Word of Salvation - November 2010

 

SACRED LIVING, John de Hoog

(Sermon 7 in a series on the Ten Commandments)

 

Reading: Matthew 5:17-30

Text: Exodus 20:13 & Genesis 9:1-7

 

When faced with Law, our natural human response is to try to shrink it. We treat Law like the edge of a small circle. Here’s the line you can’t cross, but everything outside the line is fair enough. And we try to shrink the circle.

 

It’s natural for us; it starts when we are very young. Your children are fighting and you put a stop to it. You say, “If you lay one more finger on your brother, you’ll be punished.” Five minutes later they’re fighting again, but this time they’re kicking each other. “What did I say about fighting only five minutes ago?” “But you only spoke about laying fingers on each other, not about kicking?” It’s pure legalism – just make sure the exact words are obeyed and you can get away with anything. They have shrunk the law you have laid down about fighting.

 

Jesus does the opposite thing. Imagine the law about murder as being like a very small circle on a large piece of paper. As long as you don’t touch that circle, as long as you don’t actually pull out the knife and plunge it into someone’s body, you’re OK, you haven’t actually committed murder. You can live somewhere on that piece of paper. But Jesus takes that circle and he expands it until it touches every part of the piece of paper, and you find you can’t live there anymore without admitting that you too are a murderer.

 

How does Jesus reach that conclusion? How can he fill up the law in this way? Is it fair enough? And if it is, what does that mean for us?

 

I’d like to proceed today under three headings:

1. Human life is sacred.

2. People are sacred.

3. Practice sacred living.

 

The sixth commandment, “You shall not murder”, is laid down as part of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. But the principle is much older. The very first human being born of a mother was a murderer. Cain, the firstborn son of Adam and Eve, the hope of his parents, who should have gone on to lead the next generation into serving and loving God, is instead cursed by God because he kills his own brother Abel. God tells Cain that he hears the blood of Abel crying out to him from the ground. Right from the very start we understand that murder is a heinous crime.

 

Genesis 9 records a new start for human beings. It’s after the flood, and God lays out how things will be from now on. Humankind must produce human life and must protect human life. First, we must produce human life: Vs 1 “Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” Vs 7 “As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”

 

Second, we must protect human life. The human life we produce under God’s blessing we must also protect. Why? Because human life is sacred. It’s not like anything else. It’s not like animal life or plant life, it’s different. It’s sacred.

 

What does that mean, to say that human life is sacred? It means two things. First, it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to God. Vs 5 says, “For your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each man, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of his fellow man.” Notice the repetition; three times God says he will “demand an accounting”. He will require that the account be paid, a life for a life. Even from an animal – God hates even an animal taking the life of a human being. If God is angry when an animal, which acts from instinct, kills a person, how much more accountable is a human being who kills someone.

 

Why this accountability? Because human life doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to God. It’s like if someone lends you a beautiful car for your honeymoon, and they say “Treat it like it’s your own.” But you don’t, do you! In fact, if you have a car that is regularly appearing with new dents and scratches, they wouldn’t even think of lending you their car. Or suppose the church treasurer gives you the weekly offering to take to the bank on Monday. You don’t go out on the town on Monday morning and then bank whatever’s left over. That money is a sacred trust, you hide it carefully and you make sure every five cent piece gets to the bank. It’s sacred because it doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to someone else.

 

Here in this passage God gives human beings meat to eat, but he prohibits eating meat with its lifeblood still in it. Listen to the way God speaks of this. Vs 2 “The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. ³ Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. ⁴ But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.”

 

God gives all living things to humans – “they are all given into your hands.” They can kill and eat them. But not the blood! The blood must be drained from the meat before the people could eat it. Why? Because the blood belonged to God. Old Testament law repeated this again and again – drain out the blood before you eat the meat. The blood, which belongs to God, could be used in sacrifices only. So God teaches Israel that atoning sacrifices, which used blood, were God’s gift to his people, not their gift to God.

 

Here is the first way that human life is sacred – it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God. You will be accountable to the owner, accountable to God, if you take it or damage it.

 

There is a second reason why human life is sacred. First, it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God. And second, every human being is made in God’s image. Vs 6 “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man.”

 

I have a picture of Sallee (your wife or someone else) here. Don’t show the photo; it’s actually not of Sallee, but initially pretend that it is. Tear up the picture into several pieces. Explain that it’s not really Sallee at all, just... Even though illustrations that are shocking are good, I couldn’t bring myself to actually do that, we all understand what it means...

 

Every human being is made in God’s image. Everyone bears God’s stamp, everyone reveals something about God in a way that nothing else can, and attacking the image is like attacking God. It’s as shocking as tearing up a picture of your wife. Sallee would be rightly horrified if I actually did that, and God is horrified when we take human life. Human life is sacred for two reasons according to this passage: because it belongs to God, not to us, and because all of us are made in the image of God, and to attack a human being is to attack God.

 

Here is our first point: Human life is sacred. It’s sacred because it belongs to God, and because it bears God’s image.

 

But it’s a bit abstract – to say that this thing “human life” is sacred. To drill it home more powerfully, see our second point: People are sacred. You can’t leave the “sacredness of human life” up there as a principle; it has to mean something in life from day to day.

 

Jesus drills the principle home in a stunning way in the Sermon on the Mount. What he does is not new; he is simply explaining what the sixth commandment means. But he explains it in devastating fashion!

