We’ve been studying the code of ethics God audibly declared at Mount Sinai to the nation of Israel long ago, the Ten Commandments, which summarized most of the Law He was giving them to live by. We’re studying through these because they are also ethics our Lord, Jesus Christ commands us to live by, with the exception of the seventh day Sabbath requirement. The Lord has given us more freedom in regard to when we do what we should do. But as we were talking about last Sunday, the Lord would still have us sabbath, that is still regularly set aside a proportionate amount of time to rest from our work and draw near to Him, and to give our families and employees the same opportunity.
This morning we’re going to talk about the next commandment, the fifth one, which can be seen as introducing the next section of commands. The first four are about how we love and respect God specifically. We have no other gods but Him. We have no man-made images of God. We don’t lift up His name in worthless ways. And we are to regularly stop and give Him time, to worship Him, learn from Him and enjoy Him. Commandments five through ten are also part of loving God, but they’re about how God would have us love other people. The fifth commandment introduces this section on loving other people, and I believe it’s suggesting where loving people begins first and foremost. Of all people we must be good to, who is first of all? It’s not strangers or co-workers or people next door. Loving other people begins first of all in our own family circle.
And while not everyone has a spouse or siblings or children, everyone has parents or parental figures in their life, at least for a while. And perhaps that broader relevance was part of God’s reason for speaking on treatment of parents in His top ten ethics.
Exodus 20:12, “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
I’m sure most of you realize…
Our culture downplays the importance of one’s attitude and treatment of parents.
Disrespect, disobedience, even distain for parents, the neglect of parents as they get older, is so normal today, it’s just accepted and tolerated.
A Dr. Leonard Sax in a Wall Street Journal article, a few years ago, spoke of a typical experience in his medical practice.
“Kyle was absorbed in a videogame on his cellphone, so I asked his mom, ‘How long has Kyle had a stomach ache?’ Mom said, ‘I’m thinking it’s been about two days.’ Then Kyle replied, ‘Shut up, mom. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ And he gave a snorty laugh, without looking up from his videogame. Kyle is 10 years old…I have been a physician for 29 years. This sort of language and behavior from a 10-year-old was very rare in the 1980s and 1990s. It would have been unusual a decade ago. It is common today. America’s children are immersed in a culture of disrespect: for parents, teachers, and one another. They learn it from television, even on the Disney Channel, where parents are portrayed as clueless, out-of-touch or absent. They learn it from celebrities or the Internet. They learn it from social media. They teach it to one another. They wear T-shirts emblazoned with slogans like ‘I’m not shy. I just don’t like you.’”
Does that sound about accurate?
It’s actually a fulfillment of prophecy about the deplorable condition of humanity in the last days. II Timothy 3, beginning with verse 1, “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. 2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy…” Several other character traits are listed, then in verse 5, it says, “…having the appearance of godliness, but denying it’s power.” In other words, they have an outward show that they serve God, they profess to be Christians, they still attend church, but these ugly traits are still their character; they reject the power of truly following Christ to actually transform the human heart and their character.
What is it to honor parents and how big of a deal is it? How much does it matter? That’s what we’ll talk about in this lesson. First…
What is it to honor your parents?
The word for honor in the Hebrew text literally means to attach weight to or to make heavy. But it doesn’t mean we should tie dumbbells to our parents or feed them lots of high calorie food. It refers to attaching a heavy importance to someone, treating them as having a great weight of value and significance, as opposed to treating them lightly. It is to treat your parents as VIPs, as very important people. And I don’t believe this command is limited to biological parents, but applies to anyone who takes that role in your life. In Malachi chapter 1, God spoke to the priests who were dishonoring Him, and He said, “A son honors his father… If then I am a father, where is my honor?” It would imply Father God. And some of you may not like this, but it applies even to in-laws. There’s this paragraph in Exodus 21, that says if a man has a servant girl and he gives her to his son as a wife, then he is to treat that girl as his daughter. So if daughters-in-law are to be treated as daughters, it stands to reason that parent-in-laws are to be treated as parents and honored that way. And a great example of that in the Bible is Ruth, and the way she honored her mother-in-law. I believe it also applies to spiritual parents. The people who, as Paul puts it, fathered you through the Gospel, people who invested in you spiritually, and raised you up spiritually. So it has broad application, but for this lesson we’ll stick to what we normally think of when we hear the word parents.
And we never grow out of the responsibility to honor our parents, though the nature of honoring them changes as we age and they age, and as dependency shifts from us depending on them to eventually them depending on us. But we always owe them honor. And not necessarily because they are honorable people who deserve it. They may or may not have been good parents. But we owe them honor because God is honorable. God is worth all of our complete trust and obedience and He tells us we must honor them.
When you’re young, a dependent in their home, it involves obedience, as long as they’re not having us do anything evil. Ephesians 6:1, Paul said, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” And then in support of that Paul quotes the fifth commandment. It involves listening and taking correction. Proverbs 13:1, “A wise son hears his father’s instruction, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke.” Do you listen to rebuke, do you take correction?
To honor involves showing respect. Leviticus 19:3, “Every one of you shall revere [or show respect to] his mother and his father…” And a little further in Leviticus 19 at verse 32 it speaks of a way of showing respect, “You shall stand up before the gray head and honor the face of an old man…” Like in the courtroom when the judge walks in and all rise. Or in the Whitehouse when the president walks in a room and all rise. It’s an expression of great respect. And God was calling for showing honor like that to older people. Not that we must always rise when our parents walk in the room, but we should see God wants a culture of great respect; very very different from the culture we live in.
I don’t think God is in favor of the trendy thing now among kids of calling their parents by their first names. Have you ever called a house and a kid answers the phone and you ask to speak to a parent, instead of hearing them on the other end of the phone shouting “mom” or “dad,” they shout “Bob” or “Susan” or whatever it is. Seems to me it’s treating them like they’re just friends or classmates, not honoring them. Honoring is showing great respect. You look at them when they’re talking to you. You don’t tell them what to do, you ask kindly. You say thank you. You don’t complain when they ask you to do something.
Honoring for some of us may mean forgiving them, as we’re to forgive and love even our enemies, and as we want God to forgive us our enormous debt of sin. I’ve met brothers and sisters who find their parents to be the hardest people to forgive. Because their parents were the people they were supposed to be able to trust, the people who should have loved them and protected them, yet they’re the ones who abused or neglected them. Maybe that’s the situation of someone here. You might feel that by forgiving and honoring your parent, it’s excusing the wrongs of their past. But it isn’t. You’re doing what God tells you, you’re leaving all the judgment and righting wrongs in His hands, who is faithful to perfectly take care of what you put in His hands. You may heap those burning coals on their heads like Romans 12:20 talks about. The end of Romans 12 says never take your own revenge beloved, leave all that to God, vengeance is mine, I will repay. If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. And maybe that’s the shame they feel for the way they treated you. Then Paul says, do not be overcome by evil, don’t let the evils done to you make you bitter and resentful. But overcome evil with good. Which I believe means pursuing the course of transforming your parent’s heart the same way God transformed our hearts. He loved us first when we didn’t love Him. He overcame the evil in us with good. And there is grace available to actually do that. The Lord never calls us to do something that He doesn’t also give us the grace to be able to do.
And toward the end of our parents’ lives, honoring them looks like doing for them what they did for us at the beginning of our life. It’s providing food, clothing, shelter, whatever maintenance they need. I Timothy 5:4, “If a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God.” This will delight God’s heart.
In the brief description we have of Jesus’ adolescent years in Luke 2, we read that He went with His parents to Nazareth and it simply says He continued in subjection to them. He honored them with obedience. And as an adult, in the hardest moment, nailed to a cross, naked, mutilated beyond recognition, bleeding, struggling to breathe, suffering unbelievably. He looked down and saw His widowed mother and His beloved disciple John, and with almost His dying breaths He made provision for the care of His mother. In that awful agony He got out the words to His mother, “Woman, behold, your son,” referring her to John. Then He got out the words to John, “Behold, your mother.” And it says from that time on John took her into his own household.
The ancient Jewish Rabbis didn’t always have the best interpretations and applications of God’s commands. But I like what some of them said about what it means to honor your parents. Rabbi Eliezer said, “Even if his father orders him to throw a purse of gold into the sea, he should obey him.” Then this is found in the Jewish Talmud, “In what does reverence for a father consist and in what does honor for him consist? Reverence means that the son must neither stand nor sit in his father’s place, not contradict his words, nor judge him harshly. Honor consists of providing parents with food and drink and clothing and covering them, and in aiding them to enter and to leave the house.”
And I know there are some difficult questions that arise on this subject of caring for elderly parents. Many Christians wrestle with whether to have mom or dad live with them or in a nursing home. I’m not one to try to settle those questions. But I believe the Lord would have us ask ourselves, when we’re in the last stage of our life, how will we want to be cared for?
A little story that traces back to the classic storytellers, the Brothers Grimm, goes something like this:
Once upon a time there was a little old man. His eyes had become dim, his ears dull of hearing. And his hands trembled. When he ate, he clattered the silverware distressingly, missed his mouth with the spoon as often as not, and dropped food on the tablecloth. Now he lived with his married son, having nowhere else to live. And his son’s wife was annoyed at having to have this old man in her house and was disgusted at his table etiquette. So pretty soon she had the old man sit in the corner behind the stove. And they would give him his food in an earthenware bowl, and not even enough of it. He used to look towards the table with tears in his eyes… One day his hands trembled rather more than usual and the earthenware bowl fell and broke. The daughter-in-law was fed up by this point and stormed out of the house, went to the barn and brought back a trough and set it before the old man and said, “If you’re going to eat like a pig then you’re going to eat out of a trough.” Now, this couple had a little boy, of whom they were very fond. And one day they heard some clatter and banging coming from the shed behind the house. They walked out to find their little boy trying to nail some boards together. They asked him what he was doing. He said, “I’m making a trough to feed you and Mamma when I get big,” and smiled at them for approval. The man and his wife looked at each other for a while and didn’t say anything. Then they cried a little. At supper time they brought the old man back to the table and sat him in a comfortable chair, and gave him his food on a plate. And from then on nobody scolded him when he clattered or spilled or broke things.
