00:00:00.000 - 00:01:08.000

[Music] "Reverence for Man" a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. [Music] God spake all these words, saying, "I am the Lord thy God, which hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

00:01:08.000 - 00:01:44.000

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them. For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,

00:01:44.000 - 00:02:15.000

and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work; but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God.

00:02:15.000 - 00:02:52.000

In it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day. Wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it. Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

00:02:52.000 - 00:03:43.000

Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's. Hear also the words of our Lord Jesus, how he saith, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment, and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.

00:03:43.000 - 00:04:15.000

On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

00:04:15.000 - 00:04:44.000

The Ten Commandments are not laws. Laws, by their very nature, are rigid, stiff, unbending things. Laws are objective. They are external. They lack the dimension of the personal.

00:04:44.000 - 00:05:16.000

In the Bible, a commandment is the opposite of a law. For a commandment is a personal word spoken by God to his children. It is warm. It is altogether sensitive to the circumstances that surround the children as they hear the commandment. A law may or may not be loving, but a commandment is always an expression of love.

00:05:16.000 - 00:05:59.000

The one then who interprets the commandment in a severe legalistic sense does harm to them. I remember a good number of years ago hearing a man give an especially severe interpretation of the commandment. When he was done, I asked him if he had studied the relevant material, if he had searched out the traditions and ways of the people of the Exodus time, if he had, in short, associated himself with the best scholarship concerning the commandment.

00:05:59.000 - 00:06:46.000

He looked at me in a rather disdainful way and said, "No. I did not speak out of my head. I spoke out of my heart." Now that sounds very pious, but it is in fact altogether unsatisfactory and deeply and profoundly sinful. We are told in scripture that we are to study in order to be able to rightly divide the word of truth. It's very easy to talk about the Bible. It's very easy to speak of how you feel about what it says.

00:06:46.000 - 00:07:22.000

But the proclamation of God's word is not a matter of talk, and it is not a matter of feeling. It is a matter of wrestling deeply with the text, of discovering what God has truly said, and then echoing it for others. When you fail to do this, you do dishonor to the Bible. Anyone seeking to interpret it is obligated to search out all the available materials he or she can to understand it.

00:07:22.000 - 00:08:02.000

If you are preaching on a passage of scripture which had its origin some 1500 years before our Lord Jesus walked the face of the earth, then it is obligatory for you to try in every way you possibly can to see and hear the words in the terms in which they were heard and seen when they first came to the earth. The task is to take away from your understanding of scripture any contemporary shadow, to try to eliminate the mist of your own breath on the mirror of the scripture, to be as objective as possible.

00:08:02.000 - 00:08:41.000

Now, of course, total objectivity is quite impossible. But any building that is being erected upon the foundation of scripture will be a better building if it is built with the original stones. When a person fails to do this, they also demonstrate a lack of love for those to whom they speak. There are many, you know, who presume to speak out of the Bible and who love preaching much more than they love those to whom they preach.

00:08:41.000 - 00:09:03.000

And that is a great tragedy. For people who come to hear the word of God preached come with a deep and profound need. And it is ignoble to ignore that need. I remember once in Melbourne, Australia, I wanted to see the inside of the first congregational church.

00:09:03.000 - 00:09:26.000

And I went up to the door and rapped on it. It was a clear glass door and I could see in and I could see a man working in the pulpit. He was a custodian or a carpenter or electrician, I could not tell what. He completely ignored me. It made no difference how much I hammered, he completely ignored me. That to me was a parallel to what we often see.

00:09:26.000 - 00:10:02.000

People coming to the church, pounding out of their own need for some word from the Lord. And too often what they get is someone working in the pulpit who pays no attention to their needs at all. And when you do this, when you talk about scripture or speak only of how you feel about it, you also, it seems to me, give up the claim to personal integrity.

00:10:02.000 - 00:10:34.000

No one has any right to call a person to the threshold of his or her mind and then offer to them something cheap. I remember once in a gathering of preachers, some material was being distributed and it was suggested that more material was on the way and we would not discuss the matter until the additional material had arrived. But there was one man who insisted on speaking with just the little material which had arrived at the very beginning of the meeting.

