Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Reformation Covenant Church
## Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Sanctuary. I am the Lord. Let’s pray.

Father, we acknowledge that you are the Lord of all things. We thank you for your word now. We thank you that you have given to us the Holy Spirit. We acknowledge, Father, our dependence upon him to teach us things out of your word. May they be wondrous in our understanding and to our eyes. And may our lives be transformed by the power of your spirit. Bless us, Lord God, as we take a hold of your word to the end that we may be transformed by it and live according to it. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

We return today to a consideration of the Ten Commandments. And when we left off this series some months back, we were on the fifth word. And we had looked at the actual citation in Deuteronomy 5—that’s the Ten Commandments that we’re looking at—and we’re looking also at how they related back to Exodus 20. We did that already.

The second sermon we did on the fifth word was a consideration of the portion of Deuteronomy which is largely a sermon on the Ten Commandments. We looked at that sermon on the Ten Commandments that related to the fifth commandment and drew some observations from it.

The third thing we do in this series on the Ten Words is to look at Leviticus 19 and specifically at those portions of that chapter that relate to the particular commandment that we are studying or in the context of for that particular Sunday.

So Ten Commandments: we always look at Deuteronomy 5 and Exodus 20 for the first sermon. Then we look at the sermon portion of Deuteronomy, the section of Deuteronomy that expands that commandment. And then we also want to look at Leviticus 19 because Leviticus 19 is a summation of the Ten Commandments. It’s a listing of 70 commandments laid out in a particular way.

Now, Leviticus is the heart of the Pentateuch. It’s the middle of the five books. And the very heart of Leviticus is Leviticus 19—the section of 70 commandments in terms of describing for us what holiness is. So it’s really the beating heart of the Pentateuch.

And if we were to take the time, I think I could demonstrate to you that the heart of Leviticus 19 is the commandment in verse 18 to love your neighbor as yourself. So the beating heart of the Pentateuch found in the Old Testament is the command to love your neighbor as yourself.

And relating it back to last week’s sermon, if you open your Bibles and look at Leviticus 19, let’s look at this for just a moment and remind ourselves what love is according to what we learned last week from Matthew 20, but also according to Leviticus 19.

We read this: Verse 15 of Leviticus 19. “You shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor or defer to the great, but in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people. You shall not stand up against the life of your neighbor.”

I might mention there by the way that is an expansion, a sermonic expansion on the commandment that we’ll look at next—to not murder. And so Leviticus 19 tells us we can’t even stand up against the life of our neighbor. So this Leviticus 19 does that. It expands out the Ten Commandments. And here it specifically relates gossip and slander among people with standing up against the life of your neighbor.

“I am the Lord. Then you shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall talk frankly with your neighbor. Don’t talk about him to somebody else. Go directly to your neighbor. Don’t speak against his life. Be honest and man up enough or woman enough to talk frankly to your neighbor about problems.”

“You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people. When we don’t go directly and speak frankly, we end up bearing a lot of grudges. And then this is the context for the next statement: But you shall love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.”

It’s the same thing as Matthew 18. To live in community life together, we have to love one another enough to talk to each other, to talk frankly with one another about difficulties we may see, to avoid gossiping and slandering people, speaking against the life of people, and be honest enough and loving enough before God to talk to them directly. That’s loving your neighbor.

In the Old Testament in Matthew 19, they connect together. It’s the same thing. In fact, this section of Leviticus 19 is sometimes referred to as the Old Testament Sermon on the Mount. It has all these phrases like “love your neighbor as yourself” that we’re so familiar with.

And that’s what we want to turn to today—to relate to, to see what it says about the fifth word.

Now, again, I know I’ve done this a number of times. We like to keep our Boise Cascade people employed and the office supply people employed. We run a lot of paper through here, but this is an important outline. This is an outline that I spent a lot of time on—the section of your handout on Leviticus 19 and the structure of it. And it’s important for considering what we’re going to talk about today.

If you look at your Bibles, if you got them, open to Leviticus 19. If you have a Bible, open it to Leviticus 19. And I want to do something really quickly. We were talking about structure and style in our Bible study methods class today.

