Exodus 20:1-12 | The 5th Commandment

Will you remain standing as I read our scripture for today?

Today's reading is from Exodus chapter 20, verses 1 through 12.

Exodus 20:1–12

And God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.

You shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make yours for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is the water in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord, your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation, to those who hate me.

But showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not take the Lord the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath to the Lord your God, and on it you shall not do any work, or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates.

For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and he rested on the seventh day.

Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land, and that the Lord your God is giving you.

This is the word of the Lord.

Good morning.

It's great to see you all this morning.

It's wonderful to gather together with you this Sunday to worship.

My name's James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Thanks for joining us.

Um we've uh uh we're continuing through this fall through the Ten Commandments, and we are halfway through, I can tell, because we're at the fifth commandment.

And this is uh a shift in the commandments from uh what we've seen before.

The commandments that we've looked to uh looked to up until this point have mostly dealt with how we relate to God, and now we're beginning to deal with the commandments for how we relate to one another.

So uh it'll be a great shift for us.

But before we move into that this morning, please pray with me.

Lord, we praise you for your grace towards our church, for your attentiveness and your care for us in each of our lives.

Lord, we thank you that we have died in Christ, and that we have been raised in Christ, and that our lives are hidden with Christ in God.

Lord, I pray that because of that, because of this reality, that our lives are hidden, protected, cared for in Christ.

Lord, that we would set our minds where Christ is.

We would not set our minds on the things of the earth, but we would set our minds on you.

Lord, I pray, especially this morning as we hear your word, that we would set our minds on you, the truths that you have given to us.

Lord, that our hearts would swell with honor towards you, and that our minds would be set on the truths of your word.

Lord, that we might wonder at the goodness of your law as you have revealed it to us, and that we would see that in this are very words of life, paths of life and light, and that these might be put into practice in our hearts and in our minds, and in the actions that we that we uh participate in in our relationships, Lord, we pray that your Holy Spirit would equip us to strive towards obedience to your word.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So as I was saying earlier, the Ten Commandments are are typically grouped into two tables.

And the first table is the first four commandments.

That's uh, and those commandments correspond to the the the greatest law, which Jesus teaches us, is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.

And then the second uh the second greatest commandment, which Jesus teaches us, is to love your neighbor as yourself.

So you can see that the first table of the law, the first four commandments, have to do with loving the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

And then the second table of the law, which is the final six commandments, have to do with loving our neighbor as ourselves.

And there's this hinge point in the middle, which is the fifth commandment.

And the fifth commandment is the commandment that informs the whole second table of the law.

The fifth commandment, which we're looking at today, is to honor your mother and your father, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

That commandment structures all of our social relationships.

It informs how society, how civilization, how you as an individual are able to hold together in the world, are all in this fifth commandment.

There's a sense in which a violation of the fifth commandment is a violation of any of the other commandments that will come after it to honor your mother and your father.

Now that might that's not immediately obvious when you read it, because when we read it, we just hear like be nice to mom and dad.

And it is that.

It's definitely that.

It's not less than that, but it is far, far more than that.

Father, mother, and child, that is the uh shape of the first commandment.

These are the people that it involves honor your mother and father.

Your, that's your you're the your in it.

And you're being called to honor your mother and your father.

Father, mother, and child.

This is the atomic structure of humanity.

And this is the way that we've grown accustomed to talking about it.

This is the the reason that I call it the atomic structure is because that's a fun way of saying that it's the nuclear family.

Is it we're going to have a bit of a poetic conceit here at the beginning?

But many of the great country songs are poetic conceits.

So we're going to have one of those.

Right, John?

Oh yeah.

This is the atomic structure of humanity.

Now, what was the project of the 20th century?

The project of the 20th century was can we split the atom?

And can we can we make something of substance that's uh reducible beneath the atomic structure of the family?

Can we say that the real atomic structure of civilization is not father, mother, and child, it's not the nuclear family, but the real atomic structure of civilization is the individual.

This was the project of the 20th century.

And this is what we attempted and what we tried.

And successfully, what we did is we split the atom.

And when we split the atom, what we released was a world of chaotic energy.

Uncontrolled chaotic energy has been released upon civilization.

And that's why right now it does not hold.

There is no holding of civilization at the family level, there is no holding at the society level.

