CHAPTER 6
THE SIXTH COMMANDMENT
“You shall not murder.”
(You shall not murder)
This is a pretty straightforward commandment. You shall not murder anyone. Even though someone may have done you wrong God loves him as much as he loves you! You can not look at someone you do not like, maybe hate, and say, he is good for nothing and if I kill him I will be doing the world a favor. Well, God doesn’t see things that way. He loves that person just as much as he loves you and when someone is murdered the murderer has taken the life of one of God’s children. The victim was someone God loved and wanted him to live a long life. You have ended the life of someone God loves.
Murder hurts other people as well since loosing someone you love for any reason hurts. If he is murdered it hurts all the more, because he is suddenly gone. I do not care how tough we think we are; when someone we love is murdered we feel the pain of that loss. Then some people turn that pain into anger, anger into a plan for revenge, and that plan turns into another murder. You can see how murder can turn into a vicious cycle.
How many innocent people get killed due to violence? We see it all the time on the news about victims of drive by shooting. A gang banger has a plan to get revenge for the murder of a fellow gang member. He goes out to murder the person he feels is responsible for killing his friend. An innocent person is walking down the street and he is killed as well. He is murdered as well for no reason, and another one of God’s children is dead at the hand of one of God’s children.
A lot of murder is revenge. Someone is killed and then his friends or family feel they must make things right by taking the life of the other person. God will be the one to judge everyone and he does not want us taking the law into our own hands. Even if you feel justified in taking someone’s life, because that person is just “no good”, it is not your place to kill him.
There is a story about this in the Bible in the Book of Joshua, Chapter 20 (1). It refers to cities of refuge and states in verse three, “so that anyone who kills a person accidentally and unintentionally may flee there and find protection from the avenger of blood.” It states that if someone killed another person accidentally then he could come and stay at these designated cites and take refuge until his trial came up. The city would not give him up to the person who wanted revenge and the person who came to kill him could not enter the city. As you can see from this, God does not want us taking our vengeance out on one another.
Murder is not a special crime that is just reserved for gang members, criminals, drug dealers, and the like. We are all capable of it even if we do not want to admit it. We are all emotional beings and as such we experience anger as well as joy. If we get angry enough our angry emotions will take over our life just like when we are happy our joy takes over, but instead of giving that person a hug, we give him a shove.
Have you ever noticed how things escalate? A harsh word is repaid with a full sentence of insults and is answered with more insults. Then we begin to methodically tear down the other person. All the time we are getting more excited, our heart is beating harder and the adrenaline is really starting to pump. A push becomes a shove, becomes a punch, becomes a full on fight. If you are lucky the other guy doesn’t have a knife or a gun but, if you are not that fortunate, then things will start getting ugly. Now you are fighting for your life and every living cell in your body is out to protect you and beat down the threat that stands in front of you. We are all human; we will rise to the occasion, so we need to be careful not to rise to the wrong ones.
You hear about parents getting into fights at youth sports all the time and wonder how it got to that point. You sit there and listen to the story on TV and watch the fight and say that could never happen to you, even though you live in that same environment. Well let me give you a first hand account of how a youth sports soccer game almost turned into a brawl.
We had an early morning (8:30am) Pee Wee (5 year olds only) soccer game. At that time of the morning in November the grass was full of dew and very slippery. To five year olds who are half asleep at that time it was like being on ice. We only had one ref, who was from the other team, because our ref did not show, but we played on anyway (first mistake). The coaches were also allowed on the field (second mistake).
Since I had an older team as well as this team, I was using eight and nine year old techniques to teach my five year olds how to play the game. Whenever the other team had a break away I would tell my kids to kick the ball out of bounds. The ref did not like this and told me to stop. I told him that was good coaching and since I was here to teach soccer and not baby sit, I would continue to coach the way I like.
Since the field was so slick the kids on both teams were constantly falling down. Five year olds just throw their foot at the ball and hope they hit it. Half the time they do, and half the time they miss. If they miss, it is a pretty good bet they will hit the leg of the other kid since they are also running and trying to hit the same ball. The first half was full of running, kicking, and falling down.
To start the second half the ref came over to me after speaking with his coach and told me I had to stop my kids from kicking the other kids and knocking them down. I told him they were not doing it on purpose, but that the field was wet and I would talk to them. Five year old children do not know how to be mean or vindictive they are just clumsy and fall down a lot. Neither my kids nor the other kids were playing dirty, they were just clumsy.
