Thank you for going before us to establish and to build your church.

Lord, I pray that the words that we receive from you today, these commandments, would work their way into our hearts, that they would convict us of sin, that they would draw us to your throne of grace, and Lord, that we would see the fulfillment of all of these commandments in your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

And that in seeing that, Lord, we might be filled with joy and we might be filled with a desire to serve and obey you, to love you by obeying the commandments that you have given to us.

Let us see that they are good.

Father, I lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So this is uh the sixth commandment today, uh which means this is our sixth sermon on the Ten Commandments, for those of you keeping track.

And this is the one where it starts to sound like what you think of the Ten Commandments as.

The Ten Commandments, I think, if you were to ask a normal person on the street, they probably wouldn't initially say you shall not have your male servant or your female servant do any labor.

It's probably not where they would start.

They would probably start with something like, yeah, like don't murder, don't steal.

These are the ones they're thinking of.

These are the final five, and they are in the second table of the Ten Commandments.

One of the things that we've looked at is how the first four commandments or the first table corresponds to the greatest commandment, which is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

And the second uh table of the law, the sixth commandment, the second six commandments, uh commandments five through six, nope, nope, five through ten, uh, are the uh second table, which corresponds to loving your neighbor as yourself.

And so the summary of the Ten Commandments is given to us by our Lord of the two greatest commandments.

Last week we looked at honor your mother and father as the first of the second table, this commandment, which uh as we looked at it, we saw the implications of it organize the whole of human society.

And the second one of these uh second table of the laws, the sixth commandment, which uh is you shall not murder.

So don't murder.

This is what our uh commandment is this morning.

What the sixth commandment is really about is about how you should love life.

The Christian ethic can be understood like this we love life, and we love things that lead to life, and we hate death, and we hate things that lead to death.

This is the summary of the Christian ethic.

Now, it it's uh it sounds simple at its face, uh, but it's it's very important to recognize what we want to celebrate.

We want to celebrate life.

We don't want to celebrate death.

We want to love things that lead to life and flourishing.

One of the um, you know, I quote a lot of different theologians and I reference a lot of movies, and you know, you get what you get sometimes with your pastor, you get what you get.

And uh the um uh but there's probably a reference that I make more frequently than any other reference up here, but uh but is rarely picked up on.

I'm basically constantly referencing Norm MacDonald.

Like my whole life is like a perpetual Norm MacDonald reference, which you may or may not have picked up on.

But he has this great quote about life, and he says, and I I want to draw our attention to it, and because it's it's basically the summary of this sermon.

He says, I like life.

In fact, I love life.

I think it's the best gig there is.

You can go to Denny's, wear a hat, whatever you want to do.

This is the disposition I want to cultivate in our hearts.

This type of love for life.

Love life.

Go to Denny's, wear a hat.

Best gig you can get.

Now you shall not murder, just like the other commandments that we've looked at.

It's one of those that you think you know what it means, then you read it, you start thinking about it, and you apply it to fringe cases, and you realize I'm not sure that I have a real handle on this.

So the way that I wanted to approach this one, and I think how we how we need to, is to uh we're gonna approach this commandment with some like you uh sixth commandment, you shall not murder.

Now let's scroll and click over to the FAQ's page.

We're going to look at some of the frequently asked questions about the uh commandment uh to not murder.

So let's start with the first one.

Um murder or kill.

Is the commandment uh a prohibition against all killing?

Or is the commandment a prohibition against a particular type of killing, which we'd call murder?

You're perhaps familiar with the Ten Commandments in the KJV, the King James Version, and that says you shall not kill, is the way that they choose to translate this this word.

But the ESV, which we use here most frequently uh as a church, which I preach from basically all the time, is uh uh they use the they translate the word you shall not murder.

And the translation you shall not murder is the more appropriate translation because there is such a thing as lawful killing.

There is such a thing as the taking of life, the killing, which is not sinful.

So these instances would be judicial punishment.

