Gracepointe Church (Dover, OH)
Gracepointe Church (Dover, OH)
Exodus Series, Part 11 | Murder | Randy Garcete
Can unchecked anger really lead to murder? Explore the profound implications of the Sixth Commandment, "You shall not murder," in our latest episode. We unravel the shocking narrative of Kenneth Darlington, whose boiling rage during a protest in Panama resulted in a devastating tragedy. Discover how ancient teachings from the Old and New Testaments, particularly the powerful Sermon on the Mount, reveal the insidious link between anger and murder. As we reflect on the sanctity of life and the creation mandate given to Noah, we urge you to consider how unchecked anger can have dire consequences.
Uncover the alarming rise of road rage incidents in the United States, a statistic that starkly highlights our need to better understand and manage our emotions. Drawing from biblical teachings, we delve into how unresolved anger fuels these violent encounters and emphasize the importance of reconciliation as a pathway to peace. By dissecting the roots and various levels of anger, from minor annoyances to full-blown rage, we aim to equip you with the insights needed to prevent these emotions from escalating into harm.
Embark on a journey to distinguish between righteous and sinful anger through biblical examples and modern-day reflections. We discuss how righteous anger, when guided by love, can be a powerful catalyst for change, as demonstrated by figures like Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, we also confront the personal and relational damage wrought by sinful anger, encouraging self-reflection and seeking spiritual guidance to transform anger into a force for good. Join us as we navigate the complexity of human emotions, seeking wisdom and the Holy Spirit's guidance to align our lives with a higher purpose and transform anger into positive change.
I just want to give a greetings again in Jesus' name. It's good to be here and it's good to be in fellowship with other believers. Turn to Exodus, chapter 20. Exodus, chapter 20. So I've been making my way through the book of Exodus. We've been following the story of God's formation of his people, bringing them up out of slavery in Egypt, leading them into the wilderness and bringing them to himself on Mount Sinai. And it's on Mount Sinai that God comes down and visits his people in a vivid manifestation of his power. It's on Mount Sinai that God gives the law to Moses and to the children of Israel. And so recently I've been preaching through the Ten Commandments, and last time we talked about what it means to honor your father and mother, the Fifth Commandment and I really enjoyed some of the feedback that I got afterwards. There was some, maybe a little bit of pushback and maybe some other clarifying questions that helped me. That was just things I totally missed and I really enjoyed the conversations that were spurred from that sermon. This morning I'm going to be covering commandment number six you shall not murder Again. I invite you all to. If you have questions, clarifying questions or maybe even pushback on something that I say this morning. I would invite your feedback afterwards. I think it would generate some good discussion.
Speaker 1:I'd like to share a story of something that happened in November of 2023. Story of something that happened in November of 2023. In the country of Panama, one morning there was a long traffic jam. Traffic was held up on a major highway. People were frustrated, they were late, traffic wasn't moving at all and people discovered up ahead. There was a group of protesters who were protesting some mining that was going to be happening in the country, a contract that the government was sort of negotiating with some commercial mining companies. So the protesters were up ahead. They had totally blocked off the interstate and traffic was just sitting there.
Speaker 1:A man by the name of Kenneth Darlington, who's 77 years old, steps out of his truck and he walks a couple hundred yards up to where the protesters are and he starts to engage in conversation with them. There's video footage of this. You can see he's agitated, he's angry. He has some dialogue with them and he starts to try to move the items that are in the way some of the flags and the barriers and he turns around to go back to his truck. But then he turns around again and he pulls out a handgun and exchanges some more angry words and this whole time you can see his anger is sort of escalating. And he pulls out his gun and he's waving it around and he points it at the protesters and fires off a couple shots. This is a picture that was taken of him. You can see his jaw is clenched, he's red in the face, he's very angry and he ended up killing two of the protesters.
Speaker 1:His anger and his inability to control his anger led him to the ultimate outcome of that, which was to take another person's life. Today, I want to look at this commandment of murder do not murder, do not kill through the frame of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount and how he connected the killing of other humans to the root sin of uncontrolled anger in a person's life. So I want to do this by looking, starting off looking at the creation mandate that God had in the beginning of the world and then jumping forward to what Jesus said about anger, and then, basically, ultimately, I want to show that the killing of humans, the killing of other people, is ultimately an outcome of a seed that is uncontrolled anger, anger that is rooted in the heart, that is not resolved in the heart, that is not resolved Ultimately. The fruit of that is death, whether physically or relationally. Turn your Bibles to Genesis, chapter 9.
Speaker 1:So, right after God destroyed the world with the flood, noah and his family, his sons and their wives, they come out of the ark to a world that is sort of, in a sense, restored. Evil has been purged and God meets Noah and he basically renews the covenant with Noah. This is what he says in verse 1 of chapter 9. He says to Noah, he reiterates the creation mandate that he had given to Adam and Eve in the garden. He said be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. He goes on to talk about how that food, everything that moves, shall be food for you. I've given you green plants, I give you everything.
Speaker 1:Then he gives them basically the first command to not kill found in Scripture. Then he gives them basically the first command to not kill found in Scripture. He says but you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is its blood, and for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning From every beast, I will require it, and from man and from his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. And he says this. He says whoever sheds the blood of man by man, shall his blood be shed. And then the question is why? And he answers it by saying this for God made man in his own image. For God made man in his own image. For God made man in his own image. And you be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it At its core. As the killing of other human beings is a working and direct opposition to what God wanted for humans and that was to fill the earth, to multiply and to flourish, and the idea that God made man in his own image. In the garden, adam and Eve were stamped with the image of God, the nature and the characteristics of God. And when life is taken, when human life is taken, when people are murdered, I believe that killing is going in direct opposition to God's will for humans to multiply, to fill the earth and to reflect his image in the world.
Speaker 1:So the story of Kenneth Darlington I found really interesting. So the story of Kenneth Darlington I found really interesting, not so much because of the incidents but because of the comments section under the news article that I read. Reading comments sections just reveals so much about human nature and maybe our time today. Pretty much all of the comments underneath this article were something along the lines of well, we sort of saw this coming, or I can understand why he would do that, or it was just like those dumb protesters. They sort of had it coming and as I was reading this it was like, oh my word, this is sort of wild. But I think if I'm honest with myself myself, and if you're honest with yourselves too, there's a little part of you that can maybe identify with those commenters, in that we all know what it's like to be going down state route 39 in, uh, the second or third week of October and you are late for some appointment or an event out in Millersburg and you get caught up in traffic tourist traffic at the height of the season and you get to Bethel Church and you see the line is like that's where the line stops. Going into Berlin is like that's where the line stops going into Berlin.
Speaker 1:So road rage shootings are on the rise. This is according to an article in Trace. Road rage shootings are on the rise according across the United States as drivers increasingly turn to firearms to vent their frustrations, with often tragic consequences. Between 2014 and 2023, the number of people shot in road rage incidences surged more than 400 percent, from 92 to 481. All told, angry drivers shot 3,095 people over that decade nearly one every day. One in four of those people were killed Sort of a wild statistic. In 10 years, road rage incidents where people were shot grew 400%. Jesus.
Speaker 1:What I love about Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount is that he's brilliant in the way that he understands us as humans. Turn to the Sermon on the Mount Matthew, chapter 5. This is arguably one of the most famous and well-known and probably influential passages of Scripture, and even just literature, in the course of human history. Jesus opens up with the Beatitudes in the first part of chapter 5, but he goes on in verse 21 of chapter 5. He says this chapter 5, he says this Matthew 5, 21.
Speaker 1:You have heard that it was said to those of old you shall not murder and whoever murders will be liable to judgment. Then he says but and he does this with two or three other things he does it with lust, and then he does it with with oaths. I believe it is. He says you've been taught and you've understood from the old Testament law that it is wrong to murder. And he says, like for all of us here, it's like we can sort of pat ourselves on the back and say I haven't murdered anybody, I haven't killed anybody. That's, you know, I'm doing great. I think all of you can say that, at least I hope.
