Exodus 20:12
12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Welcome to worship here on this, Independence Day. Unfortunately, your unfortunate lot is that you have to hear from one of our elders instead of one of our many many gifted pastors. One of my My name is Collin Hansen. I've been an elder here for a number of of years. And if and if that isn't to give you more trepidation, my wife and I just brought our 3rd child home from the yesterday afternoon.
Collin Hansen:He was almost 3 weeks early, so I thought I was so smart. I'll take the 4th July spot because I'll have to be here, but I won't be, you know, won't be otherwise occupied. And, lo and behold, if that wasn't enough, then we also get the 5th commandment today, honor your father and mother. So it's all coming together. The spirit has a plan.
Collin Hansen:So as in keeping with our 10, our series on the 10 commandments, let's go ahead and recite those 10 commandments together. Alright. Well, he was the $10 founding father without a father. When he was 10, his father split, full of it, debt ridden. His father left, his mother died.
Collin Hansen:He grew up buck wild. His name is? Alexander. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Collin Hansen:Okay. That's it for the hip hop. It's only appropriate on this Independence Day that we open with one of America's most illustrious founding fathers, made famous in recent years by biographer Ron Chernow, and then by Lin Manuel Miranda in his Broadway musical. Now it's odd that we call them founding fathers because the American spirit is all about breaking ties with family, all about breaking ties with country, with history. And no one represents that spirit better than Alexander Hamilton.
Collin Hansen:He gave his life to build a prosperous new nation, free from family, free from tradition, free from the constraints of the old world, free of obligations to the past, to the generations who came before, free from his own impoverished father who abandoned his family. Alexander Hamilton was a Christian, not always an exemplary one. He cheated on his wife with an obvious schemer. His pride raged out of control in his voluminous writing. Zeal to defend his honor ultimately got him killed by Aaron Burr, grandson of the famed preacher Jonathan Edwards and former vice president.
Collin Hansen:But as a Christian, how would Hamilton have understood this biblical command? Honor your father and mother. We're going to explore this command from the context of Ephesians 6:1-4. So if you want to, go ahead and turn to Ephesians 6:1-4. We're gonna first consider the exact meaning of honor, at least try to get as close to it as we can, and why it's especially for hard difficult for us to understand in the United States and in the West more broadly.
Collin Hansen:Then we're going to, in the second part of the sermon, we're going to look at the example of Jesus for how to honor our father and mother. And this will be the basic message then we hopefully walk away from this morning. We honor our earthly parents best when we enjoy our heavenly Father most. We honor our earthly parents best when we enjoy our heavenly father most. That'll be this morning's main message.
Collin Hansen:Let's start then and look to Ephesians 6 1 to 4. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise. That it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.
Collin Hansen:Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks to God. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we ask that You, by Your Spirit, would help us to understand your word, give us insight into your plan of redemption, and give us power to be able to to obey your word even when and especially when it's difficult.
Collin Hansen:In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen. So first, let's just try to figure out what it means, what what honor means. One of the great things about being able to teach a passage is that you ask the questions that sometimes you just are prone to glaze over. Otherwise, I gotta admit, I really had no idea what it meant to honor.
Collin Hansen:I had some vague notions about it. I was actually pretty surprised by what I found. So let's let's look at that. I think one of the typical connotations for this would be to obey or to submit. That seems to be pretty obviously included in this, especially be with the context of Ephesians 6:1.
Collin Hansen:Children, obey your parents in the Lord. That's the connection. So especially for children, that application makes a lot of sense. That's definitely included. However, it's a little bit more complicated when we start to dig in to the other instances of honor in the New Testament as well as in the old.
Collin Hansen:1st Peter 2:17 tells us to honor everyone. K. It's gonna be a little bit complicated there. You can't really obey, submit to everyone, not in this way at least. So it can't mean the exact same thing as that.
Collin Hansen:Romans 12:10 tells us, outdo one another in showing honor. Okay. Again, not really a good fit necessarily for submit or obey. And for that matter, there's actually a whole different word for submission, so they can't mean the same thing there. You might think, okay, well, what about respect?
Collin Hansen:That seems to be implied as well, and I would agree that's included. But it's not quite that either, because there's a separate word in Romans 13:7 alongside honor for respect. Respect and honor. So again, it's not likely to be the same thing there. So we do get a clue in Ephesians 6:3, which is this quote from Exodus 20:12.
Collin Hansen:That it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land. I think we're getting closer now. So I'm gonna show my work a little bit. I don't recommend this typically, but it it was pretty fascinating for me to go through. So honoring the old testament, Exodus 20, there is the same word that we typically translate as glory.
Collin Hansen:Weightiness, heaviness. You can see that that would be a very different expectation. Glory glory or heavy, your father it doesn't make make much sense there. Okay. Then we have a Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint.
Collin Hansen:Then of course, we have the New Testament that's in Greek. Entirely different word, entirely different connotation. More or less, it's a type of economic term, which means to provide for the needs of, especially economically. So we have here on the on the one hand, the Hebrew, which is about this glory or heaviness. On the other hand, we have this provide for the financial needs of.
Collin Hansen:I think more or less our definition can be found somewhere in between those two options or some kind of combination of those two options. I should say it cannot be limited to just take care of your parents, because there's a lot more there's other instances of this as well that don't allow that interpretation. We're called to honor God. We're called to honor the emperor, and they don't need us to provide for them financially. We don't have to take care of them.
Collin Hansen:So I think if we if we understand these different but overlapping understandings of honor, the best way to put it would be to revere or to give them what's due their station or position, and to pay them respect, which also includes financial assistance. So, to dig a little bit deeper on here, we can see that we're called to honor God, honor the emperor, honor father and mother, all of whom are in positions of authority. All of them in positions of authority there. But it gets a little bit more complicated than that. We've seen then, 1st Peter 2:17, I mentioned that earlier, honor everyone.
Collin Hansen:We see 1st Peter 3:17 that wives should be honored as the weaker vessel. Okay. To clarify that, I think we just need to go to 1st Corinthians 12 22 to 26. Trust me. It'll pay off.
Collin Hansen:We'll go to first Corinthians 1222 to 26, and it says this. On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable. And on those parts of the body that we think less honorable, we bestow the greater honor. And our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But god has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.
Collin Hansen:If one member suffers, all suffer together. If one member is honored, all rejoice together. K. I think this passage is what illuminates what we're talking about here with honoring our father and mother. 12/23.
Collin Hansen:On the less honorable, we bestow greater honor. 12/25. So there will be no division, and the members may have the same care for one another. This is what Ephesians 6 3 and Exodus 2012 are talking about. It's that phrase, that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.
Collin Hansen:That is not merely metaphorical. That is actually literal. That's what it's talking about there. So there's 2 meanings there. One is that it'll go well with you.
Collin Hansen:You'll live long in the land. You will not be judged because you're obeying this commandment. You're submitting. You're respecting. At the same time, it'll go well with you in the land because you'll actually be providing financially for the weaker members of your community, I e the parents, I e the elderly.
Collin Hansen:This is why this passage is so often confusing for us, because we're often teaching it in the context of children. We're doing a catechism. We're doing Sunday school. But that wasn't the original audience for the commandment. That would've been more broadly the entire community.
Collin Hansen:So it would've been understood to them not so much primarily to be about obeying from children to their authorities, but primarily about taking care of the most vulnerable people in the community. Those people who can't defend themselves, Those people who can't provide for themselves. And when you do that, they live longer. The community functions in a more healthy way as it ought to. That's what it means.
Collin Hansen:You're giving your parents a home, feeding them and clothing them. You're creating this kind of virtuous cycle where the children do for their parents what the parents had done for them as children. That's how it goes well with them in the land. So that's one of the main reasons why I think it's a little bit confusing. What does it mean to honor your father and mother?
Collin Hansen:Because we're often learning it as children. But the second reason I think it's difficult to understand this is because in the United States, we're often and in the West more broadly, we're often using parents as a kinda foil for our maturity and our adulthood. We may obey our parents for a time, for a season, but then we chart our own course. We define ourselves against our parents. We define ourselves against all authorities of our youth.