I went over to my team and told them to concentrate on kicking the ball. Too many kids were falling down and we needed to concentrate on kicking the ball. My biggest kid played goalie the first half so no one had seen him playing on the field. It did not take long for him to kick the ball. When he kicked it, the other team got out of the way and since he was well rested he was all over the field.
Five minutes into the second half, I looked to my right where the ball was, it had just been kicked from my left across the field. I also saw the ref looking back to where the ball came from and he started to walk over to the two kids on the ground. As he walked by me he told me, “that is it, he is out of the game.” I asked him if he was serious. I told him that was a five year old, playing against a five year old and now he was going to Red Card him? I told him, he needed to give the kid a yellow card first. I also told him my player had been playing goalie all of the first half so he was not constantly kicking kids and knocking them over; he had just gotten on the field.
When he insisted on throwing him out, I tried to reason with him. I asked him how he could red card a five year old, but he told me since he was the ref and in charge of the game he could do as he wished and was going to do it anyway. I tried to reason with him more, and he in turn red carded me. I asked him how he could red card me without giving me a yellow card first. He said, “Yellow card, red card, you are out of here.”
Now everything they taught him in ref school reinforced the fact that the red carded coach would immediately leave the field, since that was what we, the coaches, were taught at the coach’s clinic. What they did not teach them at ref school is that the mom will come out on the field if you are picking on her precious five year old. The moms, the women who make the six o’clock news when they pull their children out of the mouth of a gator. The smaller of the two parents who will shred the dad in short order when she thinks he is no longer implementing proper parenting techniques. Well this guy had no chance and there was nothing in the rulebook to tell him how to handle what would happen next.
So here I am in the middle of the field with an over zealous ref, a mom who wants to know why her son is being thrown out of the game and why I am putting up with this jerk. Moms are like lions when you pick on their cubs and she did not see this guy’s point of view at all.
She ripped into him with as much enthusiasm as those little kids were going to rip into their snacks after the game. When he responded to her, I told him he better choose his words wisely, because that was my wife and all bets were off. I was no longer an AYSO coach out there to bow down to his every word, but a husband and a father. When I retold the story to the regional commissioner of our division he laughed with me. He admitted that when my wife walked out on the field everything changed for me and that I had no choice, but to look out for her first.
No one on the other team, including their coach, was willing to come out and protect their ref even though they had put him up to the task of slowing down my team. They all started to shout from the sidelines that we should just leave the field. They always remind you of the fact it is for the kids, but why is it the parents always start the fights? Since they all seemed to have an opinion on what I should do, I decided I would go over there and see which one of them wanted to make me leave the field.
When this story took place I was 38 years old and weighed 193 pounds. Instead of going out everyday for lunch and eating greasy burgers I would go to the gym and lift weights for an hour. I was not about to flinch at the chance to carry this on to the next level with any one of those parents and was looking forward to a confrontation. I was mentally and physically prepared to go over there and see what they had to say.
The ref had nothing to say, this was not in the rulebook, and my wife had let him know he was clueless and should not have been out there in the first place. The other coach had nothing to say, they never do, because they do not want to be tossed by AYSO as I was going to be, so I just started right down the row of parents. Some reached over to poke me and I poked them back. None of them wanted to go one on one, even though I gave them all a chance to do so. We were at a point where they were poking at me and I was poking back, we were all pushing and shoving and yelling at each other. Luckily one of our dads came over and told me to just call it a day and walked me away from the other parents. Since no one wanted to fight there was no reason to carry this on so I left the field with my son and wife.
In my defense I will say this. If my son was thrown out for knocking down the other player then how did the ball travel from my left, 50 feet across the field to my right? The only way is if it was kicked. There were only two players at the point where the ball was kicked and both of them were on the ground. Regardless of who kicked it, if you kick the ball first then hit the other player it is not a foul.
He hit the ball first and then his leg probably carried through and hit the other player knocking both of them down. Remember, they are five. Second, since I saw the ball and the ref at the same time and then saw the ref look back across the field to where the ball came from and he started walking over there then he did not see the kids fall down. He did not see who kicked whom, because he looked back also and saw the two of them on the ground.
