[0:00] If you've got a Bible, you can open up your Bibles to the Old Testament, to the book of Exodus, Exodus chapter 20, verse 1. See these famous words of the Ten Commandments, Exodus chapter 20 and verse 1.
[0:24] And God spoke all these words. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.
[0:36] You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
[0:58] You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God. For the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work.
[1:12] But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.
[1:27] For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them. But he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
[1:40] Honor your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
[1:52] You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey or anything that belongs to your neighbor. When the people saw the thunder and lightning and heard the trumpet and saw the mountain in smoke, they trembled with fear.
[2:09] They stayed at a distance and said to Moses, Speak to us yourself and we will listen, but do not have God speak to us or we will die. Moses said to the people, Do not be afraid.
[2:21] God has come to test you so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning. The people remained at a distance while Moses approached the thick darkness where God was.
[2:33] This is the word of the Lord. Let's ask for God's help as we study this together. Father, won't you help us this morning as we open up Scripture, your word to us, not the word of mere mortals, words that mortals wrote down, but words that you, by the breath of your Spirit, inspired and meant to be received by the church in all ages, to know you, to love you, and to be changed and transformed by you.
[3:07] Teach us this morning, Lord. Teach our minds, teach our hearts, and free up our hands to serve you. Let your Spirit be present in everything that we do.
[3:20] We cannot gain spiritual, powerful spiritual truth without your Spirit's work this morning. And so we ask for your Spirit to work. And we ask this in Christ's holy name and for his glory.
[3:31] Amen. So if you join us for the first time this morning, you catch us in the middle of a series in the Ten Commandments, which itself is actually a series, which some of you might have forgotten, within the book of Exodus.
[3:43] So it's a series within a series within a series. And we're slowly plodding our way through the Ten Commandments. As I kind of said last week, and I alluded to last week, these commandments are incredibly rich.
[3:55] And the implications of them are incredibly rich. And so what I'm able to do this morning is really just kind of fly over the surface, give you the bird's eye view, so that you can hopefully go and think about these things more deeply, study them more deeply.
[4:10] I would welcome questions and comments and thoughts, asking, like, what could I read? How could I think about these more carefully? Because I really do think these Ten Commandments are so incredibly fundamental to how we as Christians think about Christian living and Christian ethics.
[4:24] They have this pride of place in the law of God and in the Christian church historically, and we need to get our heads and our hearts around them. I'm going to start off with this question. It's an easy question.
[4:38] Is it wrong to murder? Please say yes. This is not a trick question. You're not going to find anybody of sound mind, regardless of their religious or their ideological convictions, who thinks murder is a good thing.
[4:59] We have this sort of kind of unanimous agreement on this across religions, across cultures, across time, and yet I want to make what in our world today would be a relatively controversial statement, and that is, without Christianity, it is impossible to ground that conviction that we should not murder in much more than social compact.
[5:23] And what I mean by social compact is all of us getting together saying, hey, let's all agree that killing each other is a bad thing, because if we do just kind of indiscriminately keep killing each other, it's going to be bad for all of us on the whole.
[5:38] But for Christians, in the teaching of Scripture, I think we have something so much more profound and rich to undergird our conviction that murder is wrong, something that when you understand it, it helps you to have this really wonderful and beautiful and comprehensive orientation towards the flourishing of life.
[5:57] A commitment to life that even the very, very best and thoughtful secular philosophy cannot give us. And that's what I want us to think about this morning as we look at the sixth commandment.
[6:10] Three things I want you to see, although again I've snuck some extra points in there, but number one, we are to be against death. Number two, we are to be for life.
[6:22] And then here's the extra points. Number three, four implications that come out of this. We are to be against death, we are to be for life, and then four implications. Here's the first one. Look at Exodus 20, verse 13, down there in your Bibles.
[6:36] Really short verse. You shall not murder. Now in Hebrew, it's actually only two words. No murder. What's interesting is that the word for murder there is a more specific word than the general word for taking life.
[6:50] So you'll notice some of the older translations like the King James Version actually have this as thou shalt not kill. I'm not sure that's a great translation of the word. There's a much more generic or common word for the word kill that occurs in many other places in the Old Testament.
[7:07] And that word is not here. Instead, the word that is used here is a word that pertains specifically to killing in an unlawful way, the unlawful killing of people. And so I think actually murder is a better translation.
[7:18] Now the fact that there is a less common word for taking life used here means that the Sixth Commandment is not an absolute blanket ban on the taking of all human life in all situations and circumstances.
