4th Commandment

4^th Commandment - July 6, 2016

Honor thy father and thy mother that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.

What does this mean?

We should fear and love God that we may not despise our parents and masters, nor provoke them to anger, but give them honor, serve and obey them, and hold them in love and esteem.

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As we see in the 10 Commandments, God’s law is divided into two tables.  The first table teaches us our duty to love God.  The second table teaches us our duty to love our neighbor.  To love God requires that we fear him and trust him.  To fear him is to acknowledge that he made us and that he is right to hold us to his holy standards.  To trust him is to have confidence toward him that he will deal with us as he has promised in his word.  This is what it means to love God.  It is both to fear and to trust him so that we have no other god, so that we call upon him in all trouble, and so that we gladly hear his word. 

As we approach the second table of the law, we should consider what is required of us when God tells us to love our neighbor.  He does not give us the duty to fear our neighbor.  Nor does he even give us the duty to trust our neighbor.  Rather, when commanding us to love our neighbor, it is not our neighbor we are to fear and trust.  It is God.  As Luther rightly explains in the Small Catechism, our first duty toward the one next to us actually begins with our primary duty toward God who is above us.  We should fear and love God so that […]. 

This means that, in order to render what you owe your neighbor, you must first render what you owe God.  You owe it to your neighbor first and foremost to fear and love God.  Think of that!  You owe it to your neighbor.  Your neighbor benefits when you fear and love God, because only when you fear and love God can you trust God when he commands you to love those who do not deserve your love, those who take advantage of your love, and who do not love you in return.  To dutifully love your neighbor out of humble obedience to God is an act of trust toward God.  It is an act of divine worship. 

This is what the Catechism so brilliantly teaches us.  We should fear and love God so that we honor our father and our mother, so that we help and defend our neighbor, and so on … in other words, so that we show in our dealings with others that we trust God who commands us to love those who don’t deserve to be loved. 

We do not choose what works are pleasing to God.  God tells us.  We do not choose which works will best serve our neighbor any more than we choose the works that we feel most inclined to do.  God tells us.  As surely as God tells us to have no other gods, he tells us to honor our father and mother.  As the 1^st Commandment serves as the foundation for those that follow, so the 4^th Commandment does too as it introduces the second table.  This commandment to honor your father and mother not only teaches you who your nearest neighbor is, but also how near God is.  In this way it bridges the two tables of the law quite well.  It also teaches us where this divine love is supposed to be shown and nurtured.  As they say, love begins in the home. 

Our neighbor is not someone far away.  He is the one next to us, in our own home. Our primary neighbors are our mother and father.  Even before my twin brother became my neighbor, our parents were my neighbors.  In learning to honor them I learned also to love my brother.  This is by God’s design.  There would have been natural affection between the two of us, no doubt.  But our parents taught us to love each other as Christian brothers by teaching us both to honor them.  Look how brotherly love suffers when fathers and mothers are ignored and the home is despised.  Love for neighbor begins with the 4^th Commandment, because it is in honoring this command that we also learn to fear God in the home. 

As our neighbor is not someone far away, neither is God’s almighty rule a distant decree from heaven.  No, it is very near, exercised from the very mouths of those whom God has given authority.  Although God does not command us to fear and trust our neighbor, but to love him, we learn to love our neighbor by first regarding our parents as agents of God.  We fear them and entrust ourselves to them because God tells us to.  And in so doing, we learn how to love one another as well, and to commit ourselves to God whose authority our parents exercise.  Parental authority is a mask that God wears to teach us this very precious lesson.  When we submit to legitimate authority, we submit to God.  When parents uphold their duties as fathers and mothers, they teach their children to have regard for God.

All authority is God’s.  He rules by delegation.  He works through means.  He gives parents authority over their children.  All earthly authority derives from theirs.  We should be subject to all lawful authority not only because of fear of punishment, but for conscience’ sake.  To honor your parents and other authorities, however, is not necessarily to obey them.  Their authority is God’s authority.  Therefore, if they require that you do something that God forbids, you must say with St. Peter in Acts 5:29, “We must obey God rather than men.”  By obeying God instead, you actually honor the authority your parents truly have even if they are blind to it, or even if they abuse and dishonor their duties. 

So it is with rulers and judges who have civil power.  Their authority comes from God.  But as surely as fathers and mothers may not require obedience in defiance to God’s word, so also the government may not require obedience in defiance to the office of mother and father, since it is from their office that their own authority is derived.  When rulers make laws that undermine the authority of parents to care for, teach, or raise their children in the training and admonition of the Lord, it is the right and duty of those parents to defy the government.  By doing so, they honor their Father in heaven.  So also they serve their children as God would have them served. 

God does not give children to the State.  He does not entrust the rearing of children to the government or to any public system of education.  The authority that God gives to rulers is an authority that must uphold and support the divine duties of fathers and mothers to raise their own children in the home.  It is parents’ job to make them honorable members of society, not the government’s.  Civil rulers are vested with authority by God so that they may serve the home, not undermine it. 

When the government forces public schools to teach the doctrine of evolution as science, it is the divine obligation of parents to refute what their children’s teachers have taught them and to correct the error.  When public schools try to pervert the distinctions between male and female, or promote other sorts of immoral behavior, it is the sacred duty of father and mother at home to teach otherwise – that is, if they would even continue to send their children to such a school.  The government may tax your income, confiscate your land, and deny your right to vote.  They may, and God will likely let them.  And you must not resist beyond what is legal.  But they may not require you to sin.  Fathers and mothers must therefore make sure that their children are not being taught to dishonor their own authority, or much less be taught to believe false doctrine. 

