historian Paul Johnson, one of my favorite historians, wrote a book called Modern Times. And in the book Modern Times, he chronicles the historical events of the 20th century. It's a really profound history of the modern period. And in that book, he makes a rather shocking statement, a statement that gives one pause. And that is that Paul Johnson says that the 20th century was the bloodiest century in all of human history. More people were killed in the 20th century alone than have been killed throughout all the rest of human history. Now that's an astounding fact. So according to Johnson then, we could say that the 20th century was the bloodiest century in all of human history. More people were killed in that century than at any other time throughout the human history. Now at the turn of the century, that is, as we made the move from the 20th to the 21st century, I remember reading an editorial by George Will. George Will said this. He said, if the 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history, the 21st century promises to be the most dangerous century in human history. And those are two astounding statements about our times. And I think that they inform us about something that we are going to talk about this morning, namely, the Six Commandment, which says that you shall not murder. And it's interesting to me, as we were going through these 10 commandments, as you come to the Six Commandment, this commandment in English consists of only four words. If you turn in your Bibles to Exodus, chapter 20 and verse 13, you can see the Six Commandment written there for you. It says, you shall not murder. Four words. This is a very short and succinct commandment. And yet, whole books have been written about this one commandment, about these four words. These four words have produced volumes of works about what it means that we should not murder. And it's interesting, while these are four short words in English, in the Hebrew, it's actually only two words, no murder. This is a very short commandment. And yet, it is chock full of meaning and importance for us as we think about what this means. And that is to say that these two words in Hebrew are pregnant with meaning and import for us. And we need to understand what this commandment means for us, the people of God, and what the context of this commandment is. This is extremely important for us. There's something here important for us, but there is something also very terrible for us here, horrible for us. And that is that what we can judge first of all from this commandment is that we are a homicidal people. I mean, think about what Johnson said. Johnson said, the 20th century, the bloodiest century in human history. And in one way to look at human history is homicidal history, or the history of homicide. If you think about human history at all, one of the things that you see, it's one of the ways that you look at human history is by doing body counts. It's astounding. And so one of the things that we see is that we are homicidal people, we are natural born killers. And it is only by the grace of God that we're not as bad as we could be. In other words, it's only by the restraining grace of God that keeps us from being as bad as we could be. The reason why you and I perhaps have not committed homicides isn't really because of anything in us, but it's because that the grace of God has restrained us. You know the old expression, right? We say it all the time, except for what? Except for the grace of God, they're going, you know, it's only the grace of God that keeps us from being as bad as we could be. If it weren't for the grace of God, think what a homicidal mess this would be. We are a homicidal people, we are natural born killers. I mean, think about this for a minute, okay? If you just go back, I don't know if you've ever done this, but a good exercise for people to do is to just sort of open the Bible in the front and kind of thumb through the pages and sort of skim the big picture of what is going on as the Bible unfolds for you. Just kind of skim, look at the headings, look at what's going on, look at the people who are named and the events that are taking place. And it's amazing what you see when you do that, when you sort of take this big panoramic view of what the Bible teaches. It's a great exercise to indulge yourself in. And one of the things that you notice, I mean, it's really interesting, right? You open up the Bible and Genesis 1 and 2, you have this wonderful and beautiful creation story, this creation narrative, the God created the heavens and the earth and everything in them. And he crowns that creation, of course, with the creation of humankind, of man and woman created in the image of God. And he looks at everything that he has created, right? The sun and the moon and all the heavenly hosts and all the heavenly lights and the earth and everything in them, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, the fish in the sea and all the things that crawl on the earth and so on and so forth. And then he creates man and woman and at the end of everything that he does, what does he say? He says, this is good. He pronounces a benediction, he pronounces a good word on everything that he has created. And he says, what his work is is good, this is good, this is what? This is very good. Genesis 1 and 2. Then you get the Genesis 3 and then something happens, right? We call it the fall. So you have creation, then you have fall. And then in the fall, we see that man rebels against the Creator God. And we know what the first sin is, right? Of eating the forbidden fruit and that passes on to us what we call original sin. And we call that the, you know, that is the fall, that is the fall of humanity. And then you get to Genesis 4. Isn't it interesting when you get the Genesis 4? Think about this from that. Think about how profound this is. We're only four chapters into the first book in the Bible. And the first recorded sin in the Bible after the fall is when Cain murders his brother able. It's the first recorded sin. The first recorded sin in the Bible after the fall is a homicide. Cain murders his brother able and think about how profound that is and what that says about us as human beings, as fallen human beings. And then you go, you know, you go a few, just a few verses