Deuteronomy

Honoring Life

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: 17-110

Genre: Talk

Track: 017

Dictation Name: RR187J17

Location/Venue:

Year: 1993

Grace be to you and peace from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ who gave Himself for our sins that He might deliver us from this present evil world according to the will of God and our Father from whom be glory forever and ever, Amen. Let us pray.

Oh lord our God we give thanks unto Thee for the blessings of the week past. We thank Thee that Thy hand is upon us for good. That all the days of our life You art closer to us than we are to ourselves. To work in us that which is pleasing in Thy sight. To make all things work together for Thy providential purpose. Teach us therefore daily to trust in Thee and to know that Thou art able. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Our scripture is Deuteronomy 5:16. Our subject: Honoring Life.

“Honor thy father and thy mother as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee that thy days may be prolonged and that it may go well with thee in the land that the Lord thy God giveth thee. “

The word honor given in both exodus 20:12 and again in Deuteronomy 5:16 is a translation of a Hebrew word that’s root meaning is weighty. It’s use in the commandment means that honoring one’s parents is a very serious, a weighty matter in the sight of God. Our parents are our immediate source of life. To dishonor them is to despise both God and life. We are then at war with our own being in favor of an imagined non-being. There is a relationship between the hatred of ones parents and a will to suicide. The persons attempting or committing suicide are marked among other things by a consuming self-pity. Self-pity as I have often said is the worst cancer that afflicts humanity. In recent generations have been very prone to it. The rebellious person pities himself that one so noble and good as himself or herself must submit to a stupid and evil inanity at the hands of the father and/or the mother. The rebellious and suicidal person is also prone to be a revolutionary and the world is seen as entrenched evil against his or her personal goodness. Their attitude is I am good and noble but I am surrounded by people who don’t understand me and who are stupid.

Well there is always enough evil in the world and some sin in the best of parents. To lend a false justification to this perspective but is a monstrous pervasion because it refuses to recognize the sin of the rebel. To dishonor ones parents is to dishonor life and authority in every sphere. It creates a rebellion which is essentially against life and therefore its suicidal nature. Saint Paul refers to this commandment and its meaning in Ephesians 6:1-4 where he says:

“Children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right. honor your father and your mother which is the first commandment with a promise so it may be well with you and that you may live long upon the earth. Fathers do not provoke your children to wrath but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.”

Obedience is required in the Lord, as a religious duty. This requirement is of children, honor is required of all, old and young. Fathers in particular are strictly commanded not to provoke their children to anger and disobedience. While their sin does not excuse the child’s sin all the same fathers in particular, even though this is true of mothers, fathers in particular are held accountable if their lawless exercise of authority provokes their children into a like lawlessness. Paul speaks also this of the first commandment with promise. First is in the Greek text [unknown Greek word] which we have in prototype, protocol and other words. And it can mean first in order of importance and this is the likely meaning. The promise of life attaches to all of God’s law as Deuteronomy 4:40 makes clear where it declares:

“Thou shalt keep therefore His statutes and commandments which I command thee this day, that it may go well with Thee and with Thy children after thee, and thy may prolong thy days upon the earth which the Lord thy God giveth thee forever.”

The consequence of obeying the commandment has an effect on the next generation so that in historical link is established. Whereas rebelliousness and dishonor is tied to revolution, the honoring of parents is firmly linked to social stability, a godly stability.

What God clearly says about obedience to all his law and especially to honoring one’s parents is that it is the key to social stability and a long life. The long life given is both personal and societal. Again we have to remember that this promise of long life is for obedience to all of God’s law and the law with a singular priority is honoring one’s parents. The link to life and prosperity is a very real one. That it may go well with thee, we are told. One aspect of honoring parents that has a long history is caring for them in their old age. This was the practice of the godly in Israel and orthodox Judaism still. It also has a long history in Christendom even to the design of homes in some countries so that in their infirmity and old age the parents could be housed and cared for. Clearly therefore any study of the interpretation of this text, of the meaning of the word honor makes clear that one aspect of its meaning has been actual services. This is very clear from our Lord’s words in Mark 7:7-13. He sharply attacks as lawlessness any failure to care for needy parents. It is he told the Pharisees making the word of God of none effect through your tradition. We cannot reduce the honoring of parents to mere verbal respect. There is still another aspect to this commandment that we cannot neglect without warping its meaning. There are two consequences to obedience that are especially stressed. First the promise of a prolonged life is a very important one. Second, it is tied to life in the land which God gives his people and it is the place where he prospers them. This commandment is both life inked and land linked. Our faith is not simply a spiritual religion but a land based faith. Psalm 37:11 declares that the meek shall inherit the earth and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace. Our Lord cites this in the Beatitudes, Matthew 5:5. This linkage of faith and the land, obedience and long life cannot be neglected without destroying Christianity. It means when there is a breakdown of the family and a dishonoring of parents God separates us also from the land.

He brings us judgments, culminating as he declares in Deuteronomy 28 with captivity, with removal from the land. All this makes clear the link between dishonoring parents and revolutionism and suicide. It destroys the essentials of life, to dishonor the immediate source of life and it is tied to a rebellion against God. Those who dishonor their parents are marked by rootless, restless discontent. Life and the world do not please them, they are bored with life. Since they are in one way or another they are killing themselves and therefore it means nothing to them to kill life all around. Now note this has reference to honor, it does not mean agreement. One can disagree with one’s parents as an adult and as a child as long as they are obedient they can disagree and I know many a Christian child whose parents are not Christian who disagrees, but continues to honor and wherever possible obey them. But those who are hostile to this commandment see themselves as suffering at the hands of a cruel family, a cruel world and a cruel God. For some revolution becomes a substitute for suicide, they relish the opportunity to punish others and their sadistic impulses are unflagging. As a student I once spent a long time in argument with a young radical who was trying to convert me to his cause. He began to do so by flattering me by stating that I surely was too intelligent to believe in religion and reactionary myths. Stalin’s purges and the enforced famines of the peasants were recent news at the time, their truth was denied by many including himself when I brought up the matter in my hostility to Marxism. His answer to my questions about these things was first to deny them as fascist lies. Second, he dismissed the problem by adding that even if true the matter was irrelevant because most people don’t deserve to live and as against a socialist plan and future these [unknown] were an obstruction to the truth.

This young man full of contempt for his parents had contempt for all who disagreed with him. He loved not life but an ideology. His faith was as destructive of life as it was by implication of the earth. And this is what the commandment means. It does not instill anything comparable to ancestor worship with a slavish obedience to parents nor does it sponsor the antifamily ideology of the modern world. It respects the integrity of the family, of the parents and of the children. It calls for obedience but not an obedience to the extent of doing sin. It does not say ‘slavish agreement’ it does require honor and it does declare that the blessing of that honoring is long life and it is also a blessing on the land which God gives us. Let us pray.

Our father we thank Thee that Thy word tells us the way wherein to walk. Thy word corrects us. Thy word blesses and prospers us. We thank Thee that we can come to Thee that Thou art God, the all merciful and the all gracious one. Forgive us oh Lord for not honoring Thee as we ought. And for not honoring all due authorities beginning with parents. Thou knowest oh Lord that as sinners we often stray. But we thank Thee that by Thy grace Thou hast called us to the knowledge of Thy truth, of Thy salvation, of Thy mercy and grace and shown us the way wherein we can rebuild our lives, our times and the future. We thank Thee that Thou hast given us so great a charge. In Christ’s name, Amen.

Are there any questions about our lesson? Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] The Hebrew definition of honor is literally as I said at the beginning, weighty. Weighty. The implication is of a great heavy weight. In other words this is a weighty matter. The family is God’s basic institution, requires honor. And we honor our parents not because they are necessarily the best people but because God requires it and because the family is such a weighty matter in his sight. So that’s the meaning. You can translate it loosely as all important. But biblical language is not abstract, it’s very concrete and that’s why the word honor has the implication of a great wake, literally. Yes?

