The Civil God
February 6, 2022
Preached by Ben Bechtel
Scripture Reading
Exodus 20:1-2,12
1 And God spoke all these words, saying, 2 “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.
12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.
If you were to make a list of important values in our society, values like civility, kindness, respect, and honor would not be high on the list. We are proficient at tearing each other down, assuming the worst of one another, being pushy bullies, and separating ourselves into tribes who wage tribal warfare against other tribes. More and more it seems like our society is devolving into barbarism not even just in the rhetoric we use but in the way we act towards one another. Images of violence on our streets and violence in our capitol are still fresh in our minds.
Traditionally, theologians have divided up the 10 Commandments into what they call the two tables of the law. The first table, comprising commandments one through four, has to do with loving God while the second table, commandment five through ten, has to do with loving our neighbor. This is precisely how Jesus summarized the whole law. One fascinating detail about these final six commands is that they don’t fit neatly into our prescribed boxes for societal flourishing. Certain commands fit into a more progressive category (do not steal, do not covet) while others fit into a more conservative category (honor your father and mother, do not commit adultery). God’s word spoken into the chaos of the wilderness of sinful humanity is so much bigger and better than anything we could come up with!
And here at the outset of the second table of the law, beginning the discussion of how we as God’s people are to love our neighbor as ourselves, is the command to honor our parents. This placement is significant because it tells us that in order to have a society of honor, respect, and dignity we must start with building families of honor, respect, and dignity.
The Specific Command
Let’s begin our time together by reading the commandment again in its totality, but from a New Testament source. In Ephesians 6:1-4 Paul is in the midst of talking about how the gospel influences family life and in these verses dedicated to the relationship between children and parents he quotes the fifth commandment:
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” 4 Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Let’s just start with that word honor. That word is the Hebrew word that means weighty. To honor someone is to treat them with the proper value and respect they deserve. And God here is saying that all parents, by virtue of holding the office of parent we may say, are deserving of honor. Parents can be more or less honorable (see v. 4) but they should still be honored as parents regardless of whether you deem them an honorable person. But notice the word choice. Not obedience, not even love in its fullest sense necessarily, but honor. If you’re an adult your parents don’t get to make your budget or make schooling choices for your children, but they ought to still be honored in your life.
When we hear this command, we typically think of parents using it as the ultimate trump card to the proverbial why question. “Why do I have to do this? Because God said so, that’s why!” But think about this: the 10 Commandments were addressed to the whole community of Israel not just the kids. Not only that, but these families were also not families the way we think of them. Israel didn’t have the 1950’s ideal of family that we do. Children, parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles all would have lived together. In giving this commandment God desires to bless us with a web of thick, dignifying, and respectful relationships that continue for generations. This commandment ensures an environment in the family where parents can lovingly teach and train their children and where children can respect and respond to their parents. It ensures an environment for honorable people on honoring relationships. Sitting under the authority of a family tree is an immense blessing.
However, we don’t often think of it this way. It’s not uncommon to hear someone between the ages of 25-40 make this exclamation: “Oh man, I can’t believe I just said that. I sound just like my dad!” Implication being, oh no, I sound just like my dad. Well of course you do! Who else would you expect to sound like? For almost all of us at least one of our parents was the most formative influence in our lives.
This type of exclamation shows that we are creatures of our age. People in the past were largely defined by their family. My dad was a blacksmith, so I will be a blacksmith. After all, we are the Smiths. However, in today’s world, particularly in the West, we are defined over and against our parents. Almost every teenage movie contains a storyline in which the teenager or young adult throws off their parents with the line, “that’s your dream dad, not mine.” This is not to say that traditional cultures were a golden age. I’m glad I got to choose my own profession and my own wife. But it is to say that we are incredibly predisposed today to undervalue family and shirk the wonderful responsibility to honor our parents. We all, both children and parents alike, don’t submit to God and the family roles he has given us.