And that's because of a fundamental neglect of the reality which the Fifth Commandment teaches us, which is that civilization is built from the foundation up, and the foundation is not the level of the individual, the foundation is the level of the family.

This is a real level.

That's why the commandment can speak to you.

And what this means is, since we have centered things at the level of the individual, this means that we have inverted the individual and family relationship.

And in doing so, we have made the family a mechanism which is designed to serve the individual.

And when the family no longer serves the individual, or when a particular individual becomes burdensome to the family, then the individuals are all permitted to part the family.

You can see this especially at the Bookends of Life.

This is where it is most evident in our culture, because the most burdensome people that we imagine in our culture are the are the uh newly born and the elderly.

And in our state, you are able to murder those who are about to be born, and you are able to murder the elderly legally in our state.

Now, how how could we have developed a conceptual frame which allows for these particular groups of humans to for it to be permissible to murder them?

Why are they in some sense subhuman?

Well, I think, in large part, it comes to our neglect of the fifth commandment, the atomic explosion that we have caused by the destruction, the denial of the reality of the nuclear family.

And that has rendered the inconvenience of family members as reasons to uh destroy them, to uh we might say dissolve those bonds.

That would be one way of uh that's called a euphemism, is what we might do.

So you can see that just in the structure of the fifth commandment itself, just in this this saying it says, honor your mother and father.

That right there, there is not just a uh there's not just an ethical ought, you ought to do this.

There is, of course, an ethical ought.

But there is also an an is.

There's a description of the way things are.

This is saying that the mother, father, and child relationship is a real thing.

This is no mere social construct.

This is a real structure built into reality.

And if you break it, you will unleash uncontrollable energy, terrific destructive power that will be released when the atom is split.

So the fifth commandment, in this sense, it also lays the groundwork for all of the other commandments because it provides and speaks to our most fundamental relationships.

And the most fundamental component of uh our of our existence is in the is in the family, the the father, mother, and child level of society.

And so because it speaks to this most fundamental structure, it informs every structure that you're a part of.

And you'll be able to see that as it informs every structure that you're a part of, you'll you'll see that uh the fifth commandment's a tough one.

The fifth commandment is one that uh, just like all of them, as we've kind of seen, this is one that we'll need to offer repentance for our not obeying the fifth commandment in all kinds of ways.

And we'll need to receive the grace of our Lord that we might be restored to the position of function in the fifth commandment.

So, what we're going to look at is we're going to look at what it means to honor.

What is that word?

To honor.

Then we're going to look at who are our mothers and fathers.

And like I likewise, we're going to look at who are you, who are children, who are mothers and fathers.

And then finally, we're going to look at the promise associated with this commandment.

So, first, let's look at honor.

So, Exodus 20, 12, here's the commandment: honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

So, the first thing to notice is that the commandment, first of all, addresses you as children.

So, when you hear this commandment, you are the children being addressed in this commandment.

And it can do that, and it can require of all children to honor their mother and father, because the Bible can pretty well count on all of you having a mother and father.

This is where people come from.

This is one of the things that it's very important for us to recognize because I did a lot of reading in my undergrad, things that I thought would never mainstream, that in 2016 mainstreamed.

And then we went crazy for eight years, and then they less mainstreamed.

But that's a brief history of the last 20 years.

And what those papers said was family is a social construct.

That what actually happened is there is a pre-existent position of the individual.

And what happened is there was the free individual, the noble savage, who then acquires property and in order to maintain their property, established the social construct of the family.

Now that's a story, but it's obviously a very silly story, because the question is, well, where did the noble savage come from?

Did he just spawn from the earth like an orc?

This doesn't, that's not where that's not where people come from.

Where people come from is people come from people.

Amen?

And so this social construct language with regards to the family, at any level, whenever anybody's sneaking in some sort of family, it's a social construct uh level of interpretation for the family, or or uh the way that this is happening, especially the we the reason we went crazy in 2016, I guess we're just gonna do this today, you guys.

Everybody buckle up.

The reason we went crazy in 2016, with regards to this in particular, is because in 2015 the Obergfeld decision happened at the Supreme Court level, which was the legalization of gay marriage.

Which is not about the reason that that was able to happen is because it was framed in terms of individuals ought to be able to enter any sort of relationship that they want to with other individuals.

And it doesn't matter for the rest of civilization because the fundamental building block of civilization is the individual.

