In this fifth installment of our Ten Commandments series, we explore the commandment that lays the foundation for authority, respect, and structure in society: “Respect your father and your mother”. Why is this the first commandment with a promise? What does “honor” truly mean from a Scriptural lens? How does this command extend beyond childhood?
Come with us as we peel back tradition and dig deep into the ancient Hebraic meaning, the cultural context, and the lasting implications of this command for today’s world. In a time when the family structure is under siege and respect for elders wanes, this teaching restores clarity and conviction.
So join us as we learn the God Honest Truth about the fifth commandment!
#FifthCommandment #TenCommandments #HonorFatherandMother
Transcript
In a world where rebellion is often praised and put up on a pedestal and where reverence is rare in today’s world, especially here in America, there is still one commandment that stands tall and strong and continues, and that is the fifth commandment of honor your father and your mother. In this video, we uncover the fifth of the 10 commandments. It’s promise, it’s wait, it’s reward. So join us as we learn the fifth of the 10 Commandments in this episode on the 10 Commandments. So this teaching or video or dross or whatever you want to call it is gonna be all about the fifth commandment in our continued series on the 10 commandments.
And this one is a turning point as it were, but we’ll get into that here in a little bit. Just wanna let everyone know, if you would like some more notes than what you see here on your screen or listening to on your audio podcast, you can get more at our website at godhonesttruth.com. Click on the image or the post for this particular episode, and it’ll bring you to an article post where you can find the on demand video that you see here on your screen. You’ll be able to see the draw slides that are before you on your video as well. You’ll be able to find the notes that we took for this particular episode and also the transcript if that so happens to be of use to you.
But it’s all right there on our website at godhonesttruth.com, or you can go down below in the description, and we’ve provided a convenient link to take you directly to that article post. Just click on that link, and you’ll have it all right there in front of you. And that should be down there in the description whether you’re watching on a video platform or an audio podcasting platform. So, like I said, this teaching is going to be all about the fifth commandment, which is oops, I didn’t get that title changed. Anyways, the fifth commandment.
Honor your father and your mother. This is how it is rendered in our preferred translation here at God Honors Truth from the scriptures 2,009 and here is the good old traditional King James rendering. Honor thy father and thy mother. The command itself is rather straightforward, but there’s a little bit added in there that really adds some spice to it, I guess you could say. Makes it even sweeter than normal commands or the rest of the 10 commandments.
They all carry the same seriousness to them, and they all contain one other thing as well, which we’ll get into here in just a little bit. But the fifth commandment states as such, from the scriptures 2,009 translation, quote, respect your father and your mother so that your days are prolonged upon the soil which Yahweh your Elohim is giving you, end quote. And that is from Exodus chapter 20 verse 12 and also Deuteronomy chapter five verse 16. Now this is rather interesting because here in this whole list of 10 commandments with these really major things like having no other gods, only having one god. Right?
The first commandment. Then you got the second commandment, which is no idols. Don’t make any graven images, bow down to them, roast statues, stuff like that. Those are pretty serious. It also, you know, goes on to say honor the Sabbath, do not murder, do not commit adultery, some pretty hefty and serious things.
And then if you’re like me and you come from a traditional mainstream, like, Baptist background, you have this fifth commandment that says, oh, just, you know, respect your honor honor your father and mother. Okay. It’s not really given the weight and the seriousness that I think it really deserves because it’s in here in this major list with all these other weighty things, and it has just as much weight, and we should give it just as much respect as the rest of those. It’s, I won’t say top 10 list because, well, it’s a 10 list, but I won’t say top 10. Let’s put it that way.
But here in the scriptures 2,009 translation, it says, respect your father and mother, but most other translations like the King James that you see here on your screen says, honor thy father and thy mother. Now this word here for honor or respect comes from Strong’s h three five one three, and that is the Hebrew word kavad. And it pretty much means what you think it would mean, but it can mean different things in different contexts. In other contexts, it could be mean or it could mean to be heavy or to make heavy or to weigh down, things like that. But, generally, it means to be honorable, to make honored, to be honored, to honor someone, to glorify someone, etcetera, etcetera.
