2 Cents

“Honor your father and mother so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.” - Exodus 20:12

The foundational purpose of this commandment is to mirror the debt of honor we owe to God. The other day I heard a friend say to his dad, “Dad, you owe me 20 bucks.” The dad then replied, “Son, you owe me your life.” They had a good laugh but the point is so true that even non-Christians agree with it. Simply bringing a person into this world inherently tells us that that person owes their very existence to their parents and therefore owes honor to them. The same is true for our relationship to God. He is the Creator of man (Gen. 1:26, ch.2). Our parents brought us into this world through physical birth but our Father in heaven created and formed us in the womb and even deeper than that is responsible for the existence of all mankind. Also we do not get to choose what kind of parents we get; we are simply brought into this world by the parents we have. Similarly we don’t get to choose what kind of God we get. We don’t get to decide whether or not we owe him our life. We are born debtors. We owe God our lives, our honor, and our glory and we owe our parents honor simply because they are responsible for our existence, just as God is.

One of the most poignant examples of this principle in the Bible is the story of Hosea and Gomer. God calls Hosea to take for himself an adulterous wife. He marries Gomer. She then proceeds to commit adultery on him. In response God does not call Hosea to divorce his wife, as many would expect, but to go buy her back and show love to her again. This is what God has done for us. In creating us we were his from the beginning. We owed him our faithfulness from the day we were born. But each one of us has been unfaithful and chosen sin. So God, in his never-ending love and compassion came and showed love to us again and bought us back (even though we were his to begin with) through Jesus’ blood shed on the cross. Truly now, having been created and bought back again by God we owe Him everything.

So the fundamental reason for the command to honor our earthly parents is because God Himself created us and as soon as we came into existence we owed him our life. Furthermore he bought us with his blood on the cross. He is the reason for our being alive and he is the reason we can inherit eternal life, and therefore all glory, honor, and worship is due him. In a similar way our parents are responsible for bringing us into this world and as soon as we are born we owe them honor for the rest of their (or our) lives.