Transcript
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Our New Testament lesson is found in Ephesians 6, chapters 1 through 9. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, that it may be well with you, and that you may live long on the earth. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as unto Christ. Not in the way of eye service as men pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord, and not to men. Knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same again from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.
Masters do the same to them, and forbear threatening, knowing that he who is both their master and yours is in heaven, and there is no partiality with him. Thus ends the reading of the New Testament lesson, and to his name be all praise and glory.
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During these weeks we've been considering together the Ten Commandments, and we have observed three great parts of three great movements in the Ten Commandments. The first part has to do with our vertical relationship with God. In other words, in this great statement of God's will for life, the law begins by showing us that that relationship with God, our relationship with God, is fundamental to every other relationship of our life. We shall
have no other gods before us, we shall not have idols, and we shall not empty the meaning of God's name. These are the first three laws. Then in the fourth law, which we considered a couple of weeks ago, the law of the Sabbath, we discovered, I call that a transitional law, between the great vertical relationship with God and the horizontal relationships with our neighbors and with the world around us. And in that great transitional law we
discovered that, again, it is God's will that we function best in that dynamic rhythm of work and rest. We're the creature that needs time to reflect and to collect our thoughts and to worship and to find out who we are. And we have to carve out both our work and find our work and find our rest. And up to the very end of our lives, we are the creature that functions best in that dynamic rhythm. Now
today we begin the horizontal laws of the Ten Commandments. Now this great law is going to direct itself and address itself to the relationships around us. And if you have your Old Testaments, you might open up to Exodus 20, and we'll read the way that horizontal part of the law begins. It begins with the relationship most nearby. Here it is, verse 12, chapter 20 of Exodus. Honor your father and your mother that your days may be
long in the land which the Lord your God gives you. And if you'll hold your finger there and move over to Deuteronomy 5, we see the other rendering of the law. There are a couple of slight changes or differences in the Deuteronomy text, enough that we might want to just observe it also. Verse 16 of chapter 5 of Deuteronomy. Honor your father and your mother as the Lord your God commanded you. That's added. That your days
may be prolonged. It's a little different, slightly different word there. In Exodus it said that your days may be long in the land. Here it's prolonged and that it may go well with you in the land which the Lord your God gives you. That's the Deuteronomy text. Well, we want to understand what this means. First, in order to understand this law, we have to try to come to some definitions of what the word honor means, because
that's, of course, crucial to the passage. This word honor appears in the New Testament in the Greek, and you saw it in the text that was read by Casey just a few moments ago in Ephesians 6 where Paul quotes the law of Moses, honor your father and your mother. In the Greek the word honor means literally to value or to know the price of something. And as an adjective it's used and translated as precious or valuable.
That's what the word honor in Greek means. Now, it's interesting because the Hebrew word for honor is quite similar. The Hebrew word literally means heavy or weighty. Now, I have to just say a few words about the Hebrew language here, not to bore you, but let me make a couple of comments that will help you understand Old Testament vocabulary and Old Testament words. The Hebrew language is not an abstract language like Greek. Greek and English both
are abstract languages. That means that you can have words for abstract ideas like anger or love or like honor could be seen in abstract terms in the Greek language. But in the Hebrew language every Hebrew word does double duty because the language by its nature is a more primitive language. That means that words, there are not abstract words in the Hebrew language. For instance, there is no word in the Hebrew language for anger. Literally, the word
for anger in Hebrew is the word burn. Adam or rather Cain burned toward Abel is what the literal Hebrew text says. That's much more vivid and much more communicative, really. It's a concrete term to express an emotion. And this is the way the Hebrew language is built. So here, the word honor, there is no Hebrew word in the Hebrew language in the Old Testament that would be in an abstract sort of sense or theoretical sense, honor.
Instead, it's the word wait. And that you'll see all the way through the Hebrew vocabulary. That's why the Hebrew vocabulary is very short and compact compared to the Greek vocabulary. If you had a Greek dictionary versus a Hebrew dictionary, the Hebrew dictionary would be much smaller because you need fewer words, because words are doing double duty. You're using one word for all kinds of things by just shifting the endings or the inflections. So here, when the
word honor is used in Exodus 20, it's literally the Hebrew word heavy, weighty. Therefore, to honor in the Hebrew means literally to see the true weight of your parents. That's what this text says. Honor your father and mother or to put it in literal Hebrew sense, Know the weight, the true weight, the weightiness of your father and your mother. Now the Apostle Paul in the Ephesians text, which was read to us a few moments ago, where
Paul comments on the Exodus 20 text, he enlarges and draws out some logical conclusions and implications from this text that are worth noting too right now. In verse 1, chapter 6 of Ephesians, Paul says, Children, obey your parents in the Lord. In a few moments we'll comment on that in the Lord phrase because it's very crucial here theologically, but let's just observe this now, the whole sentence. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is
right. Honor your father and your mother. This is the first commandment with a promise, Paul says, that's his comment, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. Now notice the next sentence. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger. And as the Colossian text which has the same advice in it says, lest they become discouraged. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the
discipling and instruction encouragement of the Lord. Now what Paul has done here is a very interesting thing. He says that we must honor our father and mother to see the true weight of our parents. And then he enlarges this to his logical conclusion and insists that parents also must see the true weight of their children. Fathers must see the weightiness, the importance of their children, and not discourage them or provoke them to wrath. But there's a
balance here. And as a matter of fact, what Paul's doing is doing a logical commentary on this law itself. Because the law has a promise in it. It said that as we honor the people in our own present and past, which would be our parents, they're the most immediate people in our own present and past, we will be honored in our own future. And so honor there is seen in this present, past, and future. The honor
is to see the true weight of not only our parents, but also it's implied that we also then will have true weight for ourselves. All right. Let's right away at the outset notice two things in this text. First of all, in the use of the word weight, the very use of that word, for honor, which is used in reference to God, we're told to honor God, to see the true weight and the majesty and the wonder
of who God is. In that sense, that use of the word weight, in the use of that word, and especially when you think of it in terms of the advice of the Apostle Paul, there is here a challenge to parents to be substantial enough that when they are weighed, they will come out weighty. You see, to honor means to know the weight of someone. It means to know the value of someone, to use the Greek. But
the Hebrew, to know the weight of someone. So there is in this, even in the use of the word honor, there is a challenge thrown out to parents in the law that they be substantial enough and weighty enough that when they are weighed, they prove weighty. But also the second observation we have to make at the outset is that though that challenge is in the law, still the command to honor is not made conditional. It does
not say honor your parents if they deserve honor. It says honor your parents because honor and weight now has been conferred upon them by God. It is God who now intervenes and interposes his own will now into this intimate relationship that you have with your parents and parents have with their children, so that he confers a weightiness to our parents. All right, now one last observation we want to make before we make two or three main
theological comments on this passage. You'll notice that the word honor is a very big word, to know the weight of. It goes through our whole life. We're not said to honor our parents when we're young, and then theoretically we don't have to honor them when we're old. But honor is a very big word. And the implication is that we are to honor our parents throughout our whole life, just like we're to work and rest throughout our
whole life. We don't just work when we're young and rest when we're old or rest when we're young and work when we're old, but it's work and rest all the way through. Now honor all the way through your life, to know the weight of. But the form of honor shifts through the various stages of our life. For instance, as Paul says rightly to the children in Ephesians 6, he says to honor your parents when you're young
means you obey them. So we talk there in the Ephesians text, obey your parents, this is how you honor them. But it would not be correct to say to an adult child that you honor your parents when you're an adult by obeying your parents. Know there, honor now takes on a new form. You honor your parents when you're an adult by caring and by ministering and by knowing their true weight in a different way and in
a different form than you would when you were a child. So that you move through the various stages and forms of your life still honoring your parents. But it may be that when you're young and your parents are with you at a zoo or at a Disneyland or somewhere else and they have a map, they have to look at the map and have to guide you through the zoo. When you're older and you're maybe a young