Collin Hansen:We have what's called a coming of age narrative that assumes that parents are generally well meaning, but ultimately, we see them as essentially clueless. We see them as stuck in the past. To help you understand how essentially radical that notion is, all you would have to do is study this passage in a place like Korea, or to study a place or or like in China, where the obvious connotation to them would be to respect, to obey, and ultimately, to provide for and to care for. To that that that would be the obvious meaning to them. But again, we're more we more get caught up in debates about, at what point do I have to stop obeying my parents?
Collin Hansen:That's a good debate to have because clearly, the relationship changes. But you can see how much our cultural context influences how we come to this passage. There's also a more practical reason why I think it can be difficult to understand what this means. That's because we have social security. We have Medicare.
Collin Hansen:We have nursing homes to care for our parents in their old age. We have retirement accounts that we set up to provide for ourselves at that time. So we often think of our parents, at least some of us, more in terms of the kind of inheritance that they will give us, as opposed to how we would be caring for them financially and otherwise in their old age. Now I'm not saying in this that necessarily nursing homes or social security are a bad thing, just because they make it a little bit difficult for us to understand this. To be clear, I'm not sure Social Security will still be around for other people to be able to take advantage of.
Collin Hansen:And I do think it's worth pointing out that 1 third of the deaths from COVID 19 came in institutional care facilities, such as nursing homes. So I don't think it would necessarily be a bad application of this passage if more of us thought about bringing older parents into our homes, when possible, to care for them. And I know some of you do that. But to be clear, that's possibly a good implication of this, but I don't think it's a necessary application. I do think the core of what it means to honor is to revere, To pay them what they're due.
Collin Hansen:To respect. But the distinction is that in a healthy community, this is happening in multiple directions, from the top all the way to the bottom, where the strong find ways to honor the weak and to care for them. And ultimately, what results is a healthier community all around. So that's the basic meaning of what it mean what I can tell, what it means to honor your father and mother. But even though it's a holiday, that's not where the sermon stops.
Collin Hansen:So let's just keep going and see what else we can discover here. So let's see what else this passage might have to offer us. So you've got it. You're thinking, I'm providing for my family. I'm helping take care of my parents in their old age.
Collin Hansen:Check. Okay. Well, let's go back to Hamilton. No more hip hop promise. But let's go back to Hamilton.
Collin Hansen:Why did he believe that his father had deserted his family? It was because he couldn't support them financially. And his biographer, Chernow, writes this. Father and son never entirely lost touch with each other, but a curious detachment, an estrangement as much psychological as geographical, separated them. Okay.
Collin Hansen:You don't need to be an expert therapist in family systems to detect the origin of Hamilton's boundless pursuit of honor and ambition. Some people rebel against their absent parents. Others try to prove their worth. Hamilton spent his entire life trying to prove that he was something to someone. He never could fill that void that was left by His Father.
Collin Hansen:He never could make that ache go away. It was a major factor that contributed ultimately to His death in that duel. When you're counseling, whether it's you're the person doing the counseling or being counseled, you're almost always dealing with parents and children. Almost always. I don't need to know each person, each one of you this morning to know that you're carrying some kind of burden in relation to your parents.
Collin Hansen:Most likely, some kind of burden there. And I want you to know on this Independence Day that you have come to the right book. Not Chernow's biography, but the Bible. You've come to the right book because the Bible is brutally honest. Brutally honest about parents and children.
Collin Hansen:It is anything but naive about the challenge for children to honor their father and mother. So let's go on an Independence Day tour of the bible's history on parenting. The bible's manual to being a good parent. Let's start with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve.
Collin Hansen:Now their son, Cain, killed their other son, Abel. Not off to a good start there. 2nd, let's go ahead to Noah. Noah got drunk, exposed himself to his sons, one of whom laughed at him. K.
Collin Hansen:Abraham conceived his first son with his slave. Then he ultimately banished that son and his mother, took his second son, Isaac, to Mount Moriah to sacrifice him at God's command, which to be clear was the right and faithful thing to do. I just have to think it complicated the father son dynamic a little bit. I don't know. Isaac, he's tricked by his wife, Rebekah, to bless their younger son, Jacob, instead of their older son, Esau.