Needless to say, I was thrown out of AYSO for a year. As you can see from this story a soccer dad is just as capable of starting a fight and having to live with the outcome of that fight as anyone else in this world. In retrospect I can say I am very fortunate that I had a dad on my team who came over to me and talked me into leaving the field, before something bad happened. If you get in a situation like I did, hopefully you will be lucky enough to have someone walk you out of it. If not, hopefully you will feel God knocking on your shoulder and telling you to let it go.
It is a small world, and to show you how ridiculous it is to get angry with people let me tell you what happened three years later. I drafted the son of the coach of that soccer team. The dad did not care, but the mom called Little League and told them I was the worst person in the world she had ever met, and she would not have her son play for me. Little League thought she was nuts, but traded her son to another team anyway.
Two years later we were on the same soccer team (no I was not the coach). Luckily the dad came to the parents meeting and not the mom, or there would have been more trading going on. My son played left half back, and their son played forward. Since Brad was good at blasting the ball up the field and their son was good at controlling the ball, my son did a great job of controlling his side of the field and their son got a lot of goals and we won the league. We went on in the AYSO playoff system and wound up taking third in the Western tri-section. Since there are only three tri-sections in the country we were one of the 11 best teams in the nation for that age group that year.
In the course of that season, I got to know the mom and dad and they got to know us. They realized that was just a bad moment in time and I just stuck up for my son and what I believed in; you don’t throw five year olds out of games. They realized I was not Attila the Hun, but just a regular guy and when we had our third son she offered to give him swimming lessons. So in retrospect how crazy is it to get angry at people? You have a lot in common with people and given half a chance you can become friends, so why let your anger get in the way of that?
Most of us think we are not capable of murdering anyone so we can be pretty assured that we will not commit this sin in the future. Well probably not, but are we in control of our emotions all the time? Most murders are ones of passion. There are a couple of murder mysteries shows on TV. I used to like watching them, but they have become so predictable, it is always the jilted lover, always the other party in the couple who did it so I stopped watching the shows.
It seems that in every real life murder you see on the news it does not take too long until the spouse becomes a “person of interest”. It is always the person who is closest to the victim that the police look at. There must be a reason for that. It was the person whose emotions got the better of them. Those emotions turned to anger, to rage, and then to murder. So if we want to look deeper into this commandment we can see that when our anger gets out of control, it will take over us. If we become more forgiving as people, then when we are in a confrontation we will be able to stop this fire from turning into a raging inferno.
I do not think a person kills someone else with a smile on their face. I think they do it in a state of rage and anger. If you are angry with someone and yelling at them, you could be very close to making the biggest mistake of your life. One moment of anger can lead to a life time of regret. It is amazing how we can live an entire life and one action can change our lives forever. One angry situation can make us lash out at that person and change our life forever.
Just think if someone at my soccer game threw a punch at me? Since there were 16 of them and one of me, I would have retaliated and hit whatever target was closest to me. What if I hit someone and really hurt them? I would go to jail for a while and there I could get into all the fights I wanted to. Though I was angry that day, I am not a fighter, I am not a tough guy, and I do not think I would do well in jail.
You don’t need a gun to murder someone. You can hit him with your hand in a rage of anger, knock him backwards and when the back of his head hits the hard cement below he dies. How sad, one moment of rage and another person is dead. You killed someone and will have to pay for that for the rest of your life. When you find yourself that angry it is best to step back, shut up and leave.
How many times have you had a fight with someone and a few days later call up and apologize to her? Maybe you see her somewhere, and even though you feel a bit awkward you walk up to her and say you are sorry. For the most part she apologizes also, accepts your apology and you can be friends again. She did not want to fight with you and you really did not want to fight with her, so it is better to just forget it.
Just remember: if you walk away, you always have the option to finish the disagreement later. If you don’t walk away when you are angry, at best you will say things you will come to regret. At worst you will do something that you will come to regret for the rest of your life.
Anger can lead us to physically harm someone, but what about our words? We can kill a child’s spirit, or an adult we love with cruel words. It is so easy to lash out at someone verbally and totally destroy her. I have said cruel things to my wife and to my sons and there are a lot of things I wish I could take back, but I can not. The old saying, “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me” is really lame. A doctor can sew up your cuts or reset a broken arm, but when someone cuts into your soul with cruel words there is no doctor who can fix that.
