The 6th Commandment: Do Not Murder

I also want to mention, for those who are just visiting, we've got a shorter first half here, because after we have a short chat about this message, we'll have about a 10-minute break, and then we've got A.M.L. McKeelan coming up. And I really am A.M.L.'s Bible study on love, which I think will be an interesting contrast to my study, our sermon today, which is on the sixth commandment. And if you've done your math, that says, you shall not murder. You shall not murder is one of the 10 great commandments recorded thousands of years ago. And as I initially reflected on this topic, I thought is really, I struggled a little bit to relate to it, because, you know, I don't want to make this the pastor confessional hour here, right? But I've broken the 10 commandments, right? Certainly in spirit. And as I kind of went through all those, I thought, okay, well, yeah, in spirit, I've done those things. But then I thought, well, murder. Well, you know, I'm good on that one. I haven't killed anybody. And I don't think I had, you know, my hate had risen to a level where I had murdered somebody in my heart. And then I thought again, and maybe some of you, as you think about the sixth commandment, you might be in the same boat. You're like, yeah, I got the nine. I'm good. Yeah, you know, I've had problems. But yeah, at least I'm good on that sixth commandment. Never done that before, you know, don't need Christ's sacrifice for that one. Thanks. And I'd ask you to think again. I'd ask you to think again as we go through this message. Now, some people listening to this message, perhaps in the future, perhaps now, have killed somebody. Maybe they've murdered somebody. Maybe they're in prison for murder. Or maybe they were involved in a crime where a murder was committed. So if you're listening, this is very real for you. And I ask your patience as the rest of us catch up to what it really means to be in that situation. Because in actual fact, all of us are susceptible to breaking this commandment, you shall not murder. And so I ask you to think with me about how that could be if you're in a space of, no, I know the nine I got a problem with, but this one I'm okay with.

And I think as we go through this command, we might begin to realize that it's not somebody's else's crime, right? That's kind of how we think. Oh yeah, as somebody else's crime. Well, you know, if you go on the FBI website, you can go to ucr.fbi.gov if you want to go look at this, you can see that the FBI identified 17,284 murders in the United States in 2017.

17,284 families scarred. 17,284 families damaged for generations.

Yet how many people have felt the intent to murder?

And how many actual attempted murders? I actually looked for that. I couldn't find that. Maybe you can find that at some point. I'm sure it's a lot more. And more significantly, how many more have felt a magnitude of hate in their hearts that they would want to kill somebody? But of course, they know they shouldn't. But if they could, they would. If we could see, I think, what God sees in the world today, I think we'd be chilled to the bone, honestly. I think we'd be chilled to the bone.

Surprisingly, murder is common enough that an enterprising data scientist actually calculated how many murderers the average person would meet in their lifetime. It's 11. Yeah, just walk by.

Like you just down the street, oh, there's a murderer, unapprehended. 11. The statistics show that we individually are going to walk by 11 murderers in our lifetimes. Now, we don't have to walk around wondering, you know, who might have done that? That's not my point. My point is that violence and murder is actually more common than we realize. Do you know, according to Dr. Norman Hare, a professor of science education at Cal State Northridge, the average young person finishing elementary school, okay? I don't know how many 13-year-olds or under 13s we've got in here, right? But the average person, young person finishing elementary school has watched 8,000 murders on television and movies. 8,000 by the time you hit 13.

I mean, that's... now, think about how many you've watched, right? Think about how many you've seen.

You know, I could quote statistics about R-rated movies and just the exponential increase in R-rated movies. And the fact that PG-13 is really kind of a euphemism for R, because it's really what it used to be years ago, and so forth and so on, because frankly this stuff sells. This stuff sells, and we become more and more hardened to it. Now, there was a time many, many years ago where if I had been giving this message, let's say 30 or 40 years ago, many of us here would have either been in some kind of combat position as a veteran, or we would have family members who had been either in Korea or in Vietnam. And so it would be a lot more personal if anybody's ever seen the Kinburn series on Vietnam, just a remarkable 10-part documentary. And what he labels one of his documentaries, one of that series, is the veneer of civilization. The veneer of civilization. And as one of the soldiers described, you know, he says, you think that what we do is we take these young men and we put them through combat training and send them into war so we can teach them how to kill?