So you got this thing: “I the Lord your God. I am holy. So he wants us to be holy. That’s the header for all the rest. And then at the end of verse 3, the one we’ll be considering today, it says, ‘I am the Lord your God.’”

Look at verse 4. “I am the Lord your God. Scan down. Do you see that phrase again? Yes. You’ll find it down at verse 10. At the end of verse 10, ‘I am the Lord your God.’ Punctuated throughout Leviticus 19 are something like 16 occurrences of ‘I am the Lord your God’ or ‘I am the Lord.’ These are markers. They delineate sections. They want us to deal with these verses not in isolation from the verses directly around them but as a section.

And so today the section—the whole section punctuated by the marker at the end—’I am the Lord your God’—has to do with the fifth commandment and the fourth commandment. So once more we see these two commandments strongly tied together.

And this outline from Leviticus 19 is a simple attempt to show the structure of the chapter. It’ll be useful to you as we continue through the Ten Words for which ones we’ll pull out because if we put at the end of each of these sections that are clearly marked off by these statements ‘I am the Lord your God’ or ‘I am the Lord.’ The A’s—’I am the Lord your God’ is referred to on your outline as an A. So the first section is A; it happens four times that phrase. ‘I am the Lord’ is the B’s. And that’s why the pattern is ABBA. It works that way.

But in any event, the point is these things break up these sections, and I put at the end of the section which commandments they refer to. And the two sections or two verses that deal with the fifth word are first of all verse 3 and then verses 29 and 30—that I read again—connecting parent-child relationships and the honoring of the Sabbath. So that’s why we’re looking at them together: because those are the sections of Leviticus 19 that we need to know to properly apply the fifth word in the context of our lives today.

All right.

So what we see here once more is the centrality of parents and the Lord’s day.

Now, we’ve talked about the fifth commandment in the Westminster Larger Catechism in terms of representing all rulers and authorities. So “honor your father and your mother” means your father and mother in the state. We saw that from Moses’ sermon section in Deuteronomy that we looked at several months back on the second sermon of the fifth word. So that’s all true and it’s important to remember that all authority are sort of subsumed under these titles, father and mother.

But it’s just as important to say very clearly that the terms “mother” and “father” here explicitly refer to the family. Yeah, we could say by way of analogy they refer to the fathers of our country, right? But in the first instance, the commandment specifically addresses relationships in the context of the family.

And so what we have here in this little header—bound together by the marker “and the Lord your God”—is the great centrality of the home and the church. That’s a way we could look at it: the family, relationships of children and parents, and then Sabbath—we would say the site of the resurrection of our Savior, the Lord’s day, convocating together—which draws us into the context of the church. So the family and church are what is being stressed here very pointedly.

It’s interesting too if we look—and you don’t need to turn here—but in Deuteronomy 27, we have a series of curses.

Okay, curse would be this, curse would be that. I’m going to read starting at verse 14.

“The Levite shall declare to all the men of Israel a loud voice, ‘Cursed be the man who makes a carved or cast metal image, an abomination to the Lord, a thing made by the hands of a craftsman, and sets it up in secret.’ And all the people shall answer and say, ‘Amen.’”

Next verse: “Cursed be anyone who dishonors his father or his mother, and all the people shall say Amen.”

And then in verse 26 is the conclusion of these curses: “Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them, and all the people shall say Amen.”

It’s a summation again of the law. And how does it begin? It begins with our relationship to God. And the second curse is upon those who dishonor their parents. So again, one more instance where the scriptures tie together the relationship we have to God and our relationship to our children and to our parents—the family, in other words.

So again, the centrality of how we worship and what our families are constructed like is placed very at the first of that list of curses, the same way those two things—although in reverse order—are placed first in the long list of 70 commandments that describe what holiness is for us.

So you’re not holy if you’re not reverencing your mother and your father, and you’re not keeping the Lord’s day. Not so. Okay, that’s what holiness is as it’s defined here—these two things together.

R.J. Rushdoony, he refers to this command to reverence your parents as the foundation of social order. He’s got a book by that title, *The Foundations of Social Order*, that refers to the creeds, one of which we’ll confess as we come to the table.