Collin Hansen:This rivalry led to centuries of warfare between Israel, that is Jacob, and Edom, which is Esau. Jacob himself favored his youngest son, Joseph, so much that his resentful older brothers left him for debt at the bottom of a well before they realized they could make a buck by selling him into slavery. Friends, we are not even out of the book of Genesis. I ain't out of Genesis yet. Okay.
Collin Hansen:David's son sexually assaulted his daughter. David did nothing about it. So his other son killed his brother, then led a revolt to overthrow his dad's kingdom. David's military commander ultimately then killed his son. 1 of David's sons, Solomon, world renowned for his wisdom.
Collin Hansen:He thought it was a great idea to take 700 wives, 300 mistresses. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that he wasn't the most attentive father to thousands of offspring. Resulting civil war in his house led the kingdom of Israel to divide. Folks, I am only talking about the heroes of the Bible. These are the Bible's heroes.
Collin Hansen:Hezekiah. Hezekiah was one of the great reformer kings of Judah. His son, Manasseh, sacrificed his children to the Canaanite God of Molech. Child sacrifice is considered the most heinous sin of the Old Testament. It was widely practiced in the ancient near east.
Collin Hansen:Seems to be more universal than that. Excavations in Mexico City have found widespread human sacrifice from the Aztec civilization as well, which often included people that they had enslaved and captured, but also included children. They've uncovered, underneath Mexico City, entire mountains of skulls. This appears to be a kind of universal evil, and clearly, it's pretty hard to honor your father and mother when they're killing you, or putting you to death. Jeremiah 732, the prophet warns that the place of child sacrifice from Manasseh in Jerusalem will become the valley of slaughter in God's judgment.
Collin Hansen:That is exactly what happened. That's what God did by bringing the Babylonians to raise Jerusalem, destroy the temple in God's righteous judgment for this for His chosen people sacrificing their own children to a Canaanite false god. This valley of slaughter, the site of Manasseh's child sacrifice, was called Gehenna, or the Valley of Hinnom in Jerusalem. You may not think that you know this place, but I promise you, you do. Because in your Bible, it's translated a certain way, real simply.
Collin Hansen:Hell. It's translated as hell. It's the place of fire. When Jesus talks about hell, He's using the imagery, He's using the language, the experience of the place where the Jews killed their own children. Evil exemplified is child sacrifice.
Collin Hansen:So, father, the Bible has so much to say about parents and children, because this is the essential problem of human nature. Fathers and mothers mess up their children who take it out on their own. Children, it is an endless cycle. Sometimes the children rebel, like Manasseh to his father Hezekiah. Sometimes they try to prove their worth to their parents, like with Alexander Hamilton.
Collin Hansen:So the question for us then is, how do you stop the cycle? How does the cycle ever end? What if you've never seen good parenting? How can we honor our parents if they hurt us? What if your parents were or are today dishonorable?
Collin Hansen:What do you do? Let's look again then to the Jews. They knew God as Father, but they It was not common for them to worship Him as Father, until Jesus came as the Son. Until Jesus came as the Son, and when he just taught his disciples to pray, our Father. Let's look closely at the zoom in on the geography of Jerusalem.
Collin Hansen:On the night he was betrayed, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. Is to the south of the city. It'd only take you today about 30 minutes to walk between Gethsemane and Gehenna. Jesus prayed in Gethsemane because he knew he was headed the next day to the place of the skull. You've probably heard that before.
Collin Hansen:Golgotha, just north of the city. Only about a 20 minute walk from Gethsemane today to Golgotha to the north of the city. When Gethsemane, knowing what lay before him, the son prayed to the father, Matthew 26:39, and He said this. My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.
Collin Hansen:At Golgotha, Jesus endured Gehenna. At Golgotha, Jesus endured Gehenna. The sun passed through the fire as the sacrifice for sin. But this son would be totally different, So was His Father. This is no Hezekiah and Manasseh.
Collin Hansen:This is no David and Solomon anymore. They're totally different. Because this son perfectly honored His Father. This son perfectly honored His Father. He did his father's will.
Collin Hansen:He obeyed his father. But Jesus is not some kind of passive victim in a child sacrifice scheme. He offered Himself willingly as a sacrifice, even though He had never sinned, which is precisely what made Him the perfect and only acceptable atoning sacrifice. Jesus explained all of this well before His death in John 10 17 to 18. He said this.
Collin Hansen:For this reason, the Father loves me, Because I laid down my life, that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again. This charge, I received from my father. Jesus did not die until he was ready.
Collin Hansen:Till he was ready. Luke 2346 tells us this from the cross. Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, father, father, into your hands, I commit my spirit. And having said this, he breathed his last. And never through this Gehenna at Golgotha did the perfect fellowship between Father and Son from all eternity past ever break.
Collin Hansen:Never did their love for one another, their perfect love for one another, ever fail or ever falter. The perfect Son cried out in His agony to His heavenly Father, and it was finished. What? What was finished? What was finished?
Collin Hansen:The endless generational cycle of sin. Parents killing their children. Children dishonoring their parents. This genealogy of misery that we're all a part of Every generation since Adam and Eve condemned to death because of sin. The perfect son died, so that we could join the family of the heavenly father.
Collin Hansen:He endured Gehenna so that we could be spared the valley of judgment, the place of fire, if we only believe. And Jesus did even more, even more than this. He obeyed His Father's will to the end, so that we could obey the 5th commandment, Honor your father and mother. Honoring your parents is one of the hardest things we ever do in this life. That's even if you have honorable parents.
Collin Hansen:Physically and economically, it is draining to obey this commandment. You add something like dementia, and it makes it feel completely impossible. And what if your parents, they treated you badly? What if your parents, they're not even around like Hamiltons, But you're still living in the pain of their perpetual prolonged absence. How were you supposed to hold up here?
Collin Hansen:It's one of the most touching moments, I think, in all of scripture. It's in John 19, verses 26 and 27. This is Jesus right in the middle of his Gehenna at Golgotha. Is in the middle of the fiery trial. And still, at this moment, he is still thinking of others.
Collin Hansen:He's still putting others ahead of himself. He's still perfectly obeying the 5th commandment. Think about this, friends. Who taught Jesus this commandment? It was His mother.
Collin Hansen:It was His mother Mary. It's his stepfather, Joseph. But Joseph's gone by this point. Joseph's dead. We don't know how long it's been.
Collin Hansen:Joseph's not around. He's not around. But they taught Jesus this commandment. They helped raise Him to to follow it. And Jesus, even on the cross, He never forgot it.
Collin Hansen:This is what we're told. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, woman, behold your son. Then he said to the disciple, that is John, behold your mother. And from that hour, the disciple took her to his own home. Jesus was the oldest son to Mary, and even in this moment of distress, he's still finding a way to provide for her, to care for her, to fulfill His obligation, to fulfill the 5th commandment.
Collin Hansen:So you see, we honor our earthly parents best when we enjoy our heavenly father the most. We honor earthly parents best, and we enjoy our heavenly father most. When we believe this Jesus, we belong to His heavenly Father. He becomes then our physical strength when we don't think we can endure another day of painful labor with our elderly parents. He becomes our emotional comfort when our parents berate us.
Collin Hansen:It becomes our financial provision if our children abandon their obedience to this commandment. He becomes our gracious forgiver when we ourselves break this commandment. The Father and the Son break the cycle so that generations are no longer doomed to repeat the sins of their fathers. Praise God. We honor our earthly parents best when we enjoy our heavenly Father most.
Collin Hansen:Let's pray. Jesus, we praise you for your obedience even to death, and we rejoice in your triumph over death through the resurrection. Spirit, we need you now to help us to obey this commandment wherever we are, in whatever circumstances, God, they're all known to you. You see us. You know us.
Collin Hansen:You love us. And you promise to help us in this time of need. And we we need that, God. On this Independence Day, God, we declare our complete and total dependence on you. In Jesus' name, we pray.
Collin Hansen:Amen.