Respecting the Image of God

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All right, well, tonight we’re going to be in Exodus chapter 20 again, Exodus chapter 20. We’re going to continue on where I left off so many weeks ago with the Ten Commandments. And our text tonight is Exodus chapter 20, verse 13, just the one verse.

And one of the shorter verses in Scripture says, Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not kill. Exactly what?

We’re going to get into that tonight. Because as I mentioned to you, I think it was last week, this is one of the commandments that is easier to misinterpret than some of the others. And it is often misinterpreted and misapplied, and it’s used to support all sorts of crazy teachings.

And not only that, it’s misinterpreted and misapplied to use as a club to beat Christians and beat Christianity over the head with. Because people who have a passing familiarity with the Bible will look at statements like, thou shalt not kill, and then they’ll look at some of the wars that God sent, some of the battles that God sent the Israelites to engage in. They’ll look at things like capital punishment.

They’ll look at things like that and say, well, see, there are contradictions right there in your own Bible. How can you support capital punishment? How can you support war at times?

How can you support this or that when the Bible says thou shalt not kill? And more importantly, how is it that God can say in one breath, don’t kill, and then in another instance says, go out and kill? So we’re going to look tonight at what this very short commandment actually says.

Because this, unfortunately for us, well, I say unfortunately, but if God had wanted to say more, he would have said more. It’s just we have to read the whole Bible together. But unfortunately for those of us who like simple answers to things, God didn’t elaborate on this commandment anymore like he did, for example, where he talks about in the fourth commandment, keeping the Sabbath holy.

He goes into great detail on that one. He goes into great detail on coveting. but when it comes to this one it just says thou shalt not kill and one of the important things that we need to remember is that this commandment was not originally written in English this commandment was originally written in anybody?

Hebrew, very good I don’t know who said it but you’re right I ask questions and sometimes y’all look at me like it’s a trick question like I’m trying to trip you up, it was written in Hebrew And so we need to understand the way the Hebrew words work. And I’ll tell you, the King James says, thou shalt not kill. The New King James translates it as thou shalt not murder.

And I think that’s the appropriate way to translate it. But we need to look at a few things that this commandment does and does not apply to. And first of all, I’ll go ahead and tell you, there are multiple words in Hebrew, and I am by no means a Hebrew expert.

I still, the one thing, I finished up everything else yesterday for my master’s degree except my Hebrew exam. And I’m dreading that. I have to take that by the first week of April.

I finished the class back in January and haven’t had a moment at all to study it because of Carly Jo. So I’m really dreading this exam. I only had a tenuous grasp of it anyway.

I told some of you all how difficult the Greek classes were. And Hebrew left me dreaming about the days of taking Greek because Hebrew was so much more difficult. So I say that, I don’t pretend to be an expert in Hebrew.

I can only tell you what I’ve read from people who are. And there are multiple Hebrew words that encompass this idea of killing. And the one that’s used in this verse is the Hebrew verb ratzak.

And I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing that correctly. ratzak, which encompasses murder, the deliberate killing of an innocent person. That’s what it’s describing.

Now, there are other words that have a broader definition, like killing. For us, in English, all murder is killing, but not all killing is murder. It works the same way in Hebrew.

All ratzak is killing, but not all killing is ratzak. So, we need to keep that in mind as we look at this commandment. And we’re going to look at some of the things it does not include.

Because some of the things that people take as killing and think this commandment applies to are things that at times God has said I need you to go do this. And I say at times because we also need to understand there were things that God told them to do in the Old Testament. There were even things that God told individuals to do in the New Testament that he was giving an instruction to a specific person at a specific point in time.

If God told Joshua to go wipe out all of the non-Israelite people in Israel, that is not a command for all of us at all times to go over and grab a gun and take out the Palestinians. That’s not what that’s about. That was a command given to him at a specific time and for a specific purpose.

But there are things still that people would put under the heading of killing that God said to somebody in the scriptures, go do this. And the first of those, the first thing that this command does not apply to is war. It does not apply to killing in warfare.