00:10:34.000 - 00:11:07.000

And when he got up to speak, he began with this sentence, which was at the same time both comic and tragic. He said, "Anyone in my congregation will tell you that I can speak on 15 or 20 minutes with practically nothing." So it is, with much that claims to be an exposition of God's word. David said, "I will offer to the Lord not that which costs me nothing."

00:11:07.000 - 00:11:42.000

We also ought not to offer to those who listen to us that which costs us nothing. The proclamation of the word of God is a kind of Bethlehem event in which the Holy Spirit hovers over that one who brings forth the word out of both pain and time. And if the word that is born is not a bastard, but is a true and holy word,

00:11:42.000 - 00:12:15.000

then the angels sing, not because of the preacher, but because of the holy thing that has been born. I ask you then tonight to think with me deeply about one of the Ten Commandments. And it will be very easy for us to become casual. We have heard these commandments hundreds of times. Many of us learned them years ago in Sunday school and can recite them at the drop of a suggestion.

00:12:15.000 - 00:12:51.000

But I would remind you that we are dealing here not with an abstract, icy, frosted law, but with a living, concrete, warm expression of the love of God. And to that we must bring our sensitivity of spirit, our alertness of mind, and in our tenderness of heart. We must seek out the mind of God then, and the mind of God for us now.

00:12:51.000 - 00:13:19.000

That is my task as preacher, and that is your task as serious listener. So think with me about the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." What does it mean? Well, literally, in the most simplified understanding of the words,

00:13:19.000 - 00:13:46.000

it means you are not to kill anything at any time, anywhere, under any circumstance. Occasionally you will pick up a translation of the Bible in which the commandment is rendered, "Thou shalt not murder." But murder does not appear in the passage. That is bringing to the word of God something which is not in the original text. It says, literally, "Thou shalt not kill." And as soon as you confront that word,

00:13:46.000 - 00:14:14.000

you are head on with some deep and profound contradictions. For example, in Genesis 9, at verse 6 we read, "Whoever sheds the blood of men, by man shall his blood be shed." In other words, whoever kills shall in turn be killed. That seems to be in direct contradiction to a suggestion, "Thou shalt not kill."

00:14:14.000 - 00:14:43.000

There are many other collections of Old Testament law in which the death penalty is specifically proscribed for various sins. And of course the Old Testament is full of references to warfare, including some that are described as "holy wars of the Lord." And in the text concerning those wars, it is sometimes written that God instructs that all of the enemies of Israel

00:14:43.000 - 00:15:00.000

are to be killed. How do you line that up with a commandment which says, "Thou shalt not kill?" It seems to be too sweeping in scope. For the other commandments there are no contradictions.

00:15:00.000 - 00:15:21.000

"Thou shalt not steal." And there is no place in the Bible where we are taught to steal. "Honor your father and your mother." And there is no place in the Bible where it says, "Do not honor your father and your mother." "Thou shalt not commit adultery." And there is no place in Scripture where one is told to commit adultery. But here, in this instance, we are told, "Thou shalt not kill."

00:15:21.000 - 00:15:54.000

And yet there are numerous paces in Holy Writ where nothing less than that is commanded. Most scholars, in seeking to solve the question of what the commandment means, point out that the key to the riddle is to be found in the fact that this is the sixth commandment. Now we know that when Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he brought the commandments on two tablets.

00:15:54.000 - 00:16:18.000

Now that may refer to two stone or clay tablets, or it may mean that he brought the commandments in two sections. It may very likely, and more commonly be, the latter. You see, in those days writing materials were very expensive and hard to come by, and the Jews passed most things down by memory.

00:16:18.000 - 00:16:41.000

And they had various mnemonic or memory devices by which they remembered things. And one of the most common of those devices was the use of the fingers. So the Ten Commandments were identified with the two tablets, with the ten fingers, and memorized in that way. Now if you do memorize the Ten Commandments in that way,

00:16:41.000 - 00:17:12.000

the sixth commandment, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, becomes the first commandment in the second tablet. Now that is important, you see, because the last five commandments deal specifically with the relationship of the Jews with other Jews. That's not true of the first five. Commandments 1, 2, and 3 concern the Jews' relationship to God.

00:17:12.000 - 00:17:41.000

Commandments 4 and 5 concern the Jews' relationship to the most solemn institutions of Jewish religion, the Sabbath day and the sanctity of the family. But commandments 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 all concern the relationship of a Jew to another Jew. And the first of these, number 6, the most basic of them, concerns the most basic question of society.

00:17:41.000 - 00:18:06.000

The question of life or death. "Thou shalt not kill." Now the commandments in the second tablet are built upon the commandments in the first tablet. It is only after God has been asserted as the only God, after all rival deities have been disposed of, after the power of God has been reserved for God exclusively,

00:18:06.000 - 00:18:35.000

after the Sabbath day has been protected and the family's sanctity has been upheld, it is only after these that we have the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." This is to say that God's authority as the maker and the sustainer and the ruler of all things is firmly established in the first five. And then out of this comes the announcement, first of all, in dealing with social regulations,

00:18:35.000 - 00:19:08.000

"Thou shalt not kill." What is being said is, God is the author of life. He is the maker of life. He is the sustainer and the keeper of life. It is not the right of any man to take life. Only the one who gives it may take it. But at the same time, there are these other suggestions in other passages about specific occasions when a life can be taken.

00:19:08.000 - 00:19:36.000

That reference in Genesis, for example, "Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed." These are corollary instructions. Remember that a commandment always takes into account the circumstances which surround it. A law does not necessarily do that, but a commandment does. And these corollary guidances from God say that there are certain occasions when a life can be taken.

00:19:36.000 - 00:20:05.000

And those occasions are the times when, if the life is not taken, other lives will be taken. In other words, you stop those who might stop others. But even then, you are to remember that you do this in fear and trembling. For God's most profoundly stated will is that there be no killing at all.

00:20:05.000 - 00:20:30.000

What I'm saying is that from youth, a Jew grew up knowing that it was God's will that no one be killed. That became routine in his religion. At the same time, he came to understand that there were certain times when people had to be killed in order to prevent further killing. But that was never to be easy.

00:20:30.000 - 00:20:48.000

Even when it was carried out in the process of justice, it was never to be casual. It was never to be done without the greatest hurt and difficulty. Because the prior principle, the one that stood above all others, was this. "Thou shalt not kill."

00:20:48.000 - 00:21:15.000

There are exceptions, but those exceptions are to be entered into only with the greatest trepidation. And they are never to be put in ascendance above God's primary word about the sanctity of life. [Bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side.

00:21:25.000 - 00:22:02.000

The sixth commandment then certainly speaks to us about the sacred nature of life. Yet as I thought more about that, it became apparent to me that, well, really life is not that precious. I mean, all of us here can think of many reasons, I would imagine, why we would be willing to lay down our lives. We were taught by our Lord Jesus, "Whosoever seeks to save his life will lose it."

00:22:02.000 - 00:22:36.000

We, in fact, only have our salvation because our Lord Jesus did not value his life so much that he was unwilling to lay it down for us on the cross. Our whole hope of glory rests in his dying. We even say of a person who is terrified of death that they are somehow lacking in faith. The only people who see life as the greatest of all things are the humanists and the materialists.

00:22:36.000 - 00:22:56.000

If you believe at the end of life there is only darkness, if you believe that at the end of life there is absolutely no hope, if you believe that at the end of life is death and that is it, that the way in which your friends disappear as they go through the gateway of death is the same way in which you will disappear,

00:22:56.000 - 00:23:14.000

and that after life comes nothing, nothing, nothing at all, if you believe that, then you are going to pride life above all the things. Now the Christian values life because it is a gift of God. He treats it with reverence and respect.

00:23:14.000 - 00:23:39.000

But he also knows that life here is only the prelude to life everlasting, that death is not the beginning of the end but only the end of the beginning. It is pagans, you will remember, who go to great lengths to preserve the dead body. Christians do not, for Christians understand that this mortal must take on immortality.

00:23:39.000 - 00:24:11.000

I like to think, for example, that I would be willing to die before I would dishonor Jesus Christ. I don't know if in a moment of testing I could live up to that, but I like to think that I could. I like to think that I would be willing to die before I would surrender to that which I know to be profoundly untrue, because when truth is gone out of a society, the society is dead at its very core.