So a a uh um judicial authority, you know, a legitimate judicial authority implementing the death penalty in a legitimate way is not a violation of the sixth command.

Likewise, self-defense.

Instances of killing in order to preserve life, killing in order to defend your own life or the lives of others, is not a violation of the Sixth Commandment.

Or just war.

So waging a just war, uh, defending your country or justly attacking another nation for reasons that you can read a lot about if you want to read about just war, uh, is a legitimate uh use of killing.

And so the translation you shall not kill is is too broad, it's it's too broad of a category.

And that's why the uh ESV translates it, you shall not murder.

But murder is in a is in another sense, it's it's all it's really too narrow of a word for the sixth commandment.

Because murder, when we when somebody is charged with murder, that means that we are charging them with a premeditated act of killing somebody.

Uh but the sixth commandment is not just about premeditated acts of killing.

The sixth commandment also includes what we would call manslaughter, which, as many have pointed out, sounds way worse than murder and is not as bad.

It's a it's a it's the word we use for accidentally killing, which we could use a new one.

So we'll just uh we'll just all have to keep that straight together in our minds as I talk about manslaughter.

But the uh the killing in the sixth commandment includes, it is a prohibition against accidentally killing.

It's a prohibition, uh, so it's it's not killing generally.

Remember, that's too broad of a word.

And although we translate it with murder, we have to think of the murder that's being used here.

It's a fly, we have to think of the murder that's being used here uh as a uh a bit more broad than we normally use murder to include accidental killing as well.

Now we can see these implications of this word uh because as we read through the rest of Exodus, as we read through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, what we see is the judicial application of the Ten Commandments for the nation of Israel.

That's the way to understand the rest of the laws that you're reading throughout uh scripture as you continue reading after the Ten Commandments.

What we're seeing, what we receive in the Ten Commandments is not a judicial law, it is a moral law.

Because you'll notice that the Ten Commandments don't include with them what happens to you if you violate them.

That's not included in the Ten Commandments.

What the Ten Commandments is saying is here is the moral law, what you ought not to do before God.

And then as we look at the rest of the law throughout the scripture, what we see is you can think of it as something like case law.

And we see how the Holy Spirit inspired the leaders of Israel to apply the moral law in a perfect way to their judicial society.

So that what we'll see is that they have nuanced applications of the law.

For some instances of killing, the person who kills is to be killed because they killed.

For other instances of the law, we'll see that the person who kills is not to be killed, but they are to go to a city of refuge to spend the rest of their days so that they might be hidden from the retribu retribution of the family members of the one who is killed.

So we need to establish these categories clearly in our mind between the moral law and the judicial application of the law.

Okay, so what we see here in the sixth commandment is uh uh I think we I think we grasp the categories now.

It is not just killing, that's too broad.

It is not just murder, that's too narrow, because it also includes manslaughter.

So this pushes us into, I think one of it it pushes into judicial questions because of the implications of the moral law.

So as I've explained before, the Ten Commandments are not just uh some like ad hoc innovations that God had uh one day and imagined these.

These are the explication, the making plain or the making explicit in language, creational norms which God has built into the fabric of creation itself.

And he's making these creational norms explicit for the people of God.

And we can see this especially in the sixth commandment, because the sixth commandment is really established with Noah right after the flood.

Right after the flood, the sixth commandment is made really plain.

Another way you can see, think of these commandments, is the uh uh honor your mother and father is the uh fifth commandment, right?

And then the sixth commandment is you shall not murder.

Well, you can see this narratively in the Adam and Eve dishonoring the authority of God that's placed above them, Adam dishonoring his father God, and then what's the narratively, the sequence, what happens next is Cain murders Abel.

So we see a fifth commandment violation, and then generationally we see a sixth commandment violation.

But it's more to the point spelled out in Genesis 9.

Right after the flood, Noah gets off the ark, and they're the only ones around, and God establishes a covenant with Noah that he will preserve the world and its uh seasons and cycles, and he will not destroy the world again by a flood.