And this is what it’s talking about in the context of the 10 commandments, to honor or respect your mother and your father. Here’s your strongest definition for the rest of my fellow nerds out there. And this pretty much means what we just talked about to be heavy, burdensome, severe, or dull in a negative sense but in the sense that we’re talking about with the 10 commandments, it means something like to be numerous, to be rich, to be honorable, respectful. Brown Driver Briggs, there’s the entry for that. And here’s your Decennialist’s Hebrew Lexicon and your Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targums entry.
And once again, we had to cut these way down. So if you want the full entry, go to our website at godhonesttruth.com and click on the post for this particular episode. And finally, here is your Klein dictionary entry for Kavad. And this fifth commandment really marks a transition between the various other commandments. We have the first four commandments.
Those commandments really dealt a lot with Yahweh and how we regard Yahweh, how we treat him, or how we should view him. Number one, we should only have one God. No other gods before Yahweh because he’s the only God. He’s the only one that’s ever existed. There’s no of these other fake gods like Allah or Zeus or Krishna.
None of those fairy tales. No. Yahweh is real, and he’s the only, quote, unquote, god in the way we think of god that has ever existed. Number two, we should not have any idols or make any graven images or bow down and worship them or serve them or anything like that because the only quote unquote God, as we understand the term, that we should be worshiping and serving is Yahweh. Number three.
We should not take the name of Yahweh in vain. Pretty self explanatory as to how that relates to Yahweh. And number four is respecting and honoring and celebrating Shabbat. And we went into that last time about how that commemorates the work of Yahweh and what he did during creation week. How it’s forever.
He even says this is how it will continue throughout your generations. So, the first four are dealing with how we interact and regard Yahweh, but the fifth starts the last six commandments and this all deals in how we interact with our fellow humans, with women and men and children, etcetera, etcetera, and how they interact with us. So this is really a transition commandment between the first four that deal with Yahweh and the last six that deal with man. Like I said, the first four are related to how we regard and treat and go about worshiping Yahweh. The fifth is that transition point and it goes towards the human relationships with our neighbors, our spouses, children, parents, as it pertains to this particular commandment tonight.
And like I said, it’s a bridge between how we love and interact with Yahweh and how we love and interact with other people. This is something that was brought up in a similar fashion in the words of Yeshua himself in Matthew chapter 22 verse 37 through 40. And Yeshua Yeshua said to him, you shall love Yahweh your Elohim with all your heart and with all your being and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it.
You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commands hang all the Torah and the prophet. So here, Yeshua pretty much sums up the 10 commandments in two different sections. You shall love Yahweh your Elohim with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. That’s the first section, the first four.
Then it goes on and says, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the last six, and that’s what we’re starting on tonight is those last six that deal with loving your neighbor. Now this fifth commandment has long lasting and far reaching impact that’s not just for childhood. In fact, this particular commandment goes on into our adulthood. So even when you become an adult, you don’t dishonor or disrespect your parents.
You continue to uphold that fifth commandment in honoring and respecting your parents. And we’re even told in scripture, it alludes to the fact that we should be caring for and taking care of our aging parents. Support them. What scripture says that those there, he who cannot provide or does not provide for his own family is worse than an infidel, worse than an unbeliever. And that extends, of course, our own being our parents because family is something you see throughout scripture as something that is very, very important.
Disregarding parents and scripture and especially in the Torah is very, very not good. We look here as an example on screen here from Exodus chapter 21 verse 17. And he who curses his father or his mother shall certainly be put to death. And there’s other verses like that that we’ve got in our notes if you wanna go check those out on godhonesttruth.com. But respecting your parents and bringing honor to them is something that is extremely important to the word of Yahweh.
As parents, we are pretty much always a child’s first taste of structure and discipline and love, and this has far reaching impacts on into their adult life. The way a child is treated is sets up the stage for the rest of their life a lot of times. They if they’re mistreated or not raised correctly, they have mental issues, they have respect issues. And you can see you see that with adults nowadays, how they were improperly raised, and you can see the way they’re living their lives now. So take care of your kids.
Teach them respect. Teach them to honor and respect their parents, especially, but elders in general, I would even go so far as to say. But teaching to teaching children to honor their parents prepares them for later in life to honor and love and respect Yahweh and his word, his commandments. How many people have you seen that were not raised to respect their parents and as soon as they went off to especially college where they are brainwashed into liberal kind of thinking, now they just totally lose faith. They go out of the faith.
