5th Commandment ...

Monday, Feb 19, 2018. Life is given by God, the creator. He is the one to give life and to take life. He is the beginning and the end. It is not up to humans to take life - except for very special circumstances. Honoring life, keeping life, that is one of the basic commands we hear in the biblical books. But it is not just murder we need to talk about, Jesus talks about more …

Honoring Life …

First, let us go back to the 10 commandments, which are written for example in Exodus 20 (2nd book of Moses). Here, we read:

13 You shall not kill [murder].

We are told not to kill. The word used here refers to killing in the sense of murder. Killing animals, killing for defense and other types of killing is not included. We are to honor life, and it is God's foremost interest to have humans live together in peace.

Why do humans kill? Why are we killing each other? Why does murder happen? It all seems easy in cases where we do not have conflicts. But humans have conflicts on many layers of their life. We are different, we have different talents, different character, different preferences. Also, we have different ideas about how we want to carry out things. Sometimes we have conflicts about ressources. We might have conflicts about acknowledgements. We might have conflicts about power and control of things.

About Hatred and Murder …

(Roland Potthast) ... further texts