God could have protected any relationship He chose. Husband and wife. Ruler and citizen. Employer and worker. Friend and friend. Neighbour and stranger.
He named one. Parents.
Of all the bonds that hold a society together, why did this one earn a place in a list that goes on to forbid murder, adultery and theft?
“Honour your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12)
2 things about this commandment surprise most readers. It’s the only one of the 10 with a promise attached—Paul calls it exactly that (Ephesians 6:2). And it was spoken, in the first instance, to a crowd of adults. The people standing at Sinai weren’t children. Many of them had already buried their parents in Egypt.
So this isn’t, at root, a commandment about small children doing as they are told.
What the Word “Honour” Actually Means
Honour means weight
The Hebrew word is kabed, and its root meaning is heavy. It’s the same root behind kabod, the word for glory.
So to honour someone is to treat them as weighty—as substantial, as someone who counts, as a person whose existence registers.
The opposite word makes this even clearer. The Hebrew qalal means to make light, to treat as trivial—and it is the word usually translated “curse”. To curse your parents, in Hebrew, is to treat them as feather-light.
The commandment is therefore not mainly about tone of voice or ceremonial politeness. It asks a blunt question: do your parents weigh anything in your life?
Notice what the commandment doesn’t say. It does not say “obey your father and mother”. Hebrew has a perfectly good word for obedience, and God didn’t use it here.
Paul keeps the distinction carefully. When he addresses children in Ephesus he tells them to obey their parents in the Lord, and then, quoting this commandment, tells them to honour father and mother (Ephesians 6:1–2). Obedience is one form that honour takes during one season of life. Honour lasts as long as you do.
This single distinction resolves a great deal of confusion. A 35-year-old woman isn’t commanded to obey her mother. She’s commanded to treat her as weighty. Those are very different obligations, and collapsing them into one has caused enormous harm.
Why Parents, of All Relationships?
Four reasons, and together they explain the placement.
1. Because nothing survives a generation without it
The Decalogue is the constitution of a covenant people. A constitution needs a mechanism for getting into the next generation, or it dies with the people who first heard it.
God supplies that mechanism a few chapters later, and it’s not a school or a temple: “You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7). The family is the delivery system for everything else in the law.
Remove the fifth commandment and the other 9 have no route into the future. That’s why it sits where it does—at the head of the second table, holding the whole structure together.
It also helps to see how seriously Israel’s law treated this. Striking a parent or cursing a parent carried the death penalty (Exodus 21:15, 17), and Deuteronomy makes provision for a case of persistent, violent rebellion by a grown son (Deuteronomy 21:18–21)—a law so severe that Jewish tradition itself questioned whether it was ever carried out. Modern readers find this shocking, and they should sit with the shock rather than explain it away.
2 things make sense of it. In the ancient world the household was the whole economic and legal system—there was no state pension, no welfare office, no care home. A son who despised his parents wasn’t merely being rude; he was removing the only support they’d ever have. And a household in open revolt was the covenant’s transmission line being cut at source. These penalties belonged to Israel as a covenant nation and aren’t the church’s to administer. But they tell us what weight God attached to the commandment.
2. Because it’s the first authority anyone meets
All of us encounter authority before we can talk about it. Long before we meet a teacher, an employer, a police officer or a government, we meet somebody bigger than us who tells us what to do.
How we learn to handle that first authority shapes how we handle every later one—and, in the end, how we handle God. This is why the Reformed catechisms have always read this commandment broadly. The Westminster Larger Catechism takes “father and mother” to include all lawful authority: in the home, in the church, in the workplace and in the state. That’s not stretching the text. It’s a recognition the home is the training ground where every other relationship of authority is first practised.
3. Because we didn’t choose it
This is the reason most easily overlooked, and it may be the deepest.
Every other significant relationship in our lives is one we enter. We choose our friends, our spouse, our church, our employer. We didn’t choose our parents. They were assigned.
So the fifth commandment is the training ground for a lesson that runs through the whole Christian life: receiving what God has given rather than only what we’d have selected. Folks who can only honour people they picked haven’t learned very much.
4. Because parents stand in a borrowed place
A small child cannot see God. What the child sees is a parent—someone who provides, protects, instructs, forgives and sets limits. Parents temporarily occupy a position only God really fills.
That’s why this commandment sits at the hinge of the 2 tables, and why some traditions argue it belongs on the first. Parents exercise a borrowed authority. Which cuts 2 ways: it explains why dishonouring them is so serious, and it explains why their authority has limits, since borrowed authority can never be used against the One who lent it.
Two ways cultures get this wrong
This commandment is broken in opposite directions in different parts of the world, and our readers live in both.
