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Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. (Exod. 20:12)
Our
country is full of broken families. Whether you are a Christian or not, from a broken
family or a whole one, God calls you to honor your parents. The apostle Paul
tells us this “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’” (Gal. 6:2-3).
Your
relationship with your parents affects your relationships with your spouse and
children. If you are not yet married, a good way to prepare for those future
relationships is to reestablish a good relationship with your parents.
The Ten Commandments give us two statements that relate to this. The first is the Exodus quote above. Here is the second:
You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments. (Deut. 5:8–10)
God says that He will punish children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation. This has stumbled and troubled people for a long time. How can a just God punish you for someone else’s sin? The answer is that He does not.
Yet you ask, “Why does the son not share the guilt of his father?” Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live. The soul who sins is the one who will die. The son will not share the guilt of the father, nor will the father share the guilt of the son. The righteousness of the righteous man will be credited to him, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against him. (Ezek. 18:19–20)
God
does not hold great-grandchildren responsible for what great-grandfather did.
Ezekiel says very clearly, “The soul that sins shall die” (v. 20). The person
who is in sin is the one who will be held accountable.
What
the Deuteronomy passage is saying is that sin flows downhill—and it does
so for three and four generations. Look at your parents and grandparents. Can
you see how you are affected by the things your parents did, and how they were
affected by your grandparents? The sinful influence of our ancestors affects
us. This is generational bad news.
However,
the sentence in Deuteronomy does not end with verse 9—it continues with
something more wonderful. “But showing love to thousands who love me and keep
my commandments” (Deut. 5:10). God punishes the children for three and four
generations, but He shows love to thousands—not just thousands of
people, but thousands of generations. “Know therefore
that the Lord your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of
love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his
commandments” (Deut. 7:9). Sin and hatred of God cause downward movement
to three or four generations, and obedience and love of God cause upward
movement to a thousand generations.
How do we turn our lives from three and
four generations going downhill to a thousand generations going uphill? If you
are part of a broken family, the solution seems obvious: get converted, leave
home, and marry a Christian. That should turn it around, because you are not
going to do life the way your parents did, right? You are going to love God and
keep His commandments.
Certainly, a major part of the solution
is to become a Christian, keep God’s commandments, and marry a Christian who also
keeps His commandments. You must do those things. Without them,
you can expect more bad generations.
However, although these actions are a very important part of
the generational turnaround, they alone bring no automatic guarantee of halting
the curse. We still have the descending promise of three and
four generations, and leaving to establish a new home does not change that.
Even if you have no contact with your parents, you carry those relationships
and the effects of them with you into your marriage. I have heard this
many times: “I decided I was not going to be the kind of father (or mother) who
raised me. I would become a Christian, marry a Christian, and do it right. I
became a Christian, married a Christian, and I am doing it wrong, just like my
parents.”
Leaving your parents is not the answer. What
you need to do is to reestablish relationships with your parents. When
you get married, you will have children, and those children are going to need
grandparents. If you are estranged from your parents, your children will be
deprived of a very important part of their growth. They need grandparents; they
need aunts and uncles; they need cousins. The entire family is important. In
fact, the family is more important than the church. God created the
family first. Of course, the best family is a Christian family, but your own
extended family is what God speaks of and gives examples of in the Scripture.
My family holds regular reunions. The
year my mother was eighty-four, her six sons, their wives, their children, and
their grandchildren all met for a reunion in Moscow, Idaho. To see how all the
children and grandchildren got along with each other was great. It was a
wonderful time, and it was very important. Every family needs this.
If
you are in the second or third bad-news generation, you do not have to wait through
more bad generations. Tt is possible to turn the descent around now. But unless
you change your relationship with your parents and grandparents, you will have
to wait two more generations. (And preaching the gospel to your parents does
not change the relationship. It needs to be repaired first.)
About
400 years before Christ, the prophet Malachi gave a negative conditional
prophecy: “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and
dreadful day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to their
children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come
and strike the land with a curse” (Mal. 4:5-6).
The
angel Gabriel alludes to this prophecy in Luke 1:17: “And he [John] will go on
before the Lord, in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the
fathers to their children and the disobedient to the wisdom of the righteous,
to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.”
Notice that to stop the curse from
happening, hearts must be turned both ways.[1] Unless
you do this, you are asking for another generation of bad news. You cannot
expect to be a good husband or a good father, a good wife or a good mother, if
you have not turned your heart to your own father and mother.
Because
we have not obeyed God’s command to honor our parents, we may be in the third-
and fourth-generation promise, and we will not live long on the earth (cf. Eph.
6:1). The land is in danger of being smitten with a curse. The Malachi text is
a call to repentance, a turnaround of the heart.
We can turn our family around by obeying
what the Ten Commandments tell us: Honor your father and your mother (Exod.
20:12). We are promised that a thousand generations of blessing come from
keeping God’s commandments, and this is one of them. If you want to turn the
flow around, this is primary.
How
do you honor parents who are not honorable? You may have parents who are
divorced. You may have a father who left home before you were born, and you
don’t even know him. You try to get in touch with him, and he does not want to
know you. How do you honor someone you don’t know? How do you honor someone who
is an alcoholic, mistreats his wife, or mistreats his children?
The
Scripture says to honor your father and mother because they are your father and
mother, not because they are honorable. When God tells us to love our
enemies, does He mean that our enemy is lovely? Does he have to deserve
love? No. Love is based upon the person who does the loving. Likewise, honor
has to do with the person doing the honoring, not the person being honored.
Do
you know any children who have been mistreated at home? How do they act in
school? Poorly. On the other hand, if children are treated with respect at
home, how do they act in school? Generally, they do well. If you want to make
someone unrespectable, treat them with no respect. The opposite is true
as well. Just as love makes people lovely, respect causes them to be
respectable. As Christians, we do not honor, love, and respect people because
they deserve it; we do it because they need it. Fathers and mothers need
it. “No, they’ve got to earn my respect first.” No, they don’t. If you want to
turn your family around, then you obey God’s command: honor your father
and your mother. If you have not honored them, confess that as sin first and then
choose to honor them.
[1]
Although most of my illustrations in this context are speaking to children, this
is even more important for parents. If you are a Christian parent reading this,
turn your heart toward your own parents, and turn your heart toward your
children.
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