Do you see how rational that is?

It's perfectly reasonable if the fundamental building block of civilization is the individual.

But if the reality is that the fundamental building block of civilization is the nuclear family, father, mother, and child, then what actually happened with the Obergfeld decision was not the instantiation of individual rights, it was the destruction of the family, therefore the destruction of civilization.

That's why right after that you begin to see all bonds fall apart.

There's there's no there's no sort of social coherence anymore after that decision.

It's because we we set off an we split the atom is what is what we did.

Now, since that happened, since we've uh denied the uh fundamental structure of reality, since we split the atom.

But the the problem with that is that what I the reason that I went there is I wanted to demonstrate that there is a level at which we are always or uh we're always in our culture deconstructing the reality of the nuclear family.

But what happens then is that bumps up against reality.

Reality is very strong, you know, it bends, and then when you bend it very far, of like family is whatever we want it to be.

Family is whoever I share a cell phone plan with, you know, and it bends, and we're all like, yeah, there was a time, you young kids, Gen Zers in the group, there was a time not long ago, where it was stomp and clap music, and family was whoever you shared a cell phone plan with.

You need to know that that happened not ironically, not that long ago.

I just want to bear witness to it.

And we bent reality this far back, and then it snaps.

It snaps.

And at the on the other side of that snap, when you what you see are are terrors that have been been unleashed that are beyond imagination.

You know, women who are being uh babies being ripped from mothers' wombs after the mother's body was bought and the baby was sold to two men.

And the baby cries out for a mother that's not there.

Terrors beyond imagination have been unleashed as we split the atom.

So that's why I want you to see that the fifth commandment is not just an is, it's not just a description of uh of an eth, excuse me, it's not just a description of an ought of an ought, but it's also a description of an is.

Here's what reality is, and reality snaps back.

Because a mother and a father is where you came from.

Everyone, everyone who made the decisions, when we all agreed together at some level to make these descrip these decisions that would deny the reality of the family as one of God's created institutions, everyone who made those decisions came from a mother and a father.

They came from no other place.

No other place.

That is the reality of the the is-ness of the fifth commandment.

And therefore, you can see this symmetry between the fifth commandment and the first commandment.

Because the first commandment is you shall have no other gods before me.

And to have another God before God is to imagine that there is some other place creation came from other than the mind of God.

And if there is some other place creation came from other than the mind of God, then perhaps there is some other being to which I owe my ultimate allegiance, to which I owe true honor.

But the first commandment says, You shall have no other gods before me.

That means that there is a true God, and to him we are bound.

He is the one that is worthy of our honor, of our worship.

He is the true one who is truly worthy of this glory.

Now, the fifth commandment, in the same way, it is saying, honor your father and your mother.

And can you see how it's the same pattern that just at a lower level?

Because honor your father and mother, well, these are this is where you came from.

It's the only place that you came from.

Just as you owe God your very existence, you owe your mother and your father your very existence.

They are the ones that you came from.

And so how do you demonstrate that?

What you do to God, you you give worship.

You give the fullness of your worship to God.

But there is another level.

What you do for your mother and your father is you honor them.

Now, honor is not something that we understand very well.

I once took a trip overseas and we were getting like some cultural training in Southeast Asia, in Malaysia, and um some of the Malaysian locals, they they brought us aside and they're like, here's something that you need to understand.

We have like an honor-shame culture here.

And this is very different from your culture.

We really care about like saving faiths and about our reputations in public and about what people think of us.

And I was like, that doesn't seem so different.

Here in America, where we don't care, I don't where I don't care what people think of me.

That's not my experience of it.

I care a lot.

And uh but anyway, this is a this is a word.

That we're not very familiar with.

It's not a word, honor is not a word that's integrated into our cultural vocabulary.

John Calvin breaks it down for us into three parts.

To honor your mother and father is to revere them.

Secondly, it's to obey.

And third, it is to love.

Honor your mother is to revere, obey, and love.

So revere.

The first thing is to revere.

What does that mean?

It's to respect or admire deeply.

This is to show honor to your mother and father.

You respect and you admire them deeply.

That means that you practice speaking positively about your parents.

You practice this.

You hunt for positive things about your parents.

That's what you do.

You honor your mother and father.

This means that the Fifth Commandment prohibits going spurlunking through the faults of your parents.