adult and you're in the same situation, you may look at the map and you may guide them. In both cases you honor your parents. In one case you honor them by obeying them when they were pointing out which road went in which direction. They could read the map better than you could. And when your life situation shifted, it may very well be that you read the map with more clarity and have a better perspective on the
road than your parents. But you still honor them. But in this case you honor by caring. You honor by ministry. So the forms shift, but the words stays intact and the same. From beginning of our life on, we're told, honor your father and mother. Know the true way. See their value in God's eyes. All right, now I want to make some theological observations about the importance of this law. What in the world is the purpose of
this law? This law is about the continuity of our life. That's what it's about, as I see it. Before we have any other laws about our relationships with the world and our neighbors and even the most intimate of all relationships, our sexual relationships, before these laws are introduced to us, we have this basic continuity law, and it teaches us something very important. Something very vital that's important to understand the rest of the law. We do not
live, according to the Ten Commandments, as isolated segments and parts stranded and isolated unto ourselves, but we live and stranded and isolated without past or without future. Up to this moment in the law, the Ten Commandments, we might have looked at the law in intensely singular or individualistic sense. We might have looked at the Ten Commandments that way. For instance, the first three laws about our relationship with God, we could have seen that in very personal
and individualistic sense. That would be correct. That's the way we should look at it. And we might have looked at the law about the Sabbath, to keep it holy, to learn that rhythm of rest and work, and when you heard that message and thought about that law, you might have thought very concretely about just your own personal experience and your own personal journey with rest and work. But now in this Fifth Commandment, we are brought right
up against the continuity that we have with the past and the present, and then by the promise with the future. So this law shows us that in God's perspective, we are a part of a whole history. And our parents concretely represent to us that history. Now what's the significance of that? Why is that of such importance to God? So that in the Ten Commandments, this would be of such great importance. Well, just in terms of the
rest of the law, we cannot really love, we cannot really care for the neighbor and love our neighbors and fulfill the rest of the law until we know who we are. That's a fundamental psychological insight into ethics. We cannot really care about the people around us. We cannot really know how to relate with values and moral values with the people around us until we know who we are and our own worth and our own identity. And
we get that identity in the creative relationship with our parents. There is simply no other way. This is how we find out who we are. Unless God wonderfully intervenes a damaged situation and gives us this sense of identity directly unto ourselves, it's in this continuity of relationship with the past that we find out our own accent, we find out our own identity and find out who we are. And this is then which prepares us for the
decisions we make with regard to others. Let me see if I can just give you some examples to show you. In establishing our values toward other people, it is the small circle and the smaller circle of the family where these values are first of all tried out and worked at and then they gradually then go into the larger circles of the larger community around us and then become then incorporated in our own value system and we
make up our own minds on them. But it works like this. When you're a little child and you're in a schoolyard and you have to make the ethical decision as a child as to whether or not you're going to steal another youngster's lunch or money or lunch money or some possession, the baseball or football of some other boy or girl in your schoolyard. In those early stages of ethical choice, you begin to make that choice maybe
not by having large ethical categories that you can work from, but you start by maybe just that simple family category that in our family we don't steal. In my family, the way we work in our life, we don't steal. When we're at the Safeway and my parents are with me, my mother does not shoplift. You can see how damaging it would be if your mother did shoplift at the Safeway. Then you would have a negative ethical
impetus in that schoolyard scene. Why not take the baseball of your buddy if your mom takes Safeway's baseball and oranges and apples? But if I'm in Safeway and my mother doesn't, and that's not the way we live our life. And when I do error and I steal a little gum off the stand, it's also inviting there, and I come up to the check stand and mother discovers I have it in my hand and she scolds me
and disciplines me for it, makes me pay out of my allowance for it, or maybe the embarrassment of taking it up to the shop owner and handing it back and saying, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to take this. I did. And when that happens to my life, then values begin to be formed. And I discover that in our family we don't steal. Now, admittedly, that ethical decision I made because my mother and father gave it to
me and I try it out in the schoolyard, but that's how values start. Can you see now why it's so important in the Ten Commandments that before we talk about the relationships with a neighbor, we're told about the relationship that fundamental earthly relationship with our mother and father. It's where our values begin. And you can see the challenge. This is the challenge to parents to have substantial enough values so that when our youngsters weigh us and
see our worth and honor us, they have some substance to draw from us. Well, you can think of other illustrations. That youngster in a schoolyard deciding whether or not to ridicule another child in the schoolyard or deciding whether or not to take lightly another person's worth, he gets his initial ethical incentive and motivation from what's happening in his relationship with his own past and present. If there is ridicule in his own family or if there is
gossip and destructive behavior toward the worth and the meaning of other people's lives within his own family, then he has no resource on the playground toward the life and meaning and worth of another person. But if in his own family there's a sense of regard for human worth, if the father does not provoke the son to wrath lest he become discouraged, but encourages the son and daughter, if mother and father encourage the son and daughter in
the nurture and the admonition, the encouragement of the Lord, then you see there's a motivational impact and a motivational implication in the schoolyard for a youngster. This is how ethics is born. And it's interesting to me that that profound psychological insight is present in the law. God knows how he has made us. And therefore there needs to be that warm continuity of relationship between you and your past to form you and prepare you for the present
and the future. Now for this reason, I want to make one parenthetic comment. We know that there are movements, and many of them within the many so-called Christian movements, that actually seem to feature and encourage and deliberately drive the wedge between parents and children. Sometimes, ostensibly for zealous reasons or theological reasons, some movements take delight, it appears. And I've observed some of these things up close myself, where you'll meet a movement or discover a movement
which takes delight in deliberately driving the wedge between, say, a young zealous convert and a young person who now discovers some great truth or breakthrough, and then almost the implication being that if he or she were zealous for her new doctrine or his new doctrine, they would maybe prove that zeal by writing off their parents or leaving their families. Let me just say this, that according to the witness of both the Old Testament and the New
Testament, this sort of manifestation goes contrary to the will of God. It is not God's will to affect our lives so that we then are absolved of this command to honor our father and our mother. Something about what God does in our lives will better enable us to know the value of and to see the weightiness of our parents, our father and mother. It goes contrary to New Testament and Old Testament teaching. Now, I have to
make one last sort of parenthetic comment in this regard. I do not believe, however, that parents who lose their children, sometimes their young adult children, to these movements should themselves then break the law. In the case of what we've been reading in the press recently, just recently, a family in Southern California that broke the law of the land to kidnap one of their own young adult children and then bring them forcibly into a motel where a
deprogrammer for $1,000 or $1,200, then an intensive brainwashing experiment will then attempt to deprogram a young person who's been caught up in some wild movement or some chaotic movement in the attempt to re-brainwash a person and bring them back into the family. It doesn't seem to me that two wrongs ever make a right. No, I want to say that in my own judgment and what I've observed with people who have been reclaimed out
of crazy movements, and we have lots of strange movements in our day, but it seems to me, and this is verified to me over and over again in the New Testament, in its whole approach to error, that faults or counterfeit gospels are best healed by a wholesome and healthy truth that dislodges the faults, not a sort of brainwashing emptiness. The whole concept of brainwashing is to empty your mind, a kind of deprogramming brainwashing approach. It doesn't
seem to me that's the gospel's way. The gospel's way trusts the truth of the gospel, the truth of a true hope and of a true love that we have in the New Testament gospel to dislodge and to undermine and to recapture a person that's been captured by a false or a counterfeit hope. It may be the slower and longer way, but it seems to me it's the biblical way, and it's the way that God honors. Well,
that was a little digression that I just wanted to place into perspective here. Now it brings us to a very important point. Notice that this relationship of parents and children is not as private or as intimate as we once thought, or we may have thought it was. What we have here in the law, in the fifth commandment, is that God himself has intervened in this relationship. And you may wonder in your own heart, is there nothing
private? Isn't there anything where God hasn't intervened? According to the Ten Commandments and according to the way the New Testament handles these commandments, no, there is nothing private. God is meddling here too. He's intervening in this relationship. He is interposing his will into the midst of this very private and personal relationship, the relationship of parents and children. Now, this is terribly important to see. Remember when Moses came down Mount Sinai, I pointed out to you at
the very beginning of this series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, that Moses went up Mount Sinai, absolute leader, and there were no checks or balances on Moses' authority. But when he came down Mount Sinai, Moses now had less authority. He was no longer absolute. The law of God stood over him. Now I want to say the same thing to parents. When parents go up Mount Sinai, you have a great deal of authority. When you come
down Mount Sinai, you have less authority because God himself has intervened. He has now placed his interpretation, his meaning has now come in between even this most personal relationship, you and your very flesh and blood, bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. And you children, God has intervened in between this relationship between you and your parents. I'll show you now what this means in New Testament terms. This is the significance of our Lord's statement,
