Exodus 20:12–17

The sixth commandment guards human life, and God is the Source of that life. Man cannot give life, and he has no right to take it away, except when he does so as ordained by God.

The murderer does more than wrong a man and injure him to the last degree. He also defaces God's image by killing a man, and God sentences him to die. Murder is an unwarrantable seizing of what belongs to God.

The sixth commandment, "You shall not murder," must be considered from the viewpoint God intends. Israel had already killed many enemies that God had told them to kill. In the land of Canaan God would require them to kill the inhabitants too. God commanded this because the inhabitants were given up to idol worship. In the same way, when justice demands the death of a criminal, it is not murder for the authorities to put him to death. But no individual is free to kill another as he sees fit. Scripture makes a distinction between murder and manslaughter.

The word of God gives no support to the modern humanitarian movement to abolish the death penalty. It puts human ideas in the place of God's original law. In fact, it lifts man above God.

The sixth law, "You shall not kill," finds an echo in everyone's conscience. A man knows this is wrong without being told. Cain, though he had no law, knew he was doing evil in killing his brother, because he lied about it afterward.

The executive law in Israel could go no further than this. It could not deal with the state of the heart, but only with the outward act. Yet the law as expressed on the tablets of stone applied to more than the outward act.

Murder was the first terrible fruit after the fall, springing as it did from envy in the heart. The penalty of murder is the judgment. This, then, is the letter of the law. It dealt with the outward deed, but it did not touch the heart itself. Now He speaks: "I say to you that everyone who is lightly angry with his brother shall be subject to the judgment." The word "lightly" belongs here: it means not outward anger only, but even the faintest feeling of displeasure. … But the words lay the heart bare and show that man cannot stand before God, who judges the heart, in a righteousness of his own.

It is not merely someone who does not love, but the active work of hating. … He is a murderer in principle. … God deals with the heart, and not only with outward things.

The debt of love is the only debt that is legitimate and honourable, good among men and acceptable to the Lord — the debt we should always be paying and can never pay off. Grace alone gives the power, but by it law is fulfilled, and indeed only so. Law kept claiming love but never found it.

Marriage was God's gift to His creatures. He set it up before the Fall — before sin entered the world. He kept it going after the Fall. He held it as something no one may break, even before the law was given (Gen. 12:17; 20:3). He then guarded it by clear commands in the law (Ex. 20:14, 17). The Lord confirmed that it is holy (Matt. 19:3-9), and the New Testament says it is honourable for everyone (Heb. 13:4). Adam must have felt how much temporal enjoyment he had lost through the Fall. But God kept this blessing for him and for his children after him. It was His original gift for the happiness and welfare of people on earth.

"You shall not commit adultery" is the seventh commandment. Adultery corrupts the marriage bond. The command reaches every corruption of that bond, whether the people are married or not. The New Testament does not use the words "You shall not," but it warns against sexual sin just as strongly (Acts 15:29; 1 Thess. 4:3-4). Homosexuality is worse still — a most flagrant corruption of the bond of marriage (Rom. 1:26-27).

In the Old Testament, adultery means being unfaithful to your husband or wife to satisfy lust. God dealt with it very severely. According to the law of Sinai this sin had to be punished with death (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22-24). The law was first of all God's set of rules for the outward, public life of His people on earth. So it punished only the finished act, even though the tenth commandment also forbade wanting your neighbour's wife... However, the mere outward keeping of this and all the other commandments could not justify him before God.

Here the Lord points to the human heart and shows that adultery has its source there. This is not a "spiritualising of the law," as is sometimes said. He says for the first time what every honest Israelite had to learn by experience. Anyone who tried to keep the command "You shall not commit adultery" found inside himself the very lusts that lead to the acts God forbids. And he had no strength to beat them. The lusts were even stirred up by the commandment: "I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, 'You shall not covet'" (Rom. 7:7-11).

Anything in our life, our habits, or our service that puts a soul in danger of giving in to these feelings must go. We should never spare it. We should leave it, whatever it costs. There must be the cutting off of everything hurtful to the soul... Cutting off a hand or an eye pictures a heart that judges itself honestly. It does not excuse itself by saying the sin was never carried out. It gives up whatever led towards the sin.