It's prohibited.

It's prohibited by the Fifth Commandment.

Now many of you are thinking, well, doesn't that just mean that I'm going to I'm forcing myself to live in sort of some sort of denial about the reality of the faults that I see in my parents?

Well, I'll ask a question about that, I guess.

Do you think that the Bible dishonors David in its description of King David?

Sort of dishonoring that the scripture does of King David, who is given the promise of the eternal throne that will come from his line.

The Bible tells all the parts of his story.

You know, we know more about David than many of us know about each other.

But the Bible is not dishonoring of David when it tells the story.

This is not about a neglect of the truth.

This is not about, you know, people use the term hagiography, like a like the story of the saints, to describe telling a story of people with no faults.

And we use that word, we use that term negatively.

I actually don't think we should use that term negatively.

I think we should just tell the stories of great people and say, wasn't that great?

Isn't that awesome?

And then we all high-five and say, yeah, that's awesome.

Maybe we could be a little more awesome.

That's the way we should be.

But instead, what we're like is like uh, hey, did you know that this person from the past is a terrible person?

And then we just destroy everything.

It's a fifth commandment violation when we do that.

What happens, it what we are called to do is we're called to revere, admire deeply.

This means that you should learn and practice telling legendary stories about your parents.

That's the way you should tell the stories.

You should you should figure some out and you should tell them.

Tell them to yourself, tell them back to your parents, tell them to your children.

That's the that's what you should do.

I bet you can find one.

You know, many of you have had terrible relationships with your parents.

This is going to be, this is why the Fifth Commandment is going to be not the most fun.

Because this is pushing you into one of the most difficult relationships that you've had in your life.

And it's pushing you into this difficult relationship that you did not ask for, but that you just received.

And in many ways, you were the victim of the difficulty of it.

And it is requ it is requiring positive actions of love from you towards that relationship.

And it feels it will feel like in your heart you're setting yourself up to be hurt again.

I I promise you, this is not what that where that path, that is not where this path leads.

This path leads towards healing.

Certainly for yourself, certainly for your soul.

You can trust the Lord with that.

Admire deeply.

Tell legendary stories, tell heroic stories.

You wouldn't believe it.

It's unbelievable what they did.

They were crazy and hilarious, and there was, you know, there was you wouldn't believe what he said.

For my dad, it's always you wouldn't believe what he said.

Those are uh uh and they're they they should go off into legend.

This is this is reverence.

Revere.

Revere your parents.

And you should think while you're revering your parents, it's crazy that I'm here.

It's crazy that I get to be here.

It's crazy that that got to be my story.

There's wonders and glories that get to be a part of my story because of this, because of my parents.

And Exodus 21, 17, in case you needed more motivation to honor your mother and father.

Exodus 21, 17 says, Whoever curses his father or his mother shall be put to death.

So secondly, we are to obey our mother and father.

Obey means we we should we should seek to do what they tell us to do.

I already preached on this one.

Uh this was the end of my parenting series, and I spoke directly to all the children in the church.

Um, children that are in here with us, uh, how's it going?

Hang in there, you guys are doing so well.

I know this the uh you guys are doing awesome.

Great job.

You always do so well sitting in church and paying attention.

I love looking out and seeing your faces.

You need to obey your parents.

So when they tell you to do things, you should do those things.

Um, you should obey them uh because the uh they love you, they desire good things for you, and they know it would blow your mind how much more they know than you.

They're thinking 10 steps ahead of things that have not even crossed your mind.

And they're all for you.

They're for you.

So when you obey them, it's gonna go really well.

It will go great for you.

It will go great for you.

In Deuteronomy 21, uh, it describes a disobedient son, and it says if the son continues in this uh disobedience, that that that they are to be stoned by the whole community.

This is another incentive.

Your parents are to be obeyed.

Third is love.

Love binds all things together.

You should love your mother and your father.

You should hold a place in your heart for them that does not belong to any others.

And you should you should think about them with thoughts of love.

You should tell them that you love them.

You should love your mother and your father.

I know many of you are probably thinking, yeah, but you haven't met my mother and father.

You haven't seen what they've done to us, they you haven't seen what they've done to me.

You you weren't there for this part of the relationship.

They're not lovely.

They're not lovely people.

Here's the way that I want you to think of it.

Maybe not.

But they're yours.

They're yours.