But in terms of how life works, Rushdoony says we have at the beginning of this section of Leviticus the foundation of social order. You cannot have social order if you don’t have these kind of families where the fifth word is being obeyed and applied and where children aren’t reverencing their parents. You have to have that. And you can’t have a social order when the Lord’s day is neglected and abandoned where you’re not doing that either.

The church and the family are the foundations of social order. And of course, in our day and age, they’re both under attack, right? I mean, you watch TV show after TV show after TV show, movie after movie. You don’t see families usually. If you do, you see dysfunctional families. You don’t see reinforcements of reverence and honor to parents or obedience. You see the ridicule of parents going on. That forms the culture in which we now live.

And of course, the Lord’s day—forget about it. Nobody does that anymore. That’s just, you know, some kind of strange thing. And even the hour or two of worship that it’s been redefined at is going away as well.

So the very foundations of social order are being eroded. They’re placed for us here in terms of this text and they’re disappearing in our day and age.

You know, thinking about the election, I put out an email a week or so ago. What is a family? A family is, you know, parents with kids. So you got parent has kids. Parent has some property that they live on and then the parent has some money they use for economic transactions. Beyond that, that’s really what defines what a household is.

And the state of course has been taking over and injecting itself into parent-child relationships ever since—well, for a long time—but certainly the public school system is the major intrusion. And beyond that, all the laws about what you can do and can’t do in terms of disciplining your children—all kinds of ways the state has taken away the parental responsibility, the ability to exercise that responsibility relative to the instruction and disciplining of children.

The state has taken away the individual householder’s ability to do with his land what he wants to do through zoning regulations, LCDC, etc. And of course, the state continually takes away more and more of the money that’s required to have a household function.

These things are all under attack. The family is under attack. And this election—whether you like Dudley or not—the point is the next governor will appoint the members of the board of education to decide how intrusive they’ll be in terms of parent-child relationships and education. And he’ll appoint the members of the LCDC, Land Conservation Development Commission, that decides how intrusive the state will be in terms of your property. And the next governor will either pass, sign, or veto tax legislation.

It’s an important issue. When we vote, partly what we’re doing is preserving the foundations of social order. We’re trying to get them back in terms of the family.

So that’s what the beginning of this section is. These are laws have a particularly strong emphasis on community life. So in other words, holiness as it begins to be defined by God in Leviticus 19 is not some sort of piety, personal piety, devotion to God—all that stuff’s great. But holiness is described in relationships—in community, in relationships in the family and then relationships in the context of the church. Their community life is object of holiness.

Rushdoony says: The foundation of community life is holiness. Hence the command: “You shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy.” Community life begins with communion with God. All the modern political efforts to establish the great community worldwide on humanistic and political foundations are thus doomed to fail.

So if social order is attempted without holiness to God and obedience to how he says holiness is supposed to be seen, you’re not going to have true community life. The center won’t hold. It will disintegrate. It’ll break down as it’s breaking down in our country now into warring factions. That’s what’s happening.

Rushdoony went on to write that the foundations of all true community requires community with God and it begins with our holiness. Foundations of social order are theological. Attempts at social peace and unity apart from the triune God are merely repetitions of the fallacy of the Tower of Babel. And like it, are doomed to fail.

So we have the tremendous importance of the family and the church reflecting what God says holiness is in the context of our culture or our life as Christians.

Okay. Parents and God.

This first sentence—verse 3 rather—it is a weird sentence. It’s strange for various reasons.

When it says fear your parents, or your mother rather, that’s unusual. And by the way, in the way the Hebrew is laid out, it actually says, “Fear—every one of you—your mother and father.” It doesn’t say “all of you fear.” It puts forward the word “fear,” and usually this is because it’s emphatic. It wants to emphasize something. When God wants to emphasize something in a sentence, he frequently will put it out of its normal order, put it first.

So the very beginning of holiness is fear. Fear—and we’re going to talk about that in a couple minutes. But not fear of him, which is almost always the correct kind of fear. There’s an improper fear, right? We’re not supposed to be fearful in a sinful sense, but we are to fear God.

But here it’s really odd because we’re supposed to fear parents. And it’s odd secondly because it doesn’t just say “fear your parents.” It says “fear your mother and your father.” You know, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5—”Honor your father and your mother.” Here the order is reversed. That’s strange. That’s unusual.