So how can our families begin more to emulate the ideal of the fifth commandment? Let me speak to immediate families first. I was listening to a podcast with a pastor a few months ago and the host asked him a question about how they raised such wonderful children. He said he and his wife used this question to guide their home life: “how could we cultivate a home where our kids know and experience that ultimate reality is the glorious goodness of God?”[1] Parents and children, are you both contributing your part to make sure that your home shows forth the goodness of God? Parents, are you lovingly training your children to launch them out to be mature adults in the world? Are you setting an honorable example for your children? Children, are you honoring and respecting your parents as those who love you and have your best interests at heart?
This command affects our relationships with our parents throughout life. There are so many things to say about the way we honor our parents throughout our lives but let me just mention two. College students and young adults, honor your parents in your speech with your peers. One of the best ways to honor your parents is to demonstrate forgiveness by what you leave unsaid.[2] Even as you come to realize the ways in which they are sinners just like you, realize also the sacrifices they have made for you. Use this season of life to drill into relationship with your parents more than you had previously.
We also honor our parents by preparing for and caring for them in their later years. There is an honor and dignity that is shown toward your parents when you commit to being in it with them until the end. This command doesn’t have an end date.
The Broad Command
Let’s return to the text of this commandment and as I read it again (from Ephesians 6:2-3) notice the promise attached to this commandment:
2 “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.”
This text can’t mean that those who honor their parents get to live longer than the rest of us. I don’t have the stats on it, but I’m sure many honoring children have died young throughout the years.
This promise gets us deeper into the goodness of this command as we see this promise tied directly to this command. Israel is given the 10 commandments on the way to the land promised to their ancestor Abraham. These commandments are like charter documents for the kingdom of Israel in the land of Canaan. The culture of the family, a culture where children honored their parents and parents loved and trained up their children, had direct implications for the broader culture of Israel as a whole. A culture with a thick social fabric of honoring and dignifying relationships begins with a thick social fabric of honoring and dignifying relationships in the family. The family structure comprised of multi-generational family teams who care for one another, is not oppressive as our world may say but unleashes blessing on the world. After all, when God wanted to bless the world, he brought Adam and Eve together and told them to start a family. The family is the basic building block to unleash blessing in God’s world.
God commands that children ought to honor their parents, which is a microcosm of all the different relationships of honor and civility we are to uphold in our world. Which is why we as Christians cannot succumb to the brutal, hyperbolic, dehumanizing nature of our days. No Christian can chant or chuckle at the phrase “let’s go Brandon” without breaking the fifth commandment. God created society and our lives to flourish through a series honoring, dignifying, loving relationships, starting with our families. Obeying the fifth commandment was the foundation for a life of blessing for the nation of Israel in the land. Honoring our parents lays the foundation for blessing in society by encouraging civil honoring relationships between honorable people.
However, like we said earlier, we all, both children and parents alike, don’t submit to God and the family roles he has given us. And this crack in the foundation has an impact on the structure of the whole house. Listen to what Christian columnist David Brooks has to say in a piece he wrote for The Atlantic about family:
When we discuss the problems confronting the country, we don’t talk about family enough. It feels too judgmental. Too uncomfortable. Maybe even too religious. But the blunt fact is that the nuclear family has been crumbling in slow motion for decades, and many of our other problems—with education, mental health, addiction, the quality of the labor force—stem from that crumbling.[3]
What Brooks is saying here is that our society is reeling, so many of us are reeling, because we have not valued the family as we should. Not just the individualized, segmented nuclear family, but family meaning multi-generational structures of respect, love, and support. When this cracks, the whole building crumbles.
It is into a culture like this that Jesus has called his church to live differently. Listen to what Jesus says in Matthew 12:46-50:
46 While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. 48 But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” 49 And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 50 For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”
So, family isn’t as important as you said? That’s not the point. Jesus isn’t downplaying the importance of the earthly family as much as he is showing the radical nature of the body of Christ, the church. If you are in Christ, the church is your family. In an age that is lonely, in an age that is brutal and polarizing, the truth of the church being the family of God is a radical and compelling alternative to our neighbors. Part of how we obey the fifth command is by being the family of God for the sake of the world.
