“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.”
— Exodus 20:12
Of all the Ten Commandments, this is the only one that comes with a specific promise attached. God does not just command it; He invests it with a consequence. The Apostle Paul calls it, in his letter to the Ephesians, “the first commandment with a promise” (Ephesians 6:2). That promise is not an accident. God underscores this one in a way He underscores no other, because He knows what is at stake.
The Fifth Commandment is the hinge of the entire Decalogue. The first four commandments deal with our relationship to God: our worship, our devotion, our time, His name. The last six deal with our relationships to one another. And right at the pivot, at the very first of the horizontal commandments, God places the family. Because the family is the laboratory where everything is first learned. How we relate to authority, how we give and receive love, how we resolve conflict, how we bear with one another in our weakness: it is all first practiced at home. Get the home right and everything else has a chance. Let the home fall apart and nothing else quite recovers.
The word honor in the original language means to give weight, to treat as significant, to elevate. You honor something when you take it seriously. And God’s command is that we take our parents seriously, not because they are perfect, because they are not, and not because their counsel is always right, because it is not. But because they occupy a position that God has established. They gave us the gift of life, which no one else on earth could give us. And God has appointed them as His vice-regents in the home.
D. L. Moody, the great nineteenth-century evangelist, observed this principle with the clarity of long pastoral experience: “I have learned one thing if nothing else: no man or woman who dishonors father or mother ever prospers.” It is a life principle as consistent as gravity. And the reverse is equally true: those who honor their parents, who treat them with respect and gratitude and care, walk in a blessing that follows them through their years.
Honor is not just obedience, though it includes that. Honor is an attitude. It is the posture of the heart toward those God used to bring you into the world. Examine yours today.
GOD ATTACHED A PROMISE TO THIS COMMANDMENT. TAKE IT AS SERIOUSLY AS HE DOES.