And so this is kind of an unusual sentence because of the sentence order itself, because of the idea of fearing somebody or something other than God, and because the mother is put first.

And we want to notice that God—you know, when we read a piece of text in the scriptures, we make observations about it. We ask questions. Why is that? That’s odd. Fearing parents instead of fearing God.

Well, what the scriptures do—and we’ve talked about it already a little bit—but they combine these things: parents and God. Parents are a reflection of God, or properly to be so.

In Proverbs 3:9, it says, “Honor the Lord with your wealth with the first fruits of all your produce.” So we’re supposed to honor God. But the fifth commandment says we’re supposed to honor our parents. Okay? They’re—in other words, they’re acquainted with God.

Deuteronomy 6:13 says, “It’s the Lord your God. You shall fear him. You shall serve and by his name you shall swear.” We’re to fear God. And yet here in Leviticus 19, we’re to fear our mothers and our fathers. So again, what it’s doing is it’s saying that the representation of God is particularly important when considering who our parents are.

One other interesting factor: Leviticus 19:14 says, “You shall not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block walk before the blind, but you shall fear your God.” Well, it’s the same thing I just said. Fear God. And as a result of that fearing God, you’re supposed to be fearing your parents as well.

Proverbs 1:7 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Fools despise wisdom and instruction.” The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. And in Leviticus 19, the beginning of holiness is the fear of your mother.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And the fear of your mother is the beginning of holiness. That’s really significant. You know, that should make us all just—I know what I’m doing today. I’m going to go home, call my mom this afternoon.

This should really kind of grab us the significance of the fifth commandment, the significance of the family, the tremendous significance, yes, of both parents, but put forward for emphasis, the mother.

So these things are put together.

Malachi 1:6 puts together this honoring and fearing of God. It says, “A son honors his father and a servant his master. If then I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? Says the Lord of hosts to you, oh priests who despise my name.”

So he says, “You’re supposed to honor your father. I’m your father. Why don’t you honor me? And you’re supposed to fear your master. Why aren’t you fearing me?” So again, the parents are representatives of who God is in the context of our relationships here on earth.

Fear of God is quite important.

This is interesting too. One last thing about this connection between parents and God. In Leviticus 24:16 we read, “Whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death. All the congregation shall stone him. Sojourner as well as the native. Okay? So if you blaspheme the name of God, you’re to be put to death.”

Leviticus 20:9 says, “Anyone who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.”

So not only is it in the positive requirements of honoring and fearing where, you know, it’s a lie to say you’re honoring and fearing God if you’re not honoring and fearing the parents that he says are essentially his representatives in your life, particularly early on. And the negative side is also true. If you don’t do these things to God, if you blaspheme God, you’re worthy of death. And if you curse your parents, the opposite of honoring and reverencing, death penalty again.

So again, they’re equated together: parents and God.

Luther said that there is a majesty there hidden. A majesty there hidden in terms of our parents. A majesty hidden in our parents. So that they ought to be most esteemed indeed, second only to God. A majesty they’re hidden.

Luther went on to say, “The reason for their right to honor is that parents have given a gift that no one can truly repay. Luther said you should—we can never render sufficient gratitude and compensation to our parents.”

On the handout today there’s a page—a painting, a copy of a painting in black and white. And this is Luther’s painter—Luther’s artist Cranach—who painted a big picture of the Ten Commandments with this rainbow going through the panel. And this picture in your handouts is Cranach’s visual representation of the fifth commandment. Fourth in their reasoning, but it’s the fifth commandment in terms of how we’re describing it.

So what you’ve got here is you’ve got a couple of kids who are being respectful and honoring to their parents. And then you got a kid over here maybe going through puberty or something, and he is being disrespectful to his parents. But notice what’s on the little boy—the older boy’s shoulder. There’s a demon there.

And a lot of these paintings by Cranach, you know, the violation of the word is seen as being kind of promoted and prompted by demonic activity. And so here the representation is demonic activity getting a son to be disrespectful toward mother and father.

Interesting painting too. They have kind of Hobbit feet. I guess if you don’t wear shoes, your toes do sort of—I don’t know. But anyway, so parents are God’s representatives upon earth. Hence God is beyond earth our substance. He’s to be feared and parents are as well.