In the acts listed here, people show how constantly they break the second half of the law — the commands about how we treat other people (Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:31). Love is the fulfilling of the law; it thinks no evil, and does no harm. So loving your neighbour keeps you from breaking each of these commands against harming him. Paul sums up all these commands in one. He writes to the church at Rome: "For the commandments, 'You shall not commit adultery, You shall not murder, You shall not steal, You shall not covet,' and any other commandment, are summed up in this word: 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself'" (Rom. 13:9).

Adultery, or idolatry — "with their idols they have committed adultery" (Ezek. 23:37) — is the sin God charged Israel with long ago, because she was His wife (Jer. 3:14; Isa. 54:1). For this He divorced her. But in His purpose and grace, the LORD will bring Israel back into that blessed relationship. She will never lose it again.

This is not just a statement giving marriage dignity. It is a command. It calls us to live out the relationship well and to keep it free from every trace of impurity. We are told to honour it, not in one way or another, but "in all things." So it is not a badge of respectability that people get simply by being married. It is a serious charge to married believers: use the relationship in a way that pleases the Lord in every detail.

"Flee from sexual immorality." Here we are not told to fight, but to keep far away, as Joseph ran from Potiphar's wife. Other sins may not involve the body in this way, but this is sin against one's own body. And besides our bodies being members of Christ, we are now told, "your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you."

The third approves marriage and makes it holy. The fourth has to do with things, not persons — the goods of others, which it protects from anyone who would rob them.

From our Lord Jesus we know the moral summary and essence of the law — love for God, and love for man. But here it was given mostly in a way that exposed the condition of man. It came not as positive commands but as negative ones, a deeply humbling proof of what man was. He loved sin so much that God had to forbid it. In most of the ten commandments, in short, it was not "You shall," but "You shall not." That is, it banned man's will. He was a sinner, and nothing else.

The eighth commandment enforces the rights of personal property. The people of Israel shared life together to some degree. In the New Testament we read of a short period of Christian sharing, when many sold property and the believers in Jerusalem had everything in common. Even then the rights of private property stood. Peter said to Ananias, "While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal?" (Acts 5:4). Yes, it belonged to Ananias, and no one had the right to grab it away from him.

The commandments mean far more than their bare letter. To keep the commandment not to steal, you must not agree to the loss or ruin of anything that belongs to your neighbour. It must be cared for, guarded, and kept for him.

A man who puts cardboard into shoes and sells them as leather is unworthy of the name of Christian. He is not even an honest man. Someone may say, "It is the custom of the trade." How does that change anything for a person who wants to walk in the fear of God and keep a good conscience? ... The Word of God, not the custom of the trade, must govern a Christian's conscience.

For an employee to take small things from where he works is no less than stealing. Many do this without thinking. A believer must take care never to take anything that does not belong to him.

The law forbids the sin of theft. Now compare that with the appeal of the gospel, which carries the same command: "Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need" (Eph. 4:28). Here shines a ray of the light of divine love. Giving has taken the place of stealing. The thief by nature has become generous by grace. The gospel appeal holds far more than the demand not to steal. It expects the person it addresses to be like God — a giver.

The question for our souls is this: if robbing a fellow man is condemned in this way, how can the sin of robbing God be met? How can those who are already sinners make restitution to Him? It is impossible... But we read in the Psalms of One who said, "What I did not steal must I now restore?" (Psalm 69:4). He was the trespass offering as well as the sin and burnt offerings. He has therefore made full and adequate restitution — we can say this, if we believe — for all our trespasses. There is not a single wrong that could be charged against us which He, in His wonderful grace and mercy, has not repaired.

The ninth commandment safeguards truth against man's sinful tendency to twist it into outright lying. A man may lie about almost anything, but what is specially prohibited is his tendency to lie at his neighbour's expense. The devil, we know, is the father of lies, but since man fell under his influence he has become a very apt pupil in that direction. In this world lies have become one of the most powerful forces of evil. Killing and stealing are two of the commonest and worst forms of violence. Adultery and lying are two of the commonest and worst forms of corruption. All four destroy human happiness.

