Exodus: Unity of Law and Grace

The Fifth Commandment

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Fifth Commandment

Genre: Lessons with Q & A

Track: 064

Dictation Name: RR171AH64

Location/Venue:

Year: Early 70’s

Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear Him, He also will hear their cry and will save them. Where two or three are gathered together in my name, saith the Lord Jesus, there am I in the midst of them. Let us pray.

Oh Lord, our God, we give thanks unto thee for the blessings of the week past, for thy providential care, and the certainty of thy government. Teach us so to walk that day after day we may serve thee, knowing that it is thy will alone that shall be done, and that all the plans and hopes of the ungodly shall, in due time, be destroyed. Fill us with faith in thy kingdom. Bless us now by thy word and by thy spirit. In Christ’s name, amen.

Our scripture is Exodus 20:12. Our subject: The Fifth Commandment. Exodus 20:12. “Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.”

This commandment is restated in various ways, and the most notable instances are Leviticus 19:3, and Ephesians 6:1-4. First, Leviticus 19:3, “Ye shall fear every man his mother, and his father, and keep my sabbaths: I am the LORD your God.” Then, Paul, in Ephesians 6:1-4, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

In Leviticus 19:3, the Hebrew word for “fear” is “yirah,” and it means both reverence and fear. Family authority is so basic to life, that its disappearance means the disintegration of a society. Failure to honor and fear parental authority means decadence in a culture. This is connected with keeping the sabbath. It means that, both in keeping the sabbath and in honoring one’s parents, we are recognizing an order beyond man, an order which must be honored, and its destruction is to be feared.

While adults are to honor their parents, children are commanded to obey them. This is to be an obedience in the Lord, Paul says, because only then is it righteous or just and not simply fearful. Only this is right, says St. Paul, because it is an obedience as a part of God’s order.

Paul tells us that this is the first commandment with promise, and the promise is that it may be “well with thee and that thou mayest live long on the earth.” The word translated from the Greek as “first” is “protos,” meaning chief, best or foremost in time, place, order, or importance. It means that honoring one’s parents is, in God’s sight, the foremost commandment in human affairs and by His ordination, carries a promise. The promise has two emphases. First, “that it may be well with thee,” and second, that “thou mayest live long on the earth.” This is a very practical commandment, as our Lord makes clear. It begins with the care of elderly parents. In Mark 7:9-13 we read that our Lord says, “Full well,” speaking to the Pharisees, “ye reject the commandment of God, that ye may keep your own tradition. For Moses said, Honour thy father and thy mother; and, Whoso curseth father or mother, let him die the death: But ye say, If a man shall say to his father or mother, It is Corban, that is to say, a gift, by whatsoever thou mightest be profited by me; he shall be free. And ye suffer him no more to do ought for his father or his mother; making the word of God of none effect through your tradition, which ye have delivered: and many such like things do ye.”

Our Lord places the fulfillment of our responsibility to our parents above our responsibility to God as a practical test of faith. There is a reason for this. It is easy to talk about loving God, and many do who will not tithe nor observe moral requirements in one sphere after another. God does not publish a report card on our delinquencies here and now. How we treat our parents, however, publically reveals what our faith is. This is what our Lord says. Faith has practical consequences, or it is not faith. Parents, however, are not allowed to exploit this commandment. The children do not exist for their sake but for the Lord’s. Hence, “Bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” Children are not to be reared to buttress parental pride and purpose, but the Lord’s kingdom.

In the New Testament Greek, the word “honor” means “pay,” as well as “honor,” which I think is marvelous usage. You do not honor a man if you do not pay him properly. And in 1 Timothy 5:17, the statement is, “Let the elders that rule well be counted worthy of double honor, or double pay,” and as we saw when we were studying Leviticus that the meaning is that all those who are levitical today, that is, those who are in the ministry who are in the field of developing a biblical perspective in ideas, and in similarly related spheres, should, in a Godly order, receive double pay. In the Hebrew, as well as in the Greek, as for example in Numbers 22:17, this word “honor,” also refers to pay. Thus, to honor parents means plainly to support them well in their old age. It is a mistake to assume that, because in Hebrew and pagan antiquity, the family often was highly regarded, that this meant a uniform respect for parents. In Antiquity, as today, you have your “ups and downs” in cultures, so that very often in Antiquity, as throughout the centuries, parents have been badly treated. Even in cultures dedicated to ancestor worship, parents have often been abusively treated. Men have been usually far worse than their verbal professions would have us believe, so that men profess one thing and do another, very commonly.

In Proverbs 19:26 and Proverbs 28:24, we read, “He that wasteth his father, and chaseth away his mother, is a son that causeth shame , and bringeth reproach ,” and “Whoso robbeth his father or his mother, and saith , It is no transgression; the same is the companion of a destroyer.” To waste one’s father means to slander or derogate him, and to drive out a mother means to deny a widowed mother support. To rob one’s parents is to deny them their due support in their infirmity, as well as to defraud them of their portion of their estate when a son takes over, because of their infirmity.

