LAW HOMILY: Murder In Marriage

Every week we look into the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say. We want to know how to obey Him. We want to know how to worship Him, not just through professions on our lips, but also through the behavior that exits out our fingertips.

The Sixth Commandment Forbids Murder

So we want to know what it means to actually walk with God. And we do that by looking at the moral law of God. Today we're in the Sixth Commandment. Exodus 20, verse 13. In the original Hebrew, it's just two words.

This is what it says, you shall not murder. Now, the commandment, do not murder, sounds ridiculously simple. That is until you actually begin applying it. And when we do that work with any level of honesty, it is not very long before we notice that the blood is actually stained our own hands.

The Westminster Larger Catechism says that the Sixth Commandment requires us not only to not take life, but also to preserve life through love and compassion and gentleness, peaceable speech, forgiveness, comfort and protection.

It not only forbids the outright homicide, but it also defines murder in two very interesting ways. First, it defines murder in what we withhold. According to Scripture in our confession, murder occurs when you withhold any means or ends that are needed to preserve life.

It also secondly defines murder, not just in the taking of life or from the withholding of life, but in the murderous behaviors that we all do, especially in the way that Jesus qualifies that, that if we have hatred in our heart, we've murdered our brother.

This means that a murder occurs when we have sinful anger, hatred, envy, or we pursue revenge. We commit murder when we use provoking words, oppression, quarreling, striking, wounding, and whatsoever else tends to destruction of any kind.

Harsh Words as Marital Murder

That's the standard. And this becomes even more excruciating, convicting, and even humiliating when we turn that lens of what murder is according to Jesus upon our own home. When we look in the kitchen, the bedroom, the car, the text thread, the argument that began over nothing and ended with two people lying awake in the dark, angry at one another.

When we look at all of these interactions within our marriages, we have every reason to believe that we are no better than a serial killer, murdering again and again with no regard for love or the law of God.

Let me give you an example. And remember, if you hate your spouse and are angry with them and use harsh words against them that Jesus said you're a murderer, which means that this category is not made up by me or by the reformers, our Lord says this is how most marital homicides occur.

You may have never actually raised a weapon against your spouse. I pray to God that you haven't, but have you raised your voice until your words tore through them like a Gatling gun? Have you called them names like stupid?

Useless, pathetic, crazy, impossible, worthless or worse? Have you used curse words to describe your spouse? Have you mocked them and maligned them? Have you said, I wish that I had never married you or you make my life miserable?

Have you ever said, no one else would put up with what I've put up with? Have you taken the deepest wounds that your husband or your wife has entrusted to you and then use them as a bludgeon against them, as ammunition to wound them?

Have you dragged out their old failures or past sins in order to embarrass them or to win an argument, to punish them or to make them feel sorry for annoying you? In a court of law, you didn't slit your husband's throat nor spill your wife's blood, but you did aim your heart filled with malice angrily at them and pull the trigger.

Silence and Withholding Affection as Punishment

Perhaps you're not the kind to shout. Maybe your weapon is silence, stonewalling, coldness. Maybe you're the kind of person that can freeze a room with your silence, the kind of silence that isn't really humble.

It's not attempting to reestablish the peace. It's the kind of silence that is intentionally aimed at punishing and withholding love, withholding life. Have you withheld affection from your spouse, making them crawl back to you and grovel before you will entertain them?

Have you stonewalled them? Have you refused to answer them, refused to look at them, refused to comfort them, refused to forgive them, all while making them guess how long this death sentence is going to last?

Have you turned your marriage bed into a bargaining table, tenderness into a reward system, and the home into a courtroom where your spouse is always on trial and you are always the prosecuting attorney and the judge?

Do you couch your sin in excusable language such as, I just needed space. I'm just making a point. I'm just setting a boundary or simply, I'm just not going to let them get away with it anymore. And while none of those statements that I just said are wrong outright, they are murderous behaviors when they arise out of a murderous heart.

Jesus said that it is out of the heart that the mouth speaks. If you're nursing hatred, if you're stewing in bitterness, if you're fantasizing revenge or starving your spouse of kindness in order to make them suffer for what you assume that they've done to you, the scriptures and the catechism has a name for what you are doing and that is murder.

