“Whoever strikes his father or his mother must be put to death. . .Whoever curses his father or his mother must be put to death.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

My kids are at the age that I wind up watching a ton of pre-teen comedies. Most of these are on Disney. Thankfully, they’re mostly older Disney series that were pretty clean and uninterested in pushing moral boundaries very far. But while there is a pretty wide variety of settings among them, they mostly all have one thing in common. In all of them parents are either absent or idiots. Only rarely are the parents of the main characters (or any characters for that matter) positive examples of what good parenting should be. The net effect here is that a whole generation of kids grew up being constantly bombarded by the idea that parents are at best unnecessary hindrances to achieving all their hopes and dreams. That kind of environment doesn’t produce a lot of respect. That’s too bad because God seems to take generational respect pretty seriously. Let’s talk about what we see here.

Children haven’t always been well-appreciated or even particularly well-liked by human cultures. Now, of course, there are many exceptions to that. I don’t even think I would submit that as a rule. It’s more of a generalized trend. Given the number of stories of the past that include situations in which children were to be “seen and not heard,” or the fact that child labor laws had to be passed to prevent children from being exploited by factory workers, or that in places like the ancient Roman empire things like infanticide were widespread, or considering how doggedly a segment of the cultural West is fighting right now to legally enshrine (and I use that word intentionally) the ability to murder children in the womb, it’s hard not to conclude that cultures which appreciated and valued children tended to be the exception to the rule.

In the Scriptures, though, we find something different. There’s certainly nothing like our culture’s present worship of adolescence, but there is a broad recognition that children are a blessing to be cherished. Parents (and explicitly fathers) should not provoke their children to anger. That is, they shouldn’t give them an overly hard time and cause them to hate the things they endeavor to raise them to believe. Grandchildren are to be celebrated as a crown. Children are a blessing from the Lord and are to be understood as such. This is the generational respect I’m talking about. But this generational respect has to be properly ordered.

A part of this proper ordering is that children are commanded to honor and respect their parents. If you have ever been a parent who had good parents yourself, this is something you understand inherently. You gave your kids the gift of life. You work hard to provide for them not just the basic essentials, but a life of abundance and joy. You are older and wiser and know better than they do what’s best for them. Making good and wise decisions does not come naturally to children. You can process the world around them more quickly and completely than they can, and you have their best interests at heart. Because of that they should trust you and demonstrate that trust by doing what you tell them to do.

Of course, all of this can go badly. Parents are broken people just like everyone else. We bring our own weaknesses and faults to the affair. Our past pains become our present insecurities, and we work those out through them in ways that unavoidably become their future problems. But when things are working like they should, like God designed them to work, parents love their children by raising them with kindness and gentleness and compassion, and children love their parents by obeying them.

Okay, assuming all of that is true for the moment, what are we supposed to do with what we see here? I mean, expecting kids to honor their parents is one thing. God actually put that one in the Big Ten. But making dishonoring your parents a capital crime? Really? That seems a little harsh, doesn’t it?

Well, happily, this is not something we are expected to put into practice today. These are old covenant laws. We don’t operate on that basis any longer. It was replaced by the new covenant law of loving one another after the pattern of Jesus’ love for us. That’s our only rule to keep as His followers. In other words, this command is not for us and doesn’t have any power over us. Any father today who tried to use these verses to somehow justify any level of abuse of his children, or mother who tried to use these verses to somehow justify any level of ungodly manipulation of her children would be dead wrong in doing so. There’s no quarter here for anything like that. Okay, but then why did God give these commands to Israel?

Here’s one thought. This was almost certainly not given with small children in mind. In fact, children aren’t mentioned in either of these verses. The perpetrator most likely in view here is an adult (keeping in mind that they would have defined adulthood as beginning not long after puberty) who is old enough to know better; who is old enough to understand and appreciate his parents’ enduring authority in his life, and the kind of respect they deserve by virtue of their position, and has rejected that position and authority in some egregious way. This is someone who has launched an attack on the integrity and stability of the family. More specifically, this was someone who actively tried to murder his parents or who has publicly disowned them.

On the latter crime this was something prohibited across the ancient world and was to be punished in a variety of ways depending on the culture. The ancient Sumerians directed that the offending child in this case be branded as a parent-rejecter and either sold into slavery (for disowning a father) or paraded around town and then kicked out of the clan (for disowning a mother). In other words, the situation we are dealing with here is likely far more severe than we are at first inclined to imagine. These two situations are describing fairly extreme acts of parental rejection and even violence.

Even more than that, what we are seeing here is a direct attack on the stability and integrity of the family. Families are foundational for any culture. Weakness there threatens the entire society. In my own culture, a great many of the problems we are facing can be directly traced back to the breakdown of the nuclear family. Problems at home eventually become problems out in the world because we don’t stay at home. We take them with us and they eventually cause problems everywhere in our society.

God was trying to build a strong, robust society for His people. He wanted them to have stability and longevity. This meant making sure that the family structure was protected and honored. This was something the ancient world understood generally as can be seen by the various laws dealing with this kind of issue in other cultures. God was essentially saying, “Yes, that sense you have that the family should be honored and protected is right.” When anyone, but most notably a member of a given family sought to do violence to that basic building block of a society in some way, that had to be dealt with swiftly and severely. The penalty for such a thing needed to be set sufficiently high so as to send the message to the rest of the society that this was not something anyone should ever do.

While we don’t have to and indeed shouldn’t support this kind of punishment today as we look at the matter through the lens of the new covenant, we can and should appreciate how seriously God takes families. Our efforts to honor this concern should lead to our advocacy for laws that help to protect the family and to elevate its importance in the hearts and minds of our culture. This should all be motivated by love. Strong families lead to better outcomes for everyone which is something we most definitely want. Let’s look for ways to celebrate and strengthen families. We’ll all be glad that we did.