February 8
Stephen MattsonDay 241: Parents
Deuteronomy 5 is a recap of the Ten Commandments. Perhaps the commandment that gives some of us the most difficulty is...oddly enough...number 5. The one about honoring parents.
This fifth commandment (some would say the only commandment of the ten) comes with a promise. "That it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you."
Many of us moderns (and post-moderns) might find ourselves scratching our heads. Because so many of us, in our estimation, did not have, or do not have parents deserving honor.
We're a smug bunch, we are. As we get older, we also come to (at least some) grips with our own parents' foibles, failures and misdeeds. So to some extent we distance ourselves from our parents. Or maybe wish we could. Self-protective measures.
Now, my own story is not that. God blessed me with wonderful parents, and an idyllic childhood. In fact, if anyone had reason to distance themselves, it was them from me, truth be told.
But many people I know, including perhaps some reading this today, struggle as adults to know how best to interact with their parents. Especially how to tangibly honor them.
Some parents have not been good parents. Some parents have been disinterested, disengaged grandparents. Some were even abandoned by a parent. (And some parents come to visit their adult children in Alaska, and stay for weeks if not months on end.)
But God is not unclear. He tells us, all of us, to honor our parents. So it will go well with [us] in the land that the LORD has given.
Two questions, then. Why? And how? Why will it go well with us? And how does it go well for us?
The very last verse in chapter 5 sheds light on my two questions. Verse 33 reads, "You shall walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land that you shall possess."
So, God is saying something, perhaps without saying it, but it's perfectly clear none the less. God saying, 'the extent to which you honor your parents is a tangible expression of the extent to which you honor me.'
If any of us are prone to ignore, distance ourselves from, and judge our parents as having not met our expectations, we may have valid justifications. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to transfer those same justifications to God, Himself.
God knows this. He said (in verse 29), "Oh that they had such a heart as this always, to fear me and to keep all my commandments, that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever!"
Our God is so incredibly compassionate toward us. Yet some of us may regard God as primarily severe and mean-spirited in how He's treated us, especially in regards to the household we were born into.
But God's severity is reserved only for those who despise His compassion. Then by extension, only for those who refuse to honor Him, above all else.
For any of us to have compassion for our very human parents, or a compassionate memory of those departed, is an act of God in our hearts. Many of us carry the wounds suffered at the hands of our parents into the present, and fully intend to carry those same hurts into the future unabated. (Sigmund Freud built his career on this.)
Honoring our parents, thus, may be improbable if not impossible. Frankly, obedience to any of the Ten Commandments is impossible. If left to be accomplished under our own power and resolve. I don't know about you, but I am in short supply of both.
God gives us the capacity to obey. That said, if we have been told to honor our parents, then it must be true He will also give us the ability to do so.
Because, in our relationship with them, and in our relationship with Him, He really is compassionate, and He really does want it to go well for us and our descendants forever.
It may be a serious undertaking for some of us to honor our parents, beyond acknowledging birthdays and the Hallmark holidays. Just like it's a serious undertaking for us to honor the LORD our God, above all others.
