‘If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone.’ With these words Mario Puzo’s Godfather character Michael Corleone justifies and explains his policy of wiping out anyone who stands in the way of his rise to criminal power. To gain supremacy, he believes, does not require any great force of argument, just the argument of force, just the willingness to take enough life to reduce your enemies to nothing. Stark and immoral as such a philosophy might seem, the quantity of blood one is willing to shed and the degree of power one enjoys have carried a lucrative ratio across human history. Civilisations have been secured and lost on the appetite for killing that leaders and peoples in every century have indulged. The past 150 years in Western Europe has witnessed the rise of powerful men and we have lived with the legacy of blood that they have left behind. Projects to subjugate nations, to visit genocide on people groups, to persecute religious minorities, and to casually murder the most vulnerable in society have enjoyed sustained seasons of success – only to be defeated by the exertion of equal and opposite forces on the part of resisting parties.
All of this means that there has been more blood shed in history than we can ever account for. Most of these wrongful killings have not been on high profile individuals whose deaths are marked, but on the populations of ordinary men and women caught up in the lust for power that fuels nation states and terrorist groups. The casual injustices which rob people of their lives through individual murders, domestic homicides, tribal conflict, religiously motivated killings, warfare, are largely unseen, unknown, and (in the grand scheme of things) insignificant. Justice is often denied those who lose their lives, and their families who grieve them, and even more troubling is the fact that those with the greatest bloodlust occasionally find office and subsequent authentication in public life. This is not to mention the industrial scale of abortion in Western society which snuffs out the most tender and vulnerable of lives, with state sponsored euthanasia not far behind it.
The question is, how can we live with this? As Christians what do we have to say about human life, large scale bloodshed, and the injustice that often follows it? Does the Bible provide us with a framework for processing and addressing these issues in a morally satisfying way? How can we think well about the legacy of blood that stains the conscience of the world we live in? In this article I want to offer some very basic anthropology and some light touch eschatology that can provide a means of scaling and dealing with the culture of casual death that blights the life of our world and our nations.
High resolution image
At the heart of how Christians think about homicide is how they think about humanity. In a television interview in 1970 Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones stated ‘I criticize the modern view of man on two grounds. One is that it makes too much of man. Secondly, that it doesn’t make enough of man.’ Lloyd-Jones’ insight here was keen. Humanism at once exalts and abases human beings, it raises them on the highest pedestal of human ingenuity and independence, only to reduce them to mere matter or mere mammals within a wider biological system. Such polarised extremes encapsulated in one worldview are the perfect ingredients for hubristic leaders and nations on the one hand, and the ultimate inconsequence of taking life on the other.
The Christian view of humanity, its anthropology, is more nuanced than this. It can give account of the human depravity that leads to murder, and upholds the human dignity that forbids it. All of this is seated in the unique identity of men and women. Created by God in a flourish of joyous divine creativity, set apart as the pinnacle of the created order, and vested with the very image of God, human beings are special, and their value is sacred. This is true in Genesis 1-2 at the beginning of human history, and remains true after the Fall. Noah’s management of the new world post-Flood includes a mandate to preserve human life and to punish those who take it, solely because people are made in the image of God (Genesis 9:6); and according to James in the New Testament this image bearing begs for respectful treatment of all persons (James 3:9). Herman Bavinck summarised the dignity of humanity in these beautiful words,
Man forms a unity of the material and spiritual world, a mirror of the universe, a connecting link, compendium, the epitome of all of nature, a microcosm, and, precisely on that account, also the image and likeness of God, his son and heir, a micro-divine-being (mikrotheos). He is the prophet who explains God and proclaims his excellencies; he is the priest who consecrates himself with all that is created to God as a holy offering; he is the king who guides and governs all things in justice and rectitude.
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics , Volume 2.
