A (63). The fifth commandment is, Honor thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.

A (64). The fifth commandment requireth the preserving the honor, and performing the duties, belonging to every one in their several places and relations, as superiors, inferiors, or equals.

In times past, our lesson today would have only required two points because there are exactly two action items in the answer to Question 64. Note the actions of PRESERVING THE HONOR and PERFORMING THE DUTIES. But these are related to relations of authority. In other words, they assumed a divinely ordered set of gifts and callings in mankind that are not egalitarian, not democratic. According to the Westminster Divines (and they were not in the minority on this one), God-ordained social reality was hiearchical. However, over the course of the past few centuries in the West, and especially over the past century in America, there has been an all-out rebellion against the notion of SUPERIORS and INFERIORS. And of course, the commandment itself at least assumes it about the home,

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

Commandment Five begins the second table of the law, which Calvin puts under the heading of CHARITY,1 whereas the first table is described by the word PIETY.2 Now as the First Commandment was foundational to all religion, so the Fifth Commandment is going to rest at the foundation of all ethics, as the home is the fundamental social unit in society.

Recognizing the Relations

What if I told you that God loves authority? Let’s start to see that in the home, since that is where we all do start. Father and mother say something about God.  A fundamental maxim of biblical ethics is that we do what we do because of what it says about God—not primarily because of what it says about any lesser thing. When God designs a thing, He does so to speak about Himself. When God commands a thing, He does so that the action would tell the truth about Himself. So when God made parents, guess what God was doing there. The answer is the same. In a prayer of Paul, he says, 

“For this reason I bow my knees before the Father (Πατέρα), from whom every family (πατριὰ) in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14-15).

God designed parents—and He did this with fathers at the head—to speak of His own Fatherhood, which as we will see, will have “Authorship” at its core. Now the mother, being placed under the headship of the father, for a child to disrespect mother on that account is an insult to the father as well, as she is called his image, or “glory,” in 1 Corinthians 11:7, every bit as much as they both image forth God.

Now let’s move from Step 1 to Step 2. Parental authority is the nursery of all-of-life honor. God himself is governing us by these authorities. Paul even calls the civil magistrate “God’s servant for your good” (Rom. 13:4), and at the end of that text the Apostle adds, “respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (v. 7). Dabney calls the family the “germ out of which civil institutions and the organized church grew.”3 This was the historic view, not only among the Reformed, but throughout Western history—namely, that the heads of homes, once they grew (just as those people under Abraham grew to the size of a nation under Moses), the patriarchs of patriarchs became chief of clans, and so eventually the first kings. This is also generally recongized by historians of Greek and Roman history as well. But for our purposes, let’s catch the theology behind this. This is why the Westminster divines used as their other two prooftexts, 1 Peter 2:17 and Romans 12:10, which are comprehensive and also reach down into motive-level,

“Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the emperor” (1 Pet. 2:17).

“Outdo one another in showing honor” (Rom. 12:10)

Crucial for context is that in Peter’s letter, the words “Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” (2:13), is actually the heading to the whole section, and then he proceeds to delineate the different heads: officers of state, officers of labor, officers of home, officers of church. 

Hodge gives us a glimpse of what we might mean by authority being a lens of God’s glory. He says about our duty toward the authority, “It matters not in what their superiority consists, whether in age, office, power, knowledge, or excellence.”4 Now think about that for a moment: age, office, power, knowledge, or some other excellence. All of those are ordained by God. For most people, we can think back over the course of our formative years. God placed others in our lives, 1. those who are older and so offer life experience to us, 2. others who have greater degrees of power or knowledge that are decisive for some task together, and 3. others who are simply in the office. God put them there, and God gave them those qualities. But God has the essence of those qualities. He has sovereign rule. He has all knowledge and all power. He has wisdom to rule well, and a just care that all things line up. The display of those divine attributes and divine priorities are at stake in all of those positions and qualities in every human authority. Parents are our first and formative school in God’s authorship of the story. We may play a prominent role, and we may have many parts, but we must never grab for the pen out of the Scriptwriter’s hands. Authority is about authorship.

Preserving the Honor of Authorities

Joined to honor was always understood to be obedience. So Paul says, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right” (Eph. 6:1), and then in the next words, quotes the Fifth Commandment verbatim. But the first obedience is to love, since, as we have seen, “the one who loves another has fulfilled the law” (Rom. 13:8). Turretin infers from this about children, “For if our neighbor is to be loved, who is a greater neighbor to us than father and mother whose flesh we are?”5

Objection 1. Jesus tells us, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk. 14:26). Hate means hate. Therefore the honor we were to give to parents has been minimized in the New.

