Mid-Lent 3
Fifth
and Sixth Commandments
3/10/21
Since the
Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade of 1973 allowed abortion in the United
States, about sixty two million babies have been murdered in our country. The practice of abortion immediately reveals
a close connection between the Fifth and Sixth Commandments. Abortion is the murder of an unborn
child. Ironically, those in our world
who are most likely to trumpet “science” as the final authority on all matters,
ignore what science has clearly revealed about life in the womb when it comes
to abortion.
Abortion
is murder and breaks the Fifth Commandment.
And of course the main reason it is practiced is because people think
they are free to have sex with whomever they want. They want to use sex for pleasure, and ignore
the setting of marriage in which God has established it. They want to break the
Sixth Commandment. But of course, the
life giving power of the one flesh union created by God has a way of winning
out. And so people want the “right” to
kill the life they have created. They want to be able to break the Fifth
Commandment so that they can continue to break the Sixth Commandment.
The Fifth
Commandment says “You shall not murder.” It teaches us that God is the giver of
life. He is the Creator, whose act of
creation continues in this world. He creates life, and with exception of the
government that can act as his representative in executing the guilty, only God
can end life.
On the
surface, it seems as if for us personally the Fifth Commandment is easy to
keep, even as it is very difficult to affirm in our society. Almost certainly, you have never murdered a
person. On the other hand, our society
increasingly acts as if it is free to kill the unborn, those whose lives it
deems not worth living, and even to encourage people to end their own life. While
we need to speak out and take part in those opportunities to oppose abortion,
euthanasia and assisted suicide, we also must recognize that the Fifth
Commandment reveals the sin in our lives, and provides guidance for how we are
to live.
The Small
Catechism explains the Fifth Commandment by saying that should not “hurt or
harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical
need.” The commandment includes our
neighbor’s physical welfare and all the ways that we can provide
assistance. Martin Luther comments in
the Large Catechism: “In short, God wants to have everyone defended, delivered,
and protected from the wickedness and violence of others, and he has placed
this commandment as a wall, fortress, and refuge around our neighbors, so that
no one may do them bodily harm or injury.”
The Fifth
Commandment does not only speak in the negative. It also tells us what we
are to do. We are to help and
support our neighbor whenever there is opportunity to do so. And this kindness is not only to be shown to
people we like. As Luther says in the
Large Catechism, “Therefore it is God’s real intention that we should allow no
one to suffer harm but show every kindness and love. And this kindness, as I
said, is directed especially toward our enemies.”
This is
something with which we struggle in our heart. And ultimately, the Fifth
Commandment addresses what is in our heart. The apostle John wrote in his first letter,
“Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer
has eternal life abiding in him.” Anger
is the source of murder, and when the Fifth Commandment forbids murder, it also
forbids everything that leads to murder.
The Sixth
Commandment says, “You shall not commit adultery.” We use it to summarize all that
Scripture teaches about sex in general, and marriage in particular. The starting point for understanding the
Sixth Commandment must be that sex is God’s good gift. God created man as male
and female. God saw that it was not good
for the man to be alone and said, “I
will make him a helper fit for him.”
God created Eve from Adam as the helper who
corresponded to him, and in doing so he instituted marriage. Genesis tells us
about God’s intention: “Therefore
a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they
shall become one flesh.” The one flesh
union of husband and wife in sexual intercourse enacts the way God now sees the
couple. And it has the purpose of producing children and family, for God
blessed Adam and Eve and said, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and
have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and
over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
The Small Catechism explains the
Sixth Commandment by saying that we should “lead a sexually pure and decent
life in what we say and do.” This means
that only a husband and wife are to have sex with one another. Sex is not to be
used outside of marriage. Those who are
married are not to commit adultery. And
of course, sex is never to take place between two men or two women.
But like the Fifth Commandment, the
meaning of the Sixth Commandment is not limited to the physical act. Jesus
said, “But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent
has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Our Lord tells us that
sexually impure and lustful thoughts cause us to be guilty of breaking the
Sixth Commandment. Therefore Christians
must avoid every form of pornography and sexually explicit material which are
intended to provoke lust.
It is in relation to the Sixth Commandment
that the Church faces some of its greatest challenges here in the twenty-first
century. The world says that people are
free to have sex with whomever they want.
It is assumed that couples who date will be having sex. Couples living together before marriage has
become common, and they expect to be married in church. Our culture promotes the acceptance of
homosexuality, and increasingly seeks to penalize and punish those who don’t.
Both as individuals and as the Church as a whole, God’s Word calls us to be
faithful to his will even if it means experiencing difficulties and hardships.
God established marriage as the one
flesh union of a man and a woman. The
Sixth Commandment also teaches us about how we are to live in marriage. As the
explanation says in the Small Catechism, husband and wife are to “love and
honor each other.” The Sixth Commandment
teaches us that our spouse is a great blessing from God. We are to treat him or her as such. We seek the welfare and good of our spouse,
and put their needs ahead of ours. We
must be willing to sacrifice in order to help and assist our spouse. St Paul wrote, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the
church and gave himself up for her.” The self-giving love of Christ
provides the model for how husbands are to treat their wives.
Even where we remain sexually faithful to God’s will in
the physical act, we recognize that we are guilty of breaking the Sixth
Commandment. We succumb to lustful
thoughts, and unless the group to whom I am speaking is a complete statistical
anomaly, there are those here who look at pornography. We know that we don’t always love and honor
our spouse, since instead at times we speak angry words and act in selfish
ways.
During Lent we are preparing to remember a murder. We are preparing to remember an occasion when
the government unjustly exercised its role in using death as a punishment. Jesus Christ was murdered. He was executed by
the Roman governor, in the full knowledge that the death was unjust.
Murders happen all the time. But this murder was
remarkable because the God the Creator, allowed his creatures to kill him. God
the Father sent the Son into the world as he was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and born of the virgin Mary. The Son, who was in the beginning with God and was
God, and by whom all things were made, became flesh. True God and true man, he lived in this world
in order to be murdered by us – by man.
Jesus Christ submitted himself to this in order take our sin and God’s’
judgment against it.
On Good Friday Jesus died on the cross and was
buried. But Lent and Holy Week lead us
to Easter. On the third day, God raised
Jesus from the dead. Through Christ, God
defeated death. The risen and ascended Lord has given us his Spirit by whom we
have been born again in baptism and through whom he will raise our bodies on
the Last Day.
Because of Jesus’s love and sacrifice for us, we are now
able to love and sacrifice in order to help our neighbor in every physical
need. Forgiven in Christ, the Spirit
enables us to forgive others and not to give in to anger. As a new creation in
Christ, the Spirit leads us to love and sacrifice for our spouse. He gives us the strength to speak and live according
to the truth God has revealed about his gift of sexuality. This we do as we
look for the return of our risen Lord who will make all things “very good” once
again.
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