And there are many instances where God told his people to go and engage in warfare. And as I said, for some people, this is a contradiction. It’s a problem because they say, how can you Christians support war?

And yet God says, thou shalt not kill. I don’t know very many people who are excited about war in general. Maybe George Patton, but not many people. Even the people whose jobs it is.

Am I saying that correctly? Well, no, war. Soldiers.

Those who, I’m wondering if I got my verb tense right. Not verb tense, oh, never mind. Let’s not have an English lesson.

Let’s just move on. Even people who have the job of going to war are not always excited about going to war, especially those who’ve been to war before and have seen what it’s about. That’s why we hear stories of people like Colin Powell urging against war and saying, You know, I’ve seen this.

Let’s take a minute and think about this. All right. So the idea that Christians are excited about war, I don’t know anybody who’s excited about war, but Christians, on the other hand, can say sometimes it’s a necessary evil, depending on the circumstances.

And one of the times it was a necessary evil took place in the book of 1 Samuel. And we’ve looked at this passage, I want to say, within the last six months. I don’t remember exactly when.

But 1 Samuel chapter 15, if you want to turn there with me. But 1 Samuel chapter 15 says, starting in verse 2, Thus says the Lord of hosts, this is God speaking, this is Samuel carrying a message to King Saul from God, it says, Thus saith the Lord of hosts, I will punish Amalek for what he did to Israel, how he ambushed him on the way when he came up from Egypt. Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them, kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.

And some people will look at this and say, how could God be so awful as to support genocide, to command genocide? And really what he was supporting, what he was commanding them was to go to war and to kill all of the Amalekites. And people look at this and assume that the God of the Old Testament is bloodthirsty and brutal, and yet on the other hand said, thou shalt not kill.

That killing, that ratzak, did not apply to killing in war. But at the same time, this was not God’s first stop in dealing with the Amalekites. It’s not as though the Amalekites did one thing wrong and suddenly God said, go kill all of them and their babies too.

This was after centuries of the Amalekites and their brutal violence toward the Israelites. This was after centuries, and the Amalekites sort of had this Hitler-esque intention of wiping out the Jews, it seems like, because they were always after the Israelites. As a matter of fact, I’ve read that apparently in the 40s, some people compared the Nazis to the Amalekites, that they said they were the Amalekites of their day, because the Amalekites in the Old Testament had this sort of visceral hatred toward the Israelites, and they were determined to wipe them off the face of the earth.

And God had dealt with them time and time again, and God had evidently given them centuries to stop the violence, and yet at a point, God said, go and just get rid of the Amalekites because we’ve got to stop the bloodshed somehow. And if God had allowed the Amalekites to continue, then it would have been centuries more of warfare between the Israelites and the Amalekites. So God just said, enough, enough, be done with it.

And so God sent them to war. And I remember a phrase that a pastor I used to work with used with me. This was years ago.

I was fresh out of college, probably a little bit more idealistic than I am now, a little bit more naive about the world. And I remember us discussing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And, you know, me, and I won’t go into the details, but me talking about some misgivings I had about it and him making the point that sometimes you’ve just got to go in and stop the madman.

That was the exact phrase he used to me. Sometimes you’ve just got to go in and stop the madman. Because I had concerns about the violence and just the ongoing, the Middle East is a mess, you know.

I had misgivings about us being involved there and the mess continuing. And he said, but sometimes you’ve got to stop the madman. And I’m not advocating one way or another on Middle East policy.

I’m just telling you what he said to me. And I think that applies to the Amalekites. They were determined to use as much violence as necessary to get rid of the Israelites.

And God says, you’ve got to go to war and you’ve got to stop them. Otherwise, it’s just going to continue. And the violence and the brutality are going to get out of hand.

And I know I’ve talked about this on a Sunday morning when I looked at this passage. But I know a lot of people object to him saying, well, they’re newborns and they’re infants. Get rid of them too.