This is the high resolution image at the centre of human identity, the crowning reality of who we are and why we matter. Every single person who is alive today and who has ever lived bears this image and is owed the honour due to it. This applies across cultures, continents, epochs, and extends from the conception of human beings in the womb to their physical conclusion at death. There are no exceptions regardless of intellectual, physical, or moral capacities. This is why Christians (with lamentable exceptions) have been at the forefront of movements that have sought to preserve human dignity and human life across the ages.
The Loud Crying Soil
Given the value of all human life and the volume of lost human life across the ages, it can be hard to reconcile where God fits in to this story. Human history can easily look like a litany of casual casualties to the force of human will and bloodlust. People can be wiped from the face of the earth individually, or tossed into mass graves collectively, and their lives appear to count for nothing. In the prologue to Henry IV Pt.1 Shakespeare allows the monarch to express hopes for the future of his kingdom in words which are rich in biblical allusion,
No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
William Shakespeare, Henry IV Pt.1
Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood
The truth is, however, that soil is neither personal nor powerful enough to stanch the flow of such blood, nor to make it matter. Even where human justice is exercised through magistrate and the penal system, there is seldom satisfaction for those wronged and bereaved, nor closure to the gaping wound that such a trauma leaves.
Here again the Christian message comes into play. The murder of Abel in Genesis 4 sends a clear message to all who will commit murder: their action and its ramifications can be concealed from other humans but it cannot be concealed from heaven. Cain embodies the spirit later expressed by the fictional character Michael Corleone – others can be wiped out with impunity, and for our own advantage. God, however, tells a different story. In words which must have chilled the heart of Cain, that should pierce the heart of perpetrators, and embrace the hearts of victims God made clear his perspective on unlawful killing,
The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.
Genesis 4:10
God marks Cain as a murderer, but prior to that he marks the mere fact of his brother’s murder. Abel’s death is recorded by God, the earth itself bearing witness to what has befallen him, the consequence and gravity of the taking of human life singing its own lament in the ears of God. This should give us pause and, counterintuitively, bring us hope. This idea of the earth calling humanity to account recurs in the New Testament, once on the lips of Jesus, and once through the pen of James. For Jesus, the blood of Abel is part of a continuum of killings which reached right down to his own crucifixion – a sequence of events which would carry penalty and sentence for those directly involved in them (Matthew 23:35-36). For James, even the injustice of unpaid farm labourers’ wages reaches God’s ears – our planet paying tribute to those who have been wronged and defrauded.
This is the loud crying soil which acts as a ledger for every life ever lost, for every drop of blood ever shed, for every injustice ever perpetrated. The God who has unique power to raise the dead also has the unique capacity to read the dossier on every killing ever committed, and whose assizes may be slow in their summons but ruthless in their exercise. Under these terms no one will ever truly get away with murder, no human life will ultimately have counted for nothing, no human sentence passed in a human court has the final say on perpetrators will suffer. A clever criminal might outrun the long arm of the law but they can never outrun the longer arm of the Lord.
Such a thought should bring us consolation, but it should also awaken conviction. In the Western world human lives are increasingly treated as being weightless. The sophistication of the philosophical cushioning placed around abortion, for example, can easily protect us from the grim reality that human lives are wantonly taken, and that infant blood cries to God for justice from our hospital wings. Countries devastated by terrorism can, in their laudable pursuit of an end to conflict, accidentally downplay the profundity of what it is to take another human life for the sake of twisted ideology. The decision of nations to go to war entails an invoice which must be addressed in eternity if every feasible effort is not made to preserve non-combatants.
Human life in the individual and collective sense is sacred, and extinguishing a person’s temporal existence matters to God at a level we struggle to capture in our limited thinking.
Conclusion
There is a remembrance of blood, a value placed on life, which is indelible and for which accountability is inevitable. For hearts and families riven by unlawful killing the fact of God’s final court hearing cannot take away present pain but it does guarantee future justice. For those whose hands are red with the lifeblood of others such a fact stands as a warning about their future before God’s face, and an invitation to repent now and place faith in the One who shed his blood even for the most deeply dyed and guilty sinner.
Thinking Pastorally 
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