The One Commandment That Came With a Promise Attached to It

The word gets used to end conversations, and I do not think most people using it that way have noticed that is what they are doing.

Somebody young says something true and difficult, and the reply is: honor your father and your mother. And the sentence functions, in that moment, as a door closing. Not an argument. A door.

So a whole generation grows up with the private conviction that honor and honesty are two roads and you have to pick one, and that picking honesty makes you the kind of person the family talks about after you leave.

I have carried that. I want to be careful in how I say the next part, because I am not about to tell anybody that their parents got a commandment wrong. That is not what I think and it is not what this is.

What I think is that a word has been asked to do a second job it was never given, and that the actual commandment is both heavier and freer than the version that gets used at the table, and that the difference is worth about fifteen years of a person's peace.

The word means weight

Here is the commandment.

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. (Exodus 20:12, King James Version)

The Hebrew behind honor is a word about weight. To honor somebody is to treat them as heavy, as substantial, as somebody whose existence carries real mass in your life.

That is a much bigger demand than agreement, and it is a different demand. Agreement is cheap and it is also easy to fake; a man can nod at a table for thirty years and hold his parents in complete contempt in his own head, and nobody would ever charge him with breaking this commandment.

And weight is not something you can produce by nodding. It shows up in where you are on a Tuesday, what you carry, who you drive somewhere, whose name you defend when they are not present.

You are commanded to something heavier than agreement, and you were never let off with a nod. Exodus 20:12 uses a word about weight rather than about consent, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 5:5, by whom the love that does this is shed abroad in a heart rather than performed with a face.

Paul points out what is attached to it

Then Paul, writing to a mixed congregation, notices something about this commandment that nobody in that room seems to have noticed.

Honour thy father and mother; (which is the first commandment with promise;) That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. (Ephesians 6:2-3)

The first commandment with promise. He stops in the middle of a letter to point out a structural detail: of all of them, this one has an outcome attached, and the outcome is that things go well and life is long.

That is a strange thing to attach to a duty, and it tells you what kind of commandment this is. It is not primarily a protection for the parents. It is a load bearing wall in the life of the one doing it, and God says so in the sentence.

Which reframes the whole thing for somebody who has been treating it as a tax. It is not a tax. It is described as the arrangement under which a life holds up.

You have a promise sitting on the other end of this, and God attached it Himself. Ephesians 6:2 calls it the first commandment with promise, and it is the Spirit of God, Galatians 5:22, who produces the longsuffering and gentleness this takes rather than leaving a person to manufacture it.

The New Testament defines it with a verb, and the verb is practical

If you want to know what honoring looks like when it is actually happening, Paul gives an example, and it is not an emotional one.

But if any widow have children or nephews, let them learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God. (1 Timothy 5:4)

Requite. To repay. And the context is entirely practical: money, food, care, the ordinary and expensive business of looking after somebody who once looked after you.

Jesus does the same thing in Mark 7. When He accuses a group of voiding this commandment, the thing they have voided is not respect in the abstract; it is material support that got redirected away from parents by a religious arrangement.

So the commandment is measured in things that cost something. It is not measured in whether the last conversation went smoothly, and it is not measured in whether a person agreed.

You are able to obey this commandment on a day when the conversation went badly. 1 Timothy 5:4 measures it in requiting rather than in atmosphere, and it is by the Spirit, Philippians 2:13, that God works in a person both to will and to do rather than only to feel.

Jesus honored His mother and did not obey her

There is a scene in John 2 that people find awkward and I find enormously freeing.

Mary tells Jesus there is no wine. He answers her in a way that has puzzled translators for centuries, and He does not simply comply. And then, a few verses later, He does something about the wine anyway.

And later still, from the cross, He arranges for her care in the middle of His own execution (John 19:26-27).

Put those two together and the picture is of a man who did not treat His mother's instruction as automatically binding and who carried the weight of her life to the last four minutes of His own. He honored her completely. He did not obey her automatically. Those two things sat inside one relationship without contradiction.

If anybody in this world was going to demonstrate that honor and agreement are separable, it would be Him, and He did.

You are looking at a life where both of those were true at once and neither canceled the other. John 19:26 has Him arranging her care from the cross, and it is by the eternal Spirit, Hebrews 9:14, that He offered Himself, which is the same Spirit given to you for the same kind of obedience.

Standing up is also in the law

There is a verse in Leviticus that says something about the old that most people have never had read to them.

Thou shalt rise up before the hoary head, and honour the face of the old man, and fear thy God: I am the LORD. (Leviticus 19:32)

Rise up. A body movement. When an old person comes into the room, get on your feet.

And notice what it is welded to: and fear thy God. The two are in one sentence, which means how a person treats the old is being tied directly to their posture toward God, not to whether the old person in question was right about anything.

I find that clarifying, and I find it costly in the right way. It means the honor is not conditional on the older one being correct, or fair, or even kind, and it also means it is not conditional on the younger one having resolved anything. You can stand up while a question is still open. Most of the standing up I have done has been done with the question still open.

You are able to rise up for somebody before anything between you is settled. Leviticus 19:32 commands the standing and ties it to the fear of God rather than to a verdict, and it is the Spirit of the fear of the LORD, Isaiah 11:2, who supplies the posture rather than a person's agreement.