Well, what did they do? They were innocent. See, God sees things from a different perspective than we do, and God knew who those children were going to grow up to be and that they were going to grow up and continue the violent campaign against the Jews.

And God’s plan all along has been to preserve the Jewish people so that they would be the vessel that he used to bring his son into the world to bring salvation to everyone. So the campaign against the Amalekites and them going to war was not about God being brutal and bloodthirsty. It was about God after giving these people chance after chance after chance, saying, I’m going to use war as an instrument of discipline to protect my people so they can fulfill prophecy and bring my son into the world so that everyone will have the opportunity to be saved.

It was actually an act of the mercy of God. So if God commanded them to go to war, but God also said, don’t kill or don’t murder, it’s because that killing in war within the rules of war did not count as what he was talking about. Then there’s also self-defense.

The command does not refer to self-defense. Two chapters after our text in Exodus 22, verse 2, it says, If the thief is found breaking in and he is struck so that he dies, there shall be no guilt for his bloodshed. All right?

So if somebody, it’s kind of like our stand your ground law here in Oklahoma. If somebody breaks into your house in the middle of the night and they end up losing their life as a result because you don’t, somebody breaks into your house in the middle of the night while you’re there, you can only assume they have nefarious intent. And you have to do what you have to do to protect your family.

And I don’t think anybody enjoys that. I think we’d all rather the thief stay away than have to get into a firefight with somebody. But you have to do what you have to do to protect your family.

Well, folks, that’s a biblical concept that was taught in the book of Exodus, that if somebody was to break into someone’s home in the middle of the night, and the thief, and we could presume they were there for more than thievery, but the thief ended up being killed, then the homeowner was not held guilty under God’s law, because God’s law permits self-defense. And I know sometimes people will raise the objection, well, what about when Jesus said to turn the other cheek? And I struggled with that for a long time, because I want to do what Jesus says, but I also believe we have a responsibility to protect our families, and I struggled with that for a long time.

How do I reconcile those two things? And then I, about the hundredth time, re-read what Jesus said about turning the other cheek in context, he’s not talking about self-defense. He’s not saying don’t defend yourself.

He’s talking about vengeance. He’s talking about vengeance. And you know, there was a time last year, I believe it was, when we had an issue with Benjamin in school.

And I know that most schools have zero-tolerance policies toward fighting or violence of any kind. I have a zero tolerance policy toward my son coming home with bruised shoe imprints on his side and nothing being done at school. And he told me this was going on on a regular basis.

I talked to him about the difference between vengeance and self-defense. I said, if they’re kicking you or if somebody’s coming up to you and they’re hitting you, they’re punching you, I said, don’t walk up to them the next day and punch them in the face to get back at them. I said, but if somebody’s hitting you, somebody’s kicking you, somebody’s punching you, I said, you ask them to stop.

You tell them to stop. I said, you try everything you can to remove yourself from the situation and get them to stop. I said, if they follow you and they continue to hit you or continue to kick you, I said, you turn around and you knock them flat on the ground.

And here, let me show you how to do it. And I’m not a fighter, but I understand physics. and I understand how to put your weight into something, and I have a lot of weight to put into it.

So I’m like, let me show you, let me give you some pointers on how to do this. And he said, but I’ll get in trouble, I said, with them, not with me. I said, and they’ll be in trouble with me for not having done anything about it sooner.

So we talked about the difference between vengeance and self-defense. And what Jesus is talking about with the turn the other cheek issue is vengeance. Don’t go take revenge on somebody.

You know, somebody’s hurting you. Don’t sit there and plot and think, how can I go back and get back at them later on? And yet the Bible, and I think we also, folks, have a responsibility, you know, if we’re in a situation, to try to do everything we can to extract ourselves from the situation before we get involved in any kind of ruckus.

But at the same time, if we’re not able to, I don’t believe the Bible teaches that we cannot defend ourselves and our families. because let’s face it, we live in a world, we live in a sinful world where ugly stuff happens. And it’s regrettable, but it’s right there in black and white that even under God’s law, where killing was punished, where murder was punished, somebody was not held guilty for what was done in self-defense.

