Amen. Turn to, uh, first Matthew, not first Matthew, but first turned to Matthew five. And then second, we’ll be looking at Ephesians chapter four. So in addition to reading from Genesis chapter four and God requiring, uh, recompense or his own vengeance for murder. We want to think of Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount. You probably noticed there’s not a whole lot in the Heidelberg Catechism on actually killing or murdering. It’s mostly about the heart. And that comes right here from Matthew, Matthew chapter five, beginning at verse 21. The Lord Jesus says, you have heard that it was said to those of old, you shall not murder and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.
But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council. And whoever says, you fool, will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First, be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift. Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are going with him to court. Lest your accuser hand you over to the judge and the judge to the guard and you be put in prison.
Truly, I say to you, you will never get out until you have paid every last penny. And then over in Ephesians chapter four, remember most of the time, if not all of the time in the New Testament letters, you have the first couple chapters, you have a lot of doctrine, a lot of what we call, oh, I can’t think of it now. Oh, it’ll come to me. You have a lot of doctrine.
And then in the last part of the chapter, you have, uh, the, the obedience that is required. I know what I was trying to remember. Uh, you have the indicative and the imperative. So the indicative is who God is and what he’s done for you. The imperative is how should you then live, uh, based on those things that you have learned about God yourself, sin and salvation.
And so in chapter four. of Ephesians beginning in verse 17, we read, Paul says, now this I say and testify in the Lord that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him as the truth is in Jesus.
To put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds. and to put on the new self created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members of one another. Be angry and do not sin. Do not let the sun go down on your anger and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.
Amen. The word of the living God. You hear the 10 commandments. No other gods, no graven images. Don’t take the name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. And your brain, because of your self-righteousness says, check, check. Yep, pretty good. 90%. God rounds up, not doing so bad. And then we come around to honoring parents or those in authority. And we say, I do pretty good about that. Murder. Oh, I’ve never done that. Adultery. Nope, never done that. lying and stealing and covening.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. And then you bump along and come in Matthew’s gospel to Jesus words. And he pretty much says, if you funk it, you’ve done it. If you’ve had anger in your heart, if you’ve said you fool, if you’ve looked at another woman or another man with lustful intent, he basically says you have murdered and you have committed adultery.
And so we cannot, uh, by our, uh, makeup being fallen centers and Adam and actual centers of our own accord. You cannot say I have kept the 10 commandments of God for you, for I have broken them and we break them daily and thought and word. And indeed, and even in our new creation condition, we struggle against the flesh. We struggle against the world. We struggle against the devil.
And we cannot say so far so good. We cannot say check, check, check. And I think tonight when we look at the way the Heidelberg shows us the teaching, the heart, the root of this commandment, and perhaps we apply it in other ways, we may become more humble and say, oh Lord, were it not for your grace, there would I be. Maybe we will never put a bullet in anyone. or a knife in someone or something in their drink or their food.
But we’ve thought about it. We’ve dreamed about it. We’ve wanted to do it, I’m sure. And so we ought to take great care as we hear God’s law. Now we feel pretty good about ourselves if we watch the 11 o’clock news or the 10 o’clock news or the round the clock news. And we ought to feel pretty good about ourselves that we are not on there.
A murder in Burlington. murder in Graham. You know, husband didn’t pick up his socks for one final time. Right? We are not in the newspaper if there are any anymore. We’re not in the police broader. We’ve never shot anybody. We’ve never stabbed anybody. We are not arsenic Annie. Remember her?
If you’ve been around Burlington long enough. But then we get down to the nitty gritty. We come to issues of taking the life of little ones. We come down to the issue of serving in the army or the military or on a police force, or we are an officer of the court or even the executioner. And then this begins to get maybe a little more personal.
Do not murder is the commandment given in Exodus chapter 20. It is not simply do not kill for there are times when God sanctions killing. God sanctions the taking of life, but murder is never sanctioned. For the government bears the sword to punish evil. We bear the sword to protect our land, our interest and our freedoms. And we also are allowed to bear the sword to protect our own personal body or those that we love.
In the news this week, we had the fellow who very obviously and on camera killed the head of the insurance company in New York City. And the women are swooning over him. He’s a movie star. And then there’s the killer of Charlie Kirk nearly a year ago. And just this week I listened to the argument where they said he didn’t endanger anyone but his target. How you shoot a gun over a crowd at a great distance and not endanger others, I don’t know. But you hear all of these arguments. It’s a very interesting world. First question, what is God’s will for you in the sixth commandment?
It does not go straight to bullets and sharp objects or poisonous potions. It goes right to the heart. I am not to belittle. I am not to hate. I am not to insult or kill my neighbor. Notice it gets to the heart. and the motive and the actions that often do lead up to murder. We are good at belittling. We are good at taking people down a notch. The television we watch. Now, I am guilty of it. I’m not preaching to y’all and saying, whoa, look at me.
