10 Keys To Successful Living
6 – Treat Life As Precious
Ex 20.13

A couple of weeks ago we had the longest of the commandments, the one about taking time out. This week we have one of the shortest, translated here as “You shall not murder.” In English it’s only four words. In Hebrew it’s even shorter, just six letters.

This drives home again a point that I’ve been making over the last few weeks; that the Ten Commandments are “little containers for big ideas.”

“Have no other gods but God” translates into being clear about what is at the centre of your life. “Don’t make idols for yourself” translates into not chasing after shadows and things that will disappoint you. “Don’t misuse the Lord’s name” means more than not swearing, it means not speaking or behaving in ways that damage God’s reputation. “Keep the Sabbath” is about taking time out to reconnect with God, creation and each other. “Honour your father and mother” helps us remember where we came from and that the world didn’t begin with us.

And those six Hebrew letters are a very small container for another big idea; treat life as something precious.

This command doesn’t address all killing

I don’t usually preach on one word. I prefer to preach on a passage. However, in this case the passage is one word. (It’s actually two words, but one of them is “not,” which is pretty self explanatory in any language. Whatever it’s attached to; don’t do that.) The word used in the Hebrew of Exodus 20:13 is ratsach, and it poses a bit of a problem for us in English. You can see the problem if you look at how a bunch of different Bibles translate this verse.

King James Version: Thou shalt not kill. The Revised Standard Version: You shall not kill. The Good News Translation: Do not commit murder. The New International Version: You shall not murder. The Message: No murder. New Living Translation: You must not murder.

The King James Version is the oldest and the New Living Translation is the most recent. There’s a definite trend to replace “you shall not kill” with “you shall not murder.” But the two words don’t really mean the same thing, do they?

[Clip from “Notting Hill”]

Can you actually “murder” a carrot?

So, here’s the problem. The Hebrew word ratsach doesn’t have any direct equivalent word in English. That’s not unusual. Actually there are very few direct equivalent words from one language to another, as I’m sure those of you who speak more than one language can testify. But the problem that all those translators had in translating this verse is that the English word “kill” is far too broad to translate the Hebrew (after all you can kill your lawn by not watering it) and the English “murder” is too narrow (it’s a specific legal term for a particular kind of killing.)

Doesn’t apply to animals

So what does ratsach mean?

Let’s start with what it doesn’t mean. For one thing, it’s only ever applied to human beings. When this word is used, it’s only human beings that are being killed and it’s human beings doing the killing. So, Hugh Grant’s dinner guest is out of luck. I only mention this because I’ve heard people argue for vegetarianism based on this text, when it’s translated as “You shall not kill.” That doesn’t work.

Doesn’t talk about war or the death penalty

Perhaps more importantly, we can’t use this text to talk about things like killing in war, or the death penalty. The Bible talks a lot about killing in warfare, and the death penalty. The Israelites are actually commanded to do both in scripture, but this word is never used in those contexts. It’s much narrower than that, but it’s not as narrow as our word “murder” because it includes a number of English terms most of us would recognise:

1st degree murder - a premeditated murder

2nd degree murder - intentional killing of another that is not planned or premeditated, but not in the heat of passion

Voluntary manslaughter – intentional killing in which the offender had no prior intent to kill; a killing in the heat of passion

Involuntary manslaughter - unintentional killing that results from recklessness or criminal negligence

But, if you have to choose one English word to translate all this, “murder” is probably the best we’ve got. A better translation might be, “You shall not wrongfully end the life of another human being.” That might be a bit long winded for a command that only has 6 letters in Hebrew, but it’s probably the most accurate.

It does say that human life is of great value

Let’s remind ourselves for a moment what the Ten Commandments are. When we began this series we looked at the context around Exodus 20 and we saw that these are not laws that the people of Israel had to keep in order for God to save them. He had already saved them by bringing them out of Egypt. These commandments are descriptions of how he expects his people to live in relationship with him and with each other. That’s why they’re still relevant to us today. We don’t live in a mono-cultural community made up of ethnic Israelites who are on their way to the Promised Land, so it may or may not be appropriate to try and apply these commandments to the running of Canada. But, as Christians, we’re still a community of people saved by God’s grace, just like the Israelites, and it’s still God’s desire that his people live in ways that reflect his character and reveal him to the world.

Our society has been so shaped by the Ten Commandments it’s worthwhile to take a moment and remind ourselves of the context in which they were given. The Israelites had been slaves for generations in Egypt. Slaves are truly “human resources” (I really don’t like that term). They are a source of power that can by used as the slave masters see fit. If it serves the slave masters’ purposes to work them into the ground until they drop dead on the job, then so be it. In slavery human beings are treated as a renewable resource; there will always be more where those came from.

But slavery doesn’t just diminish the value of people in the eyes of their masters. It diminishes their value in their own eyes. Ken Barnes is part of a worldwide movement which recruits successful black men to mentor the next generation. But this work doesn’t take place in a vacuum: the legacy of slavery is everywhere for his members. He says that, as the result of slavery "… you have entire peoples seen as sub-human; if someone is sub-human then the slaver is justified in what he does. This even affects the way black people today perceive themselves. Ask people what it is to be black. Black is associated with rap music, with being lazy and uninterested in society. These are traceable back to… slavery."

Slavery leaves its mark on a community, even generations later. In 2005 black males between 14 and 24 made up 1.2% of the US population, but they accounted for 15% of the victims of homicides and 28% of the offenders.

Violence is basic to the system of slavery, and it breeds violence. Remember that Moses, through whom God is giving these commands, was himself a murderer. Back in Exodus 2 he had seen a slave master beating an Israelite and he had stepped in and killed the Egyptian and hidden the body. And this wasn’t a crime of passion. He knew what he was doing. It says “Glancing this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.” That’s what we would call “2nd degree murder.” When his crime became known Moses ran away, even though he would probably only have had to pay “blood money” to cover the killing.

That was the normal way of dealing with deaths, and it still is in many parts of the world. If you kill someone (whether deliberate or not) you pay a sum of money according to how valuable they were. Slaves and children came pretty cheap, family breadwinners cost more, folks from the upper class and aristocrats were the most “valuable.” If you couldn’t pay, then you might have to face execution.

That system still exists in many parts of the world, including much of the Middle East. The problem of course is that, even after you pay the blood money, the dead person’s family can still come after you for blood vengeance.

[You have to be aware of these kinds of things in certain parts of the world. Pakistan is one of those places where families still seek blood vengeance for the death of one of their members. That affects all kinds of everyday things, like how you drive your car.

So you’re flying down the road at a great rate of speed (because that’s the only way people drive there) and someone steps off the sidewalk right into your path and walks across the road. You would expect them to maybe run, or at least walk quickly to avoid being hit. But no, that would be undignified. So they walk across the road in front of you, looking you right in the eye, and you know what they’re thinking to themselves. “Go ahead. Hit me. I’ve got 10 brothers who’ll hunt you down and kill you!]

It’s into this kind of situation that God gives this command. Other people might live by those rules, but God’s people are to be different. This commandment outlaws people in the community killing each other for whatever cause, under whatever circumstances.

Because all life belongs to God

That’s because the Bible teaches that all life belongs to God. Only God has life in himself. He doesn’t need anything else to sustain him. He doesn’t need to eat or sleep. He is the only totally alive being in the universe. And he takes some of that life and lends it to his creatures.

There’s an old hymn that we sometimes sing here called “My Jesus I Love Thee.” The last verse reads, I love thee in life / I will love thee in death / And praise thee as long as thou lendeth me breath. That echoes what Job says in Job 27.3, as long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils, my lips will not speak wickedness, and my tongue will utter no deceit. Ecclesiastes says something similar, Then joy will accompany him in his work all the days of the life God has given him under the sun. (Ecc 8.15) Life is something that God gives us for our time here on earth.

I want to be sensitive here but there’s something that needs to be said. When we talk about suicide, we often say something like, so-and-so “took their own life.” According to the Bible, it was never theirs to take in the first place. All life belongs to God; he only lends it to us.

Because human beings are made in God’s image

And human life is especially precious because, as Genesis 1.26 says, God made human beings in his own image.

Now, that doesn’t mean that God has two arms and two legs. In the context of Genesis it probably has more to do with what comes next, let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.

So we are like God in the way that we relate to the rest of creation. We are God’s image bearers in creation, acting on his behalf in caring for it. As Paul says in a different context in Corinthians, we are God’s ambassadors. Each one of us. Not just the “important” people. Each one of us is God’s image bearer in the world.

Devaluing human life has serious consequences

In the middle of the 20^th century there was a movement that was supported by leading scientists, politicians and celebrities around the world. The theory was taught in colleges and high schools. Its supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Alexander Graham Bell, Leland Stanford (who founded Stanford University), H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw. Research was backed by Nobel Prize winners and the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations. Laws based on the theory were passed in many countries, including Canada and the US.

The name of the theory was “eugenics” and it took the horrors of Hitler’s extermination camps to show it in its true light. Hitler only systematised something that was already going on in many western nations in the mid 20^th century; the sterilisation and (sometimes) killing of people considered genetically inferior; Jews, gypsies, blacks, homosexuals, the disabled, the mentally ill.

Sad to say, even many of the leaders of mainline churches supported eugenics; a clear example of Christians allowing their ideas to be shaped more by the surrounding culture than by scripture. And it’s still a struggle, even today. Eugenics has been rejected as junk science, but we still have culturally acceptable ways of devaluing human life.

For unborn children

At one end of the life cycle we have abortions. Those who speak in favour of abortions talk about things like “self-sustaining personhood” as the defining point for not allowing an abortion. I’m not even sure how you measure that when one part of a hospital is especially equipped to keep alive premature babies who are clearly not “self-sustaining” while another terminates pregnancies of about the same length.

But the Bible doesn’t address questions like “Is the foetus a person?” or “At what point is life sustainable?” It asks a much simpler question. “Is it alive?” If the child in the womb is we don’t have the right to kill it, because its life is not ours to take. Life belongs to God.

For the elderly

At the other end of the life cycle there’s a growing acceptance of the idea that old people should just quietly get out of the way of the next generation. As the population ages, euthanasia of the elderly will become more and more of an issue.

For the terminally ill

In the middle is the question of “physician assisted suicide.” Once again, the question that is asked has to do with “quality of life.” Let me be clear. I’m not talking about palliative care like what happens in a hospice, where someone is clearly dying and they don’t want any heroic efforts to keep them alive. So they are just made comfortable while their body slowly shuts down. That’s very different from actively helping someone to kill themselves. Once again it comes back to the statement that life is not theirs to take.

For the disabled

And all of this leads to a devaluing of any life that doesn’t meet some kind of accepted standard of “quality” or “value.” So it’s only a short step to devaluing the disabled in our midst.

While I was researching this message I read one article that argued that if a disabled child was loved by his parents and served the purpose of challenging them to care for him; that was OK. But if the parents didn’t respond that way he served no purpose and it would be better if he had never lived.

His life wasn’t valuable in and of itself, only in terms of its value to others around him. That sounds a lot like the value system of slavery.

Conclusion

I was going to spend some time on what Jesus says about this command in the New Testament, but you’re going to have to wait for that until next year, when I preach on the Beatitudes. And in the end I think it’s probably better this way. Jesus takes this commandment and turns it inward to address our own internal lives and motivations. And that’s good. But I’m not preaching from Matthew, I’m preaching from Exodus, and addressing a much more basic question. How valuable is a human life?

The answer is well put in Ps 49:7-8, No-one can redeem the life of another or give to God a ransom for them—the ransom for a life is costly, no payment is ever enough—

That’s true. But in the end a ransom was found that was enough. God himself provided that ransom in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ, who died on the cross that we might live forever with him.