Dishonorable | Sunday, November 15, 2020

Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you. (Deuteronomy 5:16)

When we break God's law, we dishonor the parents who raised us in it—but in Christ there is forgiving grace.

Hiding God's Commands in Our Hearts

This year I have been working slowly through the book of Deuteronomy, considering the statutes and judgments of God. Most recently we have come to the actual Ten Commandments. While the phrase "the Ten Commandments" is fairly well known in our culture, the actual words of them are not. My aim in teaching through these commands has been to help you hide them in your heart and mind by memorizing them.

You may remember that a couple of months ago we made available a PDF to walk you through memorizing the Ten Commandments easily. You can go to lifeinconnection.com/commands to download it. It is important for us to memorize Scripture, and as we'll see in Deuteronomy 6, it is also important to teach these things to our kids, grandkids, nieces, and nephews.

David says in Psalm 119:11, "Your word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against You." And in Psalm 19 we read:

The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple; the statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes... More to be desired are they than gold... For by them Your servant is warned, and in keeping them there is great reward.

If you want to become wise and have your soul transformed, commit these things to memory. They will begin to transform your mind, your heart, and ultimately your life—which is what God desires. He wants to transform us by the renewing of our minds, so that in our daily interactions with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors we would demonstrate His perfect will.

A Cultural Memory of the Commands

Although most people we meet cannot recite the Ten Commandments word for word, there is still something of a cultural memory of them. People might say, "Honor your father and mother," or "You shall not kill," which as we'll see isn't really what the command says, or "You shall not steal." I once had someone tell me one of the Ten Commandments was "You shall not judge"—which is obviously not one of them. That's right up there with "God helps those who help themselves," which is also not in the Bible.

Most of the remaining commands are straightforward. Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, do not covet. You don't need a degree in the biblical languages to grasp these or their importance. Murder is bad, adultery is bad, theft is bad, lying is bad. So I'm not going to spend an hour each week unearthing the nuances of the Hebrew behind "you shall not murder."

Why Focus on the Fifth Commandment

This morning I want to zero in on the Fifth Commandment, found in Deuteronomy 5:16. Whereas the Sixth through Tenth Commandments are presented as negatives—"thou shalt not"—the Fifth is presented as a positive, and it comes with a promise.

Honor your father and your mother, as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you.

I want to focus on this command for several reasons. First, it is distinct: it is a positive command, and it carries a promised blessing. Second, it sometimes causes confusion. Third, as one commentator said, it is justly regarded as asserting the foundation of all social ordinances and arrangements.

In other words, the family—ordered around a father and a mother—is the seed of all society and community. If you get family wrong, you get society wrong. If you destroy the family structure—father, mother, children, grandparents, grandchildren, aunts, uncles, cousins—then civil society falls apart and begins to manifest murder, adultery, theft, deception, greed, and covetousness.

The development of civil society was supposed to happen through the training and rearing of children within the family. The knowledge of the "thou shalt nots" of this passage was originally to come from within the family, as Deuteronomy 6 will show. So I don't find it odd that our society is increasingly less civil as families in the West have fallen apart. The union of a father and mother joined as one flesh and bringing forth a family has been under attack for a very long time, and the breakdown of society follows the breakdown of the family.

Clearing Up the Confusion

So what does this command mean? Some people assume that honoring father and mother means obeying everything your parents tell you to do, right on through adulthood. Obedience is important—Paul says in Ephesians 6:1, "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right." So there is a New Testament command connected to this one in Deuteronomy. But it is not identical.

The command in Ephesians is spoken to children: obey your parents. The command in Deuteronomy 5 was spoken to adults, and the word "honor" is not the same word as "obey," even if there is a connection between them. So to the adult who feels they cannot make decisions outside their parents' direct will, that's not what's being taught here.

Hopefully your parents raised you in the training and admonition of the Lord, so that as you grow older they remain a source of wise counsel. When you become an adult, there is a leaving that takes place as you become an autonomous individual. But even then, the command to honor your father and mother remains, and so does the promise—your days may be long, and it will be well with you in the land. I have counseled people in their twenties and thirties who feel conflicted about decisions outside what their parents want, saying "I need to honor and obey." That's not necessarily what this passage is speaking of.

What It Looks Like to Dishonor Your Parents

So what does it actually mean to honor your father and mother, if it doesn't mean obeying in every single point? The best commentary on the Bible is the Bible. I want to illustrate this from Scripture by showing what it looks like to dishonor your father and mother.

Living in the West, we live under what has been described as a guilt-based society. But much of the rest of the world, including the Hebrew world of the Old Testament, lived under an honor-and-shame culture. If you did not live in a righteous way in that culture, you would bring dishonor and shame upon your family. This is clear in the Proverbs of Solomon. Proverbs 19:26 says, "He who mistreats his father and chases away his mother is a son who causes shame and brings reproach."