00:24:11.000 - 00:24:36.000

I like to think that I would be willing to die before allowing others to die. If I'm not willing to do that, then I am living in disobedience to my Lord Jesus Christ. We all know of scientists, for example, who have given their lives to their research. We know of nurses who have lost their lives in alleviating the sufferings of others.

00:24:36.000 - 00:24:57.000

We know of soldiers who have thrown their bodies on hand grenades to preserve the lives of others. And what do we say of these scientists and these nurses and these brave men who give up their lives? Do we say of them that they are foolish, that they have thrown away the greatest thing of all, the gift of life? No! We honor them.

00:24:57.000 - 00:25:20.000

They have written some of the brightest pages in our history. Why? Because they're faithful to something greater than life. They are faithful to the dignity of man. The Bible does not speak of the sacredness of life.

00:25:20.000 - 00:25:49.000

The Bible speaks of the sacredness of man. That man has been made in the image of God. So the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," is not to preserve life, but rather to preserve man. It is not that life is so great that a man may not be killed, but rather that man is so great

00:25:49.000 - 00:26:11.000

that his life may not be taken. The sixth commandment, viewed in its deepest and most profound sense, does not speak of reverence for life, but of reverence for man. Man, who alone, of all the creatures of the universe, has a mind like God's and can grasp the universe.

00:26:11.000 - 00:26:33.000

Man, who alone, of all the creatures of the universe, is made in the image of God. Which does not mean that he is like God in every respect, or like God in any respect, but that he is at least like God in some of the essential aspects of God's being. Man has a moral character like God.

00:26:33.000 - 00:26:58.000

Man has the divine spark of immortality within him as God. Man is able to grasp the will of God as nothing else is, and then to decide to follow or not to follow that will. Man has conscience and the ability to communicate. He alone, of all the creatures, can speak to God and speak to other creatures.

00:26:58.000 - 00:27:34.000

He can determine his course to live to his fullest potential, or to deny that potential if he prefers. Of all the things God has made, only man shares with God intelligence and freedom and creativity and some ability to be partly self-creative and moral responsibility and eternity within his heart. Shakespeare wrote, "What a piece of work is man!

00:27:34.000 - 00:28:00.000

How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving, how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god." And Psalm 8 goes beyond that, when the psalmist sings that "Man has received the crown of reason so that he is but a little lower," not in the angels, that's a mistaken translation,

00:28:00.000 - 00:28:17.000

"but that he is but a little lower than God himself." The whole universe exists for man. The sun is his lamp and his candle. The energies that lie hidden in the earth are for his blessings.

00:28:17.000 - 00:28:36.000

The fields and the forests and the flocks are to feed him and clothe him. The oceans and the heavens are the pathways through which he moves. The laws of space and of nature are for his convenience. The sky and the woods, the earth and the sea are for his delight.

00:28:36.000 - 00:28:58.000

And the psalmist said, "God has given to man dominion over these things." I know that man is sinful. There are always those about who are ready to stain the name of man. But think of it like this.

00:28:58.000 - 00:29:26.000

Suppose you were living upon an ocean island, shipwrecked there. Year after year, all you had about you was hot white sand and deep green forests and surging blue seas, and a few birds and small animals that fled whenever you would approach them. And then one day, like Robinson Crusoe in DeSault's story, you found in the sand a human footprint.

00:29:26.000 - 00:29:44.000

Can you imagine the emotions that would surge through you? Here was one with whom you could communicate. Here was one with whom you could dream and imagine and converse. Here was one who was made in the image of yourself.

00:29:44.000 - 00:30:15.000

You can get just a bit of what that would mean. Then you can understand why God says, "Thou shalt not kill him." And then you can understand why Christ amplifies this commandment in Matthew 5, where he says, "You have heard it said, 'Thou shalt not kill.' But I say to you, do not be angry with your brother.

