The Seedbed Of Bloodshed
When God said, “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13), He was not only stopping the hand that could take a life, but also reaching into the hidden room where motives are born and letting His light run along the floorboards where anger coils and pride whispers, so that the command would protect the body by purifying the heart, and would restrain the blade by exposing the boast that sharpens it, and would teach us that the Lord sees the seed as clearly as the fruit and judges the tree by what it is becoming long before the harvest shows.
And when Jesus said, “You have heard…‘You shall not commit murder’…but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother shall be guilty” (Matthew 5:21–22), He was not changing Moses but opening Moses, because He knew how we hide behind clean hands while carrying hard hearts, and He knew that a mouth that calls a neighbor “fool” has already handled his life as if it were cheap, and He knew that words are not steam that vanishes but sparks that travel, which is why He warns us that the fire starts inside us, and if we will not quench it there, it will leap to the tongue and from the tongue to the world.
Pride stands at the headwaters of that fire, because pride is the story we tell ourselves in which we must be first, and when we are not first we must find a reason, and when we cannot find a reason we must find a rival, and when we find a rival we must push him down so that we may stand taller, which is why pride feels the sting of correction as an attack, and hears another’s praise as theft, and turns the good of a brother into a mirror that we cannot bear to look into without breaking.
You can see this in the first family, where Abel brought the first and the best and Cain brought something less, and when God had regard for Abel and not for Cain, Cain’s face fell because pride cannot be glad at someone else’s yes when it wants the yes for itself, and even when God came near with patient warning—telling him that sin was crouching like a beast at the door and would rule him if he yielded—Cain still opened the door, and because he opened the door he opened the field, and because he opened the field he opened his brother’s body (Genesis 4:3–8), so that the blood on the ground was only the end of a path that began when pride refused to bow.
You can see it in Joseph’s brothers, who watched their father’s favor and heard Joseph’s dreams and let those signs scrape against their ego day after day until their talk soured and their peace died, and because they would not kill their pride they planned to kill their brother, and because they stopped short of blood they sold him for silver, and because they sold him they thought themselves clean while heaven recorded the truth that murder can be finished with a knife but can also be started with a nod (Genesis 37:4, 20, 28).
You can see it in Saul, who could bear victory while it was counted in his column but could not bear a song that counted more for David, and because the chorus bruised his pride he narrowed his eyes and took up the spear, and because his heart had already thrown the spear his hand soon followed, which is how quickly a small wound in the ego can become a large wound in a wall where a friend’s head almost was (1 Samuel 18–19).
And you can see it in the rulers who watched Jesus heal and teach with authority and gather the people they thought were theirs, and because they loved their place more than the truth they urged a cross for the Lord of glory, and because envy can wear religious robes they washed their hands before the feast while their hearts were still red (Matthew 27:18; John 11:48).
If we are honest we can see it in ourselves, because most of us have not taken a life and yet many of us have taken aim, and we have done it in the quiet, when we replay an insult until the heat returns, and in the shadows, when we shape a “prayer request” that carries a rumor with a pious bow, and in the pew, when we prefer a polished image to a hard apology, and at the table, when our sarcasm cuts deeper than a knife and our silence tightens like a rope, so that while the world cannot see a body on the ground the Lord can see a brother in our mind who is smaller, weaker, and more expendable than the image-bearer He made.
Scripture will not let us off the hook, because it says, “Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer” (1 John 3:15), and it says, “We should love one another; not as Cain” (1 John 3:11–12), which means that hate is not a mood but a verdict, and that contempt is not a quirk but a weapon, and that our titles and our reputations and our causes do not cancel our guilt if we carry knives in our words and poisons in our thoughts, for you can defend good doctrine and still damage a neighbor, and you can argue for life in the public square and still take life with your tongue at home.
The Gospel meets us here, not to flatter us but to save us, because the One we injured did no injury, and the One we accused told no lie, and the One we mocked answered not with mockery but with trust, and the One we nailed to a tree used His breath to pray for mercy for the people who held the hammer (1 Peter 2:22–24; Luke 23:34), so that the justice that should have fallen on murderers fell on Him, and the love that the command requires was fulfilled by Him, and the door that we opened to sin He shut by His death and opened to life by His rising.
Because this is true, the way forward is not to manage pride but to kill it, not to sand down envy but to bury it, which none of us can do alone and which all of us can receive by the Spirit, who unites us to Christ and gives us His mind, so that instead of clutching advantage we begin to pour out mercy, and instead of guarding our “place” we begin to serve our people, and instead of counting ourselves first we begin to count others more important than ourselves, not because we are noble but because He is near (Philippians 2:3–5).
Repentance then looks like worship that will not hide sin, because when we remember a brother who has something against us we go and make it right and then return to the altar (Matthew 5:23–24), and it looks like speech that stops being a sword and starts being medicine, because rash words wound like thrusts but wise tongues bind up (Proverbs 12:18), and it looks like a house where wrath and malice and slander are thrown out with the trash and kept out by daily watchfulness (Colossians 3:8), and it looks like blessing those who curse us and feeding those who hate us until the fire of revenge loses its fuel and the circle breaks (Romans 12:14–21).
And when you feel the old heat and want to baptize it as “righteous anger,” you test it by its fruit, because holy anger bows low before God and grows patient toward people and stays ready to be wronged without returning evil for evil, while proud anger makes you large in your own eyes and quick with the barb and eager to see someone bleed, even if only online, which is why James tells us to be slow to anger, since man’s anger does not produce God’s righteousness (James 1:19–20).
All of this is possible because the Christian life is not a coat of paint on an old heart but a death and a resurrection, in which we are crucified with Christ and raised to live by His life (Galatians 2:20), and in which the cross does not only pardon the murderer but also puts to death the enmity that made us dangerous (Ephesians 2:16), and in which the empty tomb is not only our hope for later but our power for now, because the Spirit who raised Jesus raises new words in our mouths and new habits in our homes and new patience in our bones.
So bring the hidden things into the open, and do it today, dragging into the light the cutting joke you keep ready and the list of wrongs you keep close and the small pleasure you feel when a rival slips, and ask the Lord to burn them, and then believe that He has, because there is a fountain filled with blood—His blood, not yours—into which murderers may plunge and come up clean, with quieter voices and softer hands and stronger backs for the work of peace.
And then live as people who prize life because you prize the Lord of life, guarding your neighbor’s name like a treasure you would not trade, rejoicing when God crowns another’s work even when yours feels plain, going first with apology and last with self-defense, holding your words until love can command them, laying down your “place” and receiving from Christ a place no one can take, feeding enemies and calling them neighbors until, by grace, God makes them brothers.
For when the cross waters the Sixth Commandment, it stops being a fence you fear and becomes a field you tend, where spears are hammered thin and pruning hooks shine and tongues that once burned down forests become tools that heal, and as you walk that field you will discover that the King whom our pride once opposed now reigns with patience and power, putting all His enemies under His feet and beginning, by mercy, with the enemy that sat on the little throne inside your chest, so that as you bow low and ask for the Spirit you find, to your surprise, that in the death of your pride there is a life that cannot be killed.
