Yeshua Explored
17th July 2023
Murder
Was Jesus a pacifist?
“You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13)
This has become …
You must not kill another regardless of the circumstances and seek to preserve life as society defines it, unless personal freedom compels you otherwise.
Before the 1960s our society hardly balked at the thought of ‘an eye for an eye’, when cold-blooded murderers were strung up by their necks in retribution for deeds that deserved far more. Is it because we have become so humane, or is it that we have simply become detached from our roots? One of the earliest laws given by God to man made His views perfectly clear on the matter:
And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being. “Whoever sheds human blood, by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God has God made mankind”. (Genesis 9:5-6)
This is God’s Heart. He has never changed, but our society has. Whereas, just a few hundred years ago young boys were hanged for stealing a pig, we now reward mass-murderers and child-killers free board and lodgings for life, consistent with our warped view of ‘human rights’, even for those who have scraped the depths of what pure evil humanity is capable of. This is not justice, just humanistic nonsense dressed up in the garb of ‘progressiveness’. And if you disagree then ask yourself why nearly a quarter of a million of all pregnancies in the UK were terminated in 2018? Our humane society is a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’, content with believing that an unborn human being is worthless and casting a blind eye to the mass-murder committed in the name of ‘women’s rights’, when abortions are performed as a lifestyle choice, rather than a medical one. What an upside-down world we live in! Thankfully, this is the world that God saves us from, when we transition from the ‘Kingdom of the World’ to His Kingdom.
Surely one of the goals of every Christian is to discern God’s Will and then make sure our actions are consistent with it:
Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Romans 12:2)
This passage is key to what has gone wrong in society and in much of our Christian life in our country. We have not allowed the Holy Spirit to renew our minds, instead we have allowed the world to seduce us with its patterns, fashions, factions, actions, reactions and tractions.
How and when did all this happen? Well, there were two separate historical processes and they both came together in the 1960s. Firstly, there was a decline in the Church. Here’s how I explained it in “How the Church Lost the Truth”.
“But the really bad stuff in the 19th Century was happening in Germany and I’m not even going to cover the anti-Semitic and racial theories developed there, that were eventually going to lead to the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. I’m not even going to mention the dark, soulless deliberations of Karl Marx and Frederick Nietzsche. Instead we focus on a direct attack on the Word of God, the Bible, itself… by Christians!
One attack was on the Old Testament, led by Julius Wellhausen, a German professor of the… Old Testament! He took the five books of the Torah and using the full tools of Greek logic and understanding, completed the job first started by Philo nearly 2000 years earlier. He analysed the Holy Scripture from all angles – historical, social, literary – bar one – the evidence of a supernatural authorship – and sucked away all evidence of the Holy Spirit’s work. He produced something called the documentary hypothesis, an attack on Moses as the author of the Torah, still with us today, courtesy of liberal Christians of all persuasions.
Another attack was on the New Testament. Another German, Hermann Reimarus, a Deist, was one of many who entered a quest for the historical Jesus, a Jesus with all “mythology” swept away, an anaemic Jesus who travelled around the Holy Land doing nice things and saying nice things. A Jesus of revisionist history, but not the Jesus of the Bible, the miracle-working prophet who died for our sins and who was miraculously resurrected.
Most modern liberal Christians, whether they know it or not, follow the ideas of a German theologian, who lived at the start of the 20th Century. Adolph Harnack was canny enough to discern that Christian doctrine was thoroughly infected by Greek thought. His solution was to throw out the lot and concentrate on three selected aspects of Jesus’ teaching. He stressed the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man and the value of the human soul. He desired to strip out the supernatural elements of Christianity, but emphasised what has become known as the “social gospel”. It was man’s reason put ahead of divine revelation. It was fed by new “advances” in science, particularly the theory of evolution that was now being used to prise God’s fingers away from the only place the Deists found room for Him – the Creation.
Liberal Christianity now has a firm foothold in the modern Christian mind, thanks to the rise of rationalism, the new religion in our secular humanist society. Scientific apologists, helped by our secularised educational system, make their views so attractive so … reasonable and it is a tragedy in today’s Church that so many have just rolled over without a fight and allowed Aristotle to claim victory.
Liberal Christianity is the predominant Christian expression in the UK, a ‘Christianity’ that very much conforms with the World more that it probably even realises. When we reached the 1960s, such a ‘Christianity’ was ripe for a take-over! This came courtesy of the second historical process, a wholly secular one that started in the mid-nineteenth century, through the writings of Karl Marx. Marxism started off as an economic theory that resulted in the failed Communist regimes of the 20th century, such as Soviet Russia. By the 1960s it had morphed into a cultural phenomenon, giving rise to a process that currently has our 21st century society in a stranglehold of fear, restrictions, conformity, fake news and fake tolerance.