Many of us have watched Seinfeld. And the final show is their court, uh, their court scene where they have spent their entire lives, or at least the entire seasons of shows belittling others. Uh, what about the hatred of others? What about the anger that so boils up in our heart, uh, that we cannot look at others.
Think of Joseph’s brothers. Uh, they hated him. And when the father gave him a coat of many colors, they hated him all the more. And then when he told him about his dream, a dream that you all bowed down to me and served me and they hated him so much, they sold him into slavery.
What about insults? We’re pretty good at that too. We learn that on the playground, don’t we? The mama jokes or the you’re so fat jokes or whatever. But what happens is we get older. and we get a deeper vocabulary. What happens is we get older and our heart gets harder and more calloused.
I am not to belittle, insult, or hate, or even kill my neighbor. I imagine most of us, well, all of us are probably not going to have the chance to kill somebody. We are not gonna pull out a gun. We are not going to make a bomb. We are not going to carry a big knife you know, in some way, shape or form, kill our neighbor. We’ll talk about accidents in just a moment.
But what about our thoughts? What about our words? What about our looks? If looks could kill, you’d be a dead man. Don’t we say that? What about our gestures? The number of fingers we hold up? Or are they clenched in a fist? And then it says, and certainly not by my actual deeds. And so what we think about others, what we, uh, what we say to and about others, the way we look at them, you know, the body language is a lot. Our gestures or are a lot, but certainly not by our actual deeds. So God’s will is for us to guard our heart. God’s will is for us to protect our lips. to set a guard over our mouths. God’s will is for us to take stock of how we think and feel about others and where that leads us.
And then it goes on to say, I’m not gonna be partying this with others. What do we do when we get in a group of people and we’re belittling someone or we’re insulting them? It’s one thing to do it ourselves, it’s another to be in a party of others that do this.
And it says we’re to put away our desire for revenge. We’re to put away our desire to harm. We are to put away our desire for someone to receive payment for what we perceive they have done for us. And then very interestingly, it says, I am not to harm or recklessly endanger myself either. There’s the issue of self-harm, the issue of of suicide. I am not to harm or recklessly endanger myself. We are to protect our bodies as a temple of the Holy Spirit. We are to be careful how we live.
You know, sometimes we buy life insurance and, you know, you go through the process and they ask if you fly airplanes or jump out of them. They ask you all those questions. Are you reckless and are you full of risk? Sometimes there are professions and sometimes there are interest and sometimes there are hobbies where we may do what we call daredevil stuff. I don’t think many of us have had an evil career, uh, but sometimes you may fly helicopters in and out of war zones. Uh, sometimes you may do this or that, that endangers your life and you do it because it’s your calling. It’s your vocation.
It’s what God would have you do. But in general, we are to be careful, and especially when it comes to our life. We should not harm or endanger ourselves. Today, it’s talked about quite a bit on the news, and I do believe it’s a real thing, the mental health crisis, the mental health condition.
You see young people cutting themselves. I have learned to notice this when being at the kids’ school. If a student has a long sleeve on under a polo shirt, or they wear one of those athletic sleeves for you know, a joint or something like that. It’s usually masking or hiding cutting. I’m sure we all know folks who’ve had enough of this world, had a lot of despair and taken their own lives. That’s a hard and difficult thing. Finally, it says in question 105, we should prevent murder.
And that’s why the government is armed with the sword. You know, it’s not working over in, is it Great Britain, where they’ve disarmed the police officers? They’ve just moved from guns to knives, right? You know, everybody needs to remember Andy Griffith was a fictional character and he, you know, he negotiated every potential crime without a gun. but it’s okay for governing authorities to bear the sword.
They do not bear it in vain is what the apostle Peter says. So what is God’s will? God’s will is for us to protect our heart and certainly not to get into actions that would lead to or cause murder. And that leads us to question 106. Does this commandment refer only to murder? Well, by forbidding murder, God teaches us to hate the root of the murder. Our outward behavior starts inside. Solomon wrote in Proverbs chapter four, above all else, guard the heart for it is the wellspring of life.
Jesus says, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks. You know, when somebody comes into church and, you know, they got their thumb all wrapped up and, you know, you find out the story and they hit it with a hammer or something. My joke, I guess I’m half serious, is what did you say? You know, when you did it, what came out, right? That shows who we are.
By forbidding murder, God teaches us that he hates the root of murder and the root is envy. The root is ill will. The root is hatred. In the South, we aren’t referring to beauty when we say so-and-so is an ugly person. Now there are occasions where they are ugly in appearance, but that’s a bless your heart sort of thing. You know, it’s good their dog loves them, right? But in the South, we also say so-and-so is just hateful. They’re just hateful. I’ve got a neighbor. He’s just hateful. He calls the police on us when we have friends over. He’s just hateful.
