Murdering Your Future: The Sixth Commandment and the Sin of Neglect
"You shall not murder." (Exodus 20:13)
When most people consider the Sixth Commandment, they instinctively interpret it through the narrow lens of criminal law. Murder, in the popular imagination, is an act of sudden violence—a moment of rage that culminates in bloodshed, sirens, and a packed out courtroom. And because most people have never plunged a knife into another human being or fired a gun in fury, they assume this commandment leaves them morally untouched. The law, they think, has nothing further to say.
But the law of God is never satisfied with surface-level obedience. Scripture does not merely prohibit final outcomes; it governs originating causes. It does not only forbid the act itself, when sin has fully bloomed into homicide; it condemns the patterns, habits, dispositions, and moral postures that cultivate death long before the act ever occurs. In this way, God does not merely forbid murder—He forbids the entire culture of death that precedes it, enables it, and quietly sustains it over time. When the Sixth Commandment is read rightly, it proves far more invasive—and far more personally confronting—than we are comfortable admitting. Jesus Himself makes this plain in the Sermon on the Mount, where He exposes unrighteous anger as the seedbed of murder (Matt. 5:21–26), a logic already present in the Law’s treatment of hatred as bloodguilt (Deut. 19:11) and the apostolic declaration that hatred itself is murder in God’s sight (1 John 3:15).
Our confessional standards also push this principle—rightly so—far beyond the narrow definitions we tend prefer. When the Westminster Larger Catechism asks what the Sixth Commandment requires, it answers plainly: “all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others” (WLC Q.135). The divines are saying that we must give active and lawful energy to the preservation of life or we are passively participating in death and murder. Later, when it asks what the commandment forbids, it does not stop with the obvious, but includes things like “neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life” (WLC Q.136).
From both the positive and negative side of the argument, the logic is uncomfortably clear. “You shall not murder” reaches far beyond violent outbursts or fits of rage and presses down into the ordinary ways we care for—or neglect—our own bodies. It does not merely ask whether you have stabbed someone in a moment of fury; it asks whether you have allowed your life, vigor, health, and vitality to waste away through long-term indifference. We recoil at the word murder because we are confident we are better than that. But, Scripture applies the same moral weight to patterns we excuse as normal: overeating without restraint, feeding the body what corrodes rather than nourishes, refusing movement while demanding longevity, and treating chronic exhaustion as an unavoidable fact of life rather than a chosen pattern.
We may not have put a revolver to our head—but how many times have we put the fork to our lips and pulled the trigger. We may have never jumped off a bridge—but how often have we leaped out of discipline, plunged into the couch instead of mission, fallen into screens instead of sleep, and then acted surprised when our strength evaporates? We may never have shed blood—but how many days and nights have we stolen from our future by refusing rest, grinding our bodies down with excessive stimulation, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, and other distractions, as coping mechanisms that rob you of your vigor.
Murder is not only committed in moments of violence. It is committed whenever a man knowingly trades away tomorrow’s strength for today’s indulgence, whenever a woman steadily drains her own reserves while refusing the limits God built into her frame, and whenever the lawful means of preserving life are consistently available and consistently ignored. Slow destruction is still destruction. A little death, and even delayed death, is still death. And neglect, stretched thinly across time, carries the same moral gravity as rage compressed into a moment.
Have you ignored the ordinary means God uses to preserve strength, health, and usefulness in your body? I have. Have you treated that neglect as harmless, excusable, or simply inevitable? I have done that too. But the Sixth Commandment is not satisfied by simply avoiding violence. It requires care. And when care is consistently refused, guilt does not vanish—it accrues.
The cost of that neglect eventually shows up in the body. It shows up as preventable disease. It shows up as type-2 diabetes driven by years of excess and inactivity. It shows up as chronic joint pain from decades of refusing movement. It shows up as heart disease fueled by gluttony and sedation. It shows up as anxiety disorders worsened by constant stimulation, late nights, and never allowing the nervous system to rest. It shows up as depression compounded by exhaustion, isolation, and physical weakness. These are not random afflictions. They are often the predictable harvest of long-term disregard.
The consequences do not stop with the individual. A man who destroys his health limits his ability to work, to protect, to provide, and to endure. A father who is chronically exhausted cannot lead with clarity or patience. A woman who never rests eventually has nothing left to give and mistakes burnout for faithfulness. Churches lose laborers not only to sin and scandal, but to preventable weakness. Families feel the strain when sickness narrows what could have been strength. What we call “personal choices” quietly become communal losses.
This is exactly what the Westminster Larger Catechism means by “neglecting or withdrawing the lawful and necessary means of preservation of life.” God ordinarily preserves human life through sleep, food, movement, rhythm, restraint, discipline—and yes, through the regular, joyful intimacy of marriage. These are not advanced techniques or luxury upgrades; they are basic means. When husbands and wives neglect their bodies by withholding sexual union, they are not merely straining their relationship; they are inviting predictable forms of decay. Marriages starved of intimacy often give birth to depression, resentment, emotional distance, heightened temptation, disordered desire, and physiological consequences such as lowered testosterone, increased stress hormones, and weakened emotional bonding. Scripture does not treat marital sex as optional affection; it treats it as a safeguard for the whole person (1 Corinthians 7:3–5).
To ignore these means—whether rest, nourishment, movement, or marital intimacy—is disobedience. It is neglect, and neglect is not passive; it is an active refusal to do what is true and good. When God supplies ordinary means for preserving life, building strength, and sustaining vigor, and we consistently reject them, we participate in a slow, cumulative form of self-destruction that accrues over years and decades and eventually bears the full weight of death. This is why Paul commands us to “present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice” (Romans 12:1)—not dragged onto the altar half-dead, but cared for, stewarded, and offered to God in strength, body and soul together.
To live exhausted, undisciplined, and overstimulated while imagining it does not affect our faithfulness is both naïve and myopic. These habits do not merely shorten our life and reduce the quality of our life; they shrink our capacity for obedience. They limit how long we can serve in God’s Kingdom, how well we can serve in God’s Kingdom, and how faithfully we can endure hardships when they come.
To repent, then, is to turn toward life itself—to embrace patterns that preserve strength, clarity, and endurance as acts of obedience to God. “Whether you eat or drink,” Paul says, “or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). The Sixth Commandment calls us to live that way in the body God has given us—for our good and His glory. And as we do that, we not only increase our obedience, but we also will increase our joyful service.