When you think of your father and your mother, you should think they're mine.

I love them because they're mine.

That's what you should think.

It's just like patriotism.

You know, I think Chesterton, who I will attribute everything I can't remember the attribution to, said something like, uh, you know, like patriotism is it is necessarily unreasonable.

Uh, because it's not like you know what the best country is, or it's not like when you're when you're deciding like which country to be loyal to, you're not like laying out a spreadsheet of the countries and you're being like, oh, well, Denmark has the happiest people, so I guess I'll be loyal to Denmark because I don't know, Newsweek did a study.

No, you don't do that.

What you the when you pick a country to be loyal to is you just get born and you look around and you say, This place took pretty good care of me.

That's it.

That's done.

Now you're now you're loyal to that country.

And it's like, well, why?

Look at all the crazy things about it, look at the absurdities, look at all the ridiculousness.

And it and what you do is you say, but it's mine, it's my home.

It's my home here with.

Because we we give such negative connotations to it, but there's something like loyalty.

There's something like loyalty in this.

When we talk about loyalty, I think we think of like the mob.

Something like organized crime syndicates require loyalty.

And we think of it as an abandonment of principles.

And that's because we've prioritized principles over the reality of the relationships that we've been placed in.

We think of the, we think of the principles that we've conformed ourselves to as being more real than the families that birthed us.

It's the way that we think of it.

It's a very dehumanizing way of thinking.

It's very unit's very unreal.

And so you should think part of what I want you to see in this commandment, before we move into the more theoretical part, is that this commandment is totally non-theoretical.

It is not honor the office of mother and father.

You can't, you won't be able to honor the what mother and father means for the rest of society unless you honor, you learn in your heart to honor your mother and father.

The reason you do that is you say because they're mine, they're the ones that God gave me.

And I'll speak with gratitude for that.

Because here you are.

So this is the way that God has written your story.

You should look for ways to honor that.

Lastly, now Calvin doesn't mention this, but this is important to recognize with honor because this is where Jesus goes in his one of his key discussions of the fifth commandment is the Pharisees would do this thing where they would um uh their parents would approach the end of life, and they would seek to not have to financially take care of their parents so that their parents wouldn't be a burden to them in any way.

And so what they would do is they would say, the resources that I was going to use to take care of my parents, I am going to give as a gift to God, and I'll donate them to the temple.

And then they would basically wait until their parents died and never give the gift.

That's what the Pharisees were doing.

And Jesus says, You are disobeying the fifth commandment, because the fifth commandment says, honor your mother and father.

And what you are doing is you are giving to God what belongs to your mother and father.

See how clever they were?

It was like, yes, but I'm giving this as a gift to God, to the church.

And Jesus is saying the commandment is honor your mother and father.

So honor has to do with financial provision as well.

That's why I get paid to preach, which is a sick gig if you can get it.

And there's a the reason is because in 1 Timothy it says that those uh who teach you the word of God are worthy of double honor.

One of the honors I get is you guys showing up and being like, we're part of this church, I'll listen to what James says and I'll trust him and that he means this for my good and that he, you know, desires me to grow in the Lord.

That's one level of honor.

And the other level of honor is that sweet, sweet cash.

Double honor.

Double honor.

So that's what it means to honor your mother and father as well.

Those are those are all together.

These are all together.

Who are father and mother?

Who are meant by father and mother in the fifth commandment?

Great question.

Let's see if the larger catechism has anything to say about that.

Larger Catechism question 124.

Who are meant by father and mother in the fifth commandment?

The answer is by father and mother in the fifth commandment are meant not only natural parents, but all superiors in age and gifts, and especially such as by God's ordinance are over us in place of authority, whether in family, church, or commonwealth?

So why is it that in Romans 13, Paul says that you must be in submission to all the governing authorities that have been placed over you when they're under the leadership of Nero, who is, you know, killing Christians in the amphitheater?

Why does Paul say you are to honor the governing authorities that have been placed over you?

It's because Paul believes the fifth commandment.

He honors the fifth commandment.

He says that mother and father is a stand-in for all relationships of superiors.

There are superiors.

There are people who are superior to you.

This is why obedience to the fifth commandment, which means just ordinary participation in civilization, requires a radical amount of humility.

A deep humility must be cultivated in order to participate in the fifth commandment, because it is a receiving of the gifts of having people who are superior to you.