A human life is a life, and we are all children of God and he loves all of us, regardless of our weaknesses. Even if you are a “bad” person God is hoping you will find him and change your life. In Luke 15:7 (1a) Jesus states, “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.” God is waiting for all of us to repent and come to him. Since God, Jesus, and the angels in heaven are cheering for all of us to repent and stop being bad people, we have no right to end the life of another person. We may not see any good in someone, but God does, so we should just leave that person alone and let him find the happiness that awaits him when he welcomes God into his life.
That sinner who we may think is a lost cause and beneath us is loved by God as much as you are. He is as worthwhile and loved by God as you are and that is why heaven is waiting on him. Remember at some point in your life you were as lost as the person you dislike and heaven waited on you and rejoiced when you repented. At some point in our lives we all need to repent -- we all do it at different times so who are we to end the life of a work in progress?
Most murders are acts of passion, so I think it is fair to say one of the prerequisites to murder is anger. In Mathew 5:21-22 Jesus states, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, “Do not murder.” And anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” Jesus was telling us right here not to be angry with people. He knows what that anger will lead to.
Anger is a tough one to get rid of in our lives. We start out as happy little people in our parents’ loving arms, but as time goes on disappointments start to creep into our lives. If we do not deal with disappointment, it will turn to hurt and then to anger and then to bitterness. I for one was an angry person. I remember about three months after my father died I was lying in bed at night looking up at the ceiling. We had a vaulted ceiling so the top was a bit higher than 10 feet, but the top cross beam looked like it was a 1000 miles away. It was like looking up at the stars when you are out in the mountains, there was no end.
I started to think about how many people I was at odds with (this is about a month after the soccer incident) and how everyone in the world was crazy and wrong and I was the only one who was right. I was getting into arguments at work, in youth sports, with the commissioner of soccer in our town. You name it and I was at odds with it. I lay there next to my wife and did not even tell her she was on my list as well. When I was finally done going over my list of adversaries there was no one left in my life who was not on it other than my sister, brother, and mother (I hardly ever saw my brother and sister other than Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving).
Then I thought, hey wait a minute, I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke pot and everyone in the world is wrong and I am right. Maybe I am the problem, maybe I have a problem? So with that I turned to my wife and asked her what was wrong with me. She reminded me my Dad had just died, and if I was willing to admit it or not, it had a big impact on me. She also suggested I go see a psychologist and see what he had to say. The irony here is the psychologist I went to see was recommended to me by the divorce attorney I had been seeing.
So I went to see the psychologist. I soon realized that I was a very angry person and had turned into the father I did not like, the father I did not want to become. I had years of anger pent up inside me and when my father died I just started to unravel like a golf ball when you take off the hard cover. My fear of my father and his controlling nature had kept all that anger under control, pent up in side of me, but once he died, it wanted to come out and it did!
I spent the next three years going to see the psychologist every Monday morning. The first two years I went every Monday and the last year I went every other week. He did not like the idea of me coming every other week, but I had run out of money and could no longer afford to see him. In three years I had done well to get my anger under control, but the work was not done. I would still get angry at times and make the people around me miserable. It was not like before, no more brawls at soccer games, but I was not “feeling the love” as yet.
About five years ago I remember riding my bike. I had been praying on my ride, as I usually do, and became very focused and told God I was tired of being angry. I was tired of having to call people up and apologizing to them for things I said. I would rather not say anything cruel at all than to have to call up and apologize later. At times I would still get angry, say something mean, and make myself and that other person miserable.
I reminded God how much time and money I had spent with the psychologist and I still had that anger in me. I was much better, but far from cured. I just asked God to please take away my anger. He is capable of doing anything and I needed his help with this one. A few minutes latter a really strange sensation came over me and I started to cry. Tears just started pouring out of my eyes and down my face.
To anyone who saw me I must have looked like a wreck. I had sweat all over my face, my hair was flying in the wind, and tears were flying off my face as they got caught in the wind. I knew something good was happening to me so I kept on pedaling until the tears stopped. When I stopped crying I felt much better. I felt like a lot of that anger was gone. Now we will never be perfect, and my anger will never leave me completely, but I know a lot of it left me at that moment. So I stopped my bike and thanked God for taking that from me.