We move on to the third thing the commandment does not cover, and that’s capital punishment. How can you Christians support capital punishment? and yet the Bible says thou shalt not kill.

It’s because, first of all, God instituted capital punishment. In Exodus 21, 14 it said, But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from my altar that he may die. They said if somebody goes out and kills somebody in a premeditated fashion, their life should be taken from them.

Now we’re taught in the Bible that people are created in the image of God And we’re taught the sacredness, the sanctity of human life. How do we square those? Because when somebody takes a life deliberately and out of malice, it’s a terrible crime that requires a terrible penalty.

And so as much as it might be distasteful, it requires the ultimate penalty. That is the only way to continue to uphold the sanctity of the innocent human life, is to mete out that penalty. Now, we also need to be careful about something.

We as Christians don’t need to be cheerleaders for the death penalty. Now, we know that in Romans 13, it talks about the government being a minister of God and not bearing the sword in vain, but meeting out punishment for the guilty. But we also, as Christians, need to be, as much as we recognize the right of the government to practice capital punishment, we also don’t need to be those ones saying, yeah, get him, fry him.

I spoke about this once. I forget why I was even asked to talk about this topic, but to a group of people at a conference years ago, and I think some of them walked out of there with the idea that I was opposed to the death penalty. And I was not.

I’m just saying, I believe it’s biblical. I believe it’s allowed. I believe in many cases it’s necessary to preserve the sanctity of innocent human life, but at the same time, we don’t need to exhibit a bloodlust about it. It’s one of those things we should look at as a necessary evil and not be cheerleaders for the death penalty.

So the commandment not to murder doesn’t cover the death penalty either. And fourth of all, it does not cover animals. It does not cover animals.

I know I’ve talked about this a little bit. How can you Christians eat animals if the Bible says thou shalt not kill? And my answer is because they’re delicious.

All right. But it says in Genesis chapter 9, verses 2 and 3, this is God speaking to Noah. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and all the fish of the sea.

They are given into your hand. They’re yours. Okay.

Up to this point, they were not encouraged to eat animals for food. And now that they were, God was going to make the animals afraid of people. So he’s giving them a fighting chance just by, they see us coming now and they run away.

Most of them, except the dogs that we’ve conditioned to be too dumb to do so. We also don’t eat them. So he says, they’re given unto your hand.

They’re yours. Now they’re going to run from you, but they’re yours now. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.

I have given you all things, even as the green herbs. He says, so just the way you’ve eaten all the plants, the way he told him in the Garden of Eden, you can eat from all these plants, except he did have his exception, that one tree. He said, just as you’ve been able to eat from all these plants all this time, you can now eat the animals as well.

And so he told us, you’re able to eat the animals. And realistically, you’ve got to kill them before you can eat them. So the command not to kill, otherwise it’s even more inhumane.

There’s a command in the Bible too that you can’t, I forget the exact phrasing of it, but you can’t cut off one leg and just eat the leg. I mean, that’s cruel. The animal has to be dead before you can eat them.

The command not to kill does not extend to the animals. And at the same time, the book of Proverbs says that the righteous man cares for the life of his beast, so we don’t want to be cruel to the animals either. I’m not an animal rights person, but I am a respecting God’s creation person.

So, you know, we don’t want to, I hate seeing cows that are pinned up and unable to move and they just suffer miserable lives. And I hate, you know, I wouldn’t want to shoot a deer if I wasn’t pretty sure I could, you know, kill it with that first shot. You know, we want to, my philosophy is let’s make them as happy as possible until we eat them.

So I know that sounds strange, but the command not to kill doesn’t extend to the animals. Now let’s talk about what it does refer to. The commandment not to kill or not to murder refers to the unjustified taking of a human life outside the.

. . What makes it unjustified is that it’s outside the parameters that God has set.

