LAW HOMILY: Indifference Is Still Murder

The Law of God and Christian Obedience

Every week, we look into the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say. We want to know how we are to obey Him. We want to know how this great God who has authored faith in our heart, who has brought us into a living hope, actually caused us to live now differently.

So every week we look at this. We're not antinomian. We believe that God is good and that He's made His law for good reasons and that our life would be better if we obeyed His law. So we look into it.

The Sixth Commandment and the Evil of Abortion

This week, we're looking into the sixth commandment, Exodus 20, verse 13, which is, you shall not murder. In the Hebrew, it's just two words, murder not. Now, last weekend, the Abolitionist Rising group came to Boston for an event called We Will Be Heard and Christians came from all over the country to Boston, of all places, to preach the gospel, to hold up signs, to distribute literature, to march through the streets and to publicly confront the evil of abortion in our state's and New England's biggest city.

And it was a tremendous blessing for us as a little church to even be a small part of it. Now, on Friday evening, there was a public lecture that I think will be available on Abolitionist Rising's YouTube channel.

You should check it out. On Saturday, abolitionists hit the streets carrying the truth around Faneuil Hall, singing songs, getting kicked out of Faneuil Hall. Praise God, the Shepherd's Church gets kicked out wherever we go.

There was preaching, there was singing, there was praying, there was marching, there was public witness in the streets, the streets where abortion is celebrated, a state where, if you were to see it, runs knee deep in the blood of infants.

Boston has heard nearly every conceivable voice on every conceivable issue in the common, I've been there multiple times where people are ranting and raving about whatever liberal cause that there is.

And yet, last weekend, the voices of the tiniest neighbors that we have were finally heralded in the streets. The event was called We Will Be Heard, which is a fitting name, since the children who are being murdered are too small to be heard.

Their mouths are too small to testify. Their cries do not penetrate the womb, which is doubled as their execution chamber. They can't organize a march or hire a lawyer or call the police or beg for help.

If they're gonna be heard, then someone else actually needs to open up their mouth and speak for them. And that brings us to the sixth commandment, you shall not murder. Murder is translated from the Hebrew word, ratsah, and it does not prohibit every taking of human life.

Scripture recognizes capital punishment, just warfare, lawful self-defense, as lawful means of taking life. So there are ways in which the Bible does say that taking of human life is permissible, but this is an unlawful kind.

The Image of God and the Sanctity of Human Life

This law actually is there to safeguard and protect the image of God within man, which was earlier established in Genesis 9, when God said to Noah, whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God, he made man.

From the earliest pages of Scripture, we learn that human life is sacred because human beings bear God's image. That image is not stamped on us when we take our first breath or when we receive our birth certificate or when the doctor smacks us on the bottom and we begin to cry or when we become viable or useful to society.

God knows and forms his children in the womb. That's why David said, you formed my inward parts and you covered me in my mother's womb. Psalm 139, 13. John the Baptist leaped for joy while he was still in Elizabeth's womb.

Luke called him a baby. Using the same Greek word for born baby says the baby that was in Elizabeth's womb. The fertilized egg in the womb is not a potential human being, it is a human being with tremendous potential.

Abortion and Industrialized Killing

And our culture is killing these children on an industrialized scale. In 2025, estimated 1 .126 million clinical provided abortions occurred in the United States. That number does not include abortions obtained outside the clinical reporting system like with the morning after pill.

To put that in the context, with more than 50 years of the so-called pro-life movement existing, there has not been a decrease in abortions, there has been an increase. And it's even now become something you can do with your own DIY infanticide kit.

Because of this, more than 4 ,000 children every day are murdered through this demonic practice. That's the size of your entire family after seven generations of being fruitful and multiplying, which means that it would take you over 200 years to produce the amount of children in your lineage that are killed every day in abortion.

128 every hour, more than two every minute. While we slept last night, children died. While we ate breakfast, children died. While we drove to church and sang hymns and adjusted the thermostat, no, we didn't.

Because it's already hot. Children died. And without getting into the gory details of what happens during the various kinds of abortions, if you do any amount of research on it, there is no high-browed, honorable way to describe it.

It's not humane like a lethal injection that's administered to criminals. Do you hear that? We treat criminals more humanely than we do our infants. This is murder on a scale, on an industrialized scale that should make us vomit if we think about it for more than a half a second.

And it's being perpetrated unrestrained by licensed serial killers against the tiniest little members of our society. Last week, Massachusetts was voting on a bill to take all restrictions on abortion away so that you could literally murder a child up to the moment of birth.

And our governor probably is going to sign it if she hasn't already. Abortion isn't just evil because it's bloody. Many surgeries are bloody and they save lives. Abortion is evil because the blood being shed is that of an innocent human being as the result of hatred against the image of God.

A child has become less human according to his size, location, dependence, and development or his ability to feel pain. You shall not murder means anyone who is large enough or small enough, anyone who has developed enough or not is worthy of protection because you shall not murder, no qualifications, no get out of jail free clauses.

The Duty to Protect the Vulnerable

And it'd be easy for us to direct all of our ire and hatred towards the abortion clinics. It'd be easy for us to point at the abortionists, the politicians, the activists, the mother, the father who paid for it and everyone else whose hands have been directly involved in her bloodstain.

And yes, their guilt is real. Scripture recognizes that some sins are more heinous than others. Directly killing a child is not morally identical to failing to think about a child. But the sixth commandment also doesn't merely forbid the driving of the knife into the neighbor's chest.