 

Matthew 5:22 “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Anyone who says to his brother, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” The word “Raca” means something like “blockhead” or “idiot”. Jesus gives us three examples of what the command against murder means. These ways of demeaning others – nursing a grudge against someone, or calling someone an idiot or a fool – reveal a heart attitude that in God’s sight is like murder. Just as looking at a woman lustfully is committing adultery with her in your heart, as Jesus goes on to say in the next section of the Sermon on the Mount, so hating and demeaning other people is committing murder against them in your heart!

 

I think Jesus is saying two things here. He’s saying that anger is the root of murder – that is, anger, if it is left unchecked, will lead to murder. The case of Cain and Abel is a great example. But he’s saying more. He’s saying that this principle, this commandment against murder, must come down to earth, it must be expressed in everyday relationships – with your brothers and sisters, with your friends, with the people you meet each day. Not only is human life sacred, people are sacred.

 

In explaining the meaning of the sixth commandment, the Heidelberg Catechism puts it like this: Q105 “What is God’s will for you in the sixth commandment? A. “I am not to belittle, insult, hate, or kill my neighbour – not by my thoughts, my words, my look or gesture, and certainly not by actual deeds – and I am not to be party to this in others; rather, I am to put away all desire for revenge.” Q 107 “But is it enough then that we do not kill our neighbour in any such way? A. No. By condemning envy, hatred, and anger God tells us to love our neighbours as ourselves, to be patient, peace-loving, gentle, merciful and friendly to them, to protect them from harm as much as we can, and to do good even to our enemies.”

 

This is what I mean by the illustration that Jesus takes the small circle on the page, “Do not murder”, the small circle that we think we can easily live with, and he expands it so that it touches every part of the paper, so that there is nowhere for us to live on the paper of our lives without admitting that we are murderers! Not only is human life sacred in a general sense, we must also say that people are sacred. The people we meet every day, the people who come into our lives; God calls us to love them as he has loved us. We must love them because they are made in the image of God.

 

So we must practice sacred living. Here is our third point. 1. Human life is sacred. 2. People are sacred. 3. Practice sacred living.

 

When we apply the sixth commandment, we’re itching to say things about abortion, suicide, euthanasia, war, capital punishment and so on. And we should do that; it’s important. But that’s not the place to start. The place to start is with your own heart, your own life. Everyone who comes into your life in some way must be honoured and valued. You break the sixth commandment when you treat people with coldness, with indifference, when you don’t care one way or the other about them. Do people feel warmth from you? Do they feel as if you value them?

 

We live in a world filled with people who are made in the image of God! What does that mean? When you meet someone new, do you size them up: “Will it be a burden or an advantage to cultivate this person?” Do you prefer to hang out with the beautiful people, leaving the difficult to stew by themselves? Do you make snap judgments about people based on first impressions, and steer away from those you think you can’t handle?

 

Human life, people, are important and precious to God. Certainly this means that we must not murder. But when we follow Jesus in thinking about the further implications of the sacredness of human life, then none of us can live on the page, can we! We are all murderers in God’s eyes, we have all failed to love others, we have all attacked God in the way we have dealt with his image-bearers in our world.

 

Pause

 

How does God deal with us, who have attacked him? He makes himself vulnerable to further attack! Freely, graciously, unbelievably, sovereignly, he submits to the most unspeakable attack we could imagine. Jesus, God the Son, to whom all human life belongs, takes on human form, lives a human life amongst those who have attacked God, is himself attacked, and as a human being he gives up his life. He is the perfect image of God, the only perfect image of God who ever lived on this planet, and he was assaulted beyond what any other human image-bearer of God has ever had to suffer.

 

But on the cross, he cried out, “Father forgive them, they do not know what they are doing.” They did not know what they were doing; they did not know that they were killing the Son of God. Indeed, when Peter explained it to them on the Day of Pentecost, 3000 of them were cut to the heart and turned to Jesus and became his followers.

 

But they did not become the followers of a dead man. For Jesus had risen from the dead, he had defeated death. Jesus lives today, and is continuing to call people who continue to attack him to repent and believe and have faith in him, and receive new life instead of the death we all deserve.

 

So the question that faces us all is this: Will you practice sacred living? That kind of living begins by turning to Jesus Christ, admitting that you have assaulted him in the way you have treated other people, repenting of that and trusting Jesus that he will forgive you and launch you out into a life of sacred living.

 

Once a start is made with Jesus, sacred living then means treating human life in a general sense, and then the people in your life specifically, as sacred.

 

So we have a basis to answer the big questions. Suicide. Is it OK to commit suicide? No; you don’t own your own life. You did not create yourself. Your life doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to God, and so only he has rights over it.

 

Abortion. If life is from and belongs to God, and if that baby is being formed in God’s image inside your womb, will you dare attack it?

 

Euthanasia. The same kind of answer applies. If our life is our own to do with as we wish, then certainly there can be no objection to assisting someone who is suffering to die. But life is not our own, it belongs to God.

 

So we have a way of approaching the big questions. But we also can answer the personal questions. Your friend, who was a Christian, commits suicide. Was it wrong for her to do so? Yes, it was wrong. Will she go to hell? After all, with suicide there’s no opportunity to repent, once you’ve committed the act you’re gone. So will she go to hell?

 

No, if she was a Christian her final end is already determined, and nothing can change that, not even her own suicide.

 

Human life belongs to God. It’s in his hands. You are not your own, because God created you. And if you belong to him, you are doubly not your own, you were bought at a price.

 

How important it is to do all we can to practice sacred living – to value and honour all people. People are precious cargo in God’s hands.

 

All of us, no matter how old or depressed or beautiful or ugly or crushed by life, all of us are mirrors reflecting something of God. Will you dare tear up the photograph, will you dare smash the mirror and destroy the image?

 

Amen