Speaker 1:But Jesus says okay, that's great, but I've come to expand on that command, to elevate it and to get to the heart of what is behind the taking of another human's life. He says this. He says but I say to you that everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment. Some translations say everyone who is angry with his brother without a cause will be liable to judgment. Whoever insults his brother will be liable to the council and whoever says you fool, will be liable to the hell of fire. So if you're offering your gift at the altar and there, remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go First, be reconciled to your brother and then come and offer your gift, and we'll stop right there with that. So, according to Jesus, what he's saying is that at the heart of murder, the root of that, the seed of that, is unresolved or sinful anger against another human being.
Speaker 1:Now what I want to do for the rest of the sermon is look at this issue of anger. Jesus tied it to, linked it with murder. How do we think of anger? What is anger and how do we deal with it in our lives? So a couple definitions that I found of anger that I thought were helpful, and this is maybe just sort of a raw maybe definition given by the American Psychological Association defines anger like this Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism towards someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong.
Speaker 1:Okay, the Hebrew word for anger can literally be translated as nostril. I believe in the Old Testament they felt that the center where anger came from was from the nostril. Basically, and it makes sense to me, it's like when I get angry, my nostrils flare and it's a response to something that happens where you feel you've been wronged or maybe somebody else has wronged you or somebody else has wronged someone you love. So the initial emotion or the feeling of anger is not sin. However, the way that we respond to that initial emotion of sin, of anger, can be sin and often does become sin.
Speaker 1:I think it was helpful for me to see an article that I saw on betterhelpcom. See an article that I saw on betterhelpcom. Most times if you just Google blogs for stuff like this, it's not helpful, but I did find this one actually to be helpful. So it as as pet peeves. So I, my wife, gets very annoyed at me when I'm eating supper and I um take a bite and my, my fork uh like scrapes against my teeth, my teeth scrape against the fork. It just annoys her a lot.
Speaker 1:Some other maybe potential like annoyances and low levels of anger are just like getting behind a slow tourist driver or when somebody's tailgating you for whatever reason, or when your wifi is slow, or maybe when your children won't go to sleep when you expect them to or when you want them to, and you're maybe watching a movie and they keep disrupting your movie and that's an annoyance. And this low level of anger will often subside quickly. It's usually something that can be taken care of or you can just sort of put up with and it's not going to completely disrupt your day and sort of. The base level of this Sort of. The second level of anger is frustration, and frustration is a little bit more intense in that it's almost like annoyance that isn't resolved, or like a recurring annoyance or a pronounced annoyance.
Speaker 1:And this is the feeling that you get when you are trying to get through to a live customer service agent with I don't know something like your insurance or I don't know some bureaucratic thing. And you know, because from your past experiences you know that this is just going to take forever and it does, and you just cannot. No matter what button you push, you cannot get through to a live agent. It just takes you to a recording. That's frustration. And all of a sudden you start feeling sort of hot inside your your blood starts pumping. You might get sort of like, um, just agitated and maybe sweaty palms. Um, this is the feeling. That frustration is maybe the feeling that you get when dads, if your teenage sons don't put away your tools and it's like the 50th time it's happened this year it's not just an annoyance anymore, it's a frustration. Maybe it's for you moms who have toddlers who are constantly making the same mess day after day, even though you tell them a hundred times to not do that thing. Or maybe you work with somebody who never shows up on time and like the first time it happened it was like okay, this is whatever. But week after week of that, it turns into a frustration. Now frustration may pass quickly if the situation gets resolved, or it may turn into a long-term issue if it continues without resolution. So that feeling is again.
Speaker 1:It's an impulse that arises from an external sort of situation, and how we choose to respond to that frustration determines whether it turns into sin or not. Now the fourth or the third level of anger is hostility, and this is where your annoyance or your maybe frustration or even your anger turns into something a little bit more. It becomes directed towards something or someone. This is where your anger is no longer just an internal thing, but it becomes an. It turns into an intent to harm or damage or tear down someone else or tear down someone else. This is maybe an example of this would be if you find out that someone was gossiping about you. That hurts and you maybe feel anger about that. Inwardly. That's a good thing, that's a natural response, I think, to the hurt that happened. But what happens and where I think anger turns into sin, is when it turns into hostility, where all of a sudden you're looking for ways to tear down this person that hurt you, or you're trying to maybe go around their back and jab them with some damaging word or action. Hostility goes from feeling anger to actively or even passive-aggressively tearing down another person, and I think this is a sinful response to anger.
