Wednesday
Wednesday
Commandment 6
You shall not murder.
Exodus 20:13
The more familiar translation “you shall not kill” is misleading. The sixth commandment cannot be interpreted as an absolute ban on all killing, including the killing of animals, since the same Mosaic law contained the sacrificial system, capital punishment for extreme offenses, and even “holy war” against the Canaanites. It is certainly possible to argue in favor of being a vegetarian, an abolitionist, or a pacifist on other grounds, but not on this ground. What the sixth commandment prohibits is the unauthorized shedding of innocent blood, that is, murder. For Scripture insists on the sanctity not so much of life in general (which is a Buddhist doctrine) as of human life in particular, because it is the life of human beings made in God’s image. It is this that makes murder such a heinous offense and indeed a capital offense (Gen. 9:6; Rom. 13:4), even if, since God himself protected the first murderer, the sentence should be commuted if there are any mitigating circumstances.
The same principle of the sanctity of human life is at stake when the human embryo is threatened. The embryo is at the very least a human being in the making and should therefore be inviolable. Consequently, most Christian opinion is pro-life rather than pro-choice. It rejects the destruction of the embryo by abortion as a form of murder, except for a very few carefully defined exceptions, and believes that experimentation on human embryos should be banned by law.
War is another issue that involves the taking of human life. Throughout the centuries Christian opinion has been divided. Pacifists argue that Jesus’s teaching and example prohibit all retaliation. But defenders of the “just war” theory believe that war may be permissible as the lesser of two evils if several conditions are fulfilled. They justify war as a last resort only and reject the use of all weapons of mass destruction because in the nature of the case these are both uncontrolled and indiscriminate. Our final comment on the sixth commandment is to note that Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount went beyond the deed of murder to murderous thoughts and insulting words (Matt. 5:21–22). The apostle John was quite outspoken, writing, “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15).
For further reading: 1 John 3:11–15