10 Life Is Sacred
Life Is Sacred
The sixth commandment (Exodus 20:13; Deuteronomy 5:17) is “you shall not kill” (RSV) or “murder” (RV, NEB). The word signifies malicious and unlawful killing, so “murder” is more accurate. Judicial execution (e.g., for murder) and killing in war are not in view; God actually calls for both in the very books from which the commandment comes (see Exodus 21:12-17; Deuteronomy 20:10-18). However strongly we may think the death penalty inadvisable and even hateful (views vary), we may not invoke this commandment to prove our point; in its context, it has no bearing on either question, but deals with private morality.
Man in God’s Image
The commandment rests on the principle that human life is holy, first because it is God’s gift and second because man bears God’s image (Genesis 1:27; 9:6). Human life is thus the most precious and sacred thing in the world, and to end it, or direct its ending, is God’s prerogative alone. We honor God by respecting his image in each other, which means consistently preserving life and furthering each other’s welfare in all possible ways.
There are several things, not always called murder, which the commandment rules out. First is malice, the desire to diminish someone or, as we say, to “see him dead.” Jesus underlined this. “Anyone who nurses anger against his brother must be brought to judgment . . . if he sneers at him he will have to answer for it in the fires of hell” (Matthew 5:22, NEB). Hate in the heart can be as much murder as violence against the person.
Second, the commandment rules out all cruelty or violence that could weaken or shorten another person’s life. It is grievous to see how crimes against the person (mugging and bombing, for instance) have increased in supposedly Christian countries, while brainwashing and interrogation by torture (and sometimes torture without the interrogation) have established themselves as standard resources of modern militarism. Had the sixth commandment been pondered, none of this would be.
Killing the Fetus
Third, the commandment rules out abortion because, as genetic science shows, the fetus is from the moment of conception a human being in process (we might say) of arriving. The fact that for several months it cannot survive outside the womb does not affect its right to the same protection that other human beings merit, and which it will itself merit after birth. Abortion can only ever be justified (and then only as a necessary evil) when the pregnancy genuinely endangers the mother’s life—and, as doctors know, there are few such cases today. Legalizing abortion on other grounds is a social evil, whatever arguments of convenience are invoked.
Fourth, the commandment rules out suicide and euthanasia. Suicide (self-murder) is the act of a mind unhinged; though such acts do not of themselves forfeit God’s grace, as was once thought, yet suicide is a direct breach of God’s command. So is euthanasia, which is either suicide by remote control or murder based on the idea that we may lawfully “put people out of their misery” just as we lawfully shoot horses or get vets to put pets to sleep. But we may not bracket a human being with horses or pets, even if he himself in a pain-maddened moment asks us to. It is good that the law treats both suicide and euthanasia as illegal acts.
(Letting the body die when no hope of recovering consciousness remains is not, of course, euthanasia; in that case, the person must be regarded as in the most important sense dead already. The difficulty in these cases is to judge when the point at which consciousness cannot return has been reached.)
The killing of millions of Jews and cripples by the Nazis, and of millions of Russians by Russian Communists in this century shows whither denial of the sanctity of human life leads. The sixth commandment points the truer and better way.
Murderers
As murder storywriters assume, and as most of us learn in experience, we have in us capacies for fury, fear, envy, greed, conceit, callousness, and hate which, given the right provocation, could make killers out of us all—baby-batterers or Bluebeards, professional thugs or amateur hit men. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown explained his method of detection by saying, “You see, it was I who killed all those people”—in the sense that he looked within himself to find the mentality that would produce the crime he was investigating, and did in fact discover it there. Chesterton lets him moralize:
“No man’s really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he’s realized exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and sneering, and talking about ‘criminals,’ as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away . . . till he’s squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat.”
Brown, though fictitious, states fact. When the fathomless wells of rage and hatred in the normal human heart are tapped, the results are fearful. “There but for the grace of God go I.” Only restraining and renewing grace enables anyone to keep the sixth commandment.
Further Bible Study
Murder is evil:
Genesis 4:1-16; 9:1-7
Questions for Thought and Discussion
Why should hate be bracketed with murder? How do you cope with feelings of fury and hatred against other persons?
Do you agree with the position stated in this chapter on abortion and euthanasia? Why or why not?
What is the “truer and better way” that is referred to?