Much of the modern West treats the young as the standard and the old as obsolete. Wisdom is assumed to expire; a parent’s opinion is quaint; ageing relatives are a logistical problem to be solved efficiently and at a distance. That culture will find this commandment strange, and it’s failing at the plain thing the commandment asks.
Many traditional cultures make the opposite error, treating parental authority as unlimited and lifelong—deciding careers, marriages, finances and beliefs well into a child’s adulthood, and treating any independent decision as betrayal. That culture will find this commandment congenial and may be failing at it just as badly. That’s because an authority that recognises no limit has stopped being a borrowed authority. And become a rival one.
The commandment corrects both. It asks for lifelong weight, and it never asks for lifelong obedience.
The Promise Attached
“That your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.”
This promise has been misread in both directions—treated either as a personal guarantee of long life, or dismissed as applying only to ancient Israel. Neither is right.
HOW TO READ THE PROMISE
It’s not a personal contract. Godly people who honoured their parents have died young, and Scripture never pretends otherwise. This is promise language of the kind found throughout Proverbs: a description of how life generally goes, not a guarantee issued to each individual.
It’s not only about Canaan. Paul quotes it to Gentile children in Ephesus, hundreds of miles from the land, and applies it directly to them (Ephesians 6:2–3). Whatever it meant, it wasn’t exhausted by the promised land.
It’s first about a society, not an individual. A people who treat the previous generation as weightless will not last long anywhere. The wisdom, memory, warnings and faith of one generation reach the next only through honour. Cut that cable and a nation has to start from scratch every thirty years.
Christopher JH Wright notes Israel’s survival in the land was tied throughout Deuteronomy to whether the covenant was successfully passed on. The promise attached to the commandment is really a statement about that: honour is how a civilisation inherits itself.
What Honour Looks Like, Season by Season
Honour lasts a lifetime while obedience doesn’t. The shape of this commandment, therefore, changes as we age.
| SEASON | WHAT HONOUR MAINLY LOOKS LIKE | THE FAILURE TO AVOID |
|---|---|---|
| Childhood | Obedience “in the Lord” (Ephesians 6:1); learning that authority is not an insult | Defiance treated as personality |
| Leaving home | Seeking counsel rather than permission; leaving well rather than escaping | Cutting off, or never leaving at all |
| Marriage | A new household is formed—“a man shall leave his father and his mother” (Genesis 2:24)—without discarding the old one | Allowing parents to govern a marriage, or freezing them out of it |
| The middle years | Speaking respectfully about them to others; refusing to make them a joke; keeping contact | Quiet contempt, expressed mostly to your spouse and friends |
| Their old age | Practical provision—time, money, presence, arrangements | Outsourcing everything and calling it busyness |
| After they die | Keeping promises made to them; speaking truthfully about them; honouring what was good | Rewriting them, in either direction |
The row about old age deserves emphasis, because Scripture is unusually direct about it. Paul says anyone who doesn’t provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever (1 Timothy 5:8). That’s startling language, and it’s written in a passage specifically about caring for widowed mothers and grandmothers.
Jesus made the same point with more heat. Some of His contemporaries had found a way to dodge the cost of supporting ageing parents by declaring their assets Corban—dedicated to God. Jesus called it what it was: using religion to void the commandment of God (Mark 7:9–13). The dodge has changed shape but not disappeared. Ministry commitments, career demands and geographical distance can all be arranged to look unavoidable.
The Hardest Question: What If My Parents Aren’t Deserving?
Notice first the difficulty honestly. The commandment contains no quality clause. It doesn’t say “honour your father and mother if they have earned it”. That silence is uncomfortable, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help.
But the commandment isn’t a blank cheque, and four limits are built into Scripture itself.
What honour does and doesn’t require
Honour isn’t obedience. This commandment doesn’t require an adult to obey a parent. If you’re grown, you’re not disobeying God by making your own decisions.
Borrowed authority has limits. A parent stands in God’s place, and therefore cannot use that place against Him. Where a parent commands sin, the answer is the apostles’ answer: we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29).
Honour isn’t the same as access, trust or proximity. Scripture is full of prudence about people who cause harm. You can treat someone as weighty while keeping a distance that safety requires, and distance isn’t automatically dishonour.
Honour doesn’t require pretending. God nowhere asks anyone to lie about what happened. Honour governs how you speak—truthfully rather than vengefully, to the people who need to know rather than to everyone—but it doesn’t demand a false account.
What, then, is left? More than it may seem.
- Refusing bitterness. Not the same as feeling nothing. It means declining to let what was done to us become the thing that runs us.