And he establishes and makes clear and plain to Noah the sanctity of human life above all other life on earth.

In Genesis 9, verses 5 through 6, he commands him and he says, And for your lifeblood, God speaks to Noah, and for your lifeblood, I will require a reckoning.

Genesis 9:5–6

From every beast I will require it, and from man.

From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man.

Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed.

For God made man in his own image.

So what God is explaining to Noah there is that the requirement of justice, the requirement of retributive justice, punishing in kind for the offense that it takes place against a person, is based in the principle that all people are made in the image of God.

And so that means when someone is killed, when someone is murdered, when their life is taken from them unjustly by another man or even by a beast, by an animal, God will require a reckoning.

God will require justice to be done against that person.

So there is a high, an incredibly high value on human life that God has built into creation.

And that's because he has connected it directly to himself, as all people are his image bearers.

You know, what is it that Cain says when he's questioned about the whereabouts of Abel by God?

Cain responds and says, Am I my brother's keeper?

And there weren't many people around at that time, but this is a this is a little microcosm example of the way we ought to feel about all of humanity.

Because we all come from Adam, and then it shrinks down again, and then we all come from Noah.

And that means that the whole of humanity is united in a brotherhood that is the image of God within us.

And so we ought to be jealous of the lives of our fellow people.

We ought to be protective of our own lives and of the lives of others.

And the way that God has instituted that this honoring of life would take place for his people in the covenant with Noah and for the whole of creation at the covenant with Noah, because everybody comes from Noah, is that when somebody is when someone murders, then they are to be killed.

That is the principle of justice for mankind.

Which means the principle that we can draw from this is if somebody murders someone else, and we do not enact justice against the murderer by taking their life, what we are doing is we are denying the image of God in the victim.

We are saying that the victim is not sufficient, not sufficiently the image of God for justice to be enacted against their perpetrator.

This is the principle of Lex Talionis, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, life for life.

Now, you've heard probably things about the principle of about lex talionis.

You probably maybe you haven't heard it in Latin, but you've heard eye for an eye.

And when you've heard uh about this this principle, you've probably heard something like an eye for an eye leaves leaves the whole world blind, right?

These are that's how colloquially we understand it.

So when we hear an eye for an eye, we think bad, not good.

Eye for an eye, this is an archaic form of justice.

It is not an archaic form of justice.

What eye for an eye is, because it's in the Bible, you know.

So what an eye for an eye is, it is a requirement and a limit.

So you know there's a wartime principle of proportionality.

And you may have heard this, you may be familiar with it if you watched the if you watched the West Wing, it has one of the best episodes on proportionality that you can see.

Uh proportionality is if a um country, you know, uh attacks one of your military bases, you cannot uh uh you know drop a nuclear bomb on the on the country and annihilate the whole country.

That uh would be a disproportionate response and it would be an unjust response.

Now that's something that we kind of intuit in foreign policy.

We sort of intuit that understanding, but you know why we intuit that understanding, what that principle is.

That principle is the biblical principle of an eye for an eye.

Because what that means is if uh if an uh if an eye is lost, if somebody you know hits you and you go blind, you can't murder them.

There is a proportion in the response, there is a limit to this.

And so what this principle shows us that God gives us in Genesis 9 is not simply that there is a uh it is it is the it shows us the value of life, that it is to be valued so highly that when even an animal, you know, if a bear attacks someone and kills them, we should kill the bear.

You know, this is why Jaws is such a great Bible story.

We've got this shark killing all these people, we should go uh enact vengeance on a shark.

Just the most if any of you find yourselves in a situation like that and you don't call me, just sounds like the most fun you could ever have with your friends.

But the uh uh so it is sorry, I got distracted by Jaws, but the the it shows us the value of human life, how highly valued it is to be because it is the image of God.

It also shows us that human life is not of infinite value.

The loss of one life does not justify the taking of 10,000.

There is a limit, there's a proportionality to how we are called to understand.

Do you see the wisdom of the law of God for how we are to understand the value of human life?

So we can consider this with regards to the death penalty.

That can be one of our frequently asked questions.

What about the death penalty?

Well, we can see that there is something like a requirement of the death penalty in a moral sense.

We morally ought to.

So remember remember our categories moral and judicial.

Now, here's another question.

Do we have a society or a civilization which isn't able to morally enact the death penalty?

Well, that's another question.

How could it be enacted?

In a timely manner or a slow manner?

In a just way or an unjust way?

These are judicial questions.

So, what would a good society do?

Say you were in a society which morally ought to enact the death penalty, which is every society for murder.

Every society morally ought to enact the death penalty, lest they uh uh deny the law of God over them, lest they they deny the humanity of their citizens, the image of godness of their citizens.

But within but that society is at such a level of corruption and and uh uh wickedness that they're unable to enact uh this this you know baseline noaic principle.

Then what they should do is they should seek, that society should seek to reform themselves so that they would be able to participate in the law of God in an appropriate way.

That's why we have moral and we have judicial.

You see, these different categories.

One, it requires a lot of creativity and difficulty to apply among the people, that's the judicial part.

One is very clear and plain to understand, that's the moral part, which the Lord gives to us.

What about self-defense?

This is often this is another one in which the um you shall not murder comes up.

And this is something like the in the you shall not bear false witness, um you'll see that these same these same arguments often take place uh with these with these commandments, you shall not murder and you shall not bear false witness.

The example for you shall not murder is somebody, you know, jumps out of the bushes and points a gun at you and your family.

Are you allowed to kill them as they threaten you?

The answer is yes.

Yes, you are.

And the reason that you are is because that is actually obedience to the sixth commandment.

Because the sixth commandment is about not murdering, and it is about the preservation of life, and it is about the defense of the innocence.

And so, in order to obey the sixth commandment, there is a requirement of self-defense in the biblical law.

One of the ways that we can see this, but but this, of course, we in the same way we sh and so what happens there is you can see, like, yeah, but that's killing.

And so when people take the commandments and they they blanket, there's no killing, and you'll see a lot of um sects of Christianity that uh teach uh a sort of Christian pacifism.

The reason that that can't be taught is because it's a neglect of the whole council of God, uh, the teaching of Christian pacifism.

Likewise, and what I hope you begin to see is if you see somebody teaching something like uh uh Christian pacifism, what you should hear in the back of your mind is they are denying the image of God in man.

Because there will be victims.

That is the world that we live in.

And what they are saying is these victims are not worthy of God's justice.

That's what you should hear when somebody claims a Christian pacifism.

It'll take some, you know, mind training because they're typically very sweet people.

You know, and it doesn't feel like they're denying the image of God.

They don't feel like that's what they're doing.

Um but at the level of the Bible's teaching, it's plainly the case.

It's plainly the case.

It is a way of hating life.

In Exodus 22, verses 2 through 3, here's one of the applications of the sixth commandment that's given to us in the remainder of the law.

Exodus 22:2–3

It says, if a thief is found breaking in and is struck so that he dies, there shall be no blood guilt for him.

So if a thief is found breaking into your house and you strike the thief so that he dies, there's no blood guilt for the thief.

It's done, it's settled.

No, there will be there's no punishment for the person who is defending his house.

Now, verse 3 says, but if the sun has risen on him, there shall be blood guilt for him.

Do you see, do you see the wisdom of the way that that God's law is applied in Israel?

The the beauty of the wisdom of the application of the sixth commandment.

Because here's you may be thinking, well, sun up, sun down, who cares?

Why does that make someone's life there be blood guilt or not blood guilt?

Well, well, you know, there's no uh lights.

They didn't have electricity, you know?

And you're probably not waking up and lighting a candle situation.

So that means that at nighttime, it's dark.

And when it's dark, you can't clearly identify the nature of a threat.

And so, because of your inability to identify the nature of a threat, it is sensible and even right for you to be able to eliminate that threat because of your inability to identify it.

That's why the scripture demonstrates there should be no punishment for such an occasion against the person who kills.

But if it is daylight, and what you can think of this as is if you have reason to if you have reason to understand that the person breaking into your house, into your house, is merely a thief, then you don't have a right to kill them.

So this shows us that human life is of incredible value.

Even the life of the thief cannot be taken because they are a thief.

You cannot take their life into your hands because they take your things.

Is not life of more value than that?

Is it not more important than your stuff?

This is the principle that's being demonstrated here.

So we see here that there is a principle of self-defense, and there is a principle of a limit to that self-defense.

And what you can see is that both of these are grounded in the nature of all people being in the image of God.

Because all people are in the image of God, then it is appropriate to kill a murderer, and it is inappropriate to kill a thief.

It is appropriate to defend yourself and your family and your life and the lives of the innocent and of loved ones, even using lethal force.

It is inappropriate to use lethal force for the defense of lesser things.

See, there's a calculus of value here.

Likewise, so we've got the death penalty, self-defense.

We should also consider just war.

Throughout the scriptures, we see that that God does not require, for example, the uh uh Roman soldiers who come to faith, there is no requirement that they step away from their military obligations.

In fact, there's got Jesus even goes so far as to say, you know, if one of those soldiers comes to you and he asks you to carry his stuff for one mile, which is the Roman soldiers were allowed to do that, because a mile's a thousand paces of a Roman soldier, which is why our system of measurement is the best.

Because it's so humane and human-centered.

A kilometer, a thousand meters, it's all it's it's it's heady and enlightenment, non-human, not good.

But a thousand paces of a Roman soldier, I say that and we all immediately know how much that is.

Now, if a Roman soldier comes to you and says, Come with me, you have to carry this a mile, Jesus says, carry those things with him two miles.

Carry it a second mile with him.

This is support of a military endeavor.

It's not sinful.

It's even good.

Jesus uh desires the demonstration of that.

So there is uh there are uh there is such a thing of just war, of just killing in war, the defense of a homeland.

Deuteronomy 20 lays out the principles for a just war.

And uh what the Lord requires of the leaders of Israel, uh, if they were to have a further conquest beyond the conquest of the land of Canaan, which was permissible for them, well, the initial step of that would be that they would go to the leaders of that nation and they would uh first seek peace.

First seek peace with the leaders of that nation.

And if peace was able to be established, then they would do something like establish free trade or establish some sort of some sort of level of cooperation.

And they would basically say, like, hey, we're the empire, you get to be Star Wars made empire a bad word, but think of empire neutrally.

We're the empire, and you will serve us in some way, and and we know how to run a civilization, and it's gonna be great for you.

It's gonna be awesome.

And that other nation might say, Yeah, you're right, that does sound great.

That does sound awesome.

Then they would they would rule over them.

Uh if otherwise, if they don't accept the terms of peace, then there becomes reasons for just war.

But you can see that even in war, in foreign policy, there is an initial seeking of peace and the preservation of life.

That the purpose of war is finally for the preservation of life and the life of the innocent and the lives of those that the Lord has given his people to defend.

And so the sixth commandment cannot be a prohibition of war either.

Finally, let's turn to manslaughter, which is better than murder.

The sixth commandment is also a prohibition against manslaughter.

Now, here's the weird one, and this is where we're we're gonna get we're gonna start to draw a little closer and move out of the um, you know, philosophy ethics 101 class that we've been having.

There were no trolley problems this morning.

I resisted how can there be a moral prohibition against manslaughter?

It is an accident.

How can there be a prohibition against accidents that how can there be a moral prohibition against accidents taking place?

That's what we should be wondering.