So if God told them to go to war and you happen to kill an enemy soldier in war, that’s not murder. If it’s capital punishment, somebody has been out taking innocent lives and you take this guilty human life as a punishment, that’s not murder. It refers to what we know of as murder.

And in some cases, the biblical word, the ratzak, I believe, includes manslaughter as well. But it refers primarily to murder. Okay, that’s what that word means.

Now, we also see in the Bible that the command would cover manslaughter. It’s something that God is opposed to. Because it says in Exodus 21, the very next chapter, He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death.

Okay, so if somebody kills somebody, if somebody murders somebody, they’re to be put to death. However, if he did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee. There was a whole system set up, and I don’t have time to get into the whole system tonight, but there was a whole system set up in the Old Testament where if somebody were guilty of manslaughter, where it was an accident, maybe they were negligent.

It’s not like they sat down and said, I’m going to kill Phil. But it was an accident. They didn’t have cars, but maybe it was a car wreck and somebody was being negligent, that sort of thing.

They didn’t have cars. Maybe you got into a fight and you didn’t mean to kill him or any number of things where it was accidental, where it wasn’t clear that you had tried to kill somebody on purpose. All right, there was this system in place where you could flee for refuge because you couldn’t stay there.

You were guilty of this person’s life. And honestly, the family had the capability of taking revenge on you. So what God had done was he set up, I believe it was 10 cities of refuge scattered all throughout Israel, that the people could run to, and as long as they stayed within the confines of that city of refuge, they could not be harmed.

If they left the city of refuge, then the family could hang out outside the gate and wait for you to leave the city of refuge and get you. But as long as you stayed in that city of refuge, you were safe. And if the family came into the city of refuge to get you, then they were in trouble with God’s law.

That city of refuge was there for people to flee to, to be safe. And it’s one of our Old Testament pictures of Jesus. But still, it’s something that God was saying, you know, I will give you this grace.

I’ll be merciful to you and make a place of refuge for you. But still, you need to understand that you don’t get to just continue on with life as you’ve known it. You’ve taken a life, you’ve taken an innocent human life, and it’s something that is going to be treated seriously.

It’s something that incurs a penalty. Because whether it’s murder, whether it’s manslaughter, these things that were outside of the parameters that God had set up, and these exceptions, if we’re talking about taking a life outside of God’s parameters, then what we’re talking about doing is ignoring the value that God places on human life because he has created us in his image. And that’s what it comes down to.

Man is created, and woman. Mankind is created in the image of God. And because we’re created in his image, and because he loves us, there’s value placed on each human life.

So throughout the Old Testament, we see this system in place for protecting innocent human life. Now people that are only marginally familiar with the scriptures, you may see skeptics who have a few choice verses they like to pick out here and there and say how bloodthirsty God was in the Old Testament. You look at the system in its entirety.

You look at the whole of the Old Testament, what you see is a law that was put in place for several reasons, but one of the emphasis of the law was to protect innocent human life, to get people to realize what a grave situation it was when somebody was deprived, somebody created in God’s image, was deprived of their life, their God-given life, outside of the parameters of what God had set up. And God said, don’t do it. And God said, there’s going to be a penalty for it.

So when we look at things like war, capital punishment, those sorts of things, those are parameters that God allows. And when he says don’t kill, don’t murder here, he’s talking about don’t take anybody’s life. Don’t take any innocent lives outside of the parameters that I’ve set up.

Life is precious and needs to be protected. That was God’s emphasis. And we see that when we get to the New Testament, And Jesus’ explanation of this commandment, when we come to Matthew chapter 5, he 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.

And that’s all true. That’s all correct. He’s quoting Old Testament law here.

He says, You’ve heard in the Old Testament that you’re not supposed to murder, and if you do, there’s going to be a penalty. You’ve heard that. You know that.

He tells the Jewish people, you know that. He says, but I say to you, not that he’s correcting that, but he’s adding to it. He’s helping them see the principle behind it here.