down in the map, right? You know, also commits a homicide and then he boasts about it, right? He says if Cain should be, you know, you know, for, you know, events were seven times and then I should be events 77 times. He boasts about his homicide. He's presumed to us about it. And then you, all you got to do is get over to Genesis chapter six. Genesis chapter six is as far as you've got to go to see how really, really bad this gets. You go to Genesis chapter six. And what does it say? It says that the, the imaginations of the human heart are so wicked and so profoundly evil, right? That God has to destroy the earth by water, by flood. And do you remember what the reason for that is? The Lord looked on the earth and he saw that the earth was filled with what? Violence. That the earth was so filled with violence and everything that's associated with violence, hate, anger, envy, covetousness and so forth, all that is, all that is associated with that, the earth was so filled with violence. It says that God had to destroy all human beings except Noah and his family, except eight people. And you think about that. We're only to Genesis chapter six. We're only four chapters away from that beautiful and wonderful and glorious and exalted language that we find in the creation narrative. And it all goes to Pat and six chapters. And then what God does is a, is a recreation, if you will, through the flood. The darkness covers the earth again, the waters of the deeper covering the earth again. And out of that, God sort of starts again, it's a new beginning, it's sort of a new creation. But how long does it take before that goes back? Isn't it interesting? When we first started this, you know, in the Ten Commandments and we began reading the beginning of chapter seven, it said, God spoke all of these words. We said, this is the word of God. It was God that spoke these words. God is the author. Indeed, we said that there's a way in which the God is the author of these words in a way that he's not in others in that, if you go on and read in this, in the book of verses, it tells us that these words were written by the very finger of God. God is the author of these words. He spoke these words and he spoke them to who? To Moses. And then Moses was to communicate them to the people of Israel, the people of God. So Moses is the representative. He's the goal between, he's the mediator here that is going to tell us what God has said. And the God has said that I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt out of the land of slavery. You shall know the God's before me. You shall not make for yourself any idol, any graven image. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Honor your father and mother as we saw last week and now you shall not commit murder. Now I want to tell you something. I don't know what was going through Moses' mind when he was up there on the mount with God Almighty. But receiving these words of the commandments, I don't know what he was thinking. I don't know what was going through his mind. But I do, I know enough about human nature to think about this. That when God said doubt shall not murder what went through Moses' mind and Moses' heart was this, I am guilty. One of the first things that we learned about Moses, Moses who was called to be the deliverer of the people of God, Moses who was to confront Pharaoh and say, let my people go. One of the first things we see about Moses and one of the first things we learn about Moses is that Moses is a murderer. He kills, he slays, an Egyptian in cold blood. And not only is he a murderer, but then after that he becomes a fugitive and he has to spend his life, most of his adult life running. Just a cold blooded killer, maybe a little deception able, let's go out to the field. Where else were they going to go? What else was out there? Let's go to the field. It's not a whole lot of deception there. Let's go out to the field, take a look around and then he kills him. Pretty routine murder as far as homicides go, right? We don't know exactly what the details were. Obviously he was not under any sort of conviction about what he did, boasted about what he did, almost dared God or anybody else doing anything about it. Nothing too ingenious about his murder that I can gather from that. Moses, it's sort of a crime of passion, a crime of anger. Most people are enslaved, he sees one of his people being misused, abused, and so he takes matters into his own hands and he defends his fellow human being by taking the life of another pretty common as far as what I know about homicides. Most of the homicides that occur are crimes of passion is what I understand. David, David takes this thing to a whole new level, doesn't he? David wakes up in the night, the script says when it was time and the spring time when the king should be at war and he goes out on his porch and he looks out and he sees a woman bathing. He's attracted to that woman, he sends for her, he comes, he commits adultery with her and then he sends her home. And then he gets word back that she's with child, that she was pregnant and now he knows that he's in trouble. And then what does he do? He sends for you ride the hit type, the husband of Beth Sheba. He tells Job, send me, send you ride the hit type home and he brings him to the power, dines at his table, gives him the king's food and drink, ask somehow the war is going. And then at the end of the dismisses, you know, why don't you go home to your wife and you know, isn't it ironic? Do you see the irony here that you ride the hit type has more integrity than the king of Israel? And he says, how can I go home and sleep in my bed and sleep with my wife? When Joab and all of the armies of Israel are on the battlefield, sleeping in the field at night? And so he goes down these sleeps in the court with the servants of the king rather than go home. And then David gets word that you ride and go home. And so he brings him in again, this time he gets some drunk, he tries to get him to go home one more time. And when he sees that this is fruitless and futile, then he decides that he's going to have to take matters into his long hands. David says tomorrow you will go back to the battlefield and you will take a letter to King Joab. You will give this letter to King Joab and you ride the hit