Well, we see the the um prohibition against it because we see in the moral, in the judicial law, in the judicial law's application of this moral law, which is the sixth commandment, throughout uh the scriptures, we see that the person who accidentally kills another person receives a strict consequence.

In Exodus 21, 12 through 13 it says, Whoever strikes a man so that he dies shall be put to death.

But if he did not lie in wait for him, but God let him fall into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place to which he may flee.

This is that strange part that you may remember from some Bible reading plan or something.

The cities of refuge, that there are certain cities that are placed within Israel that are cities of refuge.

And what happens is if uh one example given in the scripture is you're swinging an axe, you know, you're cutting down a tree, you know when you do this, and your axe head flies off.

And imagine your axe head flies off and it hits some someone standing by and it kills them.

Well, this isn't this is an accidental, it kind of sounds like a pun.

Murder.

Or yeah, an accidental murder, manslaughter.

Well, what happens if you commit one of those, if you do that?

Well, you are given a city of refuge to flee to, so that the family does not uh enact their vengeance upon you, which they would uh justly be able to do.

Uh, but you are never allowed to leave that city.

So once you go to that city, you are never allowed to leave that city.

Now, this is one of those where I'm like banging my head against the wall, like, what does it mean?

How am I gonna preach this in two days?

Uh situations, which happens about once a week in my experience.

And John Frame really opened this for me.

Because what he describes here is what's what's being shown to us here is a principle in the sixth commandment, which he calls the principle of carefulness.

The principle of carefulness.

What the sixth commandment requires of us is that we show a strong care for the lives around us, that we care for the people that are around us, that we care for the lives of the people in the world.

And why this is shown in this in this principle, and he's laid this out so beautifully, is that the man who commits manslaughter or or the woman who commits manslaughter was not being careful with the lives around them.

And now their punishment is that they must be especially careful with their own life for the rest of their lives.

They cannot set foot outside of the city of refuge.

But they must off they must offer a special care for their own lives.

Now, there is a um now that we now that we see the principle of carefulness, you can see how the sixth commandment is being explicated all over the um law of God, uh, and in these very in these very particular ways.

You know, with a classic example is that if you uh it was illegal in Israel to build um a house that didn't have a railing around the roof.

This is sort of the classic example.

And why couldn't you have a railing around the roof?

Well, because people, you know, would hang out on the roofs of their homes all the time.

And to not have a railing up there is to put your family and yourself and your friends in danger of falling off the roof.

You guys know about falling off roofs?

This is an ancient problem.

And what what is that to not put a railing on your roof is a violation of the sixth commandment?

Because it is saying that the lives of my own life and the lives of my neighbors are not worth being careful with.

The lives of my neighbors actually need to be preserved and protected.

Therefore, you must put a railing around your roof.

You can hear of it with like taking care of animals.

You know, if uh in the law of sensible, it's like, hey, if your ox mauls someone, but your ox has never done anything like that before, is like a like an ox freak out, then we're not gonna hold you accountable for that.

But if we but if there's been like news of your ox, and it there's been uh dangerous situations that we've seen like this before, and you had good reason, and yet you still allowed people around it, or you didn't keep it contained in such a way that would prevent something like this, then you're liable for murder.

You're liable for murder.

So there's this principle of carefulness that is within the sixth commandment that you can see all hinges on what is this love that we are meant to have for the image of God in others.

We aren't even able to say, pay attention for yourself.

If you fall, you fall.

You can't walk on a flat surface without falling off a cliff.

No, we don't get to say that type of thing.

We must be proactively careful for people, full of care for the circumstances of people and their and their safety for the preservation of life.

That's what we should be seeking here.

Now you can see, now that you see within the sixth commandment, this principle of carefulness within it, now you can understand what Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount.

What Jesus is doing in the Sermon on the Mount is he's taking this principle, which is already implicit in the Sixth Commandment, and the way that the Sixth Commandment is applied in the judicial law for Israel in the rest of the scriptures.

And he's saying this principle of carefulness extends not only to your circumstances, but it extends to your very heart.

