The sixth commandment begins a series of commandments about our relationship with others – but in a way it begins with the first family and the almost immediate effect of sin – the murder of Abel by Cain. No sooner had they lost paradise than the Ebola of violence against a brother broke out. But, it is not just an impersonal force or disease, is it? Look at the passage Genesis 4:6: “Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” Now Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let’s go out to the field. While they were in the field, Cain attacked his brother Abel and killed him.”

Sin is crouching like a wild animal and desires to have you. It is the power of hate. Ray Stedman puts it this way:

“Hate is a deeper force than we usually think it to be. It is more than a mere psychological reaction of one human being to another. It releases sinister powers into the human stream. It brings dark powers into control of human minds and human hearts. It twists and distorts, deludes and blocks, so that when we act we act in utter delusion, completely out of line with reality, out of accord with the facts. What we do, therefore, is always folly, foolish, senseless, without any reason behind it.”

So, that is why God deals first with our relationship with him, then our parents and then the first outcome of sin outside the Garden – hatred and murder. You shall not allow hatred to have you because it ends in the destruction of other people who are created in the image of God.

2.  But let’s look at the same Commandment in the context of the New Testament in Matthew 5 and the Beatitudes.

5:21: “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder,[a] and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ 22 But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell. 23 “Therefore, if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, 24 leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift. 25 “Settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court. Do it while you are still together on the way, or your adversary may hand you over to the judge, and the judge may hand you over to the officer, and you may be thrown into prison. 26 Truly I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny.

These are the nine blessed’s by which we are to live and not the ten commandments. But, in a way, they are harder – no impossible – to live by. We memorized them as children but life soon teaches us that they are impractical and idealistic.

I’ve been re-reading “The Fall” by Albert Camus and in it the main character says about Jesus, “the unfortunate thing is that he left us alone, to carry on, knowing in turn what he knew, but incapable of doing what he did.” I think that is how many people feel about the Beatitudes. They would rather live with commandments that, with enough effort, can be obeyed. Think about the rich young ruler in Luke. He had obeyed all the commandments his whole life. It was possible with enough effort.

The Beatitudes seem impossible. Eugene Peterson says that is intentional because they are the characteristics of an entirely new life and impossible to be lived except through supernatural means. The Beatitudes are meant to frustrate all our attempts to live on our own or to have a Christian ethic that does not require new birth and the power of the Holy Spirit. If we can live the Christian life without the new creation then the Christian life is just a better version of the Ten Commandments – it is a moral ethic but not a changed life. You can have a form of Christian-like values but you cannot have a Christian life.

Ronnie McBrayer in “How Far Is Heaven“ writes, “The Beatitudes are no spiritual “to do list” to be attempted by eager, rule-keeping disciples. It is a spiritual “done” list of the qualities God brings to bear in the people who follow Jesus.”

The author Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that we are fine with hanging the Ten Commandments on walls and courthouses because they are the ethical rules that almost anyone with enough effort can obey and they become the foundation of a society built on laws. But, he asked, why do we not hang the Beatitudes instead? “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.”

Because we would rather have rules than an impossible standard that no natural person can obey. It would be like demanding someone over and over to lift a 1,000 pound weight. No matter how many times you demand it there is no possibility of their doing it.

Jesus is giving us the characteristics of the re-created life and not the commandments of the natural life. That is the context of this passage. Living this way on our own is not difficult – it is impossible.

3.  So, for Jesus, the whole issue is not just about murder or more rules. It is about reconciliation. That is where he wants to go when he talks about anger and murder in the heart. And it is not just violent murder, is it? It is the desire to destroy someone. But that desire always eventually takes our life away instead. Nelson Mandela said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” In a sense, that is the beginning of judgment Jesus describes. It is the desire of sin to have us – to have our hearts. It is the desire of sin to use our resentment and hatred of someone to destroy us and others around us. Think how many families have been destroyed by the anger of one person or the effects of the failure to reconcile with another person.

A good friend years ago, Norman Shawchuck, was a church consultant who specialized in church conflict resolution. He told me that most of the problems in a church could be traced back to an unresolved conflict from years ago in the past. Part of his work was tracing back the roots of the conflict that had been swept under the carpet. Almost always, it was an unresolved conflict between two people that had remained a “pea under a stack of mattresses” for years.

