So God retraces the logic of honor written into humanity: As a son honors a father, so should my people honor me. His people had grown reluctant in their worship, treating him with less honor than their favorite politicians (Malachi 1:8). If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear?” (Malachi 1:6). God ties together these threads of honor through the prophet Malachi: “A son honors his father, and a servant his master. “God has children look up to parents, for a time, so that we might see far beyond them to him.” Because God, with literally billions of options, chose this mother and this father for you.
So, will you take this man and this woman, the parents he has chosen for you, to love and to honor for as long as they both shall live? Teachers will come and go, bosses will be hired and retire, governors and presidents will be elected and leave office, whole nations will rise and fall, but your parents will always be your parents. “ made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,” the apostle Paul reminds us, “having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place” (Acts 17:26) - and whose children we would be. When God says, “Honor your father and your mother,” he is also saying, Will you trust and submit to me? - to my wise, sovereign, and specific plan for you, however hard that plan feels along the way? He chose your mother’s womb as your first home (Psalm 139:13), and then wove pieces of your parents together into a new person. Parents are also, however, a first opportunity for children to receive, submit to, and obey God-given authority, another compelling reason for God to make the world - and the family - as he did. And good parents, like the wonderful father and mother God has given me, are especially brilliant reflections of that loving fullness and creativity. Parents are a vivid reminder of the fullness of God, the kind of fullness that spills over in creation. God has children look up to parents, for a time, so that we might see far beyond them to him. Even when they fail to love us (and each other) well, parents remind us of the better, purer, more reliable Love that made us. Therefore, God, wanting to deeply, even inescapably remind us why he made the world - why he made us - made us the product of love (however broken, immature, or unwise the love of our particular parents may have been). Adam and Eve, and you and me, are the fruit of an unparalleled love. Within the Trinity, God himself - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - was devoted, enthralled, and overflowingly happy. Life was the natural overflow of his love. He did not make man and woman because of any deficiency in himself. New life comes from the intense and intimate love between a husband and wife because human life began from the intense and intimate love within God. Parenthood takes its pattern from God himself. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’” (Genesis 1:28). And then two verses later, “And God blessed them. Genesis might give us the highest, most overarching reason, though: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’” (Genesis 1:26).
Why might God, with every conceivable possibility available to him, decide to create and nurture new life through parents? Why would he bring us into the world through a father and a mother?Īs with everything God does, he has many reasons (and most of them unknown to us, at least for now). Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.