[Question unintelligible] …honor is not a word used in contemporary usage…

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, that’s an especially point, Otto, the subject of honor was once the subject of manuals, children were brought up to give honor where honor is due, as Paul says. And not to impugn the honor of anyone falsely. Now a disrespect is regarded as proof that you’re a man. The routine disrespect for other people that is increasingly a mark of more and more people in our society is evidence that honor is no longer a factor in our culture. One of the more important aspects of training and bygone generations was associated with the word honor. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Yes our educational system, our child welfare workers very often, our courts, teach dishonor. Consider for example allowing a child to get an abortion without knowledge of her parents. And without their consent. That’s the deliberate dishonoring of parents, a very deliberate dishonoring. And that is legislation that strikes at the family and it is one of a multitude of laws that have been passed at every level of government today that strike at the integrity of the family. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] it depends on the person. It is a godly thing ot make provision for your old age. It is a godly thing to live providentially. But not so if the purpose is that you don’t believe your children will take care of you and you’re protecting yourself against that. You hope that you won’t have to be dependent on them but if you are, it’s their obligation and their duty. What social security has done is to strike at the family. Now when the stock market crash came in 1929 and then a further crash in ’31 and then the lowest depth of the depression was from ’35 and 6 on to World War Two. And yet there were no homeless people really. Families cared for their own and there were many cases to my knowledge among people I knew where families were doubled up and even tripled up. Caring for the children and their grandchildren. Nobody thought of it, it was routine. Well, social security has destroyed that feeling of duty, of obligation and of family love and honor. And children now feel that the sooner they cut the ties the better. I saw in the fifties in one California resort area the elder people moving in and buying or building homes which had one bedroom and if there were more than one and if they used two separate bedrooms there were two, and if there were more they turned it into a den or something so that no child or grandchild could stay with them. Deliberately doing that and saying so and these were people who called themselves good Christians. And we’ve seen that since on both the parent side and the children side and its very destructive. It’s anarchistic. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, there is [unknown] in the world. It is an interesting fact, by the way, that science no longer speaks about cause and effect. Philosophically they are becoming more and more self-consciously in the world of chance, even though they don’t say so. So the concept of causality is no longer spoken of even though it is used. And we no longer have any teaching in the educational systems about cause and effect. So that people do not understand the relationships between things. It’s a world where things just happen.

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Excuse me, go ahead, that’s very true. This hostility I saw begin after World War Two when I was on the Indian reservation and the surrounding mountain country was all federally owned and there was an increasing hostility to allowing that to be grazed and they began back then to limit the grazing, more than was necessary. And over the years they have been gradually cutting back on grazing permits even though many people had it as a right when their land was taken over by the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service or one group after another and it was supposed to be a right attached to that property permanently. It’s now gone. So we are creating the conditions that will make for more and more fires. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] Well, there is as I have mentioned care, but apart from that there is the matter of honor by regarding something as something more than people we’ve forgotten. For example, there are many elderly people that I know of who are living alone because they are still capable of so doing. But no one bothers to visit them, neither the children or the grand children or the great grandchildren. They are not honored and yet very often apart from the fact that there is a duty of caring for them, it’s a privilege to be around some of those people and listen to them. Now next Sunday evening my aunt will have her 99th birthday party. And we will be going and one of the things that delights her is that so many of her, well there are six generations in her own family, but when some of our children come up this way they and the grand children stop by and see her and it delights her. She enjoys the many people who come by, that’s a form of honor and it’s a wonderful way of rearing up children because it gives them a sense of the past and of their heritage. Yes?

[Question unintelligible]

[Rushdoony] I think so. It’s primarily parents but its giving honor where honor is due as Paul said. One of the problems today is that pension funds have been set up for the ministers which in itself is good but they are encouraged to retire at 65 and many of them are in excellent health. They are then very quickly on the shelf feeling very useless. For a while they may be invited here and there to preach. Now some of these men have reached the high point of their wisdom. If you go back over the great statesman of the last two centuries the number of men who well along in years who were ruling great nations is considerable. For example in the ranks of the prime ministers of England there were more than a few who were well up in years. One of the amusing things to me is that Queen Victoria who never liked Gladstone, Israeli was her favorite and then Lord Salisbury, once irritably told Gladstone that there were too many crisis in his administration and this was hard for her as a old lady in her latter sixties to take time and to come down to London to give attention to these matters, well at the time of course Gladstone was about eighty and was having to run up to wherever she was staying and the same was true of Lord Salisbury later. But in our time [unknown] at an advanced age and [also unknown] were still very active and important in what they were doing. But our modern tendency has been to put a premium on youth and youth is important but so too is age. Say I, seventy-six years old. Any other questions or comments?

Well if not let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, Thy word indeed is sufficient. It gives us the way of life, it points us to Him who is the way, the truth and the life. It corrects us in our sins and errors and strengthens us in our strength. We thank Thee. Give us joy in Thy service and confidence in Thy victory. 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.