He says, but I say to you that whoever was angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of judgment. So whoever is angry with his brother for no reason and acts out of anger and does malicious things toward his brother for no reason, is in danger of judgment. I believe he’s talking about the judgment of earthly authorities here.

He says, and whoever says to his brother, Raka, which is empty fellow, I think is what one of the translators says. He says, whoever insults his brother will be in danger of the council. But whoever says, you fool, will be in danger of hellfire.

And what he’s doing is he’s talking about, he says, you know, let me add to this, let me add some clarification to this. Whoever comes to his brother and says, you fool, is in danger of God’s judgment. He’s equating this with murder.

Now, some of you may be a little worried at that point because we say things like fool and idiot and probably even worse in traffic. But that’s not entirely what that means. That word fool indicated somebody who was wicked, somebody who was beyond the grace or forgiveness of God, as I understand it.

I would use that in line with where it says in the book of Psalms, the fool has said in his heart there’s no God. throw that verse out a lot as though it’s talking about atheists. What that verse is talking about is it’s foolish, these people who live like there’s no God, they know there is, and yet they live like there’s not.

They know that God is going to hold them accountable, and yet they live like there’s no judgment coming. I can just do whatever I want to. And the Bible says that that is foolish.

So what we’re talking about here when he says, you fool, it’s almost like we’re talking about that kind of person, you know, that super sinner who just totally rejects all the things of God, and is, as far as we’re concerned, beyond the reach of God’s grace. What we would be doing at that point is saying, you are, you’re on the road to hell. You’re just, or you’re just already, you’re knocking at the gates there.

There’s no hope for you. And what we’re doing is combining, or consigning, that’s a different word, consigning somebody to hell. It’s different from saying this is what God’s word says and sin will send you to hell and that sort of biblical teaching.

This is something that’s driven by your hatred of somebody. And as I’ve read and studied what this passage is talking about, the nearest thing I can come to in our language of how we would talk to somebody, and please forgive me for saying this, but I don’t know any other way to get it across, is if we were to look at somebody and tell them to go to hell. Why would we wish that on anybody?

And yet they’re calling somebody, you fool, you godless person. How much do you have to hate somebody to want them to be separated from God for all eternity? Some of you may have heard of the comedian Penn Jillette, well-known atheist, skeptic.

If you’ve heard of the Penn and Teller, I think they have had television. I’ve never watched any of their shows, but I know who they are. Penn Jillette is a well-known atheist, very open about it.

And I remember watching a video, you could probably find it on Facebook or YouTube if you looked hard enough. It’s floated around out there for years, but he was on a video talking about how a man had come to him after one of his shows and had brought him a Bible. And I think walking up to somebody like Penn Jillette and taking him a Bible, that takes some courage because you don’t know how he’s going to react.

And he said he thanked the man, and he was very impressed by this. He said he didn’t believe in God. He doesn’t believe in salvation through Jesus.

He is an atheist, and the man bringing him the Bible didn’t change his mind. but when he did this video he was talking to other atheists and skeptics saying why do you get so offended when the Christians try to witness to you if they care enough about you that they think you’re going to hell and they care enough about you to come and talk to you about your soul he said why would you be upset about that he said because if I believed that somebody was going to die and go to hell a hell that the Bible describes. He said, I would do everything in my power to warn them.

He said, how much do you have to hate somebody? But this was a great point. How much do you have to hate somebody to believe they’re going to hell and not want to do something about it?

And if you’re like me, that’s a convicting question. And yet what he’s describing here is somebody who would look at their fellow man and write them off as somebody not worthy, well, none of us are worthy of God’s mercy, but somebody who shouldn’t have God’s mercy, somebody that should just be consigned to hell, somebody that just is, somebody that you’re ready to write off, and that’s the kind of hate he’s describing, and he equates that with murder. And under the New Testament, we’re taught that this command against murder would also apply to the hatred of others, because it also causes us, it causes us, just like the physical act of murder, to look at somebody and have to deny tha