Children, obey
your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the
first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life
on the earth.” Ephesians 6:1-3
The first four commandments deal
with our relationship with God. If we
ignore those, we break our relationship with God.
The other six deal with our
relationship with other people. The
consequences of those are pretty obvious (steal and kill lead to jail, adultery
destroys a marriage, envy is the precursor to stealing and the heart of
discontent).
Honoring parents doesn’t seem to
have a clear “or else” built into it, but if someone hates their parents it
definitely trickles down into other areas—how they see God, how they deal with
authority, family dysfunction, legacies of hate. God presents Himself as our “Father” so we
need to honor that title by loving our own father and mother.
It’s important enough to make the
Top 10 list of Commandments so it must be important enough to mention and it
must have a clear connection to other areas of our lives.