It gives us two categories of these superiors.

It says, but all superiors in age and gifts.

So a superior in age, raise your hand, superiors in age.

I'm just kidding.

Superior in age, they are worthy of honor.

They've seen more than you quantitatively.

They're worthy of honor just for making it.

There's something that's honorable about that that should be restored and recognized.

That we would honor the superiors among us.

You ever watch a Western and somebody will like walk up to the side of a store, and the guy in the cowboy will be like, hey, old timer, how's it going?

And they don't mean anything.

There's no negative anything by it.

Hey, old timer.

It was like a term of endearment.

Anyway, I just like that.

I was wondering if things I would like to bring back that won't work.

But the point is that there's an honor, there's an there's an honor that's happening to the elderly, to those who are who are above us in age.

This is like the opposite of right now.

There's like a there's like it's basically like as many civil wars as you can think of are taking place culturally right now, because it's a it's all like boys versus girls.

It's like a playground boys versus girls game right now, and it's a battle of the generations.

You know, and I'm seduced by both of these.

I'm seduced by both of these.

But these are both violations of the Fifth Commandment.

So what is required of us then is to honor those.

Uh likewise, what's required is to honor those of superior gifting.

This can be even harder.

Because this can be a peer.

This could be someone who's younger than you.

And you are to recognize God has gifted them uniquely.

And this gift, the the fifth commandment, it it pushes you right into this place where you can say, God's gifting of them is either a critique of me, or it is good news that I am able to receive the benefits of their giftedness.

And we can give thanks to the Lord for the superior giftedness of others.

Imagine how your life would feel if you obeyed that commandment.

Think of the possibilities for gratitude and enjoyment that you're missing out on now because of your inability to obey the fifth commandment, and instead look at superiors, people who are superiorly gifted to you, and feel uh criticized by them, uh undermined by them in some way, rather than have humble gratitude for their superior giftedness.

And likewise, this is uh uh especially required submission to those who, by God's ordinance, are over us in places of authority.

The Lord built real authority into the world, especially in the three governments that he established, which are which are shown to us in this um larger catechism.

At the end, it says, whether in family, church, or commonwealth.

These are the three governments that God established: government of the family, the government of the church, and the government of the commonwealth.

And there are authorities over each of us in these places.

And we are to honor, revere, obey, love those authorities that are over us.

What this describes is coherence.

Love binds all things together.

This describes generations that were that would be able to pass down to one another, and generations that would be able to receive from above what was passed down.

It's a beautiful picture of what it would what it would mean to be united in a community.

Now, the next thing that I want us to see is that what we see what fathers and mothers are, which is all superiors.

But that means that as a superior, in the places where you are a superior, how are you required to relate to inferiors?

You are required to relate to them as a mother or father.

Mothers and fathers love the success of their children.

They love the thriving and care of their children.

Mothers and fathers are not in a tyrannical relationship with their children.

They're not in an adversarial relationship with their children.

Mothers and fathers desire to prop up, to even lay their own lives down for the flourishing of their children.

This morning at five o'clock, our three-year-old stood up in the crib and was shouting.

And we just got up and tried to calm him down.

You know?

It's like that.

You lay yourself down.

It's very ordinary.

Very ordinary.

So that means that as superiors, where you consider yourself as a superior in your life, or where not consider yourself, if you consider yourself, you may be wrong.

But where you are, where you are a superior in relationships that you're called to be a superior in, you should think motherly and fatherly.

You should think lovingly about the people who are your inferiors in those positions.

And in many relationships, you'll realize you'll you'll be moving in and out of these, you know, in and out of these structures.

You uh I leave the home and I'm uh uh superior to my children, and I come to work.

I have peers, I'm a peer with the elders uh here as we make decisions together.

This is there are there are relational structures which God has built into the world that are.

Held together by an honoring of one another and the roles that we have been given.

That is a deeply important thing.

This is what the fifth commandment is.

It is our holding together in these relational bonds which the Lord has given to us.

Now, lastly, I want to look at the promise, the promise of the commandment.

Exodus 20, verse 12.

Exodus 20:12

We'll hear the whole thing together again.

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

That your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.

When the commandments are relayed again in Deuteronomy 5, it says that you will live long in the land and that it may go well with you.

Go well with you means that you will prosper in your long time in the land.