Let’s—what does it mean to fear? What is this reverencing?

So this translation says reverence. Other translations say fear. Well, the particular Hebrew term here—it does mean—it has several different connotations to it. It does mean fear, the emotional state of being fearful. Okay? And it means reverence as well. An emotional state of being in awe, reverential to something that has great power and authority, right? You’re in awe of a thing.

It also is used to refer to observations of what’s right. Good conduct is described as conduct that is emanating from a proper fear.

Now there’s an improper fear, right? Perfect love casts out fear, but perfect love doesn’t cast out this kind of fear. Perfect love reinforces this kind of fear. There’s no distinction there. God is to be feared. Parents are to be feared—not the way that a child would cower before an abusive parent. That’s the wrong kind of fear going on. But and we don’t want to think of it that way. But we don’t want to take away the connotation of an emotional state of fear as well because of what the parent can do. This parent has authority over you. They should have the kind of authority that does put you to a certain degree of emotional fear of what they might do to you.

My mother, when I was a kid—she doesn’t listen to these talks so I can say this kind of thing—but you know, she was old school, right? Young kids don’t know what it’s like. Old school. She used to say, “I’m going to beat you till the blood runs down your legs.” That’s what she’d say. It made me fearful. Made me real fearful. Took a pancake turner to me once to put my hand back there. Ow. Cut my hand. Yeah.

I mean, that’s the way it was. And discipline, you know, you don’t really have fear when your mother orders you to go time out for a while. It’s a different kind of a deal. That doesn’t tend to promote fear. Proper fear, not an improper fear, but a proper fear, you know, in response to your parents. That tends to promote irritation with them, doesn’t it? You know, it tends—you just go to your room, you think, “What a jerk my parent was.”

So discipline timing is pretty important. And, you know, I’m not saying we should beat our kids till the blood runs. You know, she—I knew she wouldn’t do that. I mean, she didn’t do it. It wasn’t like that. But I mean, I was fearful of the proper chastisements, physical chastisement she’d bring upon me. That was good for me.

You see, the state wants to get rid of fear of parents in that sense of the term. Now, the state also wants to get rid of improper fear from abusive parents and I—we certainly agree with that. But there’s a proper form here of disciplining children that does produce a fear in the child. Reverence.

Luther commenting upon this—uh, he’s actually he comments on the other obligation to honor—and he says that honor is something greater than love. It’s a far higher thing to honor than to love one in as much as it comprehends not only love but also modesty, humility and deference as to a majesty they’re hidden. And there’s where the phrase comes in.

So you know, I don’t think the scriptures command children to love their parents. Now if you know of a verse you could bring it up during Q&A time or let me know later. I don’t think it does. The scriptures command us to honor our parents and here to reverence or fear our parents. But that’s something greater than love. It includes love. It’s kind of an assumed thing that children will love their parents. But reverence and honor, not necessarily.

So now reverence is a word too that, you know, it’s filled with kind of connotations. What does it mean to be reverential? There was a discussion on the Biblical Horizons email list serve this week—or maybe a week or two ago—about reverence in worship. So what does it mean to have a reverential attitude in worship?

And one of the men pointed out that these verses are put right next to each other. At the end of Psalm 46, we read, “Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I’ll be exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us. The God of Jacob is our fortress. Selah.”

And then the very next psalm says, “Clap your hands all you people. Shout to God with louds of joy. For the glory of the most high is to be feared, a great king over all the earth.”

The fear of God doesn’t result in a complete silence. You know, “children should be seen and not heard”—that’s really not, you know, that’s not what worship is like. We shout, we sing, we shout praises. Worship is supposed to be something other than this kind of romantic view of reverence that has been promulgated in the last 100 years or so that puts reverence in the context of quietness here in Psalm 47.

The fear of God, the reverence of God results in a hearty involvement in what he is doing in praise to him.

So we have to be a little careful—you know, to fear our parents of course would mean things about what we think about them. We could judge our speech relative to them—whether evidencing a proper reverence for our parents or not. Our actions as well.