Speaker 1:Fourth level of anger is rage. Rage is when you see it, you know it, and you might see it in your two-year-old toddler because he didn't get the toast that he wanted. Or you might see it in a grown adult, a grown man or woman who is shouting, who's yelling, who's cursing, who's using harmful language, who is tearing down the people anything and everything in their way. This might resort rage can resort to, into physical violence, and rage can often be used as a tool to manipulate victims or to threaten or to harm, and I believe this is an extreme form of anger, and I believe this is an extreme form of anger.
Speaker 1:I found this interesting that anger is often a secondary emotion. I know there are people who say this, that often fear or anger is a secondary emotion and that what's beneath the anger is often a primary emotion and what you see with that? You see this. I guess some primary emotions would be things like fear or love, jealousy, sadness, loneliness, even desire, and you see this expressed in. So take Kenneth Became very angry, shot and killed a protester. We don't know what the emotion was underneath that, the primary emotion, but it was probably something like fear of being late or I think of. There are moments when if you become angry at someone or something, it can often be because you're afraid of how, if you're going to be late for something, you get angry at your wife for what you think is holding you back or whatever. It can be a fear of what other people think if you're late. So it's interesting to note what is the primary emotion behind my anger, if I feel that what is driving this? What is driving this emotion? Is it fear of other people? Is it love and I think that can be a righteous thing Misplaced anger was.
Speaker 1:Also, I think, a helpful thing is that often anger, the way that anger expresses itself, can be a transferring of anger or of negative feelings to someone or something other than the true cause of the anger, and I found this painting that I think illustrates this so well. I found this painting that I think illustrates this so well. So in the top left corner you see the employee who's getting yelled at by his boss. This painting is called Transfer of Anger. Boss is angry at his employee for I don't know what. The employee comes home and is angry at his wife for whatever reason, and the wife takes those negative feelings and ends up transferring that anger to her son, yelling at her son, and you see the final outcome of that is a little boy feeling those negative emotions and yelling at his little pet cat and we chuckle. But I think it wraps up so well what can happen sometimes when we experience negative emotions and this can be even from things from trauma from your childhood or negative things you've experienced at work, where you come home from work. This just happened to me last week. It was a really warm day, it was a hot day and I was feeling tired. I was pretty exhausted, came home and I became angry at my wife and my kids for things that I was they had. No, I transferred those negative feelings onto them instead of dealing with those things myself.
Speaker 1:So is there such a thing as righteous anger? God expresses anger a lot in the Old Testament I think. In the Old Testament God is referred to as being angry 177 times, versus humans being angry 45 times. God is holy, he's perfect, his ways are just and his anger is a righteous anger. We see Jesus get angry in the New Testament. We see him flipping tables, and then the Psalms are full of expressions of anger. David asks God to express his anger on his enemies.
Speaker 1:Hope Bollinger says this. She says this righteous anger is grief over sin that arises when we witness an offense against God and his word. And you guys know what this feels like when you think of things like September 11. Maybe you don't remember that anymore as vividly as you did when it happened, but when you saw those towers come down, there was a sense in most of america and most of us of of anger, and I believe that that was a initially a feeling of of god what just went wrong here? Why are you allowing this to happen? And anger at the sin that happened. I think of October 7 that's coming up here, the one year anniversary when we saw what happened in Israel on October 7, it provoked anger in all of our hearts, I believe, and that's a healthy response to sin. It's a healthy response to injustice. Ephesians says be angry and sin not. So how do we take that initial anger that we feel towards injustice and transform it into something that is useful.
