Sermon Tone Analysis

SANCTITY OF LIFE        EXODUS 20:13  

 

 

            Many Christian leaders from many different denominations and Christian traditions have been warning us in the west that we have created in our own lifetime a culture of death, a culture that has very little regard for human life.

Life has become meaningless for many people as seen on the nightly news and as read in the daily newspaper.

Sinful men and women cannot tolerate the idea that God is in control.

Rather than acknowledging God’s creative work and submitting to His Law, they would rather believe that the universe just happened, a result of chance events somewhere in time.

A God who is nonexistent, irrelevant, or dead can demand nothing.

In the words of folk artist Joan Baez, we “are the orphans in an age of no tomorrows.”

Begin with some impersonal force, add the passage of time and a number of chance occurrences, and, “Welcome to a meaningless, absurd universe.”

Perhaps filmmaker and actor Woody Allen expressed this worldview best.

Allen may be a filmmaking genius, but he is also one of the saddest popular philosophers of our time.

In the film /Annie Hall/, in what is supposed to be a humorous line, Allen says, “Mankind is left with alienation, loneliness, and an emptiness verging on madness. . .

.Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable.”

The billboards on the postmodern road of life read: “You are going nowhere.” “You have no reason to exist.”

Why?

The reason is modern men and women, in their hostility toward God, have rejected the Maker’s instructions.

Before he tried to commit suicide, artist Paul Gauguin scrawled on his final painting, “Whence come we, what are we, whither do we go?”

Here is the answer of modern man.

Where do we come from?

Nowhere!

What are we?

Nothing!

Where are we going?

No Place!

P. S. Have a nice life!

Just from reading these statements you will notice a fundamental difference between those who believe all is chance and those who believe in a personal, intimate and involved God.

In this command God is signifying the sanctity of life.

In other words, this command indicates that life is precious to God because he created it and He is the only one with the right to take it.

Therefore, *you shall not murder.*

*            *The command is crystal clear.

It's very simple Hebrew.

And it just means "do not unlawfully or immorally take the life of another human."

This command is a call to believers to respect life and to take all care to protect and to cherish human life and not to take that life from another wrongly.

The Hebrew consists of only two words.

You could translate it "no murdering" or "no unlawful killing."

It is an emphatic prohibition of the very briefest sort.

You couldn't have said it more briefly than God says it in the sixth commandment.

But I want you to see that the phrase "no murdering" or "no killing" is not merely a generic term for any kind of killing, it is a specific term for the violent killing of a personal enemy.

This term, found here in the sixth commandment, is never used for acts of war in the Bible.

It is never used for capital punishment in the Bible.

It is never used for lethal self-defense in the Bible.

It is never used on any occasion when God or angels are the subject of this verb.

It is always, however, used in the context of, for instance, forbidding planned or premeditated murder or assassination or various kinds of manslaughter.

Yet, every year life is cut short by another individual.

In 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that there were 14,990 murders in the United States.

In Alabama, there were reported 349 murders.

This is almost a murder a day in our state.

While we still reel from the terrorist murders on 9~/11, the motivation of the terrorists' minds continue to come up with new ways to kill those they hate.

Every day we hear of another suicide bombing in the Middle East, Central Asia, or North Africa.

The Darfur region of Sudan has witnessed the slaughter, rape, maiming, and destruction of hundreds of thousands in the past couple of years.

Our generation has witnessed mass slaughter in Cambodia, Rwanda, South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, to name a few.

Murder and violence against humanity has become a primary source of entertainment in our own country.

"By the time the average child finishes elementary school, he or she has watched eight thousand televised murders and a hundred thousand acts of on-screen violence" [Philip Ryken, /Written in Stone/, 139].

It makes you want to labor for your child to be /below average!/

Even the /New York Times/ commented, "If you have the impression that movies today are bloodier and more brutal than ever in the past, and that their body counts are skyrocketing, you are absolutely right.

Inflation has hit the action-adventure movie with a big slimy splat" [quoted by Ryken, 139].

Video games have become so life-like that participants get the feel of killing someone—further numbing them to the downward spiral of a decadent society, and taking away the horror of unlawful killings.

I read recently that one computer game developer has created a /Columbine game/ with actual video footage inside the Columbine school and the crime scene, so that players can make the decision on who to shoot and who to ignore.

Most people are horrified by someone taking another life in cold blood.

But this command is about life and death.

How many people view abortion or euthanasia or suicide as violating this command?

Yet, isn’t it a violation of the sanctity of life.

Just think with me for a minute about the millions of unborn babies who have their right to life snuffed out because of abortions.

There have been over 45 million babies aborted since Roe V. Wade in 1973.

In 2003, the United States recorded over 850,000 abortions, while Alabama performed a little over 11,000.

This does not include the non-reported abortions done every year.

For the opponents of Pro-Life, they want people to believe that this issue of pregnancy is a scientific issue rather than a moral issue.

They don’t understand that the moment a baby is conceived is the moment a baby becomes a living human being, which cannot survive outside the womb of the mother.

Therefore, evangelicals have fought hard to protect the life of the innocent and those who have not a voice for themselves.

Euthanasia is another way that this commandment is violated.

Ask the locals in Waterford Township, Michigan, about Polson Street.

They call it “the Road of Death,” because it is there that a man by the name of Kevorkian enabled fifteen or more people to usurp God’s role and take their own lives.

Kevorkian himself has more than once expressed his egoistic and nihilistic worldview.

“Everyone is a phony”---everyone except him.

“Doctors are socially criminal.

Legislators are barbarians and church officials are religious fanatics.

You don’t see the tragedies.

What are we doing?

Nobody cares.”

Therefore, he says, “Put on the death mask and all will be well.”

Dr. Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, has assisted ninety-three individuals in taking their lives.

This is just the list reported in the newspaper, but there are far more murders that have been done in private.

He describes himself as a “prisoner of conscience” and “martyr to the cause of the right to choose to die.”

Derek Humphrey, president of the Euthanasia Research and Guidance Organization said, “Kevorkian’s martyrdom—self-imposed as it is—will speed up the day when voluntary euthanasia for the dying is removed from the legal classification of ‘murder’ and recognized as a justifiable act of compassion.”

In the Netherlands, it is already legalized.

No matter how it may read on the statute books of man, it will remain murder on the statute of God’s Law.

Yet, another form of murder is suicide.

Suicide is one of the top ten causes of death in America a year.

In 2004, there was reported 32, 439 suicides.

People are desperately seeking for people to save them from self-destruction.

There are more suicides than homicides in the U. S. every year.

As you can see all of these forms of murder violates God’s plan purpose for life, as well as take away the dignity of human life. 1 Samuel 2:6 says, “The Lord kills and brings life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.”

In Ezekiel 18:4, we read, “Behold, all souls are mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is mine; the soul who sins shall die.”

In other words, we claim to be the captain of our own fate and we determine our own destiny.

Yet, this verse has been misapplied and misinterpreted by various people.

These include pacifist in both religious and non-religious circles.

As I have stated earlier this command forbids unlawful murder.

So that leads me to ask the question is killing ever justified in Scriptures.

I believe the answer is yes and there are three cases for justified murder mentioned in the Bible.

The first case is that of manslaughter.

In the Old Testament, God provided places of refuge for people who accidentally killed someone.