And now kids, when you fear your parents, you have to do it in spite of their faults, right? I mean, everybody knows parents are going to make mistakes. God knows that. He knows your parents’ mistakes. But it doesn’t make any difference. You’re not—you have to be mature enough to know that even though your parents have faults, you’re to be counting up their positives. And the big positive that they brought you into life, they wiped your bottoms. They fed you. They brought you along.

I mean, you have no life apart from your parents. You’re not alive. Okay. So as something to remember in the tally sheet, pretty big deal. And if you do that, it will help create a sense of reverence and awe at the wonderful way that God brings people into the earth and sustains them.

Rushdoony in terms of this fear says this. He says, “Because the family is the basic social unit under God, we are immediately told ‘You shall fear—every command his mother and his father.’ The Hebrew word fear is *yare*, meaning to dread, revere, fear. Ten Commandments, the word is honor. We’re not required to love our parents, he says, because they are—they may be unlovable. Nor is this a blanket requirement of obedience because obedience is not required of adults. Lawful commands of parents only are to be obeyed. Nor is there any right for parents to require of children in obedience to evil.

The honor, fear, or reverence is a parental due for the Lord’s sake and because of the institution of the family.”

So you don’t want to take away this reverence, dread, awe of the majesty of your parents. That is exactly what this word connotes to us, and that’s why it’s so strange that God would use this word in terms of our parents. There is a proper fear, reverence, awe, even yes, dread about this.

The Jewish rabbis said this, and this is quoted by Rushdoony in his work on the fifth commandment. The expression “fear” they take to include the following: One, not to stand or sit in the place set apart for the parents. You probably didn’t know that, did you? When you got these things on TV or you go to a house and that’s dad’s chair and you always thought, well, that’s kind of a funny American custom. That goes back thousands of years. It goes back to the rabbinic interpretations of what this verse meant.

One way of showing reverence is to not sit in their place physically. Not to carp at or oppose their statements. Not to carp at or oppose their statements. That’s obviously unreverential, improper to do. And three, not to call them by their proper names, but either call them father or mother or my master, my lady. That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Now, again, here—my wife, hope she doesn’t mind me saying this, but sometimes she gets upset at me because I’ll refer to her as Christine when I’m talking to the kids instead of mother. And you know, I don’t know and I haven’t self-consciously done that. I’ve always kind of wonder what’s the problem. I don’t quite—yeah, okay. I see.

Well, again, here that goes back thousands of years—back to the Jewish church trying to enforce this idea of reverence for parents. I’m not Dennis to my kids. They don’t reverence Dennis. If it becomes Dennis, there’s probably not a lot to reverence. But if I’m father and Christina’s mother, then there’s reverence to that person in that role, that position that God has placed them in. Do you understand?

So, you know, this is why, you know, we’ve had these discussions over the years and what do kids call other adults in the church and all this sort of stuff. Well, this is why some people, some families here really want kids to address them by Mr. or Mrs. Same kind of notion. There’s a sense of reverence and respect for adults in the context of one of these kind of cultures.

What we’re trying to do here is figure out what a Christian culture looks like. And we don’t know anymore. You used to have some idea. The manners like not sitting in the dad’s chair or not addressing them by their proper name—these manners go back for a thousand years or more to an attempt to show reverence. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but it was the traditional way to show reverence.

And what we do today is we just rip all that stuff apart because we don’t get it. We don’t understand it. It doesn’t make sense to us. But when we do that, we’ve essentially ripped apart a Christian culture. You know, I can go out there and destroy my lawn quickly. I can just plow it all up, but I can’t grow a new lawn quickly.

And that’s what’s happened. Christian culture and all the traditions by which reverence of parents, for instance, were built up and promulgated—and more—that relationship was reinforced through manners and mores. That all has been plowed up. It’s gone. And what we have left now is a bunch of dirt clouds everywhere.

And what we’re stuck with trying to do as Christians is plant a garden in the middle of all this stuff. When we live in the dirt clouds, we live in this particular culture. Matthew Henry says this about reverence. It includes inward reverence and esteem, outward expressions of respect, obedience to the lawful commands of parents. Some commandments are not lawful. Care and endeavor to please them and make them easy and to avoid everything that may offend and grieve them and incur their displeasure.

