Do No Murder: Love of Neighbor and the Love of God

Commandment 6

The second table of the Decalogue concerns man’s duty towards his neighbor, and by the time we have arrived at the sixth commandment, we find the very foundation of that duty expressed negatively as “do not murder.” Before reflecting on contemporary Christian reflections on the commandment, this is a good juncture at which to consider the significance of the commandments as a whole and the moral life they envision. The first point to consider is how the two tables are related to one another. Said another way, what does our duty towards our neighbor have to do with our duty towards God?

The two tables of the Decalogue were broken in succession in the first chapters of Genesis. First Adam and Eve directly defy God’s command, and then Cain murders his righteous brother Abel. The archetypal story of the human race includes our alienation from our duty towards God and our duty towards our neighbor. The whole Law was summarized by our Lord in the twin commands: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind . . . [and] thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matt 22:37, 39).^[1] If the first chapters of Genesis teach us anything clearly, they teach us that the two are connected.

After the flood and God’s recapitulation of the original commission given to mankind, Genesis 9:6 lays out the basis of the relationship between our duty toward God and our duty toward our fellow man: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” The image of God is the basis of human dignity, and it is on that basis that God will not tolerate the shedding of innocent human blood.

One advantage of thinking of the sixth commandment as the first of the second table of the Decalogue is that it functions as the head of the commandments that follow. The fundamental sin against your neighbor is murder. The following commandments follow from this sin in descending levels of severity: adultery (defying the man-wife one-flesh union), stealing (taking a man’s property, the extension of his being), bearing false witness (harming a man’s reputation), and last of all, coveting (violating your neighbor in any of these ways by desire).

Of course, the first table can be described as following a similar descending scale of severity from having another god to worshiping another god, then taking the one God’s name in vain, refusing to worship and trust the one God, and finally the command to honor the authorities the one God has placed in society.

The mirroring quality of the two tables does not stop there, however. It seems that (especially) the first three commandments of each table correspond to one another rather directly. Having another god besides the Creator is akin to attempting to wipe out the one God from existence, refusing his sovereignty over all creation, and so seems related to murder. Bowing before an idol is frequently described as spiritual adultery throughout the Old Testament prophets, and the connection is not hard to see. Finally, taking the Lord’s Name in vain seems related to stealing (and, admittedly, bearing false witness) because appealing to God’s Name insincerely is feigning possession of an authority that one does not really have.^[2] At the very least, it seems clear that both the first commandment and the sixth commandments are something like “capital sins” against our duty towards God and neighbor, respectively.

The point in all these reflections is the following: the two tables are intricately related. Fidelity to the one God means acknowledging the dignity of your neighbor. As noted above, this is especially evident in the sixth commandment. Genesis 9 renders it explicit: murdering is a violation of man who has been made in the image of God.

We may press the point further with the following observation: in the incarnation, the unity of the two tables is most visibly expressed. For those in his day and still for us today, to sin against one particular Palestinian neighbor – the rabbi Jesus of Nazareth – was to sin in a direct way against God. To murder him, to steal from him, to bear false witness against him, to covet/envy, hate, revile, mock him is to commit those sins against God. As Jesus said, “whoever hates me hates my father also” (Jn 15:23). If there ever was a question about the unity of the two tables, the incarnation has settled it: “as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Matt 25:40).

Murder and the Meaning of Life and Death

The Bible opens with the story of God’s free gift of existence to all things. In his creative act, he makes life, orders the cosmos as a realm full of vitality, places man in the midst of it and charges him to be fruitful and multiply. The fateful command given to Adam and Eve to eat only from the trees that were given to them to eat (including the tree of life!), bore the specific threat of death for disobedience. Ever since the first parents’ fall, the battle between fidelity to God which leads to life and the diabolical temptation of sin which leads to death was underway. Cain’s submission to diabolical envy and anger led to death and his own exile. Noah’s faithfulness to God led to the life of his family through the death waters of the flood.

By the time we get to the Exodus it is clear: life under the thumb of Pharoah’s cruel regime is death (especially, we should observe, for the Hebrew boys). God’s deliverance of his people is a birth event. They are brought out of the realm of death, through the waters of life and receive the status of God’s firstborn son. Before entering the promised land, Moses lays before the people the two contrasting options:

See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I command you today, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his rules, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to take possession of it. But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish (Deut 30:15-18a).

This contrast between life and death will only become heightened over the course of Israel’s dramatic story of recurring fidelity and infidelity, exile and return. At last, the New Testament opens with the announcement of a birth of the one “in [whom] is life” (Jn 1:4). Jesus, the Good Shepherd (like Abel!), came that his sheep “may have life and have it abundantly” (Jn 10:10). The Christ will be the decisive Moses figure who leads his people out of the realm of death and into eternal life in the Spirit.

The heart of the life-death dialectic is brought to the fore in the teaching of Jesus. In the famous passage from the Sermon on the Mount:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not murder; and whoever murders will be liable to judgment.’ But I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment; whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council; and whoever says, ‘You fool!’ will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift (Matt 5:21-24).