So the promise of the fifth commandment, I can't resist, is that you would live long and prosper.

If you obey the fifth commandment, you will live long and prosper.

This is a glorious, glorious promise.

And you can see how when you see it, he's sending them into the land.

And settling of the land, this is not like a one-generation project.

This is going to take children that are raised, that honor their parents, parents that love their children, parents that create a world of flourishing for their children to inhabit by the material possessions that they give to them, by the skills that they render unto them, by the teaching that they have given them, and children that receive that and the desire to even pass that down to their children.

What that looks like then, when that happens, that that looks like a glorious world of that that coheres together rather than a world that restarts every generation.

Restart, restart, back to zero, back to zero.

No, this is this is a world of growth and uh a loving benefit that is able to be rendered down through the generations.

This is why God show God says that they will He will bless to a thousand generations, He says.

A thousand generations.

I don't even think there's been a thousand generations yet.

It's a lot of generations.

A thousand generations that he will bless.

You can see how clearly this is the pattern of receiving and maintaining that blessing.

Now, the the pattern that we're in now is uh we're in it we're in a different pattern of of civilization.

We're not we're not in a biblical model.

We're more like in a in a Greek mythology type of model of civilization right now.

I'm getting to read this Greek mythology book to my kids this year, and it is bizarre.

So Kronos, who was named after Watches, was a Titan, and he became the king of all the other Titans because he overthrew his father, which I'm going to pronounce Uranus, which means the sky.

So he, so Kronos is the child, time, overthrows the heavens, who's his father, and now Kronos is ruling.

Now that Kronos has killed his father to receive the throne, he's a revolutionary.

He's killed the father to receive the throne.

Now, who is Kronos most threatened by?

Exactly, the children, yes, exactly.

He's most threatened by his children because he killed the father.

And so now, where is the war?

The war is between the generations.

This is our cultural moment.

This is our story.

We are in a moment of overthrowing the father and terror of the children.

If I were to what if you know, if AI wasn't invented, and the and I could uh create like a publishing company or something, I would just like commission article after article and book after book about like whatever the next generation is, alpha or whatever, just how terrible they are.

And I would just harvest the clicks and live in this click gluttonous, it would be disgusting.

And the reason that I'd be able to do that is because I can guarantee that that will always work as we seek to devour the children.

Kill the father, devour the children.

That's where we are.

It's where we are.

We're in that situation right now.

And uh you you may be thinking, like, this whole, I'm sure this whole thing, honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you, it's like classic boomer advice.

If interest rates were, you know, and then we'll say something.

The only way to obey this, we we the only way out of that that terrible, self-devouring, end every generation at once Greek mythology society that we're in right now into a Christian one, is things must be restored to the position of function.

And the way that we do that is in love, we seek to honor our mothers and fathers.

Because they're mine.

They're the ones that God gave me.

We'll honor our mothers and fathers.

There's a time coming where you will need the honor from your children so that they may not devour you or seek to overthrow you.

And you will turn, and the question is, will they have been trained to do that?

Well, they have seen a model of that type of honor.

Last, and I have to end here.

Do you see how the gospel is the maximal version of this?

How Jesus Christ honors his father at great cost to himself.

And the honoring of his father that he does at great cost to himself restores us sinners to the Father.

It restores us to the position of function within so that we can participate in the first commandment and having no other gods before God.

His grace is sufficient for the the more distant restoration of us to a perfect God.

How might we hope for a more imminent restoration that we might honor our mothers and fathers?

Let's pray.

Lord, as your word searches our hearts, Father, I pray that it would search, that it would it would search our hearts, Lord, that that our that we would not go off to searching other people's Lord, but we would sit before you.

Lord, and that we would you would train our hearts to rest, that we would know that obedience to your commands are a glorious thing to pursue because these are words of life for us.

And how can we trust you?

Will we know that you are the one who laid down your precious beloved son, so that we might be restored to you?

How will you not also with him freely give us all things?

Lord, you have shown us, you have shown yourself more than trustworthy, more than willing to restore.

We know that your only intentions for revealing our sin is not so that we would dwell in them or wallow in them, Lord, but so that you could just take them from us.

Lord, in our hope, because you have brought this great restoration between us, is that we would live not just long in the land and prosper, but we would live eternally with you in glory.

Set our minds on those things that are above.

We have this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.