- Refusing revenge. Leaving justice with God rather than administering it ourselves (Romans 12:19).
- Speak truthfully, not destructively. Telling a counsellor, a pastor or our spouse what happened is right and often necessary. Telling everyone, so our parent becomes a story people pass around, is something else. The difference is who needs to know.
- Meet real needs where it is safe and possible. For some people this will mean a great deal of help. For others it will mean very little. But it’s never nothing, because this is a duty we owe to God, not only to them.
- Break the cycle. Some people cannot offer their parents much at all. But they can refuse to treat their own husband, wife or children the way they were treated. That refusal is real honour, and it may be the largest kind available to them.
Pray for them. This sounds like the smallest item on the list. It’s usually the hardest, because it means asking God to be good to someone who wasn’t good to us. It’s also the one thing we can still do when every other door is closed.
The Commandment Cuts Both Ways
It would be a serious misuse of this passage to preach it only at children.
Paul, having told children to obey, immediately turns to the parents: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). In Colossians he adds the reason—lest they become discouraged (Colossians 3:21).
That’s a remarkable qualification for a first-century letter, written into a culture where a father’s authority over his household was close to absolute. Authority is real, and it’s limited. A parent who makes honour nearly impossible hasn’t thereby been excused; he has sinned.
Kevin DeYoung has observed this commandment is quoted at children far more often than it’s applied to adults who hold the authority. That imbalance isn’t in the text.
What the Commandment Requires
Following the rule that governs this whole series: where a sin is forbidden, the opposite duty is commanded.
| WHAT IT FORBIDS | WHAT IT THEREFORE REQUIRES |
|---|---|
| Treating parents as weightless—mocking, dismissing, ignoring | Treating them as substantial, in speech and in practice |
| Defiance of lawful authority in home, church, work and state | Willing submission where authority is lawful |
| Neglecting parents in age, illness or poverty | Practical provision: time, money, presence, arrangements |
| Using religion or busyness to dodge the cost of care | Honest accounting of what we can actually do |
| Parents provoking, crushing or discouraging children | Parents exercising authority so that honour is possible |
| Obeying a parent into sin | Obeying God, respectfully and without contempt |
The Son Who Kept It
There’s a sentence in Luke’s Gospel that should stop us every time.
After the incident in the temple, when Jesus was 12, Luke records He went down with Mary and Joseph to Nazareth “and was submissive to them” (Luke 2:51). The eternal Son of God spent roughly 18 more years under the authority of a village carpenter and a young woman from Galilee. He kept the fifth commandment towards parents who were, in every possible sense, His inferiors.
And He kept it to the end. Among His last recorded acts, while dying, He arranged for His mother’s care—entrusting her to the disciple John, who took her into his home from that hour (John 19:26–27). Practical provision for an ageing parent, organised from a cross.
Set beside that the hard sayings—“who are my mother and my brothers?” (Mark 3:33), and the demand that a disciple must “hate” father and mother (Luke 14:26)—and the picture is not contradictory but ordered. Jesus never abolished the fifth commandment. He put it in its place: real, binding, and second.
How This Commandment Is Actually Kept
Most people find this one hardest not when their parents were monstrous but when they were simply disappointing—distant, anxious, controlling, absent, or just not what was needed.
What makes honour possible in that situation isn’t pretending the disappointment away. It’s having somewhere else to take the need. A person who is still, at 40, waiting for a parent to supply what only God gives will find honour almost impossible, because every interaction is an audition.
The Christian is in a different position. We have a Father whose approval isn’t pending. That frees us to look at our actual parents—ordinary, limited, sometimes badly wrong—and give them weight without needing them to be more than they are.
And if we’re reading this with a long history behind us, notice the commandment doesn’t require us to feel something we don’t feel. It requires us to give weight. That can begin today with a phone call, a decision not to repeat a story at their expense, or a bill quietly paid. And none of these waits on the past being resolved first.
Next in this series: the sixth commandment. From here the Decalogue turns to what one human being can take from another, and it begins with the thing that cannot be given back.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
What did Jesus mean when He said we must “hate” our father and mother?
In Luke 14:26 Jesus says that anyone who comes to Him without hating father and mother, wife and children, and even his own life, cannot be His disciple. He is using a Semitic idiom of comparison, not commanding hostility—Matthew records the same teaching as loving family more than Him (Matthew 10:37), which is the plain sense. Scripture uses “hate” this way elsewhere: Jacob is said to have hated Leah when the meaning is that he loved Rachel more (Genesis 29:30–31). The teaching is about ranking, not feeling. And it must be true, because the same Lord upheld the fifth commandment against those who dodged it and provided for His mother while dying.