He says, actually, that's just finishing school, because it's really already in our hearts, and that's what comes out when you're in those situations. And so, surprisingly, as despite what we might think, this is much more prevalent. And even here in Oakland, right, Oakland just kind of has a reputation of being a more violent area. Oakland, indeed, is one of the more violent cities in the country. But you know, Oakland? Oakland's murder rate is half of that of Detroit. Do you know Oakland's murder rate is nearly a quarter of St. Louis' murder rate. So even though we might think, okay, well, that's our connection, really, compared to many other cities, even Oakland is not that bad. And so it's easy to think of the commandment to not murder as something for other people or something that's out there, but actually, it's really all around us. And today I'd like to walk through the Sixth Commandment. I'd like to talk about some really important societal issues that we have to deal with as it relates to that. We'll define murder versus killing, because that's an important distinction. And that has distinctions, and we get into issues of capital punishment, we get into issues of military service and war, and we get into issues like abortion. And then finally, we're going to talk a little bit about the spiritual intent behind the commandment that Jesus Christ gave to New Covenant Christians. So let's talk about the commandment, first of all. Once you go over to Exodus 20, Exodus 20 verse 13, and let's read it. It's really one of the shortest verses in the Bible. Just four simple words. Exodus 20 verse 13. But we need to just look behind these words just a little bit to understand it. If you have an old King James version or a non-New King James version, it'll say, you shall not kill. And certain other versions say that, you shall not kill. My version here, the New King James, says you shall not murder.

And there's an important distinction between the word murder and the word kill. And that's where we're first going to start today. It says you shall not murder. Now this word murder in verse 13 is the Hebrew word rat-chat, R-A-W-T-S-A-K-H, R-A-W-T-S-A-K-H. And Strongs defines it as to murder or to slay. And it comes from a root which means to dash into pieces. You're going to completely obliterate. You're going to dash it into pieces. You're going to remove kind of what it was before. You're going to murder. Now we can contrast this term, you shall not murder, with another word which is often used for kill. Now let's go over to Numbers 35. Numbers 35 is a great piece of homework here that I can give you. You can look at tonight and tomorrow because it describes the cities of refuge. And if you were here last summer, we had actually Ambassador Bible College faculty members come and we had a seminar on Sunday and we went through sort of this judicial process that's described in Numbers 35. So I'm not going to do that here today. But I want to go to Numbers 35 verse 11. And you'll see here that it says that you shall appoint cities to be cities of refuge for you that the man slayer who kills, and that's a different word than murder, the man slayer who kills any person accidentally may flee there. And this word kill in this context is presumed to be accidental. And the word here for kill is naka, N-A-W-K-A-W, naka, and it means to smite. Now it could be murder or it could not be murder. Basically there's an uncertainty behind what this word means. So if you smite somebody, it might be with intention to murder, or it might be accidentally, or it might be in a fit of rage, right, where you didn't have any sort of premeditated intent to kill the person, but you killed the person nonetheless.

And so that's what this word kill means here. And so this section of scripture discusses the system of cities of refuge, like I said, which is a very interesting historical study. There were six cities and somebody could, if they had killed somebody, whether accidentally or not accidentally, they could flee to the city or one of these cities and the roads had to be maintained so they could get there quickly. And then they would be in another city where they would have some third party who wasn't, you know, connected to it, right, some independent third party that would judge whether or not the person had murdered somebody or whether it was accidental. And in verse 16, we begin to see where God shares certain what's been described by Gary Petty, who's another pastor in the United Church of God, as sort of case law. This is sort of ancient case law where God's going to share, okay, here's some examples of how you would discern whether somebody murdered or somebody didn't murder. So verse 16, if it's, he says, if he strikes him with an iron implement so that he dies, he is a murderer. The murderer shall surely be put to death. So if somebody was upset and they had some metal object in their hand and they and they hit somebody, maybe not intending to kill them, but the fact is they had some implement that was that was deadly and they should have known that if you hit somebody with a metal object, you risk killing them. Therefore, that's going to be considered murder. And this word murder in verse 16 is the same word that's in Exodus 20 verse 13. It's that same word, right? So this is what is described. This is, this person had murdered somebody. And it says here, and if he strikes him with a stone in in the hand by which one could die and he does die, he is a murderer and that murder shall surely be put to death. And so it begins to kind of go through these different examples of what is described here. And so when we get, by the time we get down to verse 22, we've seen these various sort of case law examples. And then we get to verse 22. It says, if he pushes him suddenly without enmity or throws anything at him without lying in wait, or uses a stone by which a man could die, throwing it at him without seeing him so that he dies while he was not his enemy or seeking his harm, then the congregation shall judge between the manslaughter and the avenger of blood according to these judgments. And now he's going to introduce this concept of manslaughter, which we have in our modern context of manslaughter. It was not intentional. Somebody was killed unintentionally. And so the congregation shall deliver the manslaughter from the hand of the avenger of blood, and the congregation shall return him to the city of refuge where he had fled, and he shall remain there until the death of the high priest who was anointed with the holy oil. And so we see then that even in the case of manslaughter, there's a penalty. It's not the penalty that you are going to be put to death. It's the penalty that you're going to have to stay in the city of refuge, perhaps for a very, very long time, kind of undetermined. And so we see several things discussed here. We see that there's a difference between murder, someone, murdering someone and killing someone. We see this concept of intent coming out. We see a concept of independence. We see a concept of due process described being in a third-party location. And we see also that there is capital punishment.

We see there is capital punishment because, as we read in verse 16, this murderer shall surely be put to death. So that is to say that God sanctions killing somebody who has gone through some due process and has been judged to be a murderer.

And so if we say thou shalt not kill, we're really not getting the intent because God actually sanctions killing in those ways. And of course, he is God and he gave life and he can take life.

And so that has implications all the way along. According to the website law.com, murder is defined as the killing of a human being by a sane person with intent, malice aforethought, and with no legal excuse or authority. That's the definition of murder. Whereas manslaughter, again from the same law.com, manslaughter is defined as the unlawful killing of another person without premeditation or so-called malice aforethought. So it's still, manslaughter is still an unlawful killing. But that raises the issue of if there's such a thing as an unlawful killing, then there would be such a thing as a lawful killing. Now, all of this is somewhat academic, but when you get start getting down to this, if you've ever met anybody who's accidentally killed somebody, there is a great trauma there. I had a roommate in college. We were freshmen together, we were roommates, we got to know one another pretty well. He went back home, he lived in Maryland. He went back home for the summer. And as he was driving back out to California to come back to college for his second year, he was driving through Arizona, through an Indian reservation, and a little child ran out in front of his car. And he hit this child full speed, and the child bounced off the windshield and died.

Do you know, he was so traumatized that eventually he just dropped out of college.

Just that very image of what he had done. This is a very traumatic thing. My wife describes a good friend, or a family she knew in France, where this man had accidentally killed somebody the same manner. And it just stays with that person. And obviously murder changes the psyche.

Murder changes the psyche even more so. We won't take the time to go through self-defense, but if you want to look this up, Exodus 22, 1 and 3 is a really good discussion of self-defense.

And the difference between being at night and being during the day, and how you handle intruders in your home. Really interesting discussion. Fundamentally, the value of and the preciousness and importance of life was so great that God goes into great detail around these things in Scripture.

Let's go into our second point, which is understanding how the biblical narrative, then, that we just described informs us as we think about capital punishment, as we think about military service and war, and as we think about abortion. So let's first consider capital punishment. So as we just saw in Numbers 35 here that we're in, capital punishment was executed and sanctioned by God in the Old Testament.