Right? So envy, hatred, anger, or passion, uh, vengefulness, you’re going to pay for this. Uh, these are the roots of murder. And so in God’s sight, envy and hatred and anger and vengefulness are disguised forms of murder. Isn’t that a good little phrase? disguised forms of murder.
And so question 107, is it enough then that we do not murder our neighbor in such a way? And the answer, I love these catechism, Heidelberg, there’s always a no, and I love when we recite it, the no is very loud and clear. Is it enough that we do not murder our neighbor in any such way? No, by condemning envy, By condemning hatred and by condemning anger, God wants us to love our neighbor as ourselves. So it’s one thing to guard yourself from those root evils. Do not let envy and bitterness and anger and wrath and murderous thoughts take root in your heart.
You know, when something happens, like a school shooting or whatever, there’s always the police or the, you know, the law enforcement that goes to the scene of where the shooting or whatever took place. But where is there always a second group? They’re at the house and they’re looking for journals. They’re looking for computers and they’re looking to find a reason, a motive, a manifesto. And so in a sense here, God is saying, do not write a manifesto, but also don’t leave your house with weapons and commit a crime.
And it’s not just enough to guard our hearts. It’s also required of us that we go out of our way to love our neighbor and to do good to them, even if they are hateful, even if they are a pain in the neck or whatever. So God wants us to love our neighbor as ourselves.
And we do that by being patient, by being mild. We do that by being peace loving. There’s a stillness about us. We do that by being gentle. We live in moderation of our emotions, our passions. We love our neighbors by being merciful or tender and friendly, which is really another way of saying peaceful. And we live this way toward them and we protect them from harm as much as we can. We are living in a culture of death.
To our north in Canada, if you believe that life is too difficult, you can be medically put to death, much like the putting down of a horse or a old puppy dog or a cat or animal. In the north in Canada, it is perfectly legal. to seek physician-assistant suicide. It’s legal in some of our states. It’s legal in parts of Europe and other parts of the world. And just as we should not harm ourselves or recklessly endanger our lives, we should seek to protect those who are vulnerable. And of course, that is our elderly, but that also are the unborn.
That’s a big matter. You saw probably this week up in the state of Massachusetts, the governor, I suppose it was a reaction to the reversal of Roe v. Wade several years ago, but the governor of Massachusetts signed into law, which was passed by their governing council within the state, signed into law that you can abort a baby up and until birth. Just let that sink in. And we are to not harm or recklessly endanger ourselves or others, but we are to protect others from harm as much as we can.
Now, this is a little touchy. I know I had this conversation with dad. If we’re gonna protect others from harm as much as we can, the question inevitably comes, when should we stop driving? Many of us drive at least 4 or 5,000 pounds of, we used to be able to say Detroit steel. I don’t know what it is now. It’s some kind of alloy from somewhere. But we’ve got to be careful and determine by care and by wisdom when we stop driving. It used to be that if you stopped driving, you lost your independence. Now there’s this wonderful little app called Uber. And they will pick you up. And they will take you somewhere. And guess what? You don’t pay for gas. You don’t pay for insurance. You don’t pay for repairs. You don’t pay for tires and all the rest.
And so we live in a world where what used to be a loss of freedom can now be easily overcome, especially as we live in more urban areas. What about your firearms? Do you keep them locked up? What about things that could harm a young one? You know, we always learned as children, don’t drink the detergents under the kitchen sink, right? Because what do you do when you’re a kid? You drink everything that’s liquid, I guess. Remember the little poison control center stickers you would get? You put them on the telephone on the wall of the kitchen.
But there are very practical ways we should take care to protect and promote life as best we can not to harm others or ourselves. The final thing this statement makes is we should do good even to our enemies. That is the difficult one. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord. Paul takes the teaching of the Old Testament and says, let the Lord take care of vengeance. We are to be kind to others, and in fact, we will be heaping upon them burning coals.
It’s very interesting how people will respond if we act towards them in a godly way. But we live in a world where we can get on the internet and complain. We can get on Facebook and defriend or unfriend or however that works. We can let our displeasure be known in all kinds, all sorts of ways.
And so what is God’s will for you in the sixth commandment? It’s basically this, it’s to have the heart of God, the heart of Christ, and the fruit of the spirit in you so that these moments in our minds, in our hearts, in our lips, but with also our actions do not come to pass and bear sinful, bad, wicked fruit. So let’s pause now and ask God’s help. Lord, we pray that you would keep each of us with a watch over our heart and therefore our minds and our lips and our actions so that we bring glory to your name and bring good to others. Help us to pause for a few moments on this Sunday to think about how we think, how we feel, and how we do towards others So for sure we have not been honorable, so forgive us and cleanse us. But do let us bear the fruit of the spirit in our relations with our fellow men so that we may bear great witness to the love of God in Christ. This we ask in his name, amen.