The central thrust of this new Marxism is the promotion of a ‘victim culture’, of building a narrative whereby all of the World’s ills are the fault of the prevailing culture, specifically white men working from within a Christian context. It began to roll out a series of ‘causes’, centring on those deemed to be ‘victims’, such as black people, women, homosexuals, native Americans etc. There seems to be a worthiness in this until one realises that these causes were just part of the context of Cultural Marxism. Anyone who dared criticise this process are condemned variously as homophobic, misogynists, Islamophobic, racist, sexist and so on. Most of all they are labelled as ‘Fascists’. Whereas traditional Marxism set up the ruling class, the “capitalists”, as the aggressors and the working class as the victims, Cultural Marxism takes the same pattern but tweaks it. In place of the ruling class we have the traditional Western ‘Christian’ society as aggressor and any number of ‘marginalised’ groups as ‘victim’. One key idea here is that the aggressor is never allowed any leeway, any shred of compassion, or any way of redeeming itself. It must be destroyed. Surely we see here the primacy of the ideology rather than a real concern for the “victims” who are being “defended”? This may seem a cynical attitude for me to take, but imagine if I am right on this, how cynical it is for people to perpetrate an ideology that creates conflict for their own ends?!
Out of this, political correctness triumphs and engineers the rise of the ‘nanny state’ with increasing intrusions and restrictions on the grounds of ‘health & safety’ to whittle away at our freedoms. This is what the New Left are all about these days and, with particular hold on the media and the metropolitan elite elements of society (the ‘chattering classes’), Cultural Marxism is beginning to succeed in its goal of a controlled, collectivist society.
One tactic is, to put it plainly, to confuse us all and make us begin to query aspects of life that had hitherto been unchanging and accepted. For instance, they want to move us away altogether from binary thinking. So, instead of black and white we have an infinite selection of greys, so that ‘no one colour’ is dominant enough to prejudice our thinking. ‘Man and woman’ is too binary, we need to look at the whole spectrum of genetical possibilities! You can start to see the impact this thinking has had on the modern world. For a more thorough examination of this, you may want to read Into the Lion’s Den.
None of this, of course, conforms to a Biblical worldview but, sadly, many in the Church have been dragged into it. If we were to summarise Cultural Marxism into a single word it is this, liberation, albeit a false one. Supposedly freeing people from the “restrictions” of the Judeo-Christian structure of society would make them happy and fulfilled. Women’s-Lib(eration), Animal Liberation, Liberation theology and the rest do nothing more than concentrate on conflict rather than resolution and do nothing to ensure a stable society. Taking it further, it is saying that man (and woman) are basically good, but oppressed by external structures, such as church or family, hindering them from reaching their true potential.
All of this is a million miles away from the absolute truth of Biblical principles, such as:
“You shall not murder.” (Exodus 20:13)
In a recent novel by John Grisham, the main character kills someone in cold blood but offers no explanation. He is a war veteran who had experienced much death and suffering and was no stranger to rough justice. It turns out that he killed the man because he suspected him of having an affair with his wife. He was tried and offered no defence because he knew he was guilty of premeditated murder and accepted that he had to die. To him, the Sixth Commandment was a natural and valid law and he accepted its verdict. He died on the electric chair.
Yet society in the UK has moved on from then …
Christian pacificism, surely an oxymoron, though some would argue otherwise. It’s all down to worldviews, as we have already discussed. There’s the Biblical worldview, borne out of the Jesus Mindset, where God’s Word is precious, universal and timeless. Then there’s the World’s worldview, borne out of the prevailing philosophy of the day, which currently is a tussle between the rational but atheistic secular humanism and the irrational mess created by cultural Marxism. Finally, there’s the worldview of the ‘compromised’ Church that mixes up all three, with the Biblical worldview ever pushed backwards. Christian pacificism, that insists that Jesus wouldn’t harm a fly and neither should we, comes from this synthesis.
They declare that he embodied a vision of life that was deeply pacifist, even though he never explicitly brought up the subject of warfare. It all revolves around their concept of love, quoting Jesus in Matthew 22 (“You shall love your neighbour as yourself”) and they declare that Jesus understood this concept as the summary of the Hebrew Scriptures. This seems rather narrow as, of course God’s love is painted on every page, but there are other aspects of God that are equally important, namely His holiness and righteousness. These are conveniently ignored as this would take us into areas that are very far from pacifism and would basically destroy their arguments for ‘peace at all costs’. They are being very disingenuous in their reading of Scripture, using the liberal lens that had been forged over the last couple of centuries to raise ‘human rights’ above God’s Righteous standards.
Was Jesus a pacifist? He healed the Roman centurion’s servant, without castigating him for his career choice. His followers owned weapons, something Jesus condoned, Peter even used a sword during Jesus’ arrest. Weapons were necessary for self-defence and you wouldn’t own one if you never intended using it to protect your loved ones.
So, when we return to the Commandment, You shall not murder, we must always consider context, which includes consequences of actions and justice and one of the most ingrained instincts placed within us, our need to protect those who we love.
This is an extract from the book, Sinner’s Charter: Are the ten commandments for today?, available for £10 at https://www.sppublishing.com/the-sinners-charter-260-p.asp