Now the challenge here comes when human forms of justice are devised to make decisions of life or death. And if we just simply ask the question, is capital punishment sanctioned in Scripture? Well, then the answer is yes. It is sanctioned in Scripture. It's clear. We could also turn to Genesis 9 verse 6. I won't quote that to you, but if you want to write that down, Genesis 9 verse 6 says, The blood of a man shall be shed for taking the blood of a man. This is not just some isolated situation. However, if we take it one step further and we ask how we can know for certain that someone had intent to kill and therefore is a murderer deserving capital punishment or a manslaughter deserving a lesser sentence, see now that gets to be very, very difficult because now we have to judge the intent of the heart. Further complicating this is that we are not part as Christians of a national system of justice. That is to say, we live in this land and we are under this justice system, but it is not a national system of justice that is administered by God the Father and Jesus Christ. It's a national system of justice that's administered by the laws of the United States of America. And we look for that greater system. And so now when we begin to take what we see in Scripture and say, well, this can just be applied here by men kind of under their own understanding, maybe based on loosely on some of these things, and we can kind of go with this and we can just be part of that, that's where we begin to have to tread very, very lightly. God commands His people to judge with righteous judgment. That's in John 7 verse 28, not looking on the appearance. It also says in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 20 that we are to be ambassadors for Christ.

If we're ambassadors, we're ambassadors to a system that is not what we're part of. It's just sort of an ambassador into that system. We're ambassadors of Jesus Christ to the United States, to the system here. And in a sense, the United Church of God supports those who for reasons of conscience do not believe they can serve on juries. That's why we say that. It's an individual choice. Some people draw the line of being serving on a jury completely. They don't serve on any juries. Other people might draw the line on serving on a jury where there would be capital punishment involved because they then would have to make that judgment. And if they were wrong, they would be accomplices to murder.

The National Academy of Science has reported in April 2014 that 4% of death row inmates are innocent. 4%. That is, the system, the judge, the jury, etc. They got it wrong. They convicted the wrong person. Now, some might argue that 96%... that's not too bad, right? I'll take 96% on my test. I'll go with that. That's an A, okay? But the problem is we're talking about a human life here. We're talking about human life. And you wouldn't want to be one of those 4% that they got wrong, would you? Right? Because we're talking about a human life.

And so, if we're one of those 12 jurors, and we don't get all the facts, because there's systems... courts have systems of what you can be presented and what you can't, right? If we didn't get all the facts, or we were misled, and so forth, and we can tend someone to die, then we could have blood on our hands. And so, as God's people, we're expected to show mercy and to reflect a spirit of love and concern and respect for human life. And in cases of life in prison versus capital punishment, some would argue that this is too fine a line to cross. And so, we have to be very careful when we consider what we think about capital punishment.

Again, it would be great if I could say, this is black and this is white. But you know what? This is complicated, isn't it? Because now we're judging the thoughts and intents of another man's heart, or another woman's heart. Now, let's talk about war and military service.

Most mainstream Christians argue that military service is sanctioned in Scripture, and therefore killing in war is not contrary to God's law. Killing in war is not murder.

Killing in war is sanctioned killing by duly constituted authorities.

Now, biblically, there's a basis to see that war was sanctioned in Scripture. We can see it in Joshua 6 and 1 Samuel 15. Those are examples where God directs the leaders at the time to make war against another people and to kill them.

So from this, mainstream Christian thinkers will say, well, there you have it. We can, as duly constituted authorities, make war on those who would come to attack us. And not only is it justified, it's honorable. Now, for God's people, there are two additional teachings that are key to this understanding. One is in John 18, verse 36. Let's go over there. John 18, 36.

Because the similar principles are going to apply here from capital punishment. John 18, verse 36.

Jesus before Pilate.