Must I obey my parents about whom I marry?
Honour requires that you take their view seriously; it does not hand them the decision. Scripture nowhere makes parental approval a condition of a valid marriage, and it establishes the opposite direction of travel—a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife (Genesis 2:24). That said, dismissing parental objection is usually unwise, because parents often see things affection hides, and because a marriage begun in open contempt for family starts with a wound that takes years to heal. The one place a Christian must not yield is where obedience would mean marrying an unbeliever or refusing a believer on grounds of caste, community or wealth, since that is a parent using borrowed authority against the One who lent it. Move slowly, involve your church, and try hard to persuade rather than simply to proceed.
What if my parents forbid me to follow Christ, or to be baptised?
Then this is one of the clear cases where the limit applies: we must obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). No parent has authority to forbid what God commands, and Jesus said plainly that following Him would set some households against themselves (Matthew 10:34–37). But how you disobey matters enormously. Refuse the demand without adopting a defiant manner; go on serving in the home, speaking respectfully, and carrying your share of family duty, so that what they see is conviction rather than rebellion. Tell your church, ask for people to walk with you, and be prepared for this to be slow—many families that reacted furiously at first came round over years of steady, honouring behaviour.
Does this commandment cover stepparents, adoptive parents, in-laws and guardians?
Yes. The commandment addresses the office rather than only the biology, which is why the catechisms extend it to all who hold lawful authority over us. Adoptive and foster parents who have taken on the responsibility have taken on the honour that goes with it. In-laws are owed real honour too, and the Bible gives us Ruth and Naomi as one of its finest pictures of it, though the obligation is genuinely lighter than the one owed to your own parents, and a spouse should never be forced to choose. Where family structures are complicated—and for many readers they are—the question to ask is not who is technically entitled but who actually stood in the parental place.
Is it dishonouring to move far away, or to place an elderly parent in professional care?
Neither is dishonouring in itself, and Scripture never commands children to live in the same town as their parents. What the commandment requires is that their genuine needs are met, not that you personally perform every task. Professional care can be the most honouring option available when needs exceed what a family can safely provide, and refusing it out of guilt sometimes serves the child’s conscience rather than the parent’s wellbeing. The honest test is whether the arrangement is chosen for their good or for your convenience, and whether it leaves them visited, consulted, financially supported and known. Distance is a reason to work harder at contact, not a reason to consider the duty discharged.
How should a Christian handle ancestor rites, death anniversaries and memorial ceremonies?
Honouring the memory of parents is good, and Christians should not be squeamish about grief, remembrance, gravesides or family gatherings that mark an anniversary. The line falls where remembrance becomes religious transaction—offerings made to or for the dead, rites intended to secure their peace or their favour, or ceremonies that petition them for help. Scripture gives no warrant for praying to or for the dead, and treats attempts to reach them as forbidden (Deuteronomy 18:11); at death the outcome is settled, and no rite performed by the living alters it. This can be extremely costly in families where non-participation reads as an insult to a parent’s memory, so it is worth explaining early and warmly, offering to be present where presence is not participation, and finding other visible ways to honour them—caring for the surviving parent, speaking well of the one who died, keeping promises made to them.
Does the fifth commandment mean I must obey my government?
The Reformed reading extends this commandment to all lawful authority, and the New Testament says the same thing directly: every person is to be subject to the governing authorities, since there is no authority except from God (Romans 13:1). That obligation is real even when rulers are poor ones—Paul wrote those words under Nero. But the same limit applies as with parents: the authority is derived, and it cannot be used against the One who granted it. Where a government commands what God forbids, or forbids what God commands, Christians refuse—openly, respectfully, and accepting the consequences rather than taking up arms. Honour and obedience are not identical here either: a Christian may criticise a government sharply while still refusing to treat it with contempt.
CONTINUE THE SERIES: THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
This post is part of our series working through the Ten Commandments. It follows Why God Gave the 10 Commandments—And Why These 10?, The First Commandment: Why Does God Demand Exclusive Worship?, The Second Commandment: Why Does God Forbid Idols?, The Third Commandment: What Does “Taking God’s Name in Vain” Mean?, and The Fourth Commandment: Why Did God Command a Day of Rest?.
Related Reads
- Why God Gave the 10 Commandments—And Why These 10?
- The First Commandment: Why Does God Demand Exclusive Worship?
- The Second Commandment: Why Does God Forbid Idols?
- The Third Commandment: What Does “Taking God’s Name in Vain” Mean?
- The Fourth Commandment: Why Did God Command a Day of Rest?
- Are Children Punished For Parents’ Sins? What Does Scripture Really Say?