I had a conversation with a journalist this week as he is doing a project on civility. He thinks that civility should be one of the characteristics of a Christian life and he has been commissioned to write on why Christians are not perceived by others as being civil – but angry and mean. While we know that some of that is our being caricatured by people who have an ax to grind with Christians and a vested interest in portraying us in the worst light possible, we also know there is at least some truth in that. Philip Yancey says in his new book titled “Vanishing Grace: Whatever Happened to the Good News”, “Unless Christians demonstrate truth with our lives, what we say about what we believe will sound like empty advertising slogans…When a poll of college students asked, “Write the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “Christianity,” the most common answer was, “People who don’t practice what they preach.”

Unfortunately, the people who represent us the most visibly are the most angry. I told the journalist I had a theory. There was a time a few decades ago when Christians felt married to the culture around them. They shared the same values, the same aspirations and the same general assumptions about what is good and bad. One day we woke up and found out our spouse had been cheating on us and they had become someone we did not even recognize. How could they believe what they now believed? How could they be worshipping other gods and behaving in ways that were idolatrous and immoral? What was our response? Unfortunately, it was to not only divorce ourselves from them but to hire the meanest, loudest, most hateful and derisive representatives we could find to handle the divorce. That is what people from the outside see. A messy divorce between evangelical Christians and the culture.

But Jesus says it is not only murder or murder in the heart that will be judged. It is demeaning and deriding someone. It is taking delight in seeing them made to look foolish. It is the Hebrew word “raca” that is perhaps a play on the Hebrew word for murder which is “ratsach”. It is labeling that person worthless and so much without value that we are free to say whatever we please about them. There are genuine fools in Scripture but this is different. This is what happens to your life when once you begin to treat people with such indifference and disregard. Over time, you are truly in danger of turning your life into a living hell.

Unfortunately, labeling people as worthless and ridiculing them is one of the more well developed skills of angry liberals and conservatives alike and part of the judgment for that is the complete and total breakdown of trust. James says it is a constant danger even in the church. “What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires (there’s that word again) that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight.”

4.  But isn’t there some kind of anger that is good? Isn’t there anger that is different from murderous anger and anger that demeans others? What about righteous indignation or the anger of the prophets when you see what is happening that is wrong? Yes, I think there is but it is different from people who are simply angry about things. Look at the range of emotions displayed by the prophets. It was not just anger. It was indignation but it was also pleading, weeping, begging, promising, comforting as well as indictment. That is not what we see today. It is not prophetic indignation that we see but the result of anger and resentment.

There is an appropriate hatred. There are things we should hate. There is a passage out of Lewis’ book “Perelandra” that describes that:

“Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him in a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood. What was before him appeared no longer a creature of corrupted will. It was corruption itself to which will was attached only as an instrument. Ages ago it had been a Person: but the ruins of personality now survived in it only as weapons at the disposal of a furious self-exiled negation. It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for.”

There are things we can lawfully hate – but they are few – and hating them does not destroy us in the process.

5.  But don’t lose the point of the passage. It is not just the prohibition of murder and uncontrollable anger. It is not just about the effects of allowing those to control your life. That is not the end. The whole purpose of the passage is about reconciliation with each other because that is what Christ himself came to do first before he asked it of us. Look at 2 Corinthians 5:17:  “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

But reconciliation is not easy, is it? It’s not just “kiss and make up”. It is restoring a relationship that has been cracked or broken. It is sometimes even harder. I want to close with reading a passage from Corrie Ten Boom’s book, The Hiding Place:

“It was in a church in Munich that I saw him—a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear.

It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.

It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown. ‘When we confess our sins,’ I said, ‘God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever. …’

The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.

And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones. It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were! [Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbruck concentration camp where we were sent.]

Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: ‘A fine message, Fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!’

And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course—how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?

But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face-to-face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.

‘You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,’ he was saying, ‘I was a guard there.’ No, he did not remember me.

‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein,’ again the hand came out—’will you forgive me?’

And I stood there—I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven—and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place—could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?

It could not have been many seconds that he stood there—hand held out—but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.

For I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.’

I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able also to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.

And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion—I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. ‘… Help!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’

And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.

‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart!’

For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely, as I did then”

That is what Jesus is describing as the way we are to live. It is a life that not only keeps from destroying but a life that creates and re-creates. A life that does the impossible. A life that is supernatural and not merely moral and ethical. A living illustration of God’s mission to reconcile the world to Himself. We are God’s righteousness in the world.