“Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.” — Ephesians 6:4 (HCSB)
Paul is wrapping up a section where he addresses household relationships for wives and husbands, children and parents, and later even for slaves and their masters. When he gets to verse 2, he points back to the Ten Commandments and notes that honoring your father and mother is the first commandment with a promise attached to it. He doesn’t mean first in the sense of number one on a list. He means primacy. This one carries particular weight. Then he turns to fathers specifically and gives them instruction specifically. It’s a short passage with a lot packed into it.
The cultural backdrop matters here too. In Paul’s day, the role of a father in a child’s life was not optional or peripheral. It was central. The idea that a father might be largely absent from his children’s spiritual formation would have been almost unthinkable. That’s not the world we live in now. Somewhere along the way, spiritual training in the home became seen as the domain of women, and a lot of men either handed it off or walked away from it entirely. I’m not criticizing women for stepping into that gap. That took real faithfulness. But the gap shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
This passage leaves me personally with more questions than answers, and I think that’s okay. As a grown adult, I still wrestle with what it means to honor my parents. That commandment doesn’t come with an expiration date, but what it looks like changes as life changes. And what does honoring a parent look like when that parent is making choices that clearly aren’t leading toward God? I don’t have a great answer to that. The text doesn’t spell it out here. But those are real questions that a lot of people are sitting with, and thinking they have easy answers which don’t actually help anyone.
Sometimes the Bible does that. It raises the question in us more clearly. It leads us to ask God how we actually walk that out. God intended it that way. God isn’t trying to give us a rulebook that covers every situation. He’s trying to guide us into a relationship with him where we bring those hard questions and actually wait for his answer. The Word of God should be guiding our prayer life, not just informing our opinions. A lot of times in life, when a person thinks they know everything and are quick to tell you, maybe they don’t at all.
So with this one, I’m sitting with the questions more than the answers. What does honoring my parents look like in this season of my life? What does God’s design for men look like, and how do I walk that out faithfully? I don’t have those all figured out. But I know who does, and that’s where I’m taking them.