00:30:15.000 - 00:30:45.000

Do not say to him, 'Rakah!' Do not hurl at him the words, 'Fool!' If you do this, it is enough to justify your being thrown into the very fires of Gehenna." Now the word for anger which Jesus uses is the word "orge." It means "long-seething resentment." The word "rakah" is an untranslatable word, but it's a word of utter contempt.

00:30:45.000 - 00:31:09.000

The word "moros," which he uses for "fool," does not refer to limited mental ability, but to idiotic character. It is a moral fault, not an intellectual fault. And the word "Gehenna," which Christ uses, refers to the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem, where the fires always burned, and the smoke always was above, and there was a terrible stench,

00:31:09.000 - 00:31:33.000

and an awful kind of parasitic worm grew and flourished there. So what Jesus is saying is this. Not only must you not slay man, but you must not hold him in contempt, and you must not defame his character, for if you do these things, you are bound for hell.

00:31:33.000 - 00:32:00.000

Oh yes, man is a sinner, but sinful man is still the image of God. And that means that we cannot debase that image wherever we find it. That means that in our dealings with others, there must always be forgiveness, and tolerance, and grace, and love. This is why Jesus says, in this beautiful, eloquent appeal of his,

00:32:00.000 - 00:32:37.000

"If you come to worship God, and you find that in your heart you are holding something against another man, you must set aside your gift to God, and go and be reconciled with that other man, and then come and offer your gift to God, and more than your gift, offer to him your obedience." One of my favorite spots on earth is Sosunion, which is about 60 kilometers from Athens,

00:32:37.000 - 00:33:03.000

on the coast of the Aegean Sea. There on a great bluff that sticks out over those magnificently blue waters are the ruins of the Temple of Poseidon. It is a magnificent place to be, especially at sunset, when the orb of the day is sinking into the Aegean Sea, and the light comes upon you and splatters over the stones of the temple.

00:33:03.000 - 00:33:24.000

The God who stood within the temple, the statue is long gone. Most of the pillars are crumbled to the earth. The place is covered with rubble and stones. But you can still see the foundations, and you can still see the magnificent carving in those pillars.

00:33:24.000 - 00:33:43.000

And when the light hits that place, you know that you are standing in the midst of splendor. So it is with man. His foundation, in spite of his sin, rests in God. The pillars of his very being rest in God.

00:33:43.000 - 00:34:29.000

Aristotle might be the ruin of an atom, and Athens nothing more than the rubbish of Eden. But man is still the image of God. He lives always in the shadow of the Almighty, and every breath he breathes is the echo of the breath of the Holy Spirit of God. Our scientists have demonstrated to us that from an earthy perspective, our ancestry is not illustrious.

00:34:29.000 - 00:35:10.000

God has chosen to bring us up through the lower ranks of animal life, from some swamp. But that explanation of the physical origin of man does not explain his moral mystery, or his conscience, or the glory and the magnificence that is so often found in him. That sensitivity to the things of God, to which we respond when we hear the commandments of God.

00:35:10.000 - 00:35:36.000

And for as long as there is even one man who will be sorry, for as long as there is any man who will do a heroic and a grand thing, for as long as there is any man who will love good and hate evil, the dignity of man will be assured.

00:35:36.000 - 00:36:16.000

Oh yes, physically we have come from simple parentage, but our history and our hearts proclaim undeniably that morally we have come from the hand and the heart of God. We are made in his image. That is why he says, "Thou shalt not kill."

00:36:16.000 - 00:36:55.000

And we must think of this, and we must pray about this, and please God, we must live this. For in so doing, we honor God, and we honor each other in accordance with that which he has made us to be.

00:36:55.000 - 00:37:40.000

"Thou shalt not kill." Let us pray. Oh God, we are often so conscious of our sins that we forget the splendor of our beginnings. We are so ashamed and frightened by our todays that we forget to remember our yesterdays.

00:37:40.000 - 00:38:13.000

Oh give to us a vision of who we are, and of who other men are, so that we might love ourselves and love them. For it is in loving ourselves and in loving them that we will most perfectly love thee.

00:38:13.000 - 00:38:32.000

We pray our prayer in Jesus' name. And the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give to you

00:38:32.000 - 00:38:45.000

and to all those whom you love, and to all those whom nobody loves, his peace.