I know I am not cured of my anger, but it is no longer a dominant part of my life. Things still get me upset, but it takes a lot more to really set me off. When I do get angry, it does not turn into some ugly incident and for the most part things just don’t bother me that much anymore. I have learned to let things go. In some ways I feel weak, like I am not as well equipped to attack my enemies, because I am lacking that burning anger in side of me. In reality though, I am better equipped to deal with unpleasant situations, because anger does not take over and control my life.
Hey, that was a gift from God and he answered my prayers right there on the bike path. I didn’t wait five minutes before the tears started to flow from my eyes and the anger began to leave my body. I made noticeable progress with the psychologist over a three year period and paid about $13,000.00 to do it, but God did more in five minutes after one sincere prayer. That is one of the great things about God, there is no price tag on his gifts, they are free -- just ask for it and it will come in his time.
Think of your emotional state of being like a pot of water. At 72 degrees Fahrenheit you are at a comfortable temperature. When you get angry the water gets hotter, you resolve the problem and then you go back to 72 degrees. As you let more and more things get to you the water gets hotter and hotter until it hits 212 degrees Fahrenheit and boils over. Now think about everything in life that you are angry about. If someone cuts you off on the freeway you get angry for a second and then forget about it, but if you face someone or some situation every day then it will add to your temperature, because it is always there.
Over time, your overall temperature is going to go up. Instead of starting your day at 72 degrees you start it at 140 degrees. You begin to have more conflicts, not because they are terrible things, but because you do not have the ability to deal with them. Your buffer between dealing with everyday problems and handling a true crisis has gotten smaller. Your life will start to be more difficult, because a problem will become a crisis since you will hit your boiling point that much sooner.
Think of your life like a white canvas. You are the artist and you are going to make a painting of your life. Pick out your favorite color and the color black. Now take an inventory of your life. Everything you see as a good thing (a blessing), dip your brush in your favorite color and make a dab on the canvas. Everything you see in your life that is making you angry, dip your brush in the black paint and make a dab on the canvas. Now here comes the hard part.
Look at the canvas and see if you have a happy life or an angry life. Each dab is a good thing or a bad thing. How much emphasis you put on each dab will determine how your life is going. If you let hating your ex-spouse take up more of your thoughts and emotions than your kid just getting accepted to the college of her dreams, then that is on you. You are letting that negative thought take over your life and raise your boiling point. Both dabs are meaningful to you, and you can decide which ones will have the greatest effect on your life.
My point is we should count our blessings as well as our shortcomings. I know I always focus on my shortcomings and often forget about all of my blessings. What we focus on will determine our state of mind. If someone has wronged you and you are still angry with him, it is only ruining your life; he has long since moved on and forgotten about you. If you hold on, then he is still winning the war of the wills and you are still losing. Drop the rock, and quit carrying around that burden.
Following this commandment will change your life in so many ways. It will stop you from committing the extreme act of murder, which would change your life forever. Don’t let your anger turn you into someone you are not – a murderer. If you look deeper into it, it can also change your every day life for the better, by letting God put out that internal fire of rage that is in all of us, before it comes out and ruins our lives.
So do you have a happy heart or an angry heart? If you have a happy heart people will be drawn to you, but if you have an angry heart you will push them away. When I was young, I did not really like myself, so I did not think anyone else could like me as well. Therefore I would drive people away from me either consciously or unconsciously. People liked me, but I would not give them a chance to get too close to me before my anger would drive them away.
I remember when my oldest son was about 7 and the little one was 4. We were all in the family room on a Saturday night watching TV and my wife and I started to discuss something. I guess we did not agree on the topic we were discussing, but I don’t remember arguing with her about it. I do remember that my oldest son said to his brother, “come on Brad, let’s go up stairs and play.” Jason saw something bad was going to happen and grabbed his little brother by the hand and got out of there. To this day, I don’t remember what we were talking about, but I do remember that the tone of my voice drove my son away from me. Whether they are 7, 17, or 27, if you are angry, the people you love are going to avoid you.
My seven year old son was running from me, and I was only having a “conversation” with his mother. My father had to demand I come visit him once a week once I was an adult. You can see that even though you love someone your anger will drive him away. Our two oldest boys have moved out of the house now, but they still come over all the time to see us. Even as adults they are drawn to be with me, and not repelled by me, because I have shed my anger.