This famous saying is worthy of substantial comment, but the relevant point for our purposes is that here, as Jesus always did in his teaching, the underlying human attitude, the disposition of a person’s will and affections, is brought to bear on one’s fulfillment of the commandment. It is not enough to performatively follow the letter of the law, for the law is a schoolmaster – it was meant to direct its hearers into a way of life. The law was, and is, instruction in the way of God. Thus, subsequent Old Testament, New Testament, and Christian exegesis of the sixth commandment expanded the scope of the proscription against murder to include the entire Christian attitude to the life of fellow humans and one’s own life.

In the Johannine tradition, the life-death dialectic is mapped onto some of his other favorite themes: light-darkness, truth-falsehood, and most important for our purposes, love-hatred. The Apostle wrote, “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murder, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him” (1 Jn 3:14-15).

To love is to fulfill the law (see Matt 22:37-39, Rom 13:10, Gal 5:13-14). The law has a direction to it; the law points people toward a specific way of being. The law directed Israel to the path of life as opposed to the path of death, of fidelity to God and his creation rather than diabolical opposition to the same. In essence, then, Jesus’ interpretation of the sixth commandment gets to the heart of the matter. Murder is one radical way of breaching the relationship humans are called to have with God and with their neighbors, but murder itself is a symptom of another condition, one more universal in scope: the fundamental attitude of a lack of due regard, reverence, and ultimately love for our fellow man.

In taking us to the heart of the matter, to the progeny of Adam’s fundamental opposition to the way of life, Jesus’ teaching on the sixth commandment shows its wide significance. As Herbert Butterfield said (somewhat tongue in cheek, I would guess, but less tongue in cheek than we’d like to admit): “Take the animosity in your average church choir, extend it over the world, give it a history, and you have an adequate explanation of all the wars of human history.”^[3] Hatred, then, lies at the heart of humanity’s breach of the second table.

The Sixth Commandment Today

The teaching of the New Testament, as we have seen, reiterates the connection between the first and second tables. “Whoever loves God must also love his brother” (1 Jn 4:21). Why? Because his brother is an image of God, which is especially clear to us on this side of the incarnation, and likewise because his brother’s life is itself a gratuitous gift of God and therefore must be respected. We turn now to a number of current applications of the sixth commandment for our life-opposing age.

Any contemporary application of the sixth commandment today must turn to the issues considered by the discipline of bioethics: abortion, euthanasia and physician assisted suicide, genetic modification, etc. Immediately upon entering into these considerations, however, we are confronted with two more foundational contemporary myths which render credible our culture’s advocacy of practices which seemed to previous centuries outrightly forbidden by the sixth commandment. That is to say, we must consider our culture’s notions of autonomy and compassion or freedom and suffering.^[4]

In the words of the great twentieth-century pope John Paul II, ours is a “culture of death.” He saw in our time a civilization-wide “conspiracy against life.”^[5] The pope’s principle concerns were our culture’s violation of the sanctity of life for the most vulnerable: the aged and the unborn. The life of these two groups of society is threatened by the rising legal and cultural acceptance of euthanasia and abortion, respectively. Critiques of these attacks on the inviolability of human life are many, and this is not the space for a comprehensive critique.^[6] Instead, what we should ask ourselves at this point is how our civilization came to embrace these heinous practices, and why the Church has been unsuccessful at staying the tide of the culture of death.

Modern notions of freedom, as many insightful critics have pointed out, narrowly define liberty as the abolition of constraints and limitations. This conception of freedom, of course, is on a feedback loop with technological advancements which encourage us to think that limits to our freedom are nothing more than technical problems. In the words of Oliver O’Donovan, “the technological transformation of the modern age has gone hand in hand with the social and political quest of Western man to free himself from the necessities imposed upon him by religion, society, and nature.”^[7]

In the words of bioethicist Gilbert Meilaender, it is not just “the attempt to master nature in service of human need,” but also, “[the refusal] to accept the body’s vulnerability to suffering [which] has characterized the modern age.”^[8] It is not hard to see that our vacuous conception of freedom necessarily leads to a rejection of any substantive meaning given to human suffering. For what is individual suffering but the painful confrontation with the gravest of human limitations: a body that decays and ultimately dies? Indeed, what is communal suffering but a willingness to shoulder some of the burden of the limitations of other humans? To the modern mind, these limitations are simply obstacles to be overcome through technical means.

It is not difficult to see how these two prongs of contemporary society serve as implicit justifications for practices such as abortion and euthanasia. In both cases, allowing for the broad array of particular circumstances covered by these categories, the fundamental issue at hand is the limitation of autonomy and the presence of human suffering. In both cases, our culture simply offers no conception of the significance, the goodness, of voluntarily accepting an undesirable state, of suffering. More than that, in both cases a basic commitment to the inviolability of human life is sacrificed at the altar of a particular notion of freedom and compassion (avoidance of suffering).