Physical Violence and Intimidation Violate the Sixth Commandment

Sometimes the murder is loud enough for our neighbors to hear it. Sometimes the murder comes when you put a hand to your spouse and shove them. Sometimes the weapon is a slam door in your husband's face.

Sometimes the bullets are broken glass from that time you threw the cup. Sometimes the bloodshed is from that time when you put your fist through the drywall. Sometimes the loss of life occurs when you are blocking an exit.

We don't call these things just a bad fight. We don't rename intimidation as passion or violence or somehow leadership. Striking, wounding, threatening and endangering a spouse are not ordinary marital failures.

They are sins against the sixth commandment. They are murder. And from the top to the bottom, everyone in this room has done it. Whether it be the aggressive kind or whether it be the angry vocal kind or whether it be the anger that you've harbored in your own heart, we've all done it.

The way that Jesus defines murder, we've all done it. We have all murdered our spouse. And if you're not married yet, you will. The question is not what we have done. The question is in light of what Christ has done, what will we now do?

Repentance and Forgiveness Through Christ

And what we must do is we must repent for the ways that we've fallen short of the glory of God. We must repent for the murder that we've harbored in our heart and in our hands. And we must repent and turn again to the only one who can forgive us, which is Christ Jesus, our Lord.

Let us not live in the sin that so easily entangles us and let us not treat lightly the things that put our best friend on the cross. Let us turn it over to him. Let us be healed by that. Let us walk forward in freedom.

The Bad News of Sin and the Good News of the Gospel

Let's pray. Lord, we know that the good news of the gospel would not be good news if it were not first precipitated by the very, very bad news that we are all sinners. We have all fallen short of the glory of God.

We have in every area of our life aimed it at every person in our life in malice and ill will. We've done it time and time and time again. And as we mentioned last week, there is no small sin because there is no small God with which we sin against.

Lord, help us, because that bad news is truly bad. You say in Deuteronomy that in due time, their foot will slip. And Lord, without your grace and mercy, our foot would slip and fall headlong into hell for our sins.

And yet, the bad news is not the only news that Scripture tells us. There is good news, and the good news shines all the brighter against the dark canopy of our sin because we see in the contrast the surpassing beauty of what you've done on the cross.

You embraced the darkness, went into the darkest moment in human history, took upon yourself all of the sins, the murder, the lust, the greed, the selfishness, the lies. You took it all upon you on the cross.

You who knew no sin became sin. So that we might be called the righteousness of God. And in that great exchange, we have been made whole. We have been made clean. We have been made pure. Lord, let us not fall into the equal and opposite sins, number one, of feeling despair because we are sinners.

Yes, we are sinners, but Lord, help us not to stay there. Help us to lift our eyes to the cross of Jesus Christ and to see where our freedom and our hope comes from. But let us also not become the kind of people who lean so heavily on a version of grace, cheap grace, that we never have sorrow over our sin, that we never grieve the actions and attitudes that are the very reason why you were murdered in the first place.

Lord, help us at one and the same time to hold a healthy view of the ugliness of our sin, but also a joyful, all-consuming view of the beauty of the gospel that against that backdrop, you have saved us.

You have purified us, Lord. And in that, let what arises in the tension of our ugliness and your faithfulness be exclamatory joy. Lord, help us understand both the depth of our sin and the depth of your grace so that, Lord, what comes out of our mouths is exaltation, praise, adoration, and joy.

Lord, help us to trust if we are truly in you that you have truly forgiven us. Lord, help us to remember to release, turn over, and confess our sins. And Lord, help us to press on to know and love you more through repentance and through faithful living and through trusting in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

Lord, it is in your name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to this homily on the law of God from our Covenant Renewal worship this past Lord's Day. We publish these messages each week because we believe that God loves his law and far from throwing it away, we believe that the death and resurrection of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will actually help us learn to love and obey God's law.

And that's our prayer for you, that as you chew on these expositions each week, that you would both learn to love and come into alignment with the law of God. And we pray that you would do that by the Spirit's power through the finished work of Christ and to the glory of God.

And with that, God bless you.