Reply 1. To quote Turretin, “When Christ commands us to hate parents for his sake (Lk. 14:26), he does not wish the binding duties of piety to be denied to them, which are founded in nature and are indispensable. The command must be understood comparatively, so that the love of parents should yield to divine love (as when the commands of parents are opposed to the obedience due to God, we should postpone them to the commands of God).”6

Virtues such as honor, loyalty, and faithfulness begin in the heart. Calvin says of such a heart attitude in the child, “that they should regard them with reverence.”7 This is straightforward in the command, “Every one of you shall revere his mother and his father” (Lev. 19:3), where the Hebrew יָרֵא ordinary means “fear,” which the KJV renders it as. The Greek equivalent φόβος is used of the commands in Romans 13:7 and 1 Peter 2:18.

One might suspect, “God can’t command that of me—my parents won’t know one way or the other if I highly esteem them.” Well, that may be true, as to your true feelings; but you know very well that God knows what your true feelings are toward your parents, don’t you? And the first feeling ought to be gratitude, since our fathers and mothers lovingly brought us from being the weakest of creatures to being conscious and mature. And though we hardly give it a single thought, they too had independent dreams and aspirations, but were set on a different course of self-sacrifice, not unwillingly, but out of love. That gratitude, though, ought to be accompanied by a desire to please our parents: “A wise son makes a glad father” (Prov. 15:20). So a good child is a child who is glad that they make their parents glad.

Heidelberg Catechism Question 104 asks, What does God require in the fifth commandment? Answer: “That I show all honor, love and faithfulness to my father and mother, and to all in authority over me; submit myself with due obedience to all their good instruction and correction; and also bear patiently with their infirmities: since it is God’s will to govern us by their hand.” That last part sets us up to deal with an obvious and all-too-common objection: What if my parents were not honorable people? (and the same could be asked about other authority figures).

In fact, I noticed that even as I taught through the Heidelberg a few years ago, about that language of “all their good instruction and correction.” That can be taken in two ways. It can be taken in a comprehensive way or else in a discriminating way. In the first way, it is comprehensive: namely, that the office of instruction and correction is, itself, a good. Whether the particular rules or particular counsel is good and wise and just and compelling, we can always find a better. But this is not fundamentally why we pay honor. So Peter tells servants to “be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust” (1 Pet. 2:18). So here the GOOD is the design of God, that is the office of authority. We honor that because of what it says about God. And what does it say? 

“But Jesus answered them, ‘My Father is working until now, and I am working’ … ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise’” (Jn. 5:17, 19).

Now I come to the second meaning: namely, the kind that is qualified and therefore discriminating. Here obedience is rendered to the degree that the commands from the man does not absolutely violate the First Commandment from God. In the Bible, there is only One to whom the Chrisitan is to give unqualified obedience to, and that is God himself. Calvin understands the clause, “in the Lord” (Eph. 6:1) to indicate that, “if a father enjoins anything unrighteous, obedience is freely to be denied him.”8 Naturally it is unfitting for a small child to be an arbiter on when the parent’s instruction is righteous or else unrighteous. Even when it comes to adults asking this question about authorities, we have to be realistic about the whole of what God has called us to, in covenant with other people. Jesus gives us a cross to bear, and that includes mistreatment from others:

“For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly” (1 Pet. 2:21-23).

As a norm, then, there is a good in bearing up under the bad. Not to come across too simplistically, but the words LAST RESORT come to mind when the question is “Where do we draw the line?” But even this “last resort” and this “line” is badly misunderstood.

Short of such covenant-breaking violence, our godly disposition bears “patiently with their infirmities.” There is a gracious incompetence clause here! The author of Hebrews treats earthly fathers as God’s bungling tutors. Note that this excuses no level of incompetence: much less abuse! But he does say,  

“Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live? For they disciplined us for a short time as it seemed best to them, but he disciplines us for our good, that we may share his holiness” (Heb. 12:9-10).

This reminds of the parents’ side of this commandment. As one theologian has said, “Many duties are of a reciprocal nature … Thus the duties of inferiors imply the reciprocal duties of superiors.”9 

Performing the Duties to / of Authorities

Here we can really see why it is important to unpack the meaning of a commandment with the whole counsel of God’s word. Think about it. The commandment in Exodus 20 only says “honor.” Our answer uses the expression PERFORMING THE DUTIES, BELONGING TO EVERYONE ONE IN THEIR SEVERAL PLACES AND RELATIONS … and so forth. But what are those? One way to get an answer is to take an inductive approach. In other words, we just start searching for and collecting some passages that give specific imperatives especially to children in relation to parents. And then we can expand outward from there to other authorities one will meet in life.

“A wise son hears his father's instruction, but a scoffer does not listen to rebuke” (Prov. 13:1)

“And he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was submissive to them” (Lk. 2:51).

Note that the call to obedience is always universal to the sphere in question: “Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord” (Col. 3:20).

