Commandment 5 (2) Revelation of order

Exodus 20:12 and Ephesians 6:2 -4 “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.
Although this Commandment is given to children to obey, it actually deals with every single one of us in our relationship to people who have a place of authority in our lives. This teaches us to give a place (honour) to people in God’s authority in our lives in their role of having caring input into our lives. And even though this is a perfect design that God has fashioned for us, we all fall short in our limited humanity in implementing both this authority and our response to it. The purpose and meaning of the following commandment (6), which deals with anger, is made clear when we observe the result of both the failure and success of Commandment Five.

The range of authority and submission structures; God, family (plus delegated to school etc), Church, employment, state.

The range of meaning in the words obey, submission, subjection, rule, power; To God – absolute obedience (hypakouo – listen to and do). To parents – compliance to right order (timao), Church – Trust in and be persuaded by (peitho), state – be subject under God (hypotasso – put in order),

The proper use (and misuse) of authority; From God – totally good. From parents – ranges from good and helpful to unhelpful overprotection, through neglect to abusive. From Church – ranges from truth and love through formal and distant, to manipulation and abuse of power. From the State – ranges from honest and conscientious, through self-serving power and arrogance, to harsh and oppressive, to tyrannical and destructive.

The outcomes of disobedience and ignorance towards this Commandment; The sad result in inter-relational human behaviour is frustration of mutual understanding, confusion of role and identity responsibilities, fear and anger because of resentment, and violence and destruction of life.

The outcomes of revelation, understanding and obedience to the Commandment; The blessings from obedience are; mutual helpfulness, understanding and compassion, acceptance and forgiveness, success in life goals, trust and bonding in families and communities, a spirit of empowerment, love and an ordered and peaceful mind.

If we can have faith to believe in a perfect and complete God who has perfectly designed a Universe that he upholds and maintains by the Word of his power, then we are acknowledging that he is a God of no limitations. That means that God, who IS love, has no limitations imposed upon his loving of us. The reason that he has to maintain the Universe by the Word of his power is that all created things are limited and tend to lose energy and break down into disorder and chaos (entropy) but God is continually bringing order out of this chaos by the Word of his power. Now the spiritual energy of God’s love is joined to the spiritual energy of our inner being through Jesus who has sent us his Spirit, so in the midst of the chaos that we confront in our daily lives, that seems to contradict the order of a perfect unlimited loving God, we can set our minds above the chaos and contradiction, upon this power of his love, that resonates with the spiritual energy of our inner being and restores our soul. This becomes our blow by blow victory of faith in this life on earth.