The Murderer In The Mirror

“You shall not murder.” - Exodus 20:13

You don’t have to shed blood to be a murderer. You just have to simmer. That’s the unsettling truth buried beneath the Sixth Commandment. When God says, “You shall not murder,” He is not simply policing society or discouraging violence—He is confronting the silent slaughterhouse of the soul. He is reaching beneath the visible act to condemn the invisible impulse. The commandment forbids not only the taking of life, but the brooding bitterness, the inward wrath, the unchecked contempt that makes murder possible. It does not simply call for clean hands—it demands a clean heart. It is not a regulation of behavior. It is a revelation of the depravity within us.

Jesus Christ made this terrifyingly plain when He said, “Everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty before the court” (Matthew 5:22). With that single statement, the Lord interprets the law for us. He extends it—not beyond its intent, but down to its essence. Anger, He says, is embryonic murder. It is homicide in seed form. While many of us recoil at the idea of physical violence, all of us have nurtured its forerunner. All of us have stood condemned—not merely for what we’ve done with our hands, but for what we’ve harbored in our hearts. God doesn’t just judge the knife in your hand—He judges the hate in your veins. The courtroom of God does not only try the killer with the weapon. It tries the man who has wished someone dead with a glance, a sneer, or a silent fantasy of revenge.

This is the guilt we rarely confess. We seethe in secret. We curse in our minds while smiling with our mouths. We rehearse old wounds and polish them like idols. We lash out with icy tones, with passive withdrawal, with sarcasm honed to wound. And when confronted, we justify ourselves with theological-sounding alibis. “I’m just being honest,” we say. “God doesn’t want me to lie.” “I’m just passionate,” we protest. But these are not confessions. They are camouflage. Bitterness wears a choir robe. Anger quotes Scripture. Rage hides behind a prayer request. We baptize our wrath in religious language to make it feel righteous, but heaven is not fooled. We may fool others. We may even fool ourselves. But God sees it all—and calls it murder.

Few stories in Scripture unmask this sin as vividly as Jonah’s. Called to preach repentance to Nineveh, Jonah fled—not because he feared failure, but because he feared success. He wanted the city destroyed, not delivered. He loathed the Ninevites. He longed for their obliteration. When God redirected him through the gut of a great fish and forced him to obey, Jonah did the bare minimum. He trudged into the city and delivered the shortest sermon in prophetic history: “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown!” There was no grace, no compassion, no call to repentance—only judgment. And yet, miraculously, the city repented. And when it did, Jonah boiled over in rage.

The text tells us, “But it greatly displeased Jonah, and he became angry” (Jonah 4:1). The Hebrew word used—charah—means to blaze, to burn with fury. Jonah was not mildly frustrated. He was consumed with rage. He could not tolerate a God who showed mercy to his enemies. “I knew You were gracious,” he said. “I knew You were compassionate. That’s why I ran” (cf. Jonah 4:2). He would rather die than live in a world where mercy was given to people he despised. That is what unchecked anger does. It convinces us that our rage is more righteous than God’s compassion. Jonah wasn’t preaching repentance—he was hoping for fireworks. He didn’t carry a blade, but he carried a heart sharpened for execution. And so do we, when we refuse to forgive, when we cultivate contempt, when we treat the grace of God as a scandal rather than a song.

We may not kill with knives or guns, but we murder with looks, with silence, with coldness. We destroy others not with blood, but with the slow-drip poison of withheld affection, calculated distance, and verbal daggers masked as honesty. We remember every wound and resurrect every offense. We crucify with our memory. We punish with our absence. We build relational guillotines and pretend it's just 'setting boundaries.' And in doing so, we mimic not our Savior—but the one Jesus called “a murderer from the beginning” (John 8:44).

Anger never stays small. It metastasizes. It grows. It corrupts. It spills out into our homes, seeps into our churches, sours our friendships, and fractures our families. And all the while, it disguises itself. It dons the mask of virtue. It pretends to be zeal, or discernment, or moral clarity. But there is a canyon between righteous conviction and unrighteous wrath. Conviction is anchored in truth and flows from love. Anger is anchored in pride and flows from pain. Conviction weeps for the sinner. Anger builds gallows for him. Conviction says, “Repent and live.” Anger whispers, “Rot and die.”

So we must examine ourselves. How quick are we to take offense? How often do we imagine others to be against us? How easily do we write scripts in our minds where we are the hero and everyone else is a threat? We may have outgrown childish games, but not childish judgments. We still play cops and robbers in our minds—only now, we use doctrine as the badge and bitterness as the weapon. The Sixth Commandment was not written merely to restrain murderers in dark alleys. It was written to expose murderers who hide in church pews, clinging to grudges, convinced they are righteous for hating the people God loves. The devil doesn’t mind if you read your Bible—as long as you’re using it to load your gun.

What, then, shall we do? We must repent. We must stop pretending that our anger is just a personality trait, a byproduct of our upbringing, or a justified response to someone else’s sin. We must stop managing it and start mortifying it. We must crucify it. For at the cross, the wrath of man and the wrath of God converged. Jesus Christ, the only innocent man, was murdered by the rage of men and crushed by the justice of heaven. He was insulted—and did not retaliate. He was mocked—and yet He prayed. He bore the fury of both man and God so that murderers like us could be made whole. On the cross, Jesus didn’t just take the nails—we hammered them in with every grudge we refused to give up. He didn’t merely pardon sin—He put it to death. And He rose to raise the angry into peace.

This is the glory of the gospel. It does not simply excuse our sin. It transforms us entirely. It takes hot-headed husbands and makes them gentle. It takes bitter wives and makes them gracious. It does not teach us to vent our anger more constructively—it gives us new hearts that no longer need to be angry at all. And when the Spirit of Christ indwells a man, the heat of murder gives way to the warmth of mercy. The fires of vengeance are quenched by the fountain of grace. The man who once seethed becomes a man who sings. Hell may have lit the fire of your rage, but heaven can put it out.

Hear the words of David, a man who knew both the wrath of enemies and the mercy of God: “The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness. He will not always strive with us, nor will He keep His anger forever. He has not dealt with us according to our sins… As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us” (Psalm 103:8–12).

So yes, you have been angry. You have clung to it. You may have dressed it up with piety and called it principle. But now—today—you are no longer defined by it. If you are in Christ, you are not clothed in wrath. You are clothed in righteousness. You are not identified by your simmering past, but by your sanctified future. You are not a slave to rage. You are a son of peace.

Therefore, stand in that mercy. Walk in that peace. And put the murder weapon down.

Amen.