TEACHING

God's Word : Thou Shall Not Murder

As Ted Koppel said, "These were not 10 suggestions; they were Ten Commandments." There is someone who is putting billboards around the country. One of the billboards says, "What part of 'Thou shalt not' don't you understand?" It's a wonderful statement. What don't you understand about what God was saying to you?

You start off, "thou shalt not murder." The word has to do with murder. We're not talking about a judicial execution by law, but you shall not murder. All the way down the commandments, 'thou shalt not.' When you find that all the way down, what does it imply? It implies you're already doing it and it implies that these are things that you need to be restrained from doing because you have an attitude to do it.

Thou shalt not murder--not have judicial executions--but you shall not murder. Killing is taking away somebody's life. People should be secure in their life. That is one of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that God has endowed us all with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that we have life, the right to life. Life has become more and more cheap in the society we live in. But God says you shall not murder.

In my opinion, abortion is murder. Once you begin to understand that the taking of an innocent life is murder, then that raises the bar from a 'constitutional right' to something that needs to be stopped.

Abortion is murder. Now, beyond that we're looking at euthanasia. We want to begin to terminate the lives of the elderly or those who are 'terminally ill.' We have moved from a culture honoring life to a culture that begins to exalt death.

I looked at some pictures just recently of the horror that went on in the Nazi extermination camps. There were bodies on top of bodies, starved, wretched corpses, people who'd been allowed to starve to death. Some had been terribly beaten and abused. They were covered with lice. They had been jammed into these awful barracks. They had been persecuted, tormented, and finally died. It was horrible what happened under the Nazis, horrible what happened under Josef Stalin, horrible what happened under Mao Tse-tung.

God says thou shalt not murder. Jesus Christ expanded that a little bit to have said, '"Anybody that says to your brother, 'You fool' is in danger of hell fire. So, go further and you begin to get angry with someone without cause. You begin to curse other people. That is a curse, sending somebody to hell. That's the equivalent of murder. So what comes out of our mouth is so often a breaking of the Ten Commandments, because God Almighty wants to protect life and have everyone walk the streets without fear of being murdered.

Whenever Satan is at work in the world, people's lives aren't safe. One of the things we must protect from the moment of conception to the moment of natural death is the life of people.