THOU SHALT NOT KILL

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 20, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 12.

“THOU SHALT NOT KILL.”

By I. F. T.

IN Exodus 20 are the Ten Commandments; but in the next chapter, and others, the Lord commands certain persons to be killed in one way or another; and the people are also commanded to go to war with other nations and slay them. Why did not the Lord destroy these people Himself, as He did Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, instead of ordering His people, whom He had commanded, “Thou shalt not kill,” to take the life of certain ones? I. F. T.

The question opens up several others. In the first place, God was absolute King over His people; they had so chosen Him; and He had chosen them to be His people, for the purpose of holding up to the world His saving light and truth.

2. The nations rejected were themselves responsible; that is, they utterly refused, and shut out from themselves, the truth which would save them. There was but one thing to do when they became identified with sin,—they must reap the wages of sin, death. In the light of these principles God would not suffer the children of Abraham to possess Palestine until the iniquity of the Amorite was full, until the inhabitants of that land had demonstrated that they were no longer worthy of the life God gave them. Gen. 15:16.

3. God identifies Himself with those who are His. When enemies opposed Israel, they must know that God was with Israel. God therefore chose His own way to chastise, or destroy, the sinful nations, or the sinner. Sometimes He did it with His own manifest judgments. Sometimes He did it thru human instrumentality, as best suited the case. His object in this punishment we would not attempt to fathom in its fulness; but we can see these reasons clearly: (a) It was a mercy to unborn generations to come, to destroy those nations which, by rejecting the truth, became wholly depraved. The children they would rear would be as bad or worse than they, and God, in mercy, prevented the souls being born to destruction. (b) The destruction and chastisement of nations would be a forcible object lesson to other nations and future generations that sin must bear its inevitable fruit of death. (c) All this punishment among His own people, or thru them, was so carried on that He would have the glory, and that the nations would fear or regard them, because they were the people of the Lord. (d) If they failed to give God the glory, He suffered them to be defeated, that they might learn, and, learning, might teach to others, the great fact that there is but one God, Creator and Saviour of all who believed Him. (e) In all these judgments there was mercy for the truly penitent, as witness the case of Rahab, of Jericho. Every inhabitant of Jericho might have repented, as did Rahab, and God would have spared them and the city. But having heard of God, they fortified themselves against Him, and perished in the destruction they themselves preferred and invited.

4. The detail of the way God worked we would much better understand had we lived then. We will better understand it now to translate ourselves, as far as possible, to that time and land. Suffice to say that this the believer in God may know, that what God did He did in the best way, the wisest way, the most loving and merciful way, that an infinite God could do, consistent with the character and condition and needs and free will of the people with whom, and thru whom, He dealt. And those who are willing to wait till the judgment reveals all, when faith gives place to sight, will gloriously and truthfully sing, “Just and true are Thy ways, Thou King of Ages.”