Before advancing, we should point out that we are all, in various ways, complicit in the culture of death. One may simply note many Christians uncritical acceptance of artificial birth control, our unrestrained habits of consumption, our quasi-religious confidence in technical solutions for human problems, our exploitation of food and environmental resources, etc. In all these ways, our habits of life contribute to the plausibility structures of the culture of death, no matter what our philosophical notions of freedom may say to the contrary.

It is worth remembering that our culture is heir of a thoroughgoing Christian reinterpretation of the meaning of freedom, the value of every human life and the significance of suffering. Early Christians rejected the practice, widespread in the Roman Empire, of exposing infants.^[9] Christians refused the rampant exploitation of the vulnerable in Roman society and prioritized the care of the elderly, poor, ill and orphans. One fourth century bishop, St. Basil of Caesarea, took to institutionalizing care for these neglected folks and invented something akin to the hospital.^[10] Early Christians, at their best, had fully digested the gospel’s perspective on freedom, expressed in those venerable words of St. Paul: “you were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another” (Gal 5:13).

I must admit that I once thought of the abortion issue as, not unimportant, but rather disproportionately discussed by conservatives (and rather obviously used as political bait to secure the “evangelical vote,” or what have you). I must now confess, however, that the issue of abortion appears much more radical to me. It is not an issue of isolated significance, one random misstep of a culture whose moral sensibilities are otherwise fairly well adjusted. It is, rather, one symptom of a much more insidious civilizational disease. Abortion is a practice that logically follows from our culture’s notions autonomy and suffering. In both instances, we have rejected our Christian inheritance regarding true freedom and the redemptive potential of suffering.

Conclusion

We have seen that the two tables are related. Love of neighbor is founded on love of God, whose image the neighbor bears. Furthermore, the sixth commandment’s prohibition of murder was demonstrated, in the teaching of Christ, to be in the first place a matter of desire. These two threads are picked up by St. James in his Epistle. He writes that “whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become guilty of all of it. For he who said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ also said, ‘Do not murder.’ If you do not commit adultery but do murder, you have become a transgressor of the law” (Jas 2:10-11). Notice that James seems to imply that our fundamental attitude to the lawgiver is reflected in our selective obedience to his commands: by choosing to deliberately break “the law of liberty” (Jas 2:12) at any point is to choose unfreedom and death.

Why do we do this, compromising the integrity of our obedience to the law? James addresses the question: “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and you do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel” (Jas 4:1-2a). James here forges a connection between the sixth commandment and the tenth commandment: murder and coveting are related, just as murder and forsaking the one lawgiver (commandments 1-2) are related.

Any more comprehensive reflection on the sixth commandment must consider the topics of just war and legitimate uses of lethal force by those authorized by God (see Rom 13:4), a deeper exploration of the broader bioethical questions of genetic testing and modification, IVF and surrogacy, and a host of other issues of this sort. The central point emphasized here, however, is simply that fidelity to the sixth commandment today means what it always has meant: fidelity to the whole of the Decalogue. Especially, we have seen how the sixth commandment is related to those first table duties which, in turn, instruct us in the right kind of reverence for our fellow men, images of God that they are.

Following the sixth commandment, in a word, means forsaking the domain of the “murderer from the beginning,” (Jn 8:44) and following him who is “the resurrection and the life,” (Jn 11:25). This will necessarily mean that we forsake murder and its root of hatred, jealousy and inordinate desire, and that we radically critique culturally accepted forms of killing the innocent. It will also mean taking up a wide variety of different projects – suited to each man and woman’s vocation – in love and service to our neighbors. For, in the words of St. John, “we know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers” (1 Jn 3:14a).

Notes

1. Unless otherwise noted, biblical references in this post will be taken from the The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Crossway, 2001. ↑
2. I owe the above observations to Alastair Roberts, “An Introduction to Biblical Wisdom,” lecture 13: “The Law and Wisdom,” The Davenant Institute, April 2023. Accessed April 30, 2025: https://davenantinstitute.org/biblical-wisdom-lectures. ↑
3. Cited in Gilbert Meilaender, Bioethics: A Primer for Christians, fourth edition (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2020), Audible audio ed., 5 hr., 2 min. ↑
4. These twin emphases are drawn from the work of Gilbert Meilaender, especially, but also from Oliver O’Donovan, John Paul II, and a number of other contemporary cultural critics. See Meilaender’s superb collection of essays, Bioethics and the Character of Human Life, (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2020). ↑
5. John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, [Papal Encyclical on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life], The Holy See, March 25, 1995, §12, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_25031995_evangelium-vitae.html#%242. ↑
6. Gilbert Meilaender’s Bioethics, cited above, is a worthy place to start for Christian reflection on these issues. ↑
7. Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made?, (Landrum, SC: Davenant Press, 2022), 7. ↑
8. Meilaender, Bioethics and the Character of Human Life, 12. ↑
9. See Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctives in the Roman World, (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016), 144-8. ↑
10. See Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 154-62. ↑