Whatever we decide to do with our parents, may their best interest take precedence over our inconvenience. When you were about to come into this world, probably your mother did not look down at her big tummy and think, “I sure hope this won’t change anything in my life. I sure hope this won’t interrupt my schedule or take much of my time or money.” How long did we interrupt our parent’s life? How much time and energy and money did we cost?
Well…
How much does it matter?
Let’s let God Word answer that.
Genesis 9:20 after the flood, Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. And in a moment of weakness and foolishness, he drank too much wine one night and passed out naked in his tent. The youngest of his three sons, Ham, came in and saw his dad in that shameful condition, and rather than protecting his dad from embarrassment, he just left him like that and went out and reported it to his older brothers, Shem and Japheth. But the older brothers took a garment between the two of them and walked backwards into the tent and covered their father without looking at him. It’s obvious who honored their father and who dishonored him.
When Noah awoke and knew what had happened, He pronounced a curse, I believe inspired by the Spirit of God, on the lineage of Ham through Ham’s son Canaan; that the Canaanites would be servants of the descendants of Shem and Japheth. And he laid a blessing upon the lineages of Shem and Japheth that they’d be enlarged and exalted over Canaan. That curse and blessing is what’s happened through history. So those sons’ treatment of their father had huge ramifications, not only for themselves but for their descendants for thousands of years. It matters more than we realize I think, how we treat our parents!
And before we move on from that story, perhaps we should ask ourselves, what do we do about the faults and embarrassing things our parents have done? Do we report it to others? Do we gossip about our parents? Do we magnify our parents’ shortcomings and minimize their sacrifices and love and the good things about them? Or do we protect their reputation? Protect them from shame? Proverbs 10:12 says, “Love covers all offenses” (cf. 11:13; 17:9). To honor someone involves covering what you would want covered if you were them.
Let’s notice…
What God has promised to those who honor their parents…
In Exodus 20:12, in the first giving of the Ten Commandments, long life is promised. In the repetition of the Ten Commandments in Deuteronomy 5, an additional promise is added. Deuteronomy 5:16, “Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” So long life and well-being are promised to those who honor their parents. The apostle Paul quotes that same promise from Deuteronomy in Ephesians 6 as still relevant to us as Christians. Now, is that a promise you’ll experience in this life, or in the next? I don’t know that I would limit it to one or the other. I suspect you’ll experience longer life and well-being in both this present life and the next. I Timothy 4:8 says train yourself for godly living because godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also the life to come. It’s a promise of God who never lies, who’s more faithful to keep His word than the sun is to come over the horizon every morning, that long life and well-being are for those who honor their parents.
Now, on the negative side…
God’s word has much more to say about the seriousness and consequences of dishonoring parents.
I Timothy 5:8, “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” To neglect care for aging parents, Paul says, is incompatible with faith in Christ and is to be worse in God’s eyes than the typical unbeliever who will at least care for his own.
So in the law that God gave Israel to protect them from corruption, God said things like this, Exodus 21:15, “Whoever strikes his father or his mother shall be put to death.” Exodus 21:17, “Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.” Capital punishment was not the penalty for striking or cursing other people. But to God the way you treat your mom and dad carries much greater weight.
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 is a shocking paragraph about what was to be done with a stubborn and rebellious son who is old enough to know better and too big for the parents to control anymore; they have tried and tried and tried to guide him in the right way, but he refuses to take correction. He lives only to please himself. He’s a glutton and a drunkard. God called for that young man to be publicly executed. Which sounds horrible to us, but the consequences in Israel of allowing that kind of evil to go on and spread were greater than the death of one young man.
Deuteronomy 27:16, “Cursed be anyone who dishonors his father or his mother.”
Proverbs 30:17, “The eye that mocks a father and scorns to obey a mother will be picked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by the vultures.” Maybe God is warning someone here this morning. In all seriousness, I hope you are listening.
Proverbs 20:20, “If one curses his father or his mother, his lamp will be put out in utter darkness.”
If you have been treating your parents with contempt, screaming hateful words at them, striking out at them, disrespectful, disobedient, you need to hear what God’s word is saying. You have brought a curse upon yourself. Death is coming for you, and the outer darkness forever and forever is your future. No more light. No more enjoying the blessings of God. Misery and darkness permanently. You have one hope, and that is to receive what Jesus has done for you, because on the cross He took the curse that is due to you on Himself so that you could be free from it and blessed instead. And the way you receive and benefit from what the Lord did for you is by truly repenting, turning from your sins to let Jesus lead your life from now on. John 3:36 says, “Whoever believes in the Son [trusts Him, follows Him] has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.” Dishonoring parents incurs the wrath of God. But Jesus will save us, if we truly turn to Him for mercy and let Him have our life.
May we hear what God is telling us about the extreme importance of how we treat our parents. And may we not be just hearers of His word, but doers.
James 1:25, “The one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing.”
-James Williams