[7:33] It is specifically a prohibition on the unlawful taking of human life. Which straightaway should raise a question for us for what exactly is the unlawful taking of human life?
[7:45] And this I think is where we as Christians have deeper resources for answering that question than kind of mere social pragmatism or social agreement. Here is the key teaching in the Bible that undergirds the profound value of all human life.
[8:01] It's right at the very, very beginning of your Bible. It's in Genesis chapter 1, and it's verse 27. It says, So God created mankind in His own image. In the image of God, He created them.
[8:11] Male and female, He created them. Human beings, you and me, we have intrinsic value because we are created in the image of God.
[8:23] Our inherent value, it's not predicated on our strength or on our abilities or on our power or on our advancement over the other species out there or the fact that we are sentient beings.
[8:35] It is predicated on the fact that God made us and God put His stamp on us. And so human life is precious because God says we are precious to Him.
[8:50] All human life. That is so much deeper. So much, so much richer than any social compact. It is so much stronger and more robust than pragmatism.
[9:04] Think about it this way for a moment. Think. Do we really want to have a society where the value of life is rooted in pragmatism and expedience? Is that what we want? On everyone just agreeing. What happens when one particular group comes and they take over power of a society?
[9:19] When one group, for whatever reason, rises to the top and controls that society, they rise to power, maybe through having more physical power, maybe through having more military power than everybody else, maybe through having more intellectual power than everybody else, maybe through having more economic power than everybody else.
[9:37] What happens when that one group takes over power? I'll tell you what you want at that point. At that point, you want something other than pragmatism, to undergird the preciousness of human life because pragmatism has a tendency to shift and change depending upon the agendas or the aims of the said group in power.
[10:02] So you want something then at that point that protects those without physical power. You want something at that point that protects those without military power. You want something at that point that protects those without intellectual power. And you want something at that point that protects those without economic power.
[10:17] I do not think the pragmatic and flaky nature of social agreement gets you that. It doesn't. It always breaks down somewhere.
[10:28] But the doctrine of the image of God does get you that. It does get you that. And so our original question then was what constitutes unlawful killing? I think we have to say that unlawful killing is the taking of any human life except in situations where Scripture, God's Word, makes exceptions or provisions.
[10:48] So certainly murder is breaking the sixth commandment, the premeditated decision to kill another human being. But even more than murder is actually covered in the Bible.
[11:00] So the very next chapter, Exodus chapter 21, there's a little bit of an exposition on the sixth commandment. chapter 21, verse 28 to 30 says this, If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death and its meat must not be eaten.
[11:16] But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. For if, however, the bull has had the habit of goring and the owner has been warned but has not kept it penned up and it kills a man or a woman, the bull is to be stoned and its owner is to be put to death.
[11:31] However, if payment is demanded, the owner may redeem his life by the payment of whatever is demanded. So that scenario there, that's not murder in the more kind of technical legal sense.
[11:42] It's much closer to what we would call manslaughter. I had to look up the differences between murder and manslaughter because there's lawyers in our congregation and they're going to come and tell me afterwards that I got it wrong. Christians are prohibited from taking life directly, but they're also prohibited from taking life through neglect.
[12:01] Did you see that? And that means you're not just prohibited from the actual act of murder, but you're also prohibited from engaging in activities that are on a trajectory that can reasonably end in the loss of life.
[12:13] So the famous reformer John Calvin in his big work, The Institutes, where he gets to a section where he comments on the Sixth Commandment, he says this, he says, in general, all violence and injustice and every kind of harm from which our neighbor's body suffers is prohibited.
[12:27] It's pretty broad. Now, are there exceptions to this? Well, yes, there are. There are exceptions to this. Let me give you three.
[12:39] Self-defense, capital punishment, and what we might call just war. Here's the first one, self-defense. I am, as much as I want to be in some ways, I'm actually not a pacifist.
[12:51] I don't think that when Jesus says, turn the other cheek, that's a complete ban on every single instance of resisting evil people. And I don't think that because I think there are examples in the Bible that tell us that it's not.
[13:02] So, for example, Exodus chapter 22, where you've still got these discussions about lawful killing and that going on. Exodus 22, verse 2 to 3, if a thief is caught breaking in at night and has struck a fatal blow, the defender is not guilty of bloodshed.
[13:18] But if it happens after sunrise, the defender is guilty of bloodshed. So you've got to do all your beating up in the night in the dark when you can't see what you're doing. I think what you see in this passage is what we might call the path of least resistance.
[13:32] So provision is actually made for a desperate act of self-defense. A person trying to stay alive when an intruder is coming and you have no idea what's going on in the middle of the night, you're not held guilty for that instance.
[13:46] But interestingly, you might have seen there, if it is daytime, that is, if the person can see a way to securing their own safety without killing the intruder and yet they then still deliver the fatal blow, well then they've broken the sixth commandment.
[14:04] So there's an exception for self-defense in extreme situations, but then it's even tempered, even that exception is tempered with a call to try and avoid killing as much as you possibly can.
[14:17] You see that? What about capital punishment? Now, you've been in this series for a while, most of you, so you know, as we've gone through this series, you've noticed that the death penalty is often prescribed in several places in the Mosaic laws for certain crimes.
[14:33] That is, in fact, premised on an earlier statement that comes much earlier in the Bible when God makes a covenant with Noah. He says these words to Noah in Genesis 9, verse 6, whoever sheds human blood by humans shall their blood be shed for in the image of God has God made mankind.
[14:54] So as God is rebuilding life now, as humanity comes out of the ark and are rebuilding life after all the evil and the killing that's gone on before the flood, God says to Noah, I want you to know the value of human life at this point now.
[15:05] A lot of bad stuff has just happened. I want you to know the value of human life. People are made in the image of God and so to kill a human being is to take a life from an image bearer and therefore is to forfeit your own life.
[15:21] That is the basic principle that undergirds capital punishment that you then find in the Mosaic law. Now we've said this several times in this series, we don't live under the civil penalties of the Mosaic law anymore.
[15:36] We're not supposed to carry out the civil penalties of the law because we're not in a theocracy. So there is some legitimate debate today among conservative Bible-believing Christians about whether or not modern states should prescribe the death penalty for murder.
[15:50] I think for my money, if you go to Romans chapter 13, Paul tells us there that the state wields the sword and I think he's using that word there in terms of capital punishment, at least one of the meanings of what the sword is is capital punishment.
[16:02] I think that's a suggestion that at very least it is permissible in God's economy for secular states to enact the death penalty. But saying that capital punishment is permissible is not the same thing as saying that it should be prescribed.
[16:21] And so it is a much, much bigger subject. I'm not going to say any more here because then we'll have a new sermon just on that. I'm not going to say more also partly because I'm a little bit of a fence sitter on this particular issue. I feel like I need to give more personal study to it and so you can come and fight with me afterwards about that.
[16:35] I see some good arguments on both sides but I do think we can say that the Bible seems to make capital punishment in some circumstances an exception to the Sixth Commandment.
[16:47] And then the third one, just war. You might read the Sixth Commandment and you might think well what if you live in a country where you get conscripted to military service? Some folk, and I'm not going to point out who, probably know what that's like in this church.
[17:05] Can I be conscripted? Can I join the army? Should I join the army as a Christian? Most classical Protestants have held that Christians can in exceptional circumstances participate in what they would call a just war.
[17:18] Now there are volumes and volumes and volumes of books written about just war theory. What exactly it is? What does and doesn't constitute a just war?
[17:30] If you think this is a simple thing you are severely mistaken and you need to just go and look at the literature to see how complicated and complex it is. Now again, we don't have time to tackle this big issue but notice one thing from Scripture that I think is very telling.
[17:45] Notice how Jesus and the apostles interact with Roman soldiers. There are several incidences in the New Testament where Roman soldiers come along and they show some interest in Jesus or they show some interest in the Gospel.
[17:58] and in those moments Jesus and the apostles never, ever, ever say well now that you're a Christian you're going to have to leave the army, right?
[18:11] Resign from your job as a centurion. Join the unemployment queue over there and find a new profession. They never, ever do that. And I think that's very telling because many other converts in the New Testament are told to give up various practices that are not in accordance with Christian morality.
[18:27] Soldiers are never told to stop soldiering. And so I think legitimate just war engaged in for the very purpose of gaining peace and preserving life is another exception to the Sixth Commandment.
[18:47] Now that brings us on to our second point and that is that the Sixth Commandment is not just about killing it is also about preserving life. So as Christians we're supposed to be against death but as Christians we're also supposed to be for life.
[19:04] Deuteronomy chapter 22 there's another interesting piece of case law here that helps us understand the Sixth Commandment a little bit better. Verse 8 When you build a new house make a parapet around the roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.
