Your ShelfYour Projects

The Sixth Commandment

6%

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 6, 1916

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 93, No. 17.

Read the full edition

The Sixth Commandment

By Milton C. Wilcox

The Law of God — No. 11

The Sixth Commandment

MILTON C. WILCOX
It was Jehovah, the great covenant God of his people, who thundered from Mt. Sinai the sixth word of the law.
“Thou Shalt Not Kill”
With the common application of the commandment, mankind are generally agreed. But what about killing by God’s command, so often referred to in the early part of the Bible? Was not this a violation of God’s law?
Look upon it in this light: All life is from God. He gave life to man as a trust to be used to his glory and always for man’s eternal good. If man misuses the gift, God does no injustice to remove it in whatsoever way he will. If by swift and superhuman judgment or by human agent, we can leave it with him.
Sometimes a nation or a people become so corrupt, so debased, so depraved, so reprobate, that it is mercy to them and their present and probable posterity to destroy them utterly, as the Canaanites were destroyed. Think of the fearful harvest of crime and vice which would have been perpetuated if these nations had been permitted to live and continue to propagate. God’s mercy was manifest in their destruction.
Sometimes the work which God did through Israel was limited and perverted by the human instrument. But the life of man we may safely leave with God the Creator, the Life-giver, the Judge of all the earth. It is his to give; it is his to take away. But we should not hold him responsible for the sins of his people.
“Thou shalt not kill.” The law strikes at the highest transgression, and includes all under it, every motive that leads to the taking of life. Therefore the divine comment, “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” 1 John 3:15. For hatred, full-grown, free, and without restraint, results in murder. He who hates is a transgressor of this law. There are many sins which would place one in this category. He may not be free to admit it, but his words and acts reveal the hatred, and God tells us what it means.
There is one remedy—the love of God in the heart. That love will come when we, seeing the enormity of our own sins and the great mercy of God in giving his Son to die for such sinners, yield those sins to God, and open our hearts to receive the Holy Spirit. See the climax of this experience in Rom. 5:1-5.
But these are not all the transgressions covered by the commandment. Great corporations are killing men and women by their demands in service, by the unsanitary conditions under which the hands are obliged to work, and by the pitifully small wages paid. Sweatshop factories are killing men. For these conditions individual men are in some way responsible, and the judgment of God will find out how and why and where.
The husband, by leading a life of lust or selfishness, by penuriousness and brutality and bestiality, may be killing his wife. The wife, by the selfish course she is pursuing, by self-centered fault-finding, extravagance, and neglect, may be undermining the life of the husband. The careless, indifferent, wayward son, or the selfish, wanton daughter may be breaking the heart and sapping the life of father and mother.
All murder is not by bludgeon, choking, poison, shooting, or stabbing. These are sometimes the more merciful. It is sometimes the slow, long-drawn-out cruelty, the wilful, selfish neglect, the adding of weights and burdens to an already overburdened life. Husband, father, wife, mother, son, daughter, these are things for us to consider. We shall meet the consequences of our acts in the great judgment day, unless we have, by God’s grace, gained the victory over our thoughtlessness and neglect.
Suicide is murder. We have no right to kill ourselves in any way, by violence, hanging, poison, or by the slower process of a bad habit or any wrong course of life.
Regard the life of all, even your own, as sacred to Him who redeemed you with his own precious blood. Let the love of God into your heart, and it will drive out hatred, and implant therein a love for every person in the world.
Mountain View, Cal.