Another way to get at this is a more deductive, top-down, approach. In other words, we can move from some overarching principle we have already become convinced of from Scripture, and understand which passages count as Fifth Commandment commands on that basis. One such principle is that the image of God is at stake in the Second Table of the Law. And so, as the object of the Second Table is the image of God, so disobedience is violence to that image. Here in the Fifth Commandment, it would be violence against the image’s authority—anything that says ‘No’ to that authority. Anything that undermines it. Anything that disparages it to others. The violence of disobedience is easier to see with the sixth through eighth commandment, and you can even see it with the ninth and tenth when you reflect upon it for a moment. But to commit violence against the image of an authority, our generation might wonder: Is that even a thing? Does the author have a script? Does the coach have a play? Does the general have a strategy? And does the growing child care?

But speaking of reciprocal duties, this is why in Ephesians 6, Paul ends the section telling fathers, “do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (v. 4; cf. Col. 3:21). That’s a portion of the Fifth. On what might seem like the “flip side” of Do not provoke: “Do not withhold discipline from a child; if you strike him with a rod, he will not die. If you strike him with the rod, you will save his soul from Sheol” (Prov. 23:13-14). So if you put that together, you have a picture where discipline is good, and that it can and must be done in a spirit of loving correction and not out of anger. Here we are learning God’s child psychology. 

“Folly is bound up in the heart of a child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him” (Prov. 22:15).

I have mentioned that law contains wisdom as well. This is especially true when the spirit of the age has made one of our duties to God—or an entire sphere of moral activity—unintelligible. And one of the clear targets of secularist models of psychology and childhood development has been the absolute demonization of any sort of physical punishment. 

APPLICATION 

Use 1. EVANGELICAL USE. Perfect submission is “first time obedience”. Now, briefly to parents: When we count or delay the discipline moment, we give room to rebellion. That is a reminder that parents help children’s obedience. 

But to children this goes all the way down to perfect honor. Did we as children perfectly dispose ourselves to the way that our parents were instructing us or correcting us? We had a saying for that: Always obey right away, all the way, with a happy heart. 

Use 2. CIVIL USE. Disobedience to ordained authority is only for when they command direct disobedience to God. This is never taken lightly, but neither should we be naive about its frequency. One of the main narrative passages appealed to on this subject is the occasion where Peter and John stood before the Council.

“Whether it is right in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, you must judge, for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard” (Acts 4:19-20).

David was the true anointed and Saul a tyrant; yet rather than kill him off in his own time, David ascends the tops of the cave and says, “May the Lord judge between me and you, may the Lord avenge me against you, but my hand shall not be against you” (1 Sam. 24:12). Now examine the obedience which God commands to every human institution, as Peter says it. There you always find a qualifier; and the reason is obvious in texts like Matthew 22:17-21 and Matthew 28:18. Christ alone is owed unqualified obedience. We understand this about the home, the workplace, and the church. But for some reason, we make an exception to this when it comes to the state.

Hodge speaks to this:

“The principles which limit the authority of civil government and of its agents are simple and obvious. The first is that governments and magistrates have authority only within their legitimate spheres. As civil government is instituted for the protection of life and property, for the preservation of order, for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of those who do well, it has to do only with the conduct, or external acts of men … The magistrate cannot enter our families and assume parental authority, or our churches and teach as a minister … Out of his legitimate sphere a magistrate ceases to be a magistrate. A second limitation is no less plain. No human authority can make it obligatory on a man to disobey God. If all power is from God, it cannot be legitimate when used against God. This is self-evident.”10

Use 3. DIRECTIVE USE. We show love and gratitude to parents by making sure that they are cared for in their old age. Paul makes this a matter of discipleship within the local church context:

“But if a widow has children or grandchildren, let them first learn to show godliness to their own household and to make some return to their parents, for this is pleasing in the sight of God … If any believing woman has relatives who are widows, let her care for them. Let the church not be burdened, so that it may care for those who are truly widows” (1 Tim. 5:4, 16).

A common question once the life-long duties are emphasized: Do I have to obey them as an adult? No. From the beginning, we see God’s design of each new generation: “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24).

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1. Calvin puts forth a few arguments that the fifth must be considered in the Second Table, one being its inclusion by Jesus with the other five of the Second Table in Matthew 19:19; cf. Commentaries: Volume III, 7.

2. Calvin, Commentaries: Volume III, 6.

3. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 398.

4. Hodge, Systematic Theology, III.19.9

5. Turretin, Institutes, II.11.16.2.

6. Turretin, Institutes, II.11.16.12.

7. Calvin, Commentaries: Volume III, 7.

8. Calvin, Commentaries: Volume III, 8.

9. Dabney, Systematic Theology, 399.

10. Hodge, Systematic Theology, III.19.9—he also addresses the right of resistance on the following page, distinguishing between the individual Christian’s duty to submit to punishments even where he justly disobeys the unlawful government. The right of resistance (and revolution) “is in the community,” and Hodge wholly affirms it.