[19:22] Now that sounds pretty similar to the Exodus 21 passage about the ox the unruly ox but here the emphasis is not actually on negligence but on being proactive in preserving the safety of other human beings.
[19:37] So the verse is go, build, build a parapet. So John Calvin in that same section in the Institutes he says this he says after saying that the command prohibits taking life he says accordingly we are required faithfully to do what in us lies to defend the life of our neighbor to promote whatever tends to his tranquility to be vigilant in warding of harm and when danger comes to assisting in removing it.
[20:08] This you might notice is a constant ethical theme in Christianity Old Testament and New Testament. We don't just want to avoid the things we're prohibited from we also want to positively live in such a way that we promote the very thing that the prohibition is preserving.
[20:23] That we promote the very thing that the prohibition is preserving. There's a lot of Ps in that sentence but the bottom line is this the positive application of the sixth commandment we want to be people who preserve life.
[20:38] That's why you get a really, really I think beautiful summary of the duties of the sixth commandment in the Westminster Larger Catechism and the Presbyterian Catechism is the big one. Question number 136 says what are the duties required in the sixth commandment?
[20:54] And the answer the duties required in the sixth commandment are all manner of careful efforts and lawful endeavors to preserve the life of ourselves and others by resisting all thoughts and purposes subduing all passions and avoiding all occasions temptations and practices which tend to the unjust taking away of anyone's life.
[21:13] This includes the following the just defense of lives against violence patiently bearing the hand of God with quietness of mind and cheerfulness of spirit sober use of food drink medicine sleep labor and recreations charitable thoughts love compassion meekness gentleness and kindness peaceable mild and courteous speeches and behavior forbearance readiness to be reconciled patient bearing and forgiving of injuries and returning good for evil and comforting and supporting the distressed and protecting and defending the innocent that that's a pretty comprehensive pro-life ethic right we just all need to read the catechism and we all be really good people nice people you might have noticed the Westminster Divines the guys who put the catechism together they even had a little bit of self-care in there did you see that part sober use of food drink medicine sleep and labor labor and recreation so they're like one of the ways that you keep the sixth commandment is by maintaining a healthy work life rest exercise balance and eat well so the sixth commandment will help you with your discovery vitality points you can quote that and put that on social media this morning
[22:23] Christians are supposed to be for life now here are the implications number one Christians are committed to non-violence so the sixth commandment is the basis for our general posture of non-violence and that you will find across most Christian traditions listen to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount how he teaches about this this is Matthew chapter 5 verse 38 and 39 he says you have heard that it was said eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth but I tell you do not resist an evil person if anyone slaps you on the right cheek turn to them the other cheek also now that that original law that Jesus is referencing an eye for an eye tooth for a tooth it's a law that actually pertains in the Old Testament to limiting blood feuds within the nation of Israel so in other words if somebody chops off your finger you can't then go and chop off his whole hand and escalate the whole thing punishment must be proportional it's actually about regulation and limitation not necessarily prescription on what should be done in the event of a crime but then you see what Jesus does with the command he goes even further and he says he basically says look
[23:42] I just don't want you Christian I don't want you to just keep the peace by only caring about proportional justice I actually want you to go above and beyond and resist violence altogether as far as you're able to don't even engage in the sort of activity that can lead to death and this even when you are provoked he's saying now violence is obviously one of the key contributors to death and so Christians on the whole seek to live lives of non-violence in obedience to the sixth commandment that's number one number two Christians seek to avoid negligent behavior that harms others so you go back to that law in Exodus chapter 21 about the ox when the owner is negligent that is he knows that the ox has a bad attitude and yet he doesn't go and make sure that the fence is put up properly to keep the ox in there he is on track at that point to breaking the sixth commandment now you can probably think of a lot of examples like this today driving under the influence of alcohol would be the sort of example of negligent behavior letting a 12 month old baby crawl unsupervised near an uncovered swimming pool playing around with making bushfires on table mountain in the middle of summer making unguarded comments about your spouse's cooking or dress sense all of these examples of negligence could lead to death yours or somebody else's so Christians don't just care about directly not killing people they care about living life in such a way so as not to bring harm to others that's the second thing third thing at an ideological level
[25:35] I think Christians should be opposed to cultural trends and they change from culture to culture and where we live but cultural trends that seek to minimize the God given value of human life and normalize the taking of life two areas I think of particular concern in our culture today there are others but two in particular I think are abortion and euthanasia they are both enormous incredibly complex subjects politically charged subjects we could do whole seminars on each of those so I'm taking a little bit of a risk by just mentioning it and then kind of running away afterwards let me say a few things about abortion I don't have time to tackle euthanasia as well but I think a lot of what I'm going to say about abortion could probably the principles of these could be translated over to the euthanasia question but think about abortion for a moment here I think I think that it is impossible to take the Bible as God's word and not clearly see that abortion is a violation of the sixth commandment okay
