“You shall not murder.”
— Exodus 20:13
On August 18, 1970, I was twenty years old, preaching revival meetings in west Texas. The phone rang in my motel room, and it was my brother. He told me our father had been attacked. A man had walked into the hardware store where Dad was the manager, and when a scuffle broke out, he had beaten my father over the head with a hammer. Five or six blows. My father clung to life for ten days in the intensive care unit of Harris Hospital in Fort Worth. On the tenth day, I walked in alone and held his hand. I felt the slightest tug. And an hour later, the doctor told us he was gone.
I tell you that not for sympathy. I tell you it because the Sixth Commandment has never been an abstraction to me. My father was not a statistic. He was a man who worked hard, loved his family, served his church, and whose life was taken from him in an act of violence that left a wound in our family that still aches more than fifty years later. And standing in that hospital chapel, praying through tears, I understood something I have never forgotten: every life is sacred, because every life belongs to God.
The word the Bible uses here is not kill. It is murder, the deliberate taking of innocent life. This commandment does not prohibit the protection of one’s family, or the just war fought in defense of freedom, or the law-enforcement officer who stops a threat to innocent life. What it prohibits is the deliberate, willful taking of innocent human life. And it prohibits it because life is God’s to give and God’s to take. We are not the owners. We are the stewards.
This is why the church must speak clearly about abortion, the taking of life in the womb. God told Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5). David wrote that God’s eyes saw his unformed substance before a single day of his life had come to be (Psalm 139:16). Life in the womb is not potential life. It is life. And the God who formed it forbids its destruction.
Every life. Born and unborn. Young and old. Convenient and inconvenient. Every one of them is sacred, because every one of them carries the breath of God. Treat them accordingly.
EVERY LIFE BELONGS TO GOD. SPEAK AND LIVE LIKE YOU BELIEVE IT.