which has been so misunderstood, especially by cultic groups. It's often a fondly quoted passage by cultic groups where Jesus says, unless you hate your father and mother for my sake, you cannot be my disciple. What does he mean? If you read that in this total context of that teaching, Jesus makes it very clear. He is intervening himself, interposing himself between every relationship of life. It is not Christ's will to cause us to hate our parents. No,
the more we worship Jesus Christ and see his authority working in our lives, and the more we allow him to be truly the mediator between us and our parents and every other relationship, he makes all the other relationships of life more meaningful. But in this hyperbolic way, Jesus makes it clear that even in this relationship, and imagine how that would sound to a Hebrew father, Hebrew mother, in this relationship too, I stand first. And every relationship
you have will be mediated through my mediatorship. Then when you're my disciple, I give you back every relationship in life. Now through the mediator. This is now the significance of Paul in the Ephesian text saying, Children, obey your parents in the Lord. That little in the Lord phrase is terribly important for Paul. It means that Jesus Christ as Lord, he's the one that gives meaning to the children as they look at their parents and parents as
they look at their children. Your children don't belong to you as a possession. You have a stewardship relationship with your children. This is the significance of Christian baptism of children. When a child is baptized, we acknowledge that that child has his worth or her worth sealed by God's decision. That means that that little child handed back to the parents after the baptism comes back into their hands as a unique person. The worth of that person is
determined by God's decision. Therefore, you don't own your children. Your children and my children are a stewardship that we're to raise and set free. And they don't own us. They're to honor us and see the weight of us. But in the Lord, we now have a deeper and richer basis for that honoring. All right. What does it all mean? Well, as we said a couple of weeks ago about the law of the Sabbath, we function best
in that dynamic rhythm of all of our lives of work and rest up to the very last day of our life. And folks, according to this law, and remember Paul sees this law in Romans as the divine will of God. According to the will of God, we function best in a healthy, weighty relationship with the past, the present, and the future. With our parents, in a creative relationship with our mothers and our fathers, with our children,
past, present, and future. We do not function best according to the law of God, according to his will, in isolation. We do not function best lonely and alienated from our parents or from our children. Are some of you alienated right now from your parents or your children? Is it awfully hard for you to honor them or to know how to see another human being and these ones who are so close to you, to see them as
weighty, to honor them, to know their value, to see how precious, to see how meaningful they are in God's sight? According to the law of God, you function best, and I function best, when we are in this creative relationship with our past, our present, and our future. We are not meant to be stranded like little islands carved out of the sky sitting by ourselves. That's not the way he made us. Now, one last thought. All of
this takes work. It takes our decision to make. As we said about work and rest, I warned you that you have to carve out rest, or you'll be a work-olic. You'll drift into it. Unless you carve it out and decide to rest, to creatively rest, you'll just end up working meaninglessly and resting meaninglessly with kind of meaningless blocks of time, but when you look back on them, you sort of waste them. Either as a work
-olic or a leisure-olic. In our culture, it's producing a lot of leisure-olics. You have to carve out work. You have to find work, and you have to find rest. It's our decision to make. Now, the same thing is true here. We must carve out the quality time that it takes to be a parent. It takes quality time to be a parent and quality time to be a child. We need time to hear our parents
and to hear our children, or to use this great biblical image, we need time to weigh each other. And you who are parents, you'd better be thinking, and I say this to myself as well, about some of the weight and some of the resources that go into making us substantial enough that when our children weigh us, believe me they do, that we come out weighty. That we have something to share them in the formation of values,
in the formation of life outlooks, which are going to play such a key role in the rest of the law. And then there's a promise. The promise is that when we honor the people around us, and notice this is just getting us ready to honor everyone. When we honor the people around us, life goes better. You believe it? Amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for the law of God, for your law that shows us your will
for life. We thank you that you don't scold us in the law, but you invite us to discover the depth of meaning that's your will for life. And Lord we pray that we may discover in our own lives how weighty the people around us really are. That you have granted worth and that we never advance our own cause by diminishing the worth of people around us. Lord help us to see the true value and weight of
all those people in our lives. And may it begin with our parents and with our children. So Lord bless us all and guide us in the fulfillment of what this means in our own lives. Through Christ our Lord we pray, Amen.
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