One way we do this is by broadening our family boundaries. Whitley and I were a part of a community group in college that was led by one of the elders at our church, Steve. As we took part in this group, I witnessed Steve keep the fifth commandment. I watched as he welcomed four single, middle-aged adults who had never married, those often overlooked by the church, into not just our group but his family. They celebrated holidays with his family. They went on trips with his family. They were his family.
Church, this command is not a call to preserve sanitary domestic bliss. God’s call for societal flourishing begins with bringing those who have no family or are estranged from their family into our family. Be spiritual fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters to one another. In this age where honoring and dignifying relationships are collapsing may the church show the world the way forward.
In this same vein, the elderly saints in this church ought to be treated like heroes among us. There are older saints in this church who have given their lives to the cause of the gospel that deserve our honor and who have lived lives worth emulating. Even this last week Carolyn and I were looking at original documents from this church and seeing some people’s names among those who planted this church 23 years ago. Younger people, ask them to go out to breakfast or coffee. Sit under them and learn from them. And to our older saints, we who are younger need you. Don’t check out on us. You are essential in the body of Christ. We need spiritual fathers and mothers to follow and learn from.
The Gospel in This Command
I recognize that I haven’t yet addressed those who have parents who have abandoned them or have actively sought their harm. Some of you have trouble trusting God as your Father because of what your earthly parents have done to you. How do you honor the parent that abused you or tore you down or left your siblings? Undoubtedly some of you will bristle at even that question.
I would submit to you that if this is your situation, so much of learning to honor the parent(s) that harmed you is to learn to forgive them for what they have done. Honor doesn’t mean you have to have a relationship with that person, but I believe it does mean you work to let go of your bitterness and resentment against them. In some way I would argue we all have to do this. In order to honor our parents, we must first recognize that they are sinners and forgive them.
The only way we get the resources to forgive and honor like that is by receiving the love of our heavenly Father. So many of us fail to honor our parents and fail to receive the love of our heavenly Father because we are still holding our earthly parents up on the pedestal that is reserved for God alone. But in the gospel you receive the unconditional love of a Father our hearts all long for, demonstrated by Jesus dying on the cross for sinners.
Out of this love we receive from our heavenly Father, we can learn to forgive and honor our parents. For those of you who had parents who were not perfect but good and honorable, the love of God the Father allows you to stop treating them as a god, forgive their sins, and humbly accept all the wonderful loving care they have poured into your life. And for those of you who had parents who actively sought to harm you, the love of God allows you to not let them rule your life through bitterness and resentment.
But you might say, “you don’t understand! How can I know and trust a heavenly Father when my earthly parents have done things like this?” Let me ask you a question if this is what you are thinking. Why are you so mad at your dad who left? Or at your mom who abused you? You’re angry with them because you know you were made for the love of a true parent. The fact that you are so angry shows that you were made to receive the unconditional love of your Father in heaven. The cross of Jesus is the proof of his love for you.
No matter whether you have great parents or awful ones, you have the love of the Father and the true family in his church that your heart truly longs for. Receive the love of God the Father and enjoy your adoption in him. This is the foundation of how we honor our earthly parents.
Next week Pastor Benjamin is going to be speaking on the 6th commandment, “do not murder.” Although we are all chronic devaluers and defacers of human life, this commandment is God’s declaration that life matters. Come back next week to hear more.
[1] Russell Moore show with Ray Ortlund accessed here.
[2] Jen Wilken, Ten Wo to Live By, 82.
[3] David Brooks, “The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake,” https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuclear-family-was-a-mistake/605536/
Family Discussion Questions
Talk as a family about how you can each do your part in the family to display the goodness of God through your home.
Are there people your family could draw into your life together who do not have family close-by or who are lonely? Who can you welcome into your family?
Parents, ask your children about ways in which you have sinned against them. Double down today on being the kind of parents that are quick to repent with your children. Let your children know this.