So a huge part of honoring your father and mother is living according to the wisdom of the Scriptures, in which—biblically speaking—mom and dad are supposed to train you.

David's Dishonorable Sin

To illustrate what it looks like to bring shame and reproach, I want to read a long passage from 2 Samuel 11, the life of King David, who lived 3,000 years ago—the great king and psalmist of Israel, a man after God's own heart.

It happened in the spring of the year, at the time when kings go out to battle, that David sent Joab and his servants... but David remained at Jerusalem. (2 Samuel 11:1)

So the king sends his armies off, but he stays home. One evening he arose and walked on the roof of the palace, and from there he saw a woman bathing, very beautiful to behold. He inquired about her and was told, "Is this not Bathsheba... the wife of Uriah the Hittite?" Then David sent messengers and took her, and she lay with him. She conceived and sent word: "I am with child."

Here is the picture of the king. He covets another man's wife. He commits adultery. Then David sends to Joab and has Uriah brought back from the battle, trying to get him to go home to his wife so the child would appear to be Uriah's. But Uriah, a man of godly character and integrity, would not go down to his house. He said:

The ark and Israel and Judah are dwelling in tents... Shall I then go to my house to eat and drink, and to lie with my wife? As you live, and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing.

David kept him another day and even got him drunk, but still Uriah would not go home. So David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by Uriah's own hand: "Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retreat from him, that he may be struck down and die." That is premeditated murder.

That is exactly what happened. When word came back that Uriah was dead, David told the messenger, "Do not let this thing displease you, for the sword devours one as well as another." When Bathsheba's mourning was over, David brought her to his house, and she became his wife and bore him a son. And then we read the last words of the chapter: "But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord." You might underline those words—it may be a bit of an understatement.

Breaking Every Command, Dishonoring His Parents

So what does it look like to dishonor your father and mother? This is it. David—the great king and psalmist, a man after God's own heart—in a moment of weakness took another man's wife, committed adultery, lied about it, and conspired to murder. He broke all of the commandments: do not covet, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, do not murder. And in doing so, he dishonored the father and mother who raised him to walk in the ways of God.

Honoring your father and mother is not merely obeying everything your parents say. It is obeying the teaching of the Scriptures they taught you. When you break the law of God, you dishonor those who trained you in it. To honor them is to not lie, not covet, not steal, not commit adultery, not murder—to walk in the ways of the Lord.

At this point you might think, "Thank God I'm not anything like David. I've never murdered or committed adultery." But Jesus updates these things in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. He says, "You have heard it said, 'You shall not murder'—but I say, if you hate someone, you've committed murder in your heart." And, "You have heard it said, 'You shall not commit adultery'—but I say, if you look upon a woman to lust after her, you've committed adultery in your heart." So hatred is equated with murder and lust with adultery. The law of God is a heavy burden, and we dishonor our father and mother when we do not walk in what is right before God.

The Good News: Repentance and Grace

So what do you do if you have lived in a way that dishonors your family by greed, theft, deception, adultery, or murder? How do you respond when you realize you've broken the commandments of God? There is good news. The same man who committed these grave sins in 2 Samuel 11 confessed with great repentance in Psalm 51.

The heading tells us this is a psalm of David "when Nathan the prophet went to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba." He had lied about it for a year. And then he prayed:

Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness... Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin... Against You, You only, have I sinned... Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow... Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me... Restore to me the joy of Your salvation... Then I will teach transgressors Your ways, and sinners shall be converted to You.

The same David who committed those horrible sins confessed and repented gloriously, speaking of God's lovingkindness and His ability to purge and forgive. That is the wonderful joy we learn of in Jesus, the Son of David. All of us, like sheep, have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord laid on Him our iniquity, so that we could be forgiven and receive His grace.

So while there is heavy news in the commandments—when we realize we have all broken them and dishonored our father and mother as liars, adulterers, and murderers at heart—we also realize that in Christ Jesus we can experience forgiving grace as we come to Him and confess our sins. My encouragement is that you would call out to the Lord, realize your sin, and confess it. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Closing Prayer

Father, we thank You for Your grace. We thank You for Your goodness. None of us is deserving of it, but we rejoice that You have blessed us with that grace and forgiveness when we realize that, just like David, all of us are sinners who fall short of Your glory. While it is our desire to honor You and to honor our father and mother by walking in obedience to the Scriptures, Lord, we all fall short. And we thank You that when we fall short, we have Your forgiving grace. So once again we confess our sins to You and pray that You would forgive us. We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen.