Is God the Creator of life?
When does life begin?
When is it ok, with God, to murder? ..... In utero?.... Post utero?....less than 1 second to 120 years old????.....
"You shall not murder" Exodus 20:13
Murder is a world magnitude. There is no corner of the globe where this command has not suffered violence. This commandment is laid across the entire spectrum of killing but, the command discriminates because not all killing is murder. Murder is arbitrary, willful, malicious; it is without legitimate purpose, and there is no inherent necessity for it. Murder can be either planned or spontaneous, but neither effects the nature of the action.
The context of the meaning of murder is the will of God, not situation or circumstance. By this single commandment, God hereby legitimizes human existence and attaches meaning and value to human life. Murder is an attempt to delegitimize and devalue human life. God has said you shall not do this.
Murder is an assault on the dignity of man and the nature of God himself because man is created in the image if his Maker. It is an unwarranted violent reaction to circumstances of whatever kind.
There is no such thing as the
right to murder. The right of murder has not been extended to governments nor to individuals. With these commandments, God is putting a cleavage between the power to do something and the right to do something, and these are not the same thing. This cleavage is an eternal prohibition against many types of human behaviors.
Man attempts to use legal power to overturn the laws of God. Today for example, the fetus is denied protection from being murdered in the womb. From the legal point of view, the unborn has been fully delegitimized and devalued. It has been decreed by law that the fetus has no rights, not even the right to live. Thus, man has taken the power of deciding the right of life out of the hands of the Almighty and placed into human courts. The fetus has been labeled by the courts as a non-person, thus it is argued that it is not murder to kill an aggregate of protoplasm. It has been completely dehumanized. This is the rationalization of the value of a human life verses the convenience or inconvenience of another.
This philosophy of human life has also affected the old and terminally ill who have become subject to euthanasia when life becomes burdensome or inconvenient, especially to others. They have simply been pushed aside and marginalized as having no intrinsic value. The idea is a very simple one, murder the Ten Commandments, then murder the people. We are witnesses to more than one holocaust emerging in our time. Murder is a crowning human overreach of power over the will of God. This command
“You shall not commit murder” generalizes to situations where one has the power to act but not the right to act. This inherently implies that man has the power to murder, but that this power must be controlled, regulated and be made to conform to a divine will. The commandment forbids the exercise of this power to all.