That's what Jesus is doing.

He's showing us the same principle.

Matthew 5, 21 through 23 through 22, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, 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 counsel, and whoever says, You fool, will be liable to the hell of fire.

You see, Jesus looks at this, at the road to murder, at the road to manslaughter, at the negligence or the lack of care for our fellow man, and he says, This road begins in your heart.

It begins with a carelessness with the way that you speak about others.

This is a seed of murder.

It begins with a cursing of your fellow man, calling them you fool, cultivating anger and hatred towards them in your heart.

So what we see in Jesus' explication of the sixth commandment is that the sixth commandment is likewise a prohibition against undue anger towards your fellow man, and it is also a prohibition against verbal abuse towards your fellow man.

It is prohibition against all of the circumstances, it is carelessness with the relational circumstances that will lead to the breakdown of fellowship and finally the breakdown of life itself by murder.

Jesus recognizes this.

And that's why he pulls the sixth commandment right into your heart.

Now it's getting close.

Now it's getting not like ethics class games anymore.

Here's how highly Jesus considers this.

And here's another application of the sixth commandment as Jesus continues this teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.

In the next verses in 23 and 24, he says, So, if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go.

First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.

Allowing persistent relational dissension or tension to exist between you and your brothers is a violation of the sixth commandment.

If you merely hear that someone has something against you, it is more important to go and be reconciled to them than it is to worship the Lord.

You should go and take care of that first.

Then come and worship.

This is how highly the Lord values the image of God in his people.

Because that fractured relationship, this is the road to murder.

And so in seeing these this application of the sixth commandment that the Lord shows us, you can then begin to understand how it is that the Westminster Divines speak about the Sixth Commandment, which I know many of you were like, how can we understand how the Westminster Divines speak about the Sixth Commandment?

Well, wait, your wait is over.

In the larger catechism, question uh 135, which is what is required of you in the Sixth Commandment, I just will we'll just go through the list.

It's subduing all passions and avoiding all occasions, temptations, and practices which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any.

So subduing all passions.

You must have self-control to obey the sixth commandment.

Avoiding all occasions.

Man, that it looks like it's going to turn into a riot down there.

Don't go there.

You know, it looks like this is a crazy dangerous game that's being played in this circumstance.

It's a violation of the Sixth Commandment.

It's a denial of the image of God.

And practices which tend to the unjust taking away the life of any by just defense thereof against violence.

So, what else is required of us?

Just defense against violence is required of you in the sixth commandment.

Patient bearing of the hand of God.

You know, why is that one of them?

Why is patient bearing of the hand of God a requirement of the sixth commandment?

Because when you aren't patiently bearing the circumstances that God has placed you in, what you're doing is you're cultivating resentment.

And you're cultivating anger.

And when you're cultivating that anger and resentment, it's a seed and you can tend to it in your mind.

And when you tend to an acorn, it's not like, ah, but it may become a dandelion.

It's not the way seeds work.

When you tend to an acorn, it becomes one thing, becomes an oak tree.

When you tend to the seed of anger, it grows up into one thing, murder.

It grows up into murder.

Patient bearing of the hand of God, quietness of mind.

So if you if you have a noisy mind, which is meditating on the sinfulness of others towards you, meditating on vengeance that you could try and enact on your own behalf towards others, this is a violation of the sixth commandment.

What is so what else is required of you?

This next one should shock you.

What does the sixth commandment require?

Cheerfulness of spirit.

Cheerfulness of spirit.

Because you know what that does?

It preserves your life.

Cheerfulness of spirit, it preserves your life and the lives of those around you.

It leads to life, it paves the way for you to be reconciled.

A sober use of meat, drink, physic, which is like medicine, sleep, labor, and recreation.

Because these things tend toward the preservation of sober-mindedness, the maintaining of loving relationship with one another.

But the abuse of them leads to occasions in which we no longer care about ourselves or others.

