Let's look at the 5th and 6th of the Ten Commandments, as most Protestants count them.
Honor Parents
Exodus 20:12 Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.
This is a positive commandment, proactive honoring of parents. How do we keep that in the spirit? We are all familiar with people calling others by their title as a sign of respect, but what such a letter-of-the-law custom does not do, is show what’s really in our hearts. Notice I said “sign” of respect. It’s like holding up a sign that says, “I’m obeying the protocol” and that may be appropriate, but have we ever looked past the words to our attitude? I can call someone sir and still be rude, or I can call someone by a nickname and have an attitude of the highest respect.
What that means is that the rules of etiquette are often just a veneer that covers up the hypocrisy that resides in our hearts. That’s the thing with honoring our parents. We may not always agree with them and we may know some of their darker secrets, but the spirit of the command is that we give them honor from the heart. Why? What if a parent sexually or physically abused us? What if they are drunkards? What if they are hated by all and sundry?
A first reason we ought to honor our parents is that, despite all their sins, they gave us life. In most cases they provided us with food and lodging for at least a couple of decades. Even if, as some have experienced, they tried unsuccessfully to kill us several times, or abandoned us, they did give us a start.
Another reason is something we only begin to discover as we have our own children. Being a parent is very difficult. Lack of sleep, infant toileting, a screaming baby, teenage hormonal attitudes of extremism, and the financial challenges are more than many weak people can handle. We ought to honor them out of gratitude for the start they gave us in life, even if it was only small.
Another reason is that our parents are the first authority figures in our lives, and learning to have a healthy relationship with imperfect human authority is a key to getting along in any society. And most important of all is, that if we can honor the imperfect authority figures in our lives, then we’ll have less problem honoring God.
So, none of us honor our parents perfectly. We all fail. Yet, if our hearts are grateful, and our love of them is sincere, we have the beginnings of the spirit of the commandment. When our obedience was imperfect and we made many mistakes in honoring our parents, we look to a perfect Savior, who honored His heavenly Father even to the cross, saying “nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done.” (Luke 22:42)
Murder
Exodus 20:13 You shall not murder.
There is another of those commands stated in the negative. A positive way of saying it is to value life. That is a principle or spirit of the law that Christians use in regard to topics like abortion, the poor, immigrants, paying a decent wage and so on. This also introduces several discussions of ethics among Christians such as, should we be pacifists or is there such a thing as a just war? Should Christians be for or against capital punishment? Those are discussions for another day.
In Matthew 5 Jesus explained that a spirit of murder is involved in name-calling and other verbal abuse. Now here is an area where we all fail. How easy does the word “idiot” or similar drop from our lips in traffic? Or when a police officer pulls someone over who has offended us in traffic, are we just a little too gleeful, a little too vengeful? Thank God for His mercy.