The fourth and fifth commandments are very closely linked. The sabbath represents God’s order, and God’s requirement concerning time. God governs time, not man, and to keep the sabbath is to recognize God governs all time absolutely. God promises life to those who honor His ordained temporal source of life, the family. The right to life is a modern term, and is not biblical but it can, in a sense, be applied to the fifth commandment. We are given a promise of life in return for godly obedience to our immediate source of life, our parents.

Over the centuries, many theologians have seen in this commandment, a basis for respect and honor for all duly constituted authorities under God. Rome made parental authority the basis for all authorities, and this concept has a long history, both in the church and outside the church. Of course, this is an interpretation which has often been misused to justify tyrants, but there is little question that we are not permitted to be abusive of our origins, our past, and all valid authorities. We are to give them their due honor.

This commandment, as we’ve seen, requires the support of parents where needed. In Exodus 20:12, the father is named first. In Leviticus 19:3, the mother, to indicate that both are equally entitled to our care and support. Now, the order of the commandments is not an accident. As we have seen, the sabbath laws call for respect for God’s order, and honoring parents means to respect life as well as God’s order. The following commandments are closely related to these. Thou shalt not kill requires a respect for all life in terms of God’s law, and thou shalt not commit adultery, respect for family life.

Antinomians have argued against this as against the whole of the law of God, as though God did not give it. Men like C.J. McIntosh, argued that no man can keep the law, and while he was not a Calvinist, he and others like him stressed the enormity and power of man’s sin. This is common with the antinomians, and it’s very, very erroneous because it’s a half-truth. Their obvious presupposition is that the sin of man prevails over the grace of God in a man’s life, and that’s a fearful kind of error. How can we believe that our sin is greater than the power of God to work in us. Such people have a new form of Pelagianism. Whereas Pelagius stressed the moral powers of man without grace, the new Pelagian stressed the morally evil power of man as against grace. So, in either case, we have heresy, a heresy that says man can resist the grace of God, or man can make himself morally righteous without God, or that man’s sin is such that God is not able to overcome it. The new Pelagians are content to trust the state to do the things which they deny God can do. They believe that the state can restrain man, because they do not believe grace can do so, so that whenever you have Pelagianism and Armenianism arising, it means that the power of God is lessened and the power of man is increased, and when you increase the power of man, you increase the power of every institution in which man has a part. You create a power church. You create an abnormally powerful family, which, on its own has powers in violation of God’s law. You create in every sphere of life, whether in the arts and sciences, or in business, authorities that have no restrain upon them, and in the sphere of the state, you create the power state.

This is why knowledge of the faith, a true and a faithful knowledge is so important. The new Pelagianism, which has merged with Armenianism and is implicit in it, now sees statist coercion as the solution. But such people do not see it, does not even occur to them that coercion by an evil state compounds evil rather than restraining it. And so we see men continuing to hope, not in God, but in statist legislation, or themselves, or in anything other than God, and the evil all around us is compounded.

This is why God says to adults, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” He does not say, “Obey them.” And this is why He tells children, “Obey your parents in the Lord,” and why He issues then immediately the warning to the parents that they are not to provoke their children to wrath, that they are to be circumscribed at all times by God’s law. Remove the restraints of God’s law and you make the center of power the human scene, and then it is a mad and passionate grab by one agency or institution after another to exercise that power. And whoever triumphs, the result is evil, and this is the problem of our time. Let us pray.

Thy word is truth, oh Lord, and thy word sets forth our need, our hope, our remedy. We come to thee, oh Lord, and to thy Son, our savior, rejoicing that, by thy grace we are a new creation. Rejoicing that thy grace is greater than we are and greater than our sin, greater than the sins of all the world, and that it is thy will that shall be done, and thy kingdom that shall come and prevail. Make us zealous in thy service. In Christ’s name, amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?}that try to overspiritualization according to, they try to mention authority and God and stuff rather than this specific…

[Rushdoony] Well, in a sense that rests on an illusion that the Ten Commandments were divided into two halves, and that one half was on one tablet and the other on the other, and they’ve argued back and forth that it was four on one and six on the other, or five and five. Well, the fact is, all ten were on each, because the requirement was when there was a covenant that there be two copies, one for each party. In this case, one for Israel and one for the Lord, and both to be placed in the ark of the covenant. So, both had the whole Ten Commandments on them. Yes?

[Audience] Well, the commandment is translated as honor the past also.

[Rushdoony] Yes, I referred to that briefly, but it does. I used the word “past,” because it very definitely militates against the kind of thing that modernism represents. It was expressed very well by Job in criticizing one of his friends when he said, “No doubt all wisdom was born with you and will die with you,” and that’s the contempt of the past. Any other questions and comments? This commandment is, as you can see, of very great political importance because it does strike at the Pelagianism of our day. It insists that it is to be obedience in the Lord, and when human authorities are spoken of, the same kind of framework is set up. That we are to obey people over us, in the Lord. We are not to have a lawless obedience, or a lawless authority, that’s the implication.

Well, let us bow our heads now in prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word. Thy word is truth, and thy word is a healing power in our lives and in our world. Give us grace to walk faithful to thy word, to give thee the priority in all things, and to be faithful one to another in thee. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape.