13 “You shall not murder. (Exodus 20:13)
Seems simple enough, yet this is one of the controversial ones for many people. Everyone (except me) has someone they want to rub out. When you read about the Israelites taking over the promised land, God told them to kill everyone who had inhabited the place before them so that they would not be influenced by people who did not love God. There are many other examples in Scripture where God has caused people who did not love Him to die. You might think, “isn’t that murder?”
You must know that there is a difference between murder and killing. Since God creates everyone, he decides when life begins, and he decides when it ends. In rare situations that involved bringing about pre mature deaths of people in a litany of different ways, natural disasters, wars, worms etc. The previous inhabitants of the Promised Land had plenty of time to repent of their sins and turn toward God. (It’s impossible to move a whole nation out of slavery without someone hearing about it). They knew what God could do and had 40 years to repent and allow God to mold them into the people He knows they could be…alas after 40 years they were still stuck in their old ways…so using the Israelites, God killed them to remove their influence from the land and more importantly, from His people.
The odds are extremely slim to none that God would ever ask you to kill someone (we haven’t fought a war that God was behind since the Old Testament) so don’t go getting your hopes up.
So, after all that, what is Murder
Murder is something YOU decide to do. You plan it out and you do it. Nobody knows why, except you.
God does not like that. He decides when a life ends, not you.
Murders have been committed since Cain killed his brother Abel back in Genesis. We all murdered Jesus when he went to the cross and gave his life so that we could be free from our sins. That’s not something to be proud of.
When you murder someone it affects their whole family and you have negative consequences, not to mention their relatives might murder you back. God did not want His people (in Old Testament times or today) to have to deal with those kinds of consequences. That’s no way to live life always having to check over your shoulder.
Yet murder is more prevalent in today’s society than ever before. You might say, “but I live in a safe neighbourhood” and I would say “That’s awesome!” but that’s not the kind of murder I’m talking about. I’m talking about abortion. Abortion is the murder of a person’s unborn child (so that the person can continue to have sex with whoever and not have to worry about any consequences). This happens more times than you can count every year all over the world. I’m not going to get into it too much because I already discussed this in a previous post.
So to end on a positive note, if you haven’t murdered anyone, keep it up! When you choose not to murder someone, you are not part of the problem and you contribute to making the world a happier place to be.