LAW HOMILY: "Murder In The Heart"

The Sixth Commandment and the Heart of Murder

Our commandment today is the sixth commandment and it is you shall not murder. The sixth commandment forbids more than murder. In fact, it forbids the seed of murder, the interior corruption that gives rise to every clenched fist and every bitter word and every bloodstained hand.

When it says you shall not murder, it's not only a prohibition against physical violence, but it's a warning against the heart that harbors it. Jesus himself made this explicit when he said, everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court and in that Jesus is interpreting the law for us and telling us what the extent of it actually is.

Anger is not a lesser offense in the courtroom of God, it is early stage homicide. It is murder that is still in the womb of the soul. And this is where the commandment finds every one of us guilty. Because while few of us have taken life with our own hands, how many of us have entertained death in our own hearts?

We see the secret, we resent in silence, we justify it with phrases like, oh, I'm just.

Venting.

I'm just being honest. God wouldn't have me lie, right? We are angry people and we try to baptize it with a kind of righteousness and justification. Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the prophet Jonah, called by God to preach repentance to the city of Nineveh.

And Jonah runs from God because he hated the Ninevites so much. And then when God has him swallowed by a big fish or a sea monster, as the Hebrew word would have us be indicated, Jonah reluctantly obeys.

And then he goes and he preaches the worst sermon ever preached. It was essentially a single line, repent or you're all going to die. It was about as half-hearted as it could be. And then God forgave the entire city by the preaching of Jonah's little sermon.

And then Jonah goes outside the city and he has a pity party and he's angry. And God says, do you have good reason to be angry? He says, yes, I have good reason to be angry. I knew you were gracious.

Do you hear that?

I'm angry because you're gracious to my enemies. The idol in Jonah's heart was that these people were worthy of nothing but destruction. And he forgot that he too was necessarily needing the grace of God.

And that is what happens with anger, isn't it? We paint ourself as the righteous one and we paint the other person that we're in conflict with as our enemy or as the wicked one. We played cops and robbers as kids and we do it as adults.

The word that is used there, kara, is a kind of smoldering, embittered wrath that Jonah experienced that he felt like he'd been wronged by God. And he says, I know that you were gracious and compassionate, so take my life for it's better for me to die than to live.

His anger was so corrosive that he would rather die than share heaven with his enemies. That's what anger does. It blinds us to grace. It hardens us to compassion. It convinces us that wrath is more righteous than God's mercy.

And in that, Jonah didn't carry a sword, but he carried a heart that had been sharpened.

To murder.

And so is ours when we nurse resentment, when we hold on to our grudges, when we wish ruin upon those who've wronged us, when we seethe in bitterness, when we bring up our list of grievances every time anything happens, that we need to whack the person over the head to remind them of what they've done.

And at the root of it, it's a kind of Satanism because Jesus said that the devil was the murderer from the very beginning. So when we act in that way, we're not serving our Father God. We're serving the Father below, as C .S. Lewis called him.

Confession, Weight, and the Call to Repentance

So with that, let us, with humility, come to the throne of grace once more, as we do every week. And let us confess our sins. And let us joyfully be rid of our sins. Because the only way you can be joyful is if you get rid of the things that are holding you down and weighing you down and the encumbrances, as Hebrews says.

The only way you're going to run the race is if you throw off every weight. So throw off the weight between you and the Lord this morning, and then we'll receive our pardon together. Amen? Let's go to the Lord in prayer.

Lord, would you help us? Because we are bitter and angry people. All of us have some preference, some opinion, some thing that we have held over someone else's head, and it's caused us to be angry and to judge them.

All of us at times have nursed bitternesses and frustrations. All of us have weaponized our comments in order to cut people down and to remind them of how guilty they really are. There's not a single one of us who stands innocent in that regard.

So Lord, would you forgive us of our sins? Lord, would you make us joyful and willing to lay down our sins? And Lord, would you remind us of your assurance that you are faithful and just to forgive us of our sins?

In Jesus' name we pray, amen. I've been recently, I used to pick the passage of pardon every week, and recently I've decided to lay out all of the ones that I could find in the Bible and just go in order.

Psalm 103 and the Removal of Sin

And I find it so beautiful that the one today is Psalm 103, 8 through 12. So this is the Lord who picked this. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in loving kindness. He will not always strive with us, nor will He keep His anger forever.

He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great His loving kindness towards those who fear Him. As far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.

For all of our angers and all of our bitternesses and all of our jealousies and all of our frustrations and all of that, the Lord has, through Jesus Christ, taken them and removed them from us as far as the East is from the West, so that today we are no longer identified by our sin.

We are identified with the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. So whoever you are and whatever you've done this week, you are in Christ. We started today's service with the union that you have in Jesus. So stand as one who belongs to Him, no longer identified with your sin, but called Saint through His blood.

Amen?

Let's stand.