Water’s Edge Week in Review: Week #3, November 18, 2008
Weekend Teaching Series: Write them On My Heart (A series on the 10 Commandments)
Message Title: Word Six: You Will Not Murder
Sermon in a Sentence: We must not treat life with such a casual disregard that someone else loses theirs because of it.
Text(s): Deuteronomy 5:17; Psalm 51:4; Genesis 9:6; Romans 12:19
Weekend Scale of Difficulty: 5 of 10; At least from a technical standpoint it was seemingly easy (though we had no end of sound glitches), the only difficulty was preaching “You shall not murder” to a bunch of teens who assume that verse doesn’t apply to them, since they’re not murderers and all.
Message Summary: We started by looking at the form and structure of the ten commandments, noting that with the shift from first half to second comes a shift of focus on our relationships with God to our relationships with each other. We noted how the last five appear, not as five separate commands, but as a single run-on sentence – a grammatical feature lost in most modern translations. And they seem to be ordered in descending severity: murder, which is the destruction of someone’s body; adultery which is the violation of someone’s body; theft, the violation of someone’s property by force; false testimony, the violation of someone’s property by deceit; and covetousness, the violation of someone’s property by intent. Yet since they are all connected, it’s not really one is worse than any of the others, instead it’s the realization that if we violate one, we violate the community they all protect.