So Jesus is obviously facing the death penalty. His life is in the balance. He's before the man who can decide. Remember, the Jews didn't have the right to kill. They did not have the right to... they were not a duly constituted authority within the nation at that time. The Romans were the only ones who had the right of life and death. And so this man Pilate had the choice of life or death over Jesus at that time. And he says in verse 35, he says, Am I a Jew, your own nation, and the chief priests have delivered you to me? What have you done? And Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would fight, so that I should not be delivered to the Jews. But now my kingdom is not from here. And so as Christians today, in the Church of God, we understand that nothing has changed from the time he said that to today. There's not been some sort of, you know, godly coup d'etat that took over the, you know, the nation's systems around the world, and that now we are reflecting the kingdom of God on earth.

And this is God's kingdom, and we are duly elected, you know, constituted authority with that kingdom, and now we have the power to do that. Jesus would not fight. And so as members of the Church of God, we teach that we also do not fight in battle or in war for that reason. Not because we don't see it sanctioned in Scripture, but because we don't see that this is God's nation that God is leading. This is a nation that is separate and apart from that. Now we also can see in Matthew 26, verse 52 and 53. Let's go over to Matthew 26 and verse 52 and 53.

Matthew 26, verse 52 and 53. Then Jesus said to him, put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you not think that I cannot now pray to my father, and he will provide me with more than twelve legions of angels? So we put our faith in God to protect us.

You could imagine that if we did fight in battles, the Church of God did not have this position. You would be in a situation during World War II or Vietnam or Korea or the Gulf War where we would be taking up arms against fellow Christians. I remember very well in the first Gulf War these stories where, you know, if you remember that time Saddam Hussein had deployed a half a million Iraqi soldiers on these trenches defending the territory, and the United States was doing this massive buildup of troops.

And in these sort of run-up to the war, there were various skirmishes and there were various Iraqi soldiers that were captured. And there would be these stories about these Iraqi soldiers that were captured. And they had gone to school in Chicago, or they had grown up in New York, right? They had, you know, they liked In-N-Out Burger in California, right? They were not this weird enemy over there. They had actually spent time in the United States, right?

And so they didn't necessarily want to fight, but they had no choice. Go down and fight for Saddam or be killed. So they did what they were told. Or maybe they weren't really so into the whole battle, but they were Iraqis and they were threatened and so on. And so they were not really able to fight and so they were there doing it. Right? So without this, you could really have Christians of all nations coming together fighting one another.

I think one of the more famous stories is during World War II, you would have German soldiers go into the Lutheran Church and they would pray for victory in battle. And then you would have, you know, people in the United States and England, and they would go into the Lutheran Church and they would pray for victory in battle for their sons and daughters who were in Germany fighting the Germans, who were also praying to the same God in the same church.

This doesn't make any sense. This is not God's kingdom. This is not God's world, and that's why we do not fight. Finally, let's talk about abortion. Jeremiah 1 verse 4. Let's go over to Jeremiah 1 verse 4. This is probably one of the most touchy issues because certainly we understand the complexities of this. There are complexities of incest and rape, and there are issues of how women feel about their bodies and so forth and the control they have. But Jeremiah 1 verse 4 tells us something very profound.

It says, Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. God knew who Jeremiah was in the womb. God knew who many people were in the womb.

In fact, in Scripture, we're told that God knew who Isaiah was in the womb. He knew who John the Baptist was in the womb. He knew who Samson was. He knew who Paul was. He knew who Jacob was. He knew who Esau was. He names all these people. You can go look it up. Type, new in the womb. He knew these people in the womb. He chose them. He knew who they were from the time before they were born. And those are just a few examples.

Now, there's a lot of debate about when human life begins, because that's what we're talking about, right? We're talking about taking a human life. So when does human life begin? Now, a baby is born after 40 weeks of development inside his or her mother's body. 40 weeks. According to babycenter.com, about 1% of babies are born before 28 weeks gestation. 1%. But they can be saved. They can be saved at 28 weeks.

In 2017, a baby was born and survived at 21 weeks in utero. 21 weeks.

