The Fifth Commandment: Honor Your Parents

Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you.

–Exodus 20:12

You probably know the fairy tales “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” but I imagine you’re less familiar with the story “The Old Grandfather’s Corner,” in which a grandfather lives with his son’s family. The old man is feeble, and his hands shake so badly that when he tries to eat his soup, more of it splashes on the tablecloth than makes it to his mouth. His son and daughter-in-law, tired of watching him eat messily, consign him to a corner behind a screen during mealtimes, where he sits alone with his earthenware bowl. One day, his trembling hands drop the bowl, and it shatters. So his daughter-in-law buys a cheap wooden bowl to replace it. Some days later, the son and daughter-in-law see their own young son playing with pieces of wood. “What are you making?” the boy’s father asks. The boy says, “I am making a little bowl for papa and mama to eat their food in when I grow up.”

Our children watch us closely. If we want them to honor us in our old age, then we must take care to honor our own parents. That is the focus of the fifth commandment: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be prolonged in the land which the Lord your God gives you” (Exodus 20:12). Put simply: Honor your parents.

The Hebrew word translated as “honor” is kabad, which means weighty or substantive. The same word is sometimes translated as “glorify.” To glorify God means to ascribe weight or substance to Him in the eyes of other people by the way we treat Him. In the same way, to honor our parents means to ascribe weight or substance to them, to reverence them in the way we speak and act. As Leviticus 19:3 says, “Every one of you shall reverence his mother and his father.”

This is the first commandment that deals with our relationships with other people. The first four of the Ten Commandments deal with how we love God; the final six deal with how we love one another. The order is crucial–it’s out of our love for God that we love one another. However, it’s fitting that this section of the Ten Commandments begins with how we love our parents. Our attitude toward our parents shapes every other earthly relationship we have.

Today’s devotion is adapted from “The Fifth Commandment: Honor Your Parents” by Dr. Robert Jeffress, 2023.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, trans. Mrs. H. B. Paull (London: Frederick Warne, 1868), 309–10.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.