They go become atheist a lot of times or something even worse. It can get worse than atheist. But, yeah. If a child is taught to honor and respect their parents, this sets them up, gives them a good foundation later on in life for loving and respecting, serving and obeying Yahweh. And that’s one of the biggest things that we can do to honor Yahweh is teaching others and spreading the word to bring more and more worship and service and obedience and glory and honor to Yahweh.
And we can do that through our children. And to rebel against your parents is often the first step towards rebelling against other authority figures like societal authorities, such as government, such as law enforcement, things like that. And it also is the first step towards disrespecting and rebelling against Yahweh. We’ve already talked about that a little bit previously. But dishonor in the home often leads to societal collapse.
That’s what we mentioned when we first introduced this during tonight’s service is that it’s a part of the very foundational basic building block of every society that has ever existed. You look at any society at any point in history at any part of the world, and the basic building block of that society is the family unit. It’s not government. It’s not a military. It’s not a corporation.
It’s not a business. It is the family. That is the basic building block of any society, and that’s the way it’s always been. And when it comes to that basic building block, the family, there has to be order and respect. And this is a commandment that deals with that very subject, order and respect in the basic building block, and then branches out and has effects on the rest of society and the world as a whole.
Think about that. Way back then, even before Sinai, but let’s, you know, just for the sake of argument tonight, start with Sinai. Even way back then, they understood and Yahweh gave these instructions and commandments for us to better ourselves, to better our nation, and to better the world through just basic stuff. All these 10 commandments and here’s not we’re talking about the fifth commandment of respecting and honoring your father and your mother. You sit down and think about it.
I really think it’s amazing, but maybe that’s just me. This commandment also comes with various blessings and curses. In fact, it’s the first commandment in the 10 commandments that is that contains a promise. We’re even told that in the book of, Ephesians, I think it is. But, anyways, one oh, yes.
There it is. Ephesians chapter six verses one through three. Children, obey your prom parents in the master for this is right. Respect your father and mother, which is the first command with promise, in order that it might be well with you and you might live long on the earth. So what’s the promise that comes along with this?
Length of days. And we saw that when we read that the commandment itself straight from scripture. And it shows Yahweh’s blessing upon order and obedience because we’re told in scripture and other places too that Yahweh is not the author of confusion. What’s the opposite of confusion? Order.
Opposite of chaos and confusion is order. So Yahweh is the author of order, and he’s given us an orderly way to conduct our lives, to conduct our families, and things like that. And we are blessed when we obey his order that he has set out. This promise that we’re given, like we alluded to earlier, is long life and well-being in the land that we are being given. And when it was talking about back in Leviticus and Exodus and Deuteronomy, that was talking about the promised land, but pretty much it’s anywhere that we go because, like I said, any society, the basic building block on anywhere on earth is going to be the family, and the thing that really keeps the families together is order and obedience structure.
I could really go down rabbit of a trip with that. But, yeah, that is really how the family operates. If you ever been in a family, which I’m sure you probably have, you understand that. Because when things get in disorder, it is, well, it’s chaotic. And, Yahweh is not the author of chaos.
But, a nation without familial honor or without family honor will crumble under lawlessness and disrespect. And we’ve seen that. We’re seeing that nowadays. We saw the tear down and the destruction of the family unit, and I’m speaking for America here. But now we’ve got divorce is way too high, and that’s destroying families.
In this destroyed family, there is a tearing of the children and their loyalty and their respect between different parents and parents pitting the children against each other and there is zero order in that kind of scenario. There’s very little of any respect that comes along with that as well. We also see that there’s not even families that even get started. These single mothers that go out there and they get pregnant and, you know, good on them for not killing it before it’s born, but then they raise or try to raise this child without a father. And that’s the children deserve a father and a mother.
And when a child only has a single mother who’s never been married, I’m not talking about widows. That’s another discussion altogether. But I’m talking about women who have never been married, and they have these children out of wedlock, and they try to raise them without a father, and the children are definitely hindered by being raised that way. Children deserve and need a father and a mother. I’m not gonna say that, you know, a guy can go out there and raise children and be just fine without benefit of the children having a mother.
No. Children need a father and a mother. So this whole single mother thing, that is certainly not ideal and is definitely not as good as having a home with a father and a mother. I’ll refer back to our polygyny series as a one way of helping to remedy that particular crisis epidemic that is happening, especially within America and probably other places around the world as well. This fifth commandment, when kept, brings restoration to homes.