Many would argue that the life of a person is in the blood. The life is in the blood. As it says in Leviticus 17 verse 13, you can look that up. The life is in the blood. Do you know that a fetus has his own blood type at seven weeks? Seven weeks he has a different blood type than his mom.

And he has his own kidney which is filtering that blood at seven weeks.

At two weeks, at two weeks in utero, the cells divide and they begin to divide on their own.

And they're dividing and dividing and dividing. How do you define when life begins? How do you start saying, well, you know what? I'm going to call it 27 weeks. I'm going to call it 20 weeks. I'm going to call it seven weeks. I'm going to call it... You know, I don't think we get to make that call. I don't think we get to make that call. Defining when life begins is obviously a hotly debated topic. But certainly our nation's current policies do not connect with what we see in the Bible. As God's people, if there's something that we want to mourn, we can mourn our policy on abortion in this country. How many millions of Jeremiah's and John the Baptist and Samson's never have a chance to take their first breath? I think it's absolutely amazing that we can spend a million dollars in one hospital saving the life of a 22-week-old baby while that same 22-week-old fetus is murdered in an abortion clinic in the same town. I just have a hard time imagining that.

Finally, let's look at the larger spiritual intent. Let's look at the larger spiritual intent of the law, do not murder. Let's look over in Matthew 5 verse 21.

Matthew 5 verse 21 says, You have heard that it was said to those of old, You shall not murder. And whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment. Indeed, we read Numbers 35, a murderer is put to death. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment. You could almost say as well. And whoever says to his brother, Raka, shall be in danger of the counsel. And whoever says, You fool, shall be in danger of hellfire. For most of us, this is where we're going to cross the line on murder.

We're going to cross the line because there's hate in our heart. There's hate. Murder is rooted in hate. Two, in a premeditated way with intent, desire to see another human being dead, you have to have hate. You have to have hate. And slander has the spirit of murder in it as well.

Because you want to destroy who that person is. You want to destroy the reputation.

We don't need to turn there, but we also know from Matthew 15 and verse 19, that murder, like other sins, comes from the heart. For out of the heart come evil, thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual morality, theft, false testimony, slander, all these things. This is where all of us are at risk of breaking the commandment.

And a lot of times, this takes the form of something we call revenge. Revenge. Somebody done us wrong. I remember as a little kid, I remember thinking, man, if somebody were to kill my parents, I'd kill them. Somebody killed my parents. I'm, you know, I love my parents.

I mean, you know, the thought of losing my parents, that was, I mean, that was, you know.

And I thought, how would I kill them? Right? I'd shoot them. Right? I'd push them off a bridge. I thought these things. As a kid, I didn't know any about this stuff. I just, you know, this is just as a kid. This is who I was. This is who we are. Revenge is often one of the key reasons that we hate. And you can see this all around the world. How does this start? Right? It starts with some fight. Right? And, you know, somebody hit somebody over the head and they killed them. And then they said, well, they, you know, they didn't mean to. Well, yes, they did. They were having a fight. And then somebody comes over and they kill the person that killed that person. And then, and then the dad is upset about that. And then they go kill the brother of that person. And pretty soon you have the Hat Mills and McCoy's in Appalachia. Right? And it just gets going. And it gets going. And pretty soon nobody knows where it started or why. And it doesn't matter that the original thing was not an intent. Then there was intent over here. And it never stops. And we have the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. And it just goes on and on and on.

Look over on Romans 12. Look over on Romans 12, verse 19. Romans 12, verse 19. Beloved, do not avenge yourselves. Oh, when I found that, I thought, Oh, how could I let that go? Do not avenge yourselves, but rather give place to wrath, for it is written vengeance is mine. I will repay, says the Lord. You give place to the, to God's wrath. God will avenge. God will take care of the situation.

Murder spiritually can take the form of defamation.

