“Thou shall not kill”; one of God’s Ten Commandments has caused much controversy in both the secular and religious realms. People for hundreds of years have quoted this commandment to justify their position for not engaging in military service, opposing the death penalty of the courts, and in opposition to the abortion of unborn children. Then there is a portion of people who say that God must not have meant that you should never take another’s life, because shortly after He gave this commandment to the Israelites, He sent them out to subdue certain lands with orders to completely destroy all the people in those lands, including women and children.
In addition to the Ten Commandments, God gave Moses certain Laws for the Israelites. If they were broken, the person breaking them was to receive the death penalty. Some of these Laws requiring the death penalty were: working on a Sabbath day, killing another person, cursing your father or mother, bestiality, sacrificing to idols, committing adultery, homosexuality, and performing witchcraft. Even-though these Laws and penalties were given to Moses for the Israelites, and in most cases have been done away with over time, God never gave the Mosaic Laws for the Gentile Nations, and those nations were never subject to the penalties contained in those Laws. The Gentile Nations did subsequently adopt civil laws that contained penalties for some of these issues.
With regard to the act of taking another person’s life during the act of engaging in war and enforcing the civil death penalty, there are some who also use other scriptures to present their position of opposition to any type of killing. One is the scripture of Romans 12:9 where God says that vengeance is His, and He will repay the person for their violation of His commandment. Another is when the apostles wanted to call fire down from Heaven to destroy some Samaritans, and the Lord said that He had not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them (Luke 9:56). Someone else says that Jesus exhibited His opposition to the death penalty when He set free the woman who was accused of adultery, which is a requirement of the Mosaic Law.
But none of these scriptural examples are valid for opposing the use of the death penalty for the breaking of certain Laws or for opposing the taking of lives during an act of war. One must examine these scriptures in the context of their use to understand why Jesus took the position that He did.
In Romans 12:9, God says that vengeance is His and He will repay, but in order to see how God planned to repay, you must consider how He always went about to do it. One of the first commandments that God gave to Noah after the flood was that if man shed another’s blood, “by man would his blood be shed”. God gave man the responsibility to punish another persoin by putting him to death (Gen 9:5-6). Then in the 13th chapter of Romans, it speaks of our rulers being ordained of God to be the avenger of those who do evil, to apply punishment, even to the death penalty (Rom 13:1-4). So even though God said that vengeance was His, His way to apply that vengeance was sometimes by man.
In Luke chapter 9, when the apostles wanted to call fire down from Heaven to destroy the Samaritans, Jesus wouldn’t allow it because the Samaritans had done nothing worthy of death. In the case where the woman was brought to Jesus to judge her for adultery, being a death penalty offence, He set her free. The reason that He did not judge her was that all of her accusers had left. The Law said that there had to be two or three witnesses before a person could be put to death (Deut 17:6-7). Many times during His ministry, Jesus told the people to comply with the Law of Moses, and I believe if those witnesses had remained who were accusing the woman of adultery, Jesus would not have set the adulterous woman free without punishment.
Most of the problem that people have with the understanding of whether it is right to take another person’s life exists with what God really meant by the commandment: “Thou shall not kill.”
In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word “ratsach” that was translated into the English word “kill,” actually means “to murder” or the unlawful killing of a person. If it did not mean murder, then God would have caused the Israelites to go against the commandment that He had given them when He told them to utterly destroy the men, women, and children of the nations they went against.
Another term that was used in the Old Testament for murder, verses other types of killing, was the shedding of innocent blood. The Israelites had no doubt what the commandment meant; it meant to kill a person that was not worthy of being killed, according to the Mosaic Law. If a person broke one of the Laws that required them to be punished by death, the Israelites knew that would not break the commandment of “thou shall not kill.” It should be obvious to us that God did not mean that another person’s life should never be taken, for if He really meant that, He would never have commanded them to utterly destroy the nations they went to war against.
The commandment of “thou shall not kill” is quoted several times in the New Testament. The Greek word “phoneuo,” which was translated into the English word “kill,” also means murder or the taking of another person’s life illegally or unjustly.
The translators of the Bible translated this commandment four times in the gospels, as it was quoted by Jesus (Matt 5:21, Matt 19:18, Mark 10:19, and in Luke 18:20). The same Greek word of “phoneuo” was used in all four of the scriptures, but in one of the scriptures, Matthew 19:18, it was translated “murder.” Even the translators knew what the word really meant, or God inspired one of the translators to translate it into the word “murder,” so that we would not be confused.
The Lord intended for us to obey the rulers that were put over us and the Laws that they made, just as the Israelites were to obey the Laws that Moses gave to them. No matter how we might personally feel about taking another person’s life, under certain circumstances, it is lawful and has the approval of God according to the scriptures. But this only applies when the law of the land dictates that it should be done.
God is not unjust, nor does He contradict Himself. If He would have given a commandment to not kill under any circumstances, then sent the Israelites out to kill the people of the nations around them, then He would have left His commandment open to interpretation, and He did not do that. By the same token, if God would have set rulers over us to enforce the Law, including the death penalty, after giving a commandment to not kill under any circumstances, He would have been going against His own Word, and God doesn’t do that. His Word never changes. The problem is our understanding of what His Word really means; that is why He sends preachers and teachers to instruct us.
When trying to understand what the scriptures really mean about a certain subject, you cannot just take a verse or a part of a verse out of context. The whole Bible must be used, from Genesis to Revelations, to determine God’s position on any issue, for God will be consistent in His meaning throughout the scriptures.
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