This commandment, by forbidding false witness, condemns deceit of every kind. Deceit is always the fallback of weakness where God is not before the soul. Its place in the order seems meant to remind the creature that he needs God. Walk with Him, and you will keep the holiness of truth.

Untrue testimony by one man against another is destructive. The law of Sinai forbade the Israelite to bear false witness against his neighbour (Ex. 20:16). Scripture also says a false witness will not go unpunished (Prov. 19:5, 9), but will perish (Prov. 21:28). He was a menace to the nation. Scripture pictures him as "a maul and a sword and a sharp arrow" (Prov. 25:18), because lying testimony bore its victim down by sheer force, cut through the very vitals, and wounded even from a distance.

To bear false witness is cruel and gross evil, but this commandment was coldly disregarded by too many Israelites. Jezebel deliberately bribed wicked men to falsely accuse Naboth to have him put to death (1 Kings 21:8-13). Even the chief priests of Israel sought false witnesses to testify against the Lord Jesus, the Son of God (Mark 14:55-59). How refreshing is the contrast in what people said of John the Baptist: "Everything that John said about this man was true" (John 10:41).

Then we find further care taken about witnesses, confirmed by the great law of just retribution. Suppose a witness gave testimony he knew was false, and so of course malicious. The punishment his charge would have brought, had it been true, fell on the man who raised the evil report.

Here we may see how God hates false witness. And keep this in mind: though we are not under law but under grace, false witness is no less hateful to God. Surely the more fully we enter into the grace in which we stand, the more we will hate false witness, slander, and evil speaking in every shape and form.

"Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another." The word "lying," or "falsehood," here means everything that has the character and nature of falsehood. It is abstract: what has this quality, not merely the act of lying. This is worth remembering. In practice it searches many of us who would never be drawn into telling an outright lie. A look, a gesture, one's manner, vague speech, evasion, compliments, and many other things can fall under this sense of lying.

In the tenth, then, God made a law not only against evil things but against the desire for evil things. That is what makes it so death-dealing for an awakened conscience. In keeping with this, the Lord Jesus moved the weight of the law against both murder and adultery. He moved it from the act to the desire and impulse that prompts the act. He did this when He gave His Sermon on the Mount, reported in Matthew 5.

To covet is to crave something that another person has. You may never steal from him, yet the craving for what he owns is itself sin.

The real aim of giving the law was to bring to light what was in His people's hearts. That is why the commandment takes the form of a prohibition. Why else would it say, You shall not murder, You shall not commit adultery, You shall not steal, You shall not covet — unless the tendency to all these forms of sin was in them?

It is a sin that is never satisfied. It grows by what it feeds on. It leads to all sorts of other sins. It is the one sin of the heart that the ten commandments forbid outright — a hidden, secret sin that comes out of the heart. It leads to injustice and oppression, and to turning away from the faith. God hates it. It shuts people out of the kingdom of God, and it ranks with sins like theft, idolatry, and adultery. Yet this sin is so deceitful that few see how dangerous and awful it is. The world hardly counts it a sin at all. So a worldly Christian finds it hard to see that coveting what belongs to someone else is as bad before God as theft or drunkenness.

Covetousness involves no dishonesty. It is not even hard or sharp dealing. It is no more than the desire for more — the very spring of modern effort, the motive of bettering oneself, recommended to everyone from the mechanic to the millionaire. So the creature becomes the object, not God. That is why covetousness is called idolatry. It is man looking down, not up in dependence on God.

He does not say that he would have had no coveting. He says only that he had not known it. The craving was there, but he was in the dark about it. Then the law, like a lamp from God, shone into the dark rooms of his heart and showed the evil that was there. It is like a man in a dark room. Dust and mess may be all around him, but the darkness hides it. Let the sunbeams shine in, and he sees it at once. Do the sunbeams create the dust? Surely not. The dust is there, and they only detect and reveal it.

We cannot get rid of this covetous attitude unless the Lord Jesus works in our hearts by new birth. He makes us willing to judge our motives and to seek to live by wholehearted faith. Then, instead of envying others, we shall know how to "rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep" with no thought of ourselves. We shall be glad when others are blessed, even when we go without. That will not be because the law commands us not to covet, but because the grace of God is working in our hearts.