Many parents fail in this regard.  They assume that the schools are there to teach the kids, and that they are there just to give them a place to eat and sleep and bring them on vacation and pay for their college and stuff.  But this is not true.  The duty to teach children is the primary duty of fathers and mothers.  It is to them that God gave children.  It is through them that God desires to bring them to the waters of Holy Baptism and raise them in the faith.  It is to parents that God gives the charge to instruct their children in the way they should go. 

And yet in the same way that many parents surrender their duty to the State, so also, similarly, many parents think that they have done their duty to raise Christian children if they only send them to Sunday school and attend service on Sunday morning.  But this is also not true.  God did not give your children to the church or to the pastor.  He gave them to you.  It is the parents who are duty bound to bring their children to the font.  God gives them to you and you give them back to God like Hannah did with Samuel.  You do this not by relinquishing your duty as a Christian parent to volunteers at VBS, but by taking your duty seriously.  It is parents who must teach them Bible stories and how to pray.  Your pastor and Sunday school teachers may help you in this.  But just as the State can merely serve you in teaching your children practical and useful skills, you must remember who it is to whom God gave them, and who it is to whom they are to be subject. 

We do not make children.  God does.  You do not plan your family.  God does.  You do not choose to become a mother or a father.  God makes you one.  It is not an evolutionary accident that children are born to men and women.  It is his gracious design.  And so in instituting marriage, he has wisely crafted the environment where he wants his children to be raised.  He wants them raised by fathers and mothers.  The 4^th Commandment does not require that we honor our parents.  It tells us to honor our father and mother.  This distinction is intentional and vitally important. 

God places a great responsibility on fathers.  They are to work and provide for their households.  Fathers are to be the pastors of their homes.  It is their primary duty to teach in a simple way what God commands, promises, and what prayers he is pleased to hear.  A good father is not one who spends time with his kids.  He is one who uses his time wisely, fearing God, and trusting him to bless those duties he has commanded of him.  It is a father’s duty to teach his household who their true Father is.  So also it is his duty to teach them who their Mother is.  He brings them to church.  He teaches them to remember their Baptism.  He teaches them to listen and sing along.  This is the measure of a man.  A father who neglects his duty to hear and repeat the word of God with his family is a father who teaches his children to dishonor Christ and his bride. 

And as he should honor Christ’s bride, so he should honor his own.  He teaches his children to honor their mother by treating her with respect.  This is how they learn to love her – by his example above all.  This means that a Christian mother should submit with grace to her husband, the father of her children.  As they humbly regard his leadership in the home as the Bible commands, she teaches them to regard Christ as the head of the Church which is his body, and of which he is also her Savior.  Christian mothers aren’t required by God to make money.  The father is required to provide for his family, and if he won’t, the Bible says he’s denied the faith.  But the Bible praises the Christian mother when she manages the home, provides an example for the children, and teaches the word of God to her little ones. 

If children had perfect parents, they would gladly honor them.  They don’t.  And so they don’t.  That’s why we need this commandment – not to ensure that we are obeyed, but for the sake of our children whom God has given us, that they it may be well with them and they may live long on the earth.  And this promise is true in an earthly sense.  He who learns to fear God will be blessed in this life.  Just look at the devastating poverty and crime that runs rampant where fathers are absent and mothers have no head of home.  But so much more this promise refers to the life that God provides within his own household. 

“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). 

The land he promises is not any parcel of earth.  Eden is gone.  The earth is cursed.  Death reigns.  It is the wages of our sin.  Generations fade and fathers and mothers are forgotten in time.  No.  Rather this land is that Paradise that no sin can defile and no sinner can enter.  It is where Christ, the second Adam, lives and reigns with his Father.  He obeyed his Father where we have all failed.  He took upon himself the curse that Adam brought, and freely feeds us with eternal life which he purchased on the tree of the cross.  He brings his gracious reign to us wherever his word is preached – wherever he has mercy on poor sinners – wherever he gathers us to worship in his name. 

Adam was to worship God by obeying his command.  He failed.  We worship God by teaching our children to obey the 4^th Commandment.  We fail.  We suffer for our failures.  As Adam saw Cain reject the gospel and witnessed generations die with the knowledge that it was his own fault, so we see our own sins and failures adversely affect those we have loved – those whom God gave us.  But God loves them more than we can.  He is our Father.  He has sent his Son to honor him.  He sent his Son to be subject to Joseph, honor Mary – even in his moments of death from the cross.  He sent him to live a holy and obedient life for all mothers … fathers … sons … daughters… 

As Jesus perfected true worship by obeying his Father in our place…so we teach our children to be subject to us – but not solely that they might fear God – but so much more that they might learn through us to trust God.  We let our children see us confess our sins, ask for forgiveness, and lay ourselves at the mercy of our Father in heaven.  And all the while we provide for all their needs, teach them the word of God as husband and wife, and live together as brother and sister as well as father and mother.  We teach them to do the same.  We give them an image of a Christian home and so impress on them the happiness and hope of our home above.  We order our own homes for the sake of that home which Christ has made us worthy to enter.  He feeds us, gives us rest, teaches us, and provides for us and our children what his Father has given him all authority to dispense in his own name.  Amen.