one, you know, what a guy, right? You know, I think if the king gave me a letter, I probably would have read that letter before I got to bed. I mean, that's just the way I am. I want to know what's in there. You're giving me some correspondence. I want to know what's in there. I mean, I think I probably would have read the letter. This guy's got so much integrity. I mean, he's just oozing with integrity. Won't go home to sleep with his wife, doesn't even peek at the letter. What a soldier. What a human being. What a person of character. And he goes there and he hands the letter to Joab and you know what the letter says, you remember what the letter says. He says put your eye on the front lines where the battle is raging the fiercest then withdraw your troops and let him be killed. So Joab sends your eye to the front lines with draws the troops. Your eye is killed along with what you missed there. If you're not careful, not only your right is killed, but a lot of Israel likes a lot of your eyes soldiers and brothers died that day. Because when Joab goes to send the news back, he says with a message, he says, tell David the battle did not go well and that many lost their lives. And when the king gets angry and when the king starts to lose his his cool about how this battle went, you tell him and also you're right. The hit tight is dead. See, don't miss it. It's not just you're right. They got killed that day. A lot of people lost their lives to cover up David's sin. What I'm trying to get you to see here, folks, is that our heart is so homicidal that we are capable of making an art out of murder. David made art out of murder. He took it to a new level and he made art out of murder. It's exactly what the 19th century Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, the German philosopher said. And that's exactly what happened to those who followed his nihilistic philosophy. You know, some of you may know this by either reading it in history, but you remember in the early part of the 20th century, the Leopold Lord murder. Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about it. Were these two young men who had been studying nihilistic philosophy from their professor at college. And he was teaching him essentially the philosophy of Wilhelm Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is the one, if you remember, that said that God is dead. And if God is dead, then nihilism, there's nothingness. There's no meaning. There's no purpose to life. There's no reason to live. And that if God is dead, then what needs to take place is this transvaluation of values. In other words, if all the values that we presently live by are built on the idea that God is alive, or that there is a God, that God does exist, and God really doesn't, then we need to scrap all of our moral values and throw them on the ass heap of civilization and stomp on them and get rid of them because they're not worth their salt. They don't apply. And then Nietzsche said that there were two kinds of people in the world who were part of the herd morality, who just followed along, like swine with rings in their nose. And by them, he was talking about the religious people in the world who just sort of blindly follow along, doing what they're told. And he said, what there's going to be a master, people who follow master morality, people who have what he called the will to power, that are brave enough and courageous enough to create their own law, law, to live the way that they want to live, not to let anybody or anyone, not any authority, not any institution, not any, not your parents, not no one can tell you what to do and how to do it. You create your own morality, you create your own moral code. And he said out of those people who have this will to power will arise a new super race. Superman, or overman as Nietzsche called them. And Leopold and Loeb were schooled on all of this 19th century philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. And they invited a friend over one day. They were having a party. It was actually in this friend's honor and in his girlfriend's honor. And they invited him over early, they had a few drinks, and then they strangled him and killed him because they believed that the moral law did not apply to them, that they were above the law. Literally, as Nietzsche said, as one of his works is entitled, they were beyond good and evil. They strangled him, then they put him in a trunk. Now, when Alfred Hitchcock made a movie about this, it's called The Rope. I don't know if you've seen it, if you haven't seen it, you've got to see it. It's an amazing little story. Takes place in one room. They put the guy in the trunk. The name had a dinner party. The food is on the trunk where the body is. People are pouring your drinks, getting food or doors, etc., etc., they're talking. And all the while, Leopold and Loeb are letting out little innuendos to try to see if anybody would get it. If anyone pick up on it, that's part of the game. That's part of the art of honor. And they also invited their old professor because they knew that if he started to put it together, he was the one person that they knew that could appreciate the fine art of honor. Now, these bozos got caught and they got arrested, thankfully. But when I think of David, I think of those guys. David took murder to a new level. David took murder to an art. And what that shows us, folks, is just how sinfully, homicidal we really are. If we weren't, would we need a prohibition not to murder? There are over, you know, each year in the United States alone, there are over 18,000 murders, 18,000 homicides, 40 million abortions since RV Wade, over a million and a half of them every year, multiple tens of thousands of them each year in the city of Orlando. You want to talk about taking murder to the level of art, abortion, a physician-assisted suicide, and all these other post-medical procedures. We've not only taken it to an art, we've made a science out of murder. It's amazing. The worst part of it is, folks, is that in the final analysis, murder is not just homicidal. It's theocidal. Murder isn't really just about killing other human beings. It's about killing the image of God and human beings. Murder is fundamentally not just anthropological, it's theological. When we commit murder, we are