[26:40] I want to be absolutely crystal clear about that that has always been our church's conviction and there's been the conviction of most orthodox Christians throughout history from the earliest times a fertilized egg in a woman's womb a zygote is a human being here is Dr. Diane Irving a professor of history of philosophy and medical ethics she writes this in a journal she says abortion is the destruction of a human being the human embryonic organism formed at fertilization is a whole human being and therefore is not just a blob or a bunch of cells this new human individual also has a mixture of both the mother's and the father's chromosomes and is therefore it is not just a piece of the mother's tissue scientifically there is absolutely no question whatsoever that the immediate product of fertilization is a newly existing human being a human zygote is a human being it is not a potential or a possible human being it is an actual human being with the potential to grow bigger and develop in its capacity that's the science and there are a lot of people on the pro-choice side of the argument who would actually agree with that statement science can't actually tell us when personhood starts it can only tell us that a human is a human from the point of fertilization social compact based on pragmatism cannot tell us when personhood starts and so as a culture what happens is we end up defining personhood at random points upon the human development line in order to serve our own experience but God does tell us when a person starts here's what he says in Jeremiah chapter 1 verse 5 talking to the prophet Jeremiah he says before I formed you in the womb
[28:35] I knew you before you were born I set you apart I appointed you as a prophet to the nations all human beings are created in the image of God all human beings are formed by God in the womb we have no right to unlawfully end the life of image bearing human beings at any point in the development process abortion is a violation of the sixth commandment but because of that sentence that I had just now with all the Ps in it Christians are not just about prohibition they are also about preservation nothing does more damage to the pro-life cause than disregarding the plight of young women in our world we must not be simply about forcing young confused women in crisis into a center of some sort counseling them to keep their babies and then functionally throwing them out to fend for themselves in this brutal world that we live in we have to have to be pro-life across the board the phrase that's often used as womb to tomb that means taking a material interest in caring about women trapped in poverty that means taking a concrete interest in providing safety from sexual violence that means taking an interest in teaching and developing family stability challenging and encouraging strongly fathers to not run away but to take up their God given responsibility to parent and to provide what we spoke about last week it means taking a serious interest in childcare in education we must must must be committed
[30:35] I think as Christians I think we're obligated to see an end to abortion committed to that end but we must also be committed to creating alternative communities of light that powerfully powerfully bear witness against the culture of death that is in this world I'm actually very thankful that contrary to a lot of liberal media out there there actually are very many comprehensive pro-life movements and organizations out there bearing witness by offering comprehensive care to both child and mother do not believe the lie that those people don't exist they are out there and there are many of them number four Christians need to obey the sixth commandment not just with their hands but also with their hearts Jesus has something to say something quite uncomfortable to say about the sixth commandment when you get to
[31:36] Matthew's gospel in the Sermon on the Mount Matthew 5 21-22 you've heard that it was said to the people long ago you shall not murder and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment but I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment again anyone who says to a brother or sister raka and that's an Aramaic term of contempt is answerable to the court to the Sanhedrin and anyone who says you fool will be in danger of the fire of hell so Jesus says to us breaking the sixth commandment it starts somewhere it starts somewhere deep down in us it starts with anger it starts with contempt it starts with hate in fact hate and contempt stem from anger Calvin in that same section in the Institutes he calls hate invertebrate anger now I had to go and look up that word because I have no idea what the word invertebrate means it means habitual hate is habitual anger as a sinful fallen human being you and me you will often be provoked in your fickle frailty to anger by the action and speech of other people around you that's going to happen it's just going to happen you're all going to get angry with people people are going to do things wrong around you and you are going to get angry and in that moment you have an option you have an option either to repent or to habitualize that anger and so when you choose the latter or you just kind of disregard the former you produce hate habitualized anger and feelings of hate are incredibly strong they can be incredibly strong people can hurt us really badly in this life you know some of you are carrying those wounds and those scars right now you have been hurt and wronged in horrendous ways by other people and so feelings of hate can be deep we despair that we can never get rid of those feelings of hate we read
[33:45] Jesus' words and they condemn us because we think I can't get those feelings out of my heart I can't take them away people have done terrible things to me you can feel like your heart is irredeemable that you can't fix it that you can't remove the hate but if you understand like Calvin does that hate is habit anger habitualized well then you do have a way to combat it by replacing it with another better habit habitual repentance habitually repenting in moments of anger stopping saying no this is wrong and turning away from it that anger is going to come because you're going to be provoked in this life it's going to come it's what you do in those moments that matters even after those moments because sometimes you won't have the control in the moment and it's what you do after that repentance that repentance is a wrestling it's a reckoning with your heart it's saying to your heart speaking to your heart sitting it down in a chair saying I'm going to have some words with you anger is not right it's not right this and why can't
[34:56] I do that well because the righteous anger of God has already been poured out on the most precious image bearer of all God's only angry with one thing sin he hates it and justifiably so he has wrath for it is the biblical term as the theologian A.W.
