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JEN WILKIN
[Cain’s] path to becoming a murderer did not start with plotting murder. It began with a far more ubiquitous sin. It began with being angry. Cain’s problem was not mere anger, but anger nursed, anger indulged, anger gratified.

JEN WILKIN
Jesus does not overturn the command not to murder. Rather, he challenges our affection for bare-minimum compliance. He urges us to look beyond the letter of the law to the spirit of the law. He takes great care to help his hearers identify the inward sin that accounts for why murder happens in the first place. And by pointing to anger as its origin, he allows no room for any of us to breeze past this sixth word. He does so by describing speech patterns that result from anger indulged…a negative emotion can lead to harmful thinking, to harmful speech, and to harmful actions.

JEN WILKIN
People who murder have embraced contempt to the point that they believe another image bearer to be so worthless as to not deserve to live. People who embrace contempt have indulged anger to the point that they believe their injury merits the greater injury of another. People who indulge anger have made a conscious decision of the will to nurture negative emotions into a viable seedling of contempt, a seedling which, over time, yields a bloody harvest. It’s a seedling that grows into a thorny vine that chokes out life. If every person dealt with anger quickly and rightly, there would be no need for the sixth word at all.

JEN WILKIN
It will require that we strive to preserve life in a culture that believes entire categories of image bearers are worthy of our contempt or our disregard…the unborn, the elderly, the physically or mentally challenged, the poor, the powerless, the foreigner. And in a world defined by living at odds with each other, it will require that we strive to live a peace with each other, as far as it is possible with us. It will ask us to be our brother’s keepers, even as Christ has been ours.

Questions to Consider:

- How has your understanding of “Don’t murder” expanded? Where might you be guilty of disobeying God’s heart behind the instruction?

- How prevalent is anger in our life? At whom is it often directed?

- Who is someone you might be allowing yourself to devalue, dismiss, be derogatory about, express anger towards in words or
in actions?

- What is a life-giving way you could respond to someone, even someone who makes you angry?