By Dr J.M. Strawn
Murder is a world magnitude. There is no corner of the globe where this command has not suffered great violence. Murder is an assault on the dignity of man and the nature of God himself because man is created in the image of his Maker.
This commandment is laid across the entire spectrum of killing but is discriminatory because not all killing is murder. Murder is arbitrary, willful, and malicious. It is without legitimate purpose, and there is no inherent necessity for it.
Scripture never speaks of murder as being a matter of degrees; this is a human contrivance. Throughout time, God has only provided one penalty for murder – death.
The context of the meaning of murder is the will of God, not human situations or circumstances. Murder is an unwarranted violent reaction against another person in response to circumstances of whatever kind. This is what the legal apparatus refers to as motive. This commandment says there is no legitimate motive for murder.
By this single commandment, God legitimizes human existence and attaches meaning and value to human life. Murder is an attempt to delegitimize and devalue human life. God says you have no right to do this. There is no such thing as the right to murder. The right of murder has not been extended to governments nor to individuals, (David vs Uriah in 2 Samuel 11).
With each of these commandments, God is driving a wedge between the power to do something and the right to do something; and these are not the same thing. Man attempts to use legal power to overturn this divine prohibition by assigning its own definition to what constitutes life. Today, the fetus is denied protection from being murdered in the womb. From the legal point of view, the unborn has been fully delegitimized and devalued. It has been decreed by law that the fetus has no rights, not even the right to live. Thus, the power of deciding the right of life has been taken out of the hands of the Almighty and placed into human courts. The fetus has been labeled by the courts as a non-person. Thus, it is argued that it is not murder to kill an aggregate of protoplasm. The unborn child then has been completely dehumanized and the fetus now has value only as a marketable commodity.
This philosophy of human life has also affected the old and terminally ill who have become subject to euthanasia when their life becomes burdensome or inconvenient to others. They have simply been pushed aside and marginalized as having no intrinsic value. This also places the right to define the value of a person in the hands of the courts rather than God. Like abortion and all other forms of murder, this is the rationalization of the value of a human life verses the convenience or inconvenience of another person.
The idea is a very simple one, murder the Ten Commandments, then murder the people. We are witnesses to more than one holocaust emerging in our time. Murder is a crowning human overreach of power over the will of God.
This command “You shall not commit murder” generalizes to situations where one has the power to act but not the right to act. This inherently implies that man has the power to murder but, this power must be controlled, regulated, and made to conform to the will of God. The commandment forbids the exercise of this power to all, without exception, and regardless of circumstances.