It also requires us to use lawful means to end murder. That's why the Westminster Larger Catechism says in the sixth commandment, all careful studies, lawful endeavors to preserve the life of ourself and others.

It also says that the commandment forbids the neglecting of or the withdrawing of the lawful and necessary means of the preservation of life. In other words, the commandment doesn't only ask us, did you kill someone?

The commandment also asks us, did you actually stand for those who are being killed? Did you go and try to protect those or stop the murder? For instance, if you saw a man being murdered in the street and stood idly by doing nothing or live streamed it on TikTok, because you congratulate yourself because you didn't hold the smoking gun.

If you saw a cashier being held at gunpoint, refused to call the police, warn anyone, seek help, render any kind of conceivable aid because you were too cowardly or callous to get involved, can you consider your conscience clean?

Would you have no guilt? You and I may not be able to tackle every gunman. Wisdom does not require that we be reckless, but love does require that we do whatever is lawful and within our power and ability to do.

And the inability to do everything is not a just refusal to do anything. Solomon says, Proverbs 24, 11 through 12, deliver those who are drawn towards death, deliver them and hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.

If you say, surely we did not know this, does he not weigh the hearts? Deliver those who are drawn towards death, hold back those who are stumbling towards the slaughter. We cannot say we don't know what's happening.

The Sin of Indifference

We know, we know. We know more than a million children are killed every year. We know where the clinics are. We know what the pills do. We know what the suction machines removes. We know what the forceps tear off.

We know what the politicians are separating. We know what the corporations are funding. We know what the culture is demanding. And yet we go entire weeks without even thinking about it. We can discuss sports for hours, but we can't pray for a minute for the Holocaust that's happening beneath our noses.

We know the injury report, the trade deadline, the rumors for playoffs, who's gonna make it, who's not. We don't spend a minute thinking about how we can get involved, how we can end this tragedy forever.

We can become furious over taxes, gas prices, elections being rigged, traffic issues, bad cell phone service, and someone saying something stupid on the internet. And yet 4 ,000 children are carried into eternity every single day without the slightest uptick in our blood pressure.

We scroll past photographs because they're upsetting to us. We close literature because it causes us to weep. We avoid looking at videos that we don't want to ruin our evening. We refuse to look squarely at the brutality in the face because the truth might make a demand upon our life.

We live like it's someone else's problem, don't we? All of us do that. We live like it's someone else's mission. It's someone else's ministry. Someone else can stand outside the clinic. Someone else can get arrested in Tennessee.

Someone else can preach in the street. Someone else can support and persuade mothers to keep their children. Someone else can confront the fathers, grab them by the neck and tell them to man up. Someone else can confront the wickedness of it.

Someone else can adopt the children. Someone else can give, speak and do everything else. And unlike Nazi Germany, where the cattle carts were passing by our windows. Unlike Nazi Germany, where Amazon sells the abortion pill literally on Amazon, you can order it and have it delivered to your house.

Unlike Nazi Germany, where there were no smokestacks spreading our neighbor's ashes across the midday sky. There's hidden clinic dumpsters, laboratory containers, blood soak instruments, medical waste bags of more than a million missing children a year.

And we've learned to live normally about it in the midst of the greatest human industrialized slaughter in all of human history. Now, I'm not saying that we bear the same guilt as the doctors who are the serial abortionists, I'm not.

Confessing Apathy and Turning to the Gospel

But we must confess the guilt of apathy. We must convince the guilt of indifference. We must confess, although we have not killed with our own hands, we prioritized our comfort and our silence. Not everyone in this room is scheduled an abortion.

If you have, there's grace and forgiveness for you in the gospel of Jesus Christ. But we have, what we've all done is we've scheduled our entire lives with calendars too busy to hear the cries of all those who are being thrown away.

That is the respectable modern and even Christian way of violating the sixth commandment, knowing the good we ought to do and doing nothing as James 4 .17 says, and for us, that is sin. May God break our hearts over this.

May God forgive the years that we've barely noticed this. May God forgive our cowardice, our coldness, our excuses, our love for comfort, our preference for a quiet life over a faithful one. And may that grief move us as a church and as people to end this damnable practice forever.

Prayer for Repentance and Abolition

Let's pray. Lord God, I apologize for all the minutes that I'm not haunted by this. Forgive me for my dullness. Forgive me for prioritizing so much of my own comfort, my own needs, my own empire and castle.

Forgive me for not hearing the cries of those who were exterminated for no good reason. Forgive me for not being more involved. Forgive me for not doing more. Forgive me for living in such prosperity and wealth while my brothers and sisters are sent to the slaughter.

Forgive me for abortion apathy. Lord, forgive us all. And God, by your grace, would you inflame our hearts to end it. Would you not please God allow us to accomplish incremental victories that lead nowhere as slavery was in early America.

God, would you abolish it for good and forever. And Lord, I pray that in eternity, we would not be known as the generation who sat on the bench, but we would be the ones who asked for the ball. Lord, empower us to do your work.

Loving and Obeying God's Law Through Christ

Whatever needs to be done. In Jesus name we pray, amen. Thank you for listening to this homily on the law of God from our covenant renewal worship this past Lord's day. We publish these messages each week because we believe that God loves his law and far from throwing it away, we believe that the death and resurrection of Christ and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit will actually help us learn to love and obey God's law.

And that's our prayer for you, that as you chew on these expositions each week, that you would both learn to love and come into alignment with the law of God. And we pray that you would do that by the spirit's power through the finished work of Christ and to the glory of God.

And with that, God bless you.