[35:23] Tozer famously said God's wrath is his utter intolerance for whatever degrades and destroys he hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio that would destroy the life of her child and so God does hate he does have anger but that hate that anger is laser focused and concentrated upon sin and death and he looks at this world that we inhabit a world where we pour out anger and hate a world where we kill where we take life he looks at this world and really from his vantage point he should turn that laser focused hate and anger upon us shouldn't he don't we deserve it don't we deserve it in in this culture of death that we have created in this world don't we deserve it don't we deserve to have his anger be poured out on us when he creates us right at the very beginning of the
[36:25] Bible he creates us he puts us in a garden of life with the tree of life next to us what do we do we hightail out of the garden and we murder the to be poured out on us we do but we don't get it poured out on us that wrath instead it's poured into a cup a cup where we never have to drink from but Christ does the perfect precious son of God the truest image of God he drinks the cup of God's wrath as he dies on the cross that's what the Bible says is happening as he's dying on that cross he's drinking the cup of God's wrath and at that moment those words from
[37:30] Genesis chapter 9 where God speaks to Noah they actually come back to haunt us whoever sheds human blood by humans shall their blood be shed for in the image of God has God made mankind here is the perfect image of God and his blood is being shed by human hands not because he shed the blood of others but because we shed the blood of others he's taking the punishment in our place he is drinking the cup of God's wrath in our place and friends when you see that when you truly see that when the eyes of your heart see that see that Christ stood in your place and took the father's anger against sin when you truly see that then you will be compelled out of love and out of thankfulness in the deepest parts of your heart to repent of anger against to obey the sixth commandment thou shalt not murder and it is only only in the gospel power of that terrible and yet glorious day that we will find the strength and the resources to live lives in radical protest of death at a practical level and at a heart level
[38:57] I have thrown out a bunch of incredibly complex things this morning capital punishment self defense euthanasia abortion these are not easy things to get your head and heart around they are not easy things to live in the midst of you will not be able to take these things on if you don't have that gospel power at the heart of who you are you will not be able to live consistently live graciously live generously live comprehensively pro-life without this gospel power because without this gospel power the hate is still here and throw yourself upon the mercy of Jesus Christ this morning let's pray Lord our hearts if we are honest are full of anger and hate at different things our wills are violated and crossed in many different ways by many different people each week and it is so easy to habitualize that anger and produce that hate it is so easy to get onto the trajectory that leads to death and we want to be free from it Lord because we watch it in action around us and it kills and it breaks down and it hurts people and it hurts communities and it hurts nations and it hurts our own emotional and psychological well-being we want to be free of it most of all it places us in a place of condemnation before you a holy and good God well let us see that in Jesus we can be free from it let us see that when we trust in him when we see that he stood in our place that he drank the cup of wrath then we have the resources and the power to remove wrath from our own lives not because we are strong enough but because your spirit is working through that atoning death in us father do that work in each one of us make us people of peace make us comprehensively pro-life in all that we do in every single part at a small practical level in the lives around us at an ideological level on bigger issues across the board
[41:16] Lord we prayed earlier that people would come in here and find out about this church by coming to the bazaar but I pray that if they do if people come in here and they find this community and if they spend some time here that they will see the way we interact with each other and the way we interact with other human beings and they will go there is life here there is a comprehensive ethic of life here and that will not be because we are amazing Christians it will be because of what Christ has done for us by giving up his life help us in this Lord we pray and we ask this for Christ's sake Amen Amen to grow THANK You