“Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

When scholars examine the Ten Commandments, they often group them together in two big sets. The first set has to do with our relationship with God. Those are the first four. The second set has to do with our relationship with people. Those are really the last five. This fifth command sometimes gets grouped with the second set, but it doesn’t really belong there. It definitely does not go with the first set, though. It’s really a transitional command to get from one to the next. Let’s talk today about why honoring parents was a big enough deal to God that He included it on this list.

A few years ago, some clever scientists managed to capture the moment when an egg was successfully fertilized and became a zygote on video. This was a pretty remarkable thing given that you can’t exactly take your phone to that particular party in order to snap a picture. The very fact that such a moment was captured was a pretty big deal on its own. What generated so much interest in the short video, though, was the fact that when the fertilization happened and life began to exist where there was none before there was this huge release of energy that manifested as a little flash of light. Life is miraculous, and apparently there’s a little fireworks show when it happens. How interesting that when God began creating, the first thing He said was, “Let there be light.”

When a husband and a wife bring a child into the world, they are repeating and extending the miracle of creation by God’s grace. Scientists today can tell us with remarkable detail about all of the physical processes that unfold to allow for such a thing, but we just can’t quite manage to escape the fundamentally miraculous nature of it. We have a pretty good handle on many of the hows related to life, but there are some whys we just can’t grasp. And that’s not for a lack of effort on our part. We certainly haven’t managed to recreate the process on our own.

As a father (or a mother I’m sure, but I can only speak to one side of that equation), there is joy and satisfaction to be found in holding your newborn baby for the first time that aren’t accessible by other means. That has to be something of what God felt when He had put the final touches on creation and the first man and woman, the only creatures created in His image, were standing before Him. It’s a wonderful moment.

Eventually, though, the wonder transforms into frustration and exasperation and even anger. This is because those little bundles of joy eventually become defiant, ugly little snots who don’t want to do what you tell them to, and who are going to use every weapon at their disposal to make you pay for asking them to do it in the first place. Oh, and could you stop ruining their life with your horribly restrictive rules? All children eventually disobey and dishonor their parents. Well, if the miracle of birth recreates the wonder of creation itself, the eventual rebellion that comes after recreates the tragic rebellion at the heart of the Fall.

But why is this a sufficiently big deal to get put on this list of foundational commands? Was this just a cultural thing? I don’t think so. Just like God created the world and everything in it and thus it rightly belongs to Him (which is part of what made sin so bad in the first place), parents create their children, and thus they belong to them. It is right for children to obey their parents in a way most parents and even whole cultures inherently understand. Okay, but why did God feel the need to get into the business of micromanaging our behavior on something like this?

That’s not what’s going on here at all. Let me explain a little further. God isn’t interested in micromanaging our behavior, He is concerned with the creation of a healthy and properly ordered culture. God created us and loves us and wants to see us flourishing as a people. That requires functioning and healthy cultures. Well, culture starts with families. The family is always the fundamental unit of any culture. There’s simply no way to avoid that…at least no way that doesn’t involve a wildly totalitarian government, and that most definitely won’t lead to a healthy culture. Because family is so fundamental to a healthy culture, when there is brokenness at that level, there will be brokenness in every part of it.

This is why God gave this command. When children are taught to honor their parents, there is a level of cultural brokenness whose roots are pulled out before much growth can begin to happen. And note well that the command here is not simply obedience, but the entirely more robust concept of honor. And this isn’t honor only for the father which would have been unsurprising given the state of the culture of most nations at that time. The honor God was calling for here was to be shown to father and mother alike. That kind of thinking introduced a notion of equality between men and women that was radically progressive in that day.

Okay, but this command as we see it here doesn’t apply to us. It’s part of the old covenant and we live under the authority of the new. Why does this matter for us? It matters for us because it gets explicitly picked up and extended in the new covenant. We find this in Ephesians 6:1-4. Paul there does something interesting and which falls pretty well in line with how Jesus handled all of the parts and pieces of the old covenant that were going to be extended into the new.

Paul notes that this was the first of the Ten Commandments to include a promise. In other words, this was the first (and only) command that God gave and at the same time gave a promise for those who got it right: “…so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” That promise speaks to the blessings of creating a positive and healthy culture. When families are broken, a long and fruitful life is much harder to achieve than when they are healthy.

Paul did something else when he extended this command to us as an application of Jesus’ instruction for us to love one another as He loved us. He added the other side to it. He said that children are to obey their parents, but that parents (and specifically fathers) aren’t to make life unnecessarily difficult for their children. Sin messes with both sides of this equation. Sometimes children dishonor and disobey their parents and so violate the very order of creation. That’s a serious matter. But sometimes parents harass their children, treat them terribly, and forfeit any right they had to expect honor in the first place.

Children need to honor even dishonorable parents as a reflection of their trust in the Lord. They honor the ones who made their life possible in the first place just as they honor the God who created all life. At the same time, parents need to love and honorable even toward wayward children as a reflection of their trust in the Lord who loves them even when they are wayward and disobedient to Him.

When we get this right, healthy culture is a whole lot more likely to get created which makes the entire society function better. How many of our problems today as a culture can be traced back to broken families where children are not honoring their parents and where parents are not loving their children (much less each other)? When the family is broken, the rest of the society will be as well.

Yet if families are broken today, it is because they are under attack and have been for a very long time. This is where the church has such a powerful role to play. As a church, we need to work to advocate for families. We need to train them well in the ways of the Gospel. We need to celebrate them actively. We need to support them when the brokenness of sin comes to bear in their lives. We need to extend Gospel protection to them when and as we can. When we get all of that right, we will indeed enjoy a long life.