really trying to kill the image of God and humanity. This is what's behind this commandment that human beings are creating an image and likeness of God. You are image-bearers. If you go back to the days of Pharaoh in the Egyptians and you see the... If you think of the people of God in slave, Israel in slave in Egypt, and everywhere they looked, what do you think they saw? You ever travel in foreign countries where there have been monarchies or where there is totalitarian governments? Have you ever been around in some of these countries? If you do, you know what I'm talking about. Every place you go, there is an image of that king or that leader or that president or whatever. This is what you saw in Iraq, right? I mean, if you saw all the images of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, everywhere you look, there was an image. It has a three-dimensional image. That's what that word means. It refers to a three-dimensional image. And when the people of Israel were enslaved and in bondage in Egypt, everywhere they looked, I'm sure, in archaeology support this, there was an image of Pharaoh. And what that said was is that Pharaoh was the image of God and the Israelites were not. And every day, and everywhere they looked in every context, they were reminded that Pharaoh was the image of God and they were not the image of God. Now, if it's true that Moses wrote the book of Genesis to encourage the people of God as they were in Exodus, as they were being delivered, then if you understand that context that everywhere they looked, there was an image of Pharaoh and then suddenly Moses writes in Genesis, you are created in the image and likeness of God. And then after Noah, after the flood, it says the same thing. That because you were created in the image and likeness of God, what he was saying is that you and me and all the people of the created order are images of God. It's not just Pharaoh. You are the image and likeness of God. You are his image bearers. But of course, what does that mean to be an image bearer of God? What does it mean to be the image of God? That's one of those words that we use a lot like the words glory and holy and sanctified and so forth, but we don't always remember what those words mean. What does it mean? Words like that suffer from what C.S. Lewis called verbicide, the murder of words, or the murder of meaning of words. We've murdered a lot of words in our day. We've taken out their meaning and watered them down to such a degree that they don't really mean anything anymore. What the image of God means basically two things. It means one. It refers to our fragilness. We are fragile. And if you know, when you looked at those images of God, sometimes they were made out of gold. Sometimes they were made out of silver. And sometimes they were made out of other precious metals. And all the rich people who had everybody had images. They were the big images that were built by the state and the monuments and so forth. But everybody had images. They were all over the place. People had little images like we have little doubts. And the rich people had images that were made of gold and silver and other precious metals. But the common person had images of clay. Now you can still find the images of the gold and the silver and all that, you know, all around the ancient, ancient areas. But it's hard to find any complete figures that were made of clay. They're broken. All we have is little pieces of them. That's how we know the exist. Because they're what? They're fragile, aren't they? See how what we're made of. When God created man and woman, he created the amount of what? The dust of the earth. We are clay images that tells us that we are fragile. Life is fragile, folks. You know it and I know it. This is a fragile life. You are not invincible. When we're young people, we think we're invincible. We think we can live forever. We think that nothing can kill us. You get a little older. You realize really fast that that's not true, right? We're fragile. Life is fragile. The second thing it tells us though is that there is great dignity in life. Seeing you are the image and likeness of God. You're not the image and likeness of some animal. You're not the, you know, you didn't come from a monkey. You're not the image and likeness of a monkey. You're not the image and likeness of the cosmos or of anything in nature. You are the image and likeness of God. It's great dignity in that. And that tells us that every human life has great value, has great dignity, has great worth. And that's why we can, we must do everything we can and we confess this more to preserve our lives and to preserve our neighbor's life and to not take life because making and taking life is God's business. Not ours. And those two things are connected. You know, when we think about the commandment about murder, we think of it in terms of not taking life, but the in versus is also true. That we're not supposed to make life either. That also belongs to God. And if ethically we can make life, if ethically we are permitted to make life, then we're also permitted to take it. You shall not, because you are made in the imaging likeness of God and there's great dignity there. That means that every one of us have value and worth and dignity beyond anything we can think of. What did, you know, we talked about creation, we talked about fall. What's redemption about? Hmm? One word. Hmm? Life. Hmm? Redemption is about life, isn't it? John says that Jesus came to do what? To give us life and life abundantly. He is what? Jesus is what? The way, the truth, and what? The life. Physical life. Spiritual life. Heavenly Father, we thank You for Your more law. We pray, O Lord God, that that law would be used through Your common grace to exercise restraint in our culture and in this world. We pray, Lord, that Your law would also work to make us aware of our inability to keep it, that we all fall short, that we all find ourselves powerless to keep Your perfect law, Your perfect standard, that it would work, Lord, to show us our sin and to drive us to Christ, our Redeemer, and our Savior from sin. We pray also, Lord, that for Your people, for those of us who believe, that this law would rule our lives and govern our lives and be our guide for life. We ask these things in Jesus' name.