Speaker 1:Martin Luther King Jr. He was a famous civil rights leader in the 60s. He talked about this a lot and he believed that it was very dangerous to use anger or to embrace anger as a motivation. But he said and he believed often it would lead to violence or bitterness against their oppressors. But he said that anger could be a motivating emotion to unite and organize a large group of people to transform a damaged or broken or unjust system. But he said this. He says, however, that anger always needs to be regulated by love. Anger always needs to be regulated by love. Anger by itself is incapable of properly regulating itself. I think that's a good definition of what righteous anger is.
Speaker 1:So what is sinful anger? It's essentially anger that is not regulated by love. It's sinful anger. Anger that results in damaging words or actions or attitudes, or even a sort of an inward bitterness or resentment, is sinful anger and it's anger that must be repented of. And it's the results of sinful anger in our lives and the lives of those around us that have long-lasting consequences and damaging consequences. Sinful anger it destroys. It destroys families, it destroys marriages, it destroys relationships between parents and children, it destroys communities, parents and children. It destroys communities, it cripples, it leaves lasting scars and it can absolutely not coincide with love. Sinful or unresolved or ongoing anger cannot abide with love. It's antagonistic to love. It's antagonistic to love. It is a direct opposition to God's design of stamping humans with his image. It is a working against the image bearers of God.
Speaker 1:We see the results of this in the life of Moses, the early part of Moses' life. He sees the Egyptian kill his fellow Hebrew and we see Moses' response to that is anger. His initial response to that is anger, and rightly so. But what he does with that initial impulse of anger is he takes the life of that Egyptian and that results in the consequence of him having to flee for his life. He had to go to the wilderness for 40 years and flee for his life. And towards the end of his life then, when he's leading we'll see this later he's leading the children of Israel in the wilderness. God brings them to a rock I think it's the Rock of Meribah and God tells him to speak to the rock and he will provide water for all the grumbling and thirsty people. And Moses is angry at the people, he feels frustrated and he says, basically, he calls them, you rebels. And then he I forget what else he says and he, in an angry manner, strikes the rock instead of speaking to it. And that action Moses' inability to control his anger, moses' inability to properly regulate his anger with love results in God banning him from entering the promised land. He says, because you've disobeyed me in this way, you will not enter the promised land.
Speaker 1:Sinful anger has lasting consequences. I believe it's the same for us. If you and I cannot learn to regulate the emotion of anger by the power of the Holy Spirit, it will have lasting consequences for relationships and for, I believe, our ultimate eternity. Craig Larson said of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun, he says, to lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain that you are given and the pain you are giving back. In many ways, it is a feast for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you. I love that quote.
Speaker 1:He's saying essentially that anger feels good in the moment, but essentially it's going to destroy you. So for you here at Grace Point, how are you? I guess processing this Anger is something that either touches all of your lives or has touched your life in some way. Maybe you're sitting here and you're feeling a sense of guilt for the ways that you've mismanaged your emotions around anger. Maybe you are someone who lashes out at your wife or at your children. Maybe you don't necessarily lash out, but you internalize this anger, and maybe it's turned you into a bitter or resentful person and it's destroying you from the inside. That will always come out somehow. Maybe you're the victim of someone who's angry. Maybe you're a wife or a child of someone who verbally uses anger in unhealthy ways and in sinful ways. How do we deal with this? How do we deal with this anger?
Speaker 1:It's a complex and a complicated thing, but I want to look at maybe just three ways that we can deal with this problem of sinful anger. The first one is to repent from sinful anger. And I put the adjective sinful in there because I don't believe we need to repent of anger. We need to repent of sinful anger. I think we could do a whole book study and maybe get a lecture series on how to manage anger or how to manage it, but ultimately it has to come down to repentance from sinful anger. Without a repentant heart, without a heart that feels sorrow for the sin that anger has caused, it's not going to do a whole lot of good. Sin management is just like it works for a little bit, but it's not going to produce lasting change from the inside. There has to be repentance. So if you're someone who struggles with this recurring, just anger that bubbles up from the inside and just spews out all over your loved ones or your coworkers, I think it has to start with this. It has to start with a deep sorrow and repentance for that sin.
Speaker 1:I think, secondly, it can be really helpful to recognize the feeling of anger when it first comes up. So often when anger comes up, it's just like a flash in the pan. It's almost like a warning light and if you're like me, you just respond, you just say what's on your mind and you just whip it out there and just let it land wherever it's going to land, and often it causes damage to relationships. I have a little SUV RA, rav4, it's in the back there, I can just see the taillights and it has the technology where you have the push button to open up the trunk and close the trunk, which is fantastic. But if it's working, but it's given out on me like probably six months ago and now, um, it'll like half the time it'll work, like it'll open when I push the button. The other half it'll like either get stuck halfway down or just not go at all. Um, so a couple months ago I had enough of this.
Speaker 1:This went from annoyance, like the first couple times, to like frustration, toility, to like almost rage, but but just hostility, and I just like. I was like I'm gonna show this thing, I'm going to show this thing, who's boss? And I put all my force on it and just like, like manually, like like shoved it closed and it didn't want to go very well and I put all of my force behind it and put a big dent right in the back. You can see it if you want to. I need to get it fixed. Yet it's going to cost me a lot of money to fix it.
Speaker 1:Anger that's unresolved has consequences and it would have been really helpful for me to just recognize in the moment okay, randy, you're feeling anger, you just need to step away for a little bit. Maybe go for a walk, maybe talk to God about it. Just hit the pause button for right now. It would have been really helpful for me just to recognize hey, I'm feeling angry right now and it's probably justified, like this trunk is ridiculous, but I'm going to come back when those feelings of anger have subsided. So I think that can be helpful to recognize it and then find out what's the emotion underneath that. Is there something that happened at work or is there something that happened in my other relationships that is fueling this underlying anger? All right, lastly, request help. This is we have some really good resources when it comes to dealing with with complex emotional and maybe even psychological problems in our community, and sometimes it can be helpful to just ask for help, to recognize this is a problem that is causing damage in your relationships and just to say, hey, I could really use some help in dealing with this. It might look like saying something to your small group leader or to a close friend or to a pastor and just saying, hey, this is a recurring problem, how do I deal with this? I want help. There's a real humility that comes from that and I think lasting change can start there.
Speaker 1:So, coming back to Kenneth Darlington, the American lawyer, this was a lawyer. It was an American citizen, 77 years old, never dreamed. I'm sure he did not wake up that morning saying I'm going to go out and kill a couple of protesters on the interstate, but there was something inside of his heart that was broken, that was not properly, that was not healthy. But in his heart that anger surfaced to the top and he ultimately took the life of somebody. We saw from Jesus that the killing of another human, the command to not murder, is often a final outcome to the seed of anger. What starts as a small annoyance or maybe as just a low-grade frustration, that anger is a seed that grows and has devastating consequences. So while most of you here, if not all of you, will probably never kill someone you'll probably never murder someone we do experience anger on a day-to-day basis and I believe if we don't learn how to submit that emotion to the Holy Spirit and to God, it will destroy, it will leave damaging consequences that are different than what he's facing but that have the same devastation and same devastating consequences. So, as believers, jesus calls us to resolve our anger and the situation where we feel that anger. To resolve it, he says go to your brother quickly and make a resolution or make a restitution before it ultimately destroys you or the people around you.
Speaker 1:Let's have a word of prayer and I will turn the time over to Kim. Lord, we come before you in Jesus' name. Thank you for making us people with emotions. Thank you that we have the ability to feel anger. Thank you that it is a mechanism that is almost like a warning light for us that warns us of potential danger or injustice in the world. Thank you that it can motivate us to get in the way of evil or to disrupt injustice.
Speaker 1:But, lord, we need a lot of help to know how to deal with this powerful emotion that can so often just get really out of control and can cause a lot of damage to the people we love. Lord, we ask that your Holy Spirit would guide us and help us to know how to regulate that emotion with love. We want to submit our lives to you. We want to ask that you would help us to live and know how to deal with this emotion Pray for everyone here. I ask that you would bless. And emotion. I pray for everyone here. I ask that you would bless everything that was said. No-transcript.