The Ten Commandments, 4 of 6: Fifth and Sixth Commandments
Scripture: Exodus 20:12, Deuteronomy 5:16
Exodus 20:12, “Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
Deuteronomy 5:16, “Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
“Honor your father and your mother:” Honor is a term of tribute. Leviticus 19:3, “You shall each revere your mother and father.” Honoring your parents is to revere them, regard them with great respect, and treat them to standards of conduct that reflect reverence and high regard by fulfilling the obligations due them.
Why honor parents: it is fitting that every person realizes that his or her parents are the cause of his or her being in the world. The parents labored through thousands of hours over each child from birth to early adulthood. Yes, there are many joys but also many times of troubles and worries. Hence, it is proper for a child to give parents every honor and every benefit that he or she can. This honor is basic to the integrity of the family, the stability of society, and generational continuity.
Actions demonstrate honor: The Bible explicitly requires honor and respect for God and parents. Honor is a duty, an obligation for parents and children. Parents must train and coach their children to establish habits, attitudes, and actions of honor and respect for God and parents. That must go hand in hand with parental actions to demonstrate honor and respect for their child. Proper language is a powerful teacher. From the time the child begins to talk, little things like teaching your child to say please and thank you, and to answer adults’ questions with Yes sir, No sir, and Yes ma’am and No ma’am are the beginning of that teaching. As the child grows, he or she may disagree with his or her parents or other people from time to time; teach them to respectfully disagree. A part of respectfully disagreeing is patiently listening to those with whom he or she disagrees. Parents are to teach their children to forgive freely those who make mistakes including forgiving themselves. Gentle corrections of a child’s mistakes are a part of their learning honor. Later in life, circumstances change. Duty requires the child to make sure that the parents have enough to eat, have a safe home, and have transportation when needed. If parents can do these things for themselves and afford their needs, the child is not obligated to provide or pay for parents’ comforts. Parents feel better when they can support themselves physically and financially. If that is getting just too hard for the grown child to do, he or she must find other ways to assist even if it means hiring help.
A child does not quarrel with his or her parents. There are always respectful ways to discuss issues. “I cannot approve of you doing that, Dad!” is also disrespectful. Mom and Dad do not require your approval. Unless they ask you to, do not call—or even refer—to your parents by name, even posthumously: they are mom and dad. If your parents are psychologically unstable, a child must still respect them. A child must respect stepparents, parents-in-law, grandparents, and older siblings.
“As the LORD your God commanded you:” He is serious. Parents are the vice-regents of the Heavenly Father. From the parents, the child learns obedience and how ladies and gentlemen are to conduct themselves. It is a mistake to view civil authority as superior to parental authority when the opposite is true. Acknowledgment of parental authority reinforces the fabric of human society and makes possible the transmission of values and the progress of humanity.
From Exodus, “so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” Deuteronomy, “It may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” These phases, in slightly different wordings, occur at least twenty-five times in the Bible. The meaning is simple: obeying God’s Commandments so that you may live, prosper, prolong your days, and have a positive effect on the nation in which you live. I contend that if the majority of the people of the world lived by these commandments, the world would be a far happier place—more of that later.
I have given you a brief overview of the Fifth Commandment. Now we look at some of the effects of following God’s law: This commandment is comprehensive in that its application for a child’s behavior toward his or her parents is different at different ages; dependence of the child on the parents’ changes over time to the trust of the parents on the child. Honoring parents will involve different acts and modes of being as the child grows and the parents’ age for the situation of a child of five with parents that are in their twenties is different than that of a child of fifty-five with parents that are in their seventies. Situations change even beyond that. Perhaps the father is deceased, and the mother is alone, this commandment demands taking such changes in circumstances into account. The shift in responsibility incumbent upon the child and parents governs the responsibility in a given relationship that one did not create but cannot abandon. Being a child puts one in a relational category, not an age category.
This commandment has a great cultural impact and is fundamental to a healthy society. This parent-child-child-parent relationship is great training for “love thy neighbor.” Neighborly relationships begin in the family circle. Here, a child can make mistakes and be lovingly corrected. Bad treatment of mother and father leads to bad treatment of other members of the community particularly of the weaker and more vulnerable persons. That leads to poor and unhappy relationships. Bad treatment and/or neglect of a child by parents are even more devastating. Loving treatments in parent-child relations lead to good results and much happier people.
“Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you” also has to do with our respect for and obedience to authority. This respect for authority and obedience to authority starts with the child-parent relationship. Without this obedience to authority, societies crumble. Obedience is a duty. It encompasses one’s responsibility for the safety and good of oneself, one’s parents, one’s neighbors, one’s community, and our nation. Those in authority protect our rights and thus we are responsible for electing and obeying those in authority. This elect and obey includes elected officials from the president to our local sheriff and those our laws appoint over us. The Fifth Commandment’s aim is broad rather than narrow; this commandment affects all relationships.
Now for some editorial remarks: “So that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land.” Things are not going well in America today. With the removal of the Ten Commandments from our schools and courthouse walls, our emphasis on this foundation of America’s ever-improving culture has not only stopped, but it is also declining. Honor our father and mother is lacking in many homes. As a result, we have seen a decrease in respect for authority and a frightening increase in violent crime. Disobedient disrespectful children have grown into disrespectful disobedient adults. It is my opinion that many of today’s problems are due to the lack of parental leadership in many homes especially during the formative years of a child’s life. Some politicians want to control those formative years filling our children not with honor their parents but with secular values. We even have major politicians insisting that parents should have no role in directing the education of their children. Honor thy father and thy mother is a most important commandment. Let us pray for a return to it.
As we move out of the commandments that concern our duties to God and our parents, we move into the commandments concerning life with our neighbors. These last five commandments are to protect the well-being of each member of the community. These commandments place upon each person a responsibility to others. We begin these last five commandments with the one that protects life itself.
The Commandment: Exodus 20:13 and Deuteronomy 5:17, “You shall not murder.” The King James Version of the Bible along with several other versions of the Bible interpreted the Hebrew word harag in the Exodus as “kill.” However, the word in Deuteronomy is hemit; which means, “put to death.” Recent translations have recognized that the Hebrew verbs used in the two versions of this commandment are more specialized than the verbs once commonly translated into the English “kill”. The more accurate translation of Hebrew is “murder”. This makes sense as the Bible sanctions killing in cases of self-defense and national wars. The Bible also distinguishes between accidental killing and murder. Other English words that indicate an intentional form of murder are genocide, euthanasia, abortion, and the like. “You shall not murder.” is the more meaningful translation.
Unchanging moral principles, naturally occurring in nearly all societies, are Natural Laws. Even if we did not have the Ten Commandments, murder is wrong. Murder is a part of a body of unchanging moral principles regarded as a basis for all human conduct.
Christians and Jews, we see another aspect of taking a human life: The most precious gift God bestows is life. Further, God created all of us in His image. Therefore, to murder is to blaspheme God. To murder someone not only extinguishes that person’s life; it extinguishes all life that may have come from that person, all his or her descendants.
Numbers Chapter 35:6-34 discusses accidental killing in depth. Numbers 35:6, “The towns that you give to the Levites shall include the six cities of refuge, where you shall permit a slayer to flee, ….” “A slayer,” or “manslayer” in some translations, is someone who accidentally killed a person. To protect such a person, the law designated six cities of asylum for people who had killed someone unintentionally and felt that he or she could not get a fair hearing in the area where the act occurred. Examples of people who are eligible for cities of refuge are a stonemason who accidentally drops a stone on someone below killing that person. Someone who hits another with his hand not intending to kill but that person dies. These cities were also protected against vendettas. Numbers 35 goes on to say that killing a person with an iron stone or wooden implement designed to kill was not eligible for cities of refuge. If the court found that the killer purposefully planned to kill, the punishment was more severe because such actions negatively affected the safety of the community.
In our country, we have types of murder and types of manslaughter. Murder charges range from first-degree for premeditated murder, second-degree for intent to harm but did not intend to kill, down to justifiable homicide. Manslaughter ranges from accidental killing down to voluntary manslaughter where someone takes a life during circumstances that alter a killer’s behavior. Further, defendants who have fears about getting a fair trial may ask for a change of venue, they have the opportunity to cast out jurors who may be biased and they may label some witness's prejudice. These ideas of cities of refuge are the Bible’s answer to manslaughter.
Prohibitions against irresponsible decisions and actions are laws that help prevent accidental killing. For example, a parapet is a low protective wall along the edge of a roof. Deuteronomy 22:8, “When you build a new house, you shall make a parapet for your roof, so that you do not bring bloodguilt on your house if anyone should fall from it.” This law makes people responsible for the health and safety of one’s community. This mundane is a detail from everyday life, yet the law about parapets is much broader; it has at least two meanings: one is the simple literal meaning, and the other is the creative outgrowth of the simple into wide-ranging principles. The simple meaning, most houses in ancient Middle Eastern countries had flat roofs. During the day, the roof served as a work area. The hot Middle Eastern sun made the roof an ideal place for such activities as drying grain. At night, the roof was a cooler place to sleep in the warmer weather. Parapets were to prevent people from falling off the roof. The parapet had to be high and strong enough to prevent accidents like rolling off the roof while sleeping to protect children from stumbling and falling off. If someone did fall off, the owner was liable. If someone pushed someone off resulting in injury or death, both the perpetrator and the owner of the house would get the same punishment. Today, many states call deaths due to reckless behavior negligent homicide.
The broader meaning: the same scriptural principle teaches that any person in charge of a property is obligated to remove or make harmless anything that might cause serious injury or death. God expects us to foresee the injuries coming from our actions, decisions, and passiveness. God wants us to build the kind of world that enhances the health and safety of all. Genesis 4:9, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Only a murderer like Cain renounces his or her obligations to humankind. We are our brother’s keeper. Deuteronomy 16:20, “Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue, so that you may live and occupy the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
Another related scripture, Leviticus 19:17, “You shall not hate in your heart anyone of your kin; you shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself.” This commandment seeks to stop and protect life by focusing on vengeance, envy, bigotry, and intolerance; the mindsets that evoke hostile acts. Jesus covers this in Matthew 5:21-22, “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.” Protection of life involves the heart as well as the hand. We are obligated to control our attitudes and feelings. Anger and/or hatred inspire hostile acts. Jesus says to stop it before it becomes hate.
The same applies to the preservation of life. God forbids us to hurt, harm, or kill another person because He wants us to hold our neighbor’s life as precious as our own. “You shall not murder,” tells us that whatever sways us to hate and/or be violent is wrong. Leviticus 19:17, “Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt.” Matthew 22:39 and Mark 12:31, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” God not only condemns envy, hatred, and anger, but He requires us to love our neighbor by showing patience, peace, gentleness, mercy, and friendliness toward our neighbor and to prevent injury of any sort to him or her. Ephesians 4:26, “’In your anger do not sin’: Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry.” Ephesians 4:31-5:2, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you. Therefore, be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” I hope you see that “You shall not murder.” encompasses much.