And, like I said, since the family is the basic building block of a society, once the restoration comes to the homes, then restoration comes to the nations as well. So just keep that in mind. There is a lot of times when thinking about this respecting or honoring your father and your mother, the people who like to throw monkey wrenches and things, they come up with these things. Well, what if the parents are evil and they tell them to do bad things? And, of course, you can fill in the blank that, you know, parent does blank.
You know? But there’s a difference between, well, there’s obedience and there’s honor. There is limits to obedience and what we should be doing, but there is no limit to honor and how we can honor someone. Even if our parents are doing incorrect things, we can still honor them even if we sometimes don’t obey. Does that make sense?
Kinda anxious about how, examples should be given. Anyways, when we obey our parents, we are obeying the command of Yahweh, especially when our parents are telling us to do something that is righteous and in line or even in, you know, the gray area that’s not prohibited by scripture. But if it’s something that is evil and wrong and we’re commanded to do that, then we should be obeying Yahweh. If a parent commands sin, Yahweh and his commandments, what he tells us, should come first. We look at Acts chapter five verse 29, and Kepha and the other emissaries answering said, we have to obey Elohim rather than men.
And likewise, in Acts chapter four verse 19, but Kepha and Yohanan answering them said, whether it is right in the sight of Elohim to listen to you more than to Elohim, you judge. So this is not scriptural examples of people disobeying a bad command from their parents, but it is very similar. Here, Kepha and or Peter and Johanan or John, they’re talking about obeying God rather than the authorities who were over them, the Sanhedrin, the Roman government, things like that. And here in these two examples, they’re saying, well, we have to obey God. We have to obey Yahweh rather than you.
Now as we look through scripture, we went over this before in previous episodes. When we look through scripture, there is a call to submit to government, And this is very similar goes along the same lines as obeying and honoring your parents. But in scripture, it tells you to submit to government, those who are over you. But here, you see these examples, there are times when you should disobey and not follow the commands of government. Likewise, there are times well, I won’t say there will be times, but there can be times when a parent is not doing the right thing.
They’re doing something unrighteous. They’re doing something simple, and they might even command it and tell their children to do it. And the child, hopefully, they’ve gotten some good direction in their life, but hopefully, they will know the right thing to do even though it contradicts what their parents told them to do. And they would obey Yahweh and his commands rather than obeying their parents. But those situations are very few and far between.
And let’s go back to the general rule of thumb, honor and respect your father and your mother. And we can still show honor even though if it’s a command that should not be given by a parent. We can still show honor to the unbelieving parent, to the abusive parent, or to a wayward parent without condoning or even participating in sin. There is nuance and difference between obedience and honor. We should always obey Yahweh.
We should always honor Yahweh. He’s our heavenly father, and he’s not going to tell us to do anything wrong. But our earthly parents, we don’t we may not always be able to obey them given what commands or what they tell us to do, but we can always honor and respect them regardless of what they do. Even if it’s a horrible situation where they’re abusive or whether they’re an unbeliever or if they’re wayward, things like that, we can still honor them even though we might not should obey them. Now if that’s hopefully, that’s clear.
It comes across as straightforward in my mind, but if it doesn’t, then let us know down in the comments or write to us at god or I’m sorry. Write to us through our email at team@godhonesttruth.com. So in summary, the fifth commandment is the first of the 10 commandments that comes with a promise. You can find that in Ephesians chapter six verses one through three for that promise or at least expounding on that promise a little bit. It marks a transition between the first four commandments which concern Yahweh and how we should regard Yahweh and the last six which regard our interactions with our fellow humans.
This commandment extends even into adulthood. Just like the rest of the commandments that are extremely serious, this fifth commandment is extremely serious. Just like the rest of the commandments that apply to us throughout our entire lives, this likewise goes along with the other commandments and this commandment applies all throughout our lives. There are limits as we discussed just then. There are limits to obedience and what should be obeyed, but there is no limit to honor.
Even though we may not be obeying for whatever particular reason, we can still honor our mother and our father. And the fifth commandment is a commandment that shows Yahweh’s blessing upon order and obedience because we should be having order and obedience to Yahweh in our lives. Because, like we said earlier, Yahweh is not the author of confusion. Yahweh is not the author of chaos, but Yahweh is the author of order and obedience as we see through his word. And that’s just the God honest truth.
