6th on the List

The tenth commandment (Exodus 20:13) is simple and clear:

"You shall not murder."

But it seems natural for people to equivocate on matters of clarity.

Here's a hypothetical example of this:

Let's say one man kills another and it is not a situation of self defense.

Without any other background information, this sounds like murder, and referring back to the commandment, it is sinful and unacceptable to God (and therefore, us)

Now let's say that the one man murdered the other because the slain man had himself been murdering other people, but it was still not self defense (nor in the sense that war is self defense).

Well, I naturally want the original murderer stopped, but it's still murder to kill him in kind. Morever, societies put in place authorities to deal with that - these are God given, or modeled after, rules of law. People universally expect to be protected against murder. So, no, you can't just act on your own to murder someone else. It's morally and legally wrong.

Ok, but what if the one man was killing innocent children?

It's still murder to kill him, and wrong. Tell the authorities and count on the rule of law to deal with the first murderer.

But, what if this first man systematically murdered as many as 60,000 innocent babies right in your midst, and took money for it (millions), and even used that same blood money to corrupt the very gov't authorities who should be prosecuting him? What if the second man, seeing this, murdered the first murderer just to make him stop?

No, even then, it is not right to murder him. 

Both men are now murderers and guilty - both in need of repentance according to God's words.

And both, as murderers, are not worthy of any adulation or equivocation. They are heroes to no one. Worse. You could try to argue from a moral equivalency that the one was at best 60,000 times worse than the other and has at least been stopped. But even in the hypothetical sense that is clearly, unambiguously flawed! 

Sin is sin, and wrong is wrong. Hopefully, the society in this hypothetical case would themselves step forward and apply the God-given rule of law to stop the paid murderer of children, and refuse to let him prey on other desperate people, or to prosper in their midst.

What do you believe?