Exodus 20:13 You shall not kill. Man alone has the inspiration of Deity. This Divine inbreathing is the august peculiarity which separates man discretively and everlastingly from the animal creation. On his body side he sprang from dust; on his soul side he sprang with the animals; on his spirit side he sprang from God. Thus in his very beginning, in the original make-up of him, man was a religious being. Coming into existence as Jehovah's inbreathing, man was, in the very fact of being Divinely inbreathed, God's Son and Image. Hence it is that the human body is such a sacred thing. It is the shrine of God's Son, God's image, God's likeness, God's spirit, God's breath. As such it is the priceless casket of unknown sacred potentialities. Hence, murder is, in the intensest sense of the word, sacrilege: not only a crime against man, but a crime against God, in whose image man is made. But murder may be of varying degrees of atrocity. Accordingly, let us now glance at some of the various forms of murder. 1. And, first, there is the murder which is born of malice, or murder in the common acceptation of the term. Murder of this kind, whether perpetrated swiftly, as by the bullet, or slowly, as by arsenic, is the most fiendish of crimes. And nature, in an especial manner, ever waits to avenge it. Nor is this strange; for, as we have seen, man, on his body side, is linked with the material creation. The same elements which compose our physical organism compose, although in different proportions, the water we drink, the food we eat, the air we breathe, the dust we await. Hence nature herself often becomes a principal factor in the detection of the murderer. She ever stands ready to be murder's avenger, supplying the prosecuting attorney with her re-agents, even with blood-corpuscles themselves. 2. Again, there is the murder which is born of sudden passion: the murder, for example, of lynch-law, when a mob usurps the functions of a court of justice; the murder of sudden vengeance, as when an outraged husband encounters and slays the destroyer of his home; the murder of manslaughter, whether voluntary or involuntary, whether provoked by insult, by menace, or by alcohol. 3. Again, there is the murder which is born of despair. Suicide, when committed by a sane person, is murder. Indeed, how often the two crimes are committed by the same person — the murderer first slaying his victim, then slaying himself. Justly does the law pronounce a suicide a felo de se — that is, one who makes a felon of himself, suicide being felonious self-murder. 4. Again, there is the murder which is born of shame: I mean infanticide. 5. Again, there if the murder which is born of harmful occupations. First in this list I would put the dram shop; it matters not that the killing is slow; the killing is moral murder; and before every saloon I would post a placard.bearing the Sinaitic legend: "Thou shalt not kill." Again, there is the sale, when not prescribed by the physician, of narcotic drugs, in their various forms, from opium joints to chloral drops. Again, there are the slow murders which are perpetrated in houses of nameless sin — murders which are particularly sacrilegious, because, as we have seen, the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. 6. Again, there is the murder which is born of thoughtlessness (see Deuteronomy 22:8). It is one of the cheering signs of the times that the public is awakening to the sense of its grave responsibility in this direction, for example, demanding that life shall not be imperiled by the failure to provide substantial structures, fire-escapes, life-preservers, railway precautions, sanitary arrangements of fresh air and wholesome food and pure water and clean streets, isolated refuges for sufferers from contagious and infectious diseases, competent physicians and druggists and nurses, sufficient hours for rest on the part of operatives, excursions for children, sanitariums for the poor, parks and recreation grounds — in brief, hygienic regulations in general. 7. And now let us ponder Christ's interpretation of the law against murder (Matthew 5:21, 22). According to Him, murder is not a matter of outward act, but of inward feeling: not a question of standing before the community, but of character before the All-seeing. No murder was ever committed which did not begin in the heart. Who of us has kept the Sixth Commandment as the Divine Man has interpreted it? Who of us has not been angry, passionate, revengeful, petulant? Remembering, then, these quarrels of ours, these grudges and piques and faults of temper, who of us is not in danger of the eternal Gehenna? But we are not yet through with the Sixth Commandment. Although it is prohibitive in form, saying, Thou shalt not kill, yet it is affirmative in spirit, saying, Thou shalt love. (G. D. Boardman.) Parallel Verses KJV: Thou shalt not kill. |
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