You know, I do a lot of like making fun of Andrew Huberman, even though that's only that's because I like him and I do all the things.

And I am easily taken in by optimal protocols as like alternative moralities for myself.

But here's the good nod that I want to give to those.

Considering your own health is obedience to the sixth commandment.

Caring for your life, and supporting the caring for of the physical lives of those around you.

This is obedience to the sixth commandment.

Charitable thoughts, love, compassion, meekness, gentleness, kindness, peaceable, mild, and courteous speeches and behavior.

You should cultivate patterns of speeches and behavior which are able to preserve loving unions between one another.

Now we're not allowed to violate the truth, of course, but we aren't allowed to inflame peaceable, mild, and courteous speeches and behavior, forbearance.

You know what forbearance is?

It's letting it go.

Forbearance is, I'm just gonna let it go.

And then letting it go.

Like you show me a murder, I'll show you some lack of forbearance somewhere upstream.

That's a part of it.

Even with like a lack of carefulness, is often like I'm not able to be patient enough to offer the care that's necessary.

This is a lack of love.

Forbearance, here's a good one: readiness to be reconciled, a readiness in your heart to be reconciled.

This is obedience to the sixth commandment.

Something has come between you and a brother or you and a sister.

You're ready to be reconciled to them.

This is what the sixth commandment requires.

Patient bearing and forgiving of injuries.

You want to obey the sixth commandment?

Then when someone sins against you, you forgive them.

And requitting good for evil.

They curse you, you bless them.

This is obedience to the sixth commandment.

Comforting and succoring the distressed.

Why is that the sixth commandment?

Because it is for the preservation of their own life.

When people are despairing of life itself, you obey the sixth commandment by moving into, moving into proximity to them, closeness with them, to call them back into the wonder and loveliness of life.

To say things like, don't forget, we can go to Denny's, we can wear a hat.

It's great, you're gonna like it out here.

Cultivating the loveliness of life for others.

This is the requirement of the sixth commandment.

And protecting and defending the innocent.

That means we're very bad at this as a society.

We're very bad at um identifying victims, uh, people who are innocent and people who are who are you know criminals.

And we we need to keep those clear in our minds in order to defend the sixth commandment or obey the sixth commandment.

So, as we have seen here, the sixth commandment reaches down into the depths of our hearts.

And you should consider, uh you should read through this.

You can Google it, it's free online, Westminster Larger Catechism, question 135.

And read through this and lay your own heart beside it and consider what are the stakes that Jesus saw these things at is the stakes of life and death.

And we are the people that love life.

Now, you can walk through all of these, and I just want you to imagine it, walking through these and considering how.

So that you can see, as you can see through this, especially in the catechism, your violation of the sixth commandment requires your life, life for life.

But our Lord has laid his life down on our behalf, so that we might come to God under the covering of his blood in perfect justice.

So that when you see these commandments, you're not weighed down by the burdensome nature of them, and you are not crushed by guilt before the Lord.

Instead, you look to Christ, you see how he has perfectly fulfilled them on your behalf, and then you should wonder at the beauty of what life could look like in obedience to them, because this is what he is calling you to.

When we look at our Lord, we should see he loved life.

He loved our eternal life so much that he was willing to lay down his life to preserve it.

This is a glorious picture of the fulfillment of the sixth commandment that we see in our Lord.

Let's pray.

Father, you are so gracious to us.

How obviously we ought to love life that you have given to us and hate death, and how obviously we ought to care for and love the lives of those around us who are in your image.

Lord, but we confess that we have neglected this, we have cultivated dour spirits, we have thought ourselves shrewd and clever by talking about how terrible life is, and we have made it something of no real value that doesn't really mean anything.

But Father, our life is of unthinkable value, and our lives are secured in that value in you, because we have died, but our life is hidden with Christ in God.

And when Christ, who is our life, appears, then we will appear also with him in glory.

We thank you, Lord, for rescuing our lives from death, even at the cost of death yourself.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.