Defamation of character. And it can take the form of prolonged, intense hatred that we can't get rid of, or we don't want to get rid of. Right? We go to sleep, we just moles over there. It just gets worse and worse and accumulates and cumulates. Let's go over to Matthew 5, verse 44. And this will be a nice introduction to the Bible study. In fact, this might even be in the Bible study. Maybe I took one of the email scriptures here. Matthew 5, verse 44. Verse 43, actually. You have heard that it was said, You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I say to you, verse 44, love your enemies. Bless those who curse you. Do good to those who hate you. And pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you. This is laying down the gauntlet for us. You know, I thought about playing a short clip from a documentary called Human. I played it at the feast for those of you who were with the feast in France who saw that.

And it was a short video. You can look at it. It's the opening line. It's from by a man named Leonard. And Leonard grew up in an abusive household. His father beat him. He didn't know what love was. And then he went out and he murdered a mother and her child who was sentenced to life in prison. And while he was in prison, a woman began to visit him. She was the mom of the woman and child, or the mom of the child and the grandma of the grandchild that had been murdered. And she showed him love. And it touched him in a way nothing had touched him before.

And if you see this, this it's about a three-minute clip, you see that he came to understand what love meant when he received the love from this woman. Because this woman, by all rights, could have wanted him dead. The hate in her heart could have said, how did he get life in prison? He should have gotten capital punishment. But she let that go. And that's the gauntlet for us, as we think about these things. Proverbs 22 verse 24 says, Make no friendship with an angry man, and with a furious man do not go.

We're told to not even hang out with people who carry anger in their hearts.

Go over in Ephesians 4 verse 26.

Ephesians 4 verse 26. This is an important principle of anger management.

Ephesians 4 verse 26. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your wrath.

Do not let the sun go down on your wrath. If you don't let the sun go down on your wrath, you're not carrying anger around with you. And whatever hate or anger you might have had, you can repent of. You can ask that God would remove it from your heart.

And it also says that anger is okay, as long as it doesn't result in sin.

There is righteous anger. There is indignation. We just cannot have or be confused that that is God's anger. Anger is a powerful emotion. And sometimes that anger can get away from us. We think we got it. We got this. We got this. And then it gets away from us. And suddenly our voice is raised higher than what we actually thought we wanted to express ourselves in that way. And then suddenly words are coming out of our mouth that we didn't think we were going to say. But the anger kind of takes over. And it can take over to a point where we work ourselves into a frenzy. You've probably seen this. Sometimes we see this on the news with certain funerals in certain cultures, right, and they're carrying the casket, and there's wailing, and there's crying, and then the the crying becomes screaming, and then there's a crowd mentality and a mob, and then there's anger. And then what happens?

Well, in times past there would be a lynching, right? They would take justice into their own hands.

What they would supposedly think was justice.

You know, I pray that whatever anger I might experience, it would never rise to that level.

Because by one man came death, Adam, and that's where our human nature comes from. But by one man comes life, Jesus Christ, and that's where we're going, into his image. And that's what we have to think about when we think about how we manage our anger. Murder is the antithesis of love.

It is the antithesis of God himself. One final scripture over in James, James, verse 119.

James, one nineteen.

James, one nineteen verse says, verse one nineteen says, Therefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, and slow to wrath.

And then verse twenty says something interesting, for the wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God. See, we're not going to get where we want to go with our wrath. It isn't the course of action. We're going to hear about that in the Bible study.

Anger is an entire sermon in itself, and something that actually we'll probably talk about in the future here. There are strategies to address anger. There are actions that we can take to manage our anger. And I think Jesus Christ made clear that anger is the evil underbelly of our human experience.

All of us have it. We might like to deny it, but we've got it. And it shines a light on how much we need forgiveness, how much we need his sacrifice. You shall not murder is a commandment we're all capable of, whether we realize it or not. It's not nine commandments are at risk, but one's okay. All ten we are capable of. And we must consider carefully, as we hear news of war, how we react to that. Oh yeah, go get him! What do you mean? Capital punishment. Yeah, he deserves to die. Oh, really? Did you? Were you? Are you going to judge the intent of a man's heart? And abortion.

It is personal, and it touches every one of us. I hope I've helped understand that myself and for you a little bit better.