That’s pretty good quote. You know, maybe I’ll put this up if you don’t have Matthew. It’s a good quote to remind yourself: Am I reverencing my parents or not? That’s a good summation of those duties.

So reverence.

Now, why mother first?

I don’t know. But it’s one of those things when you read the Bible, you got to say, “Well, why mother? Why didn’t it start with the father the way the fifth word does?”

Well, maybe one of the reasons we could think about is that it gives equality to mom and dad. Right? So if over here—when it’s talking about honor, it puts dad first and then mother. And over here, we’re talking about fear, it puts mother first, then dad—that’s God’s way of showing that they’re equal authority because they’re parents. So I think that’s part of it. It’s equaling out. You know, they’re your mother and father as a set.

I think another thing might be—because of a need we have—right, since dad is usually the disciplinarian, kids usually fear dad more than they do mom. And so maybe there’s a particular need to really stress the need to reverence the mother because kids might—if reverence has this idea of fear or dread, the father figure in a home, you know, he is probably more easily or naturally feared or dreaded. And so the Bible’s going out of its way to preach to our need.

If you don’t reverence your parents, don’t feel bad. If reverence of your parents was the normal state of affairs, we don’t need this command. He commands to our weaknesses. He commands to what’s difficult for us. Okay? That’s why it’s probably why it doesn’t say “children love your parents.” Not just that they’re unlovable, but you know, kids do that. They end up loving their parents most of the time.

So this preaches to our need, and I think we probably have a bigger need to reinforce the idea of reverence toward our mother. Okay? Not honor—maybe honor, you know, you need to remember dad more—but with reverence or fear, you got to fear your mom. Okay?

One other I think is that the mother is the direct lifegiver. She directly gives life, right? She birthed you. She went through the pangs of childbirth and you know men never have to accept experienced that. I guess some people say kidney stones are pretty bad too. I don’t know. But, you know, they went through hell, so to speak. They went through great struggles, trials, tribulations, and travails to give you life.

So, you know, maybe that’s part of it. It’s interesting though that in another case law, Deuteronomy 22:6 and 7 says, “If you come across a bird’s nest in any tree or on the ground with young ones or eggs, and the mother sitting on the young, on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. You shall let the mother go, but the young you may take for yourself that it may go well with you and that you may live long.”

Well, that’s interesting, isn’t it? Because that promise—living long and it may go well with you—that’s the promise attached to the fifth commandment, right? That first commandment with promise, first commandment of holiness. And by the way, in Leviticus 19, Paul refers to the first commandment with promise in the decalogue. And the promise is the same promise that’s attached here to letting the mother go. You can’t take both the mother and the eggs and the kids or the baby birds. You have to let the mother go.

There’s a respect for the mother, I think, as a giver and sustainer of life. That’s what she’s doing—she’s sitting on those eggs or chicks and she’s nurturing them. A mother is a nurturer. And so maybe she’s placed forward because of that. Not sure exactly, but it’s important to acknowledge that’s the way it is, and the primary emphasis thus is not just on parents but upon moms.

All right. So that’s reverencing of parents. It’s what the fifth word contains implicit in it.

And I want to talk now about the other verse that talks about parents and Sabbath later in Leviticus 19. That’s verses 29 and 30:

“Do not profane your daughter by making her a prostitute lest the land fall into prostitution and the land become full of depravity. You shall keep my Sabbaths and reverence my sanctuary.”

That’s interesting because they’re tied together by subject. You know: parents, reverence your parents, keep the Lord’s day. Parents, do what’s right to your kids. Reverence the Lord’s day. Okay? So it’s they’re tied together by the connection, and they’re also tied together by this idea of reverence—the sanctuary that is on the Lord’s day or on the Sabbath, reverencing the sanctuary.

And again, there—if we think about how the word is used in context—reverencing your mother is like—is akin here to reverencing the sanctuary. Okay?

But and so it’s real important. But the opposite is also true—that it brings responsibilities to parents. Since your children are going to be those that reverence you, you’ve got a tremendous responsibility to your children not to be a stumbling block. Back to Matthew 18, right?

So your kids are supposed to reverence you. You want to act, they’re supposed to honor you. Act in a way that’s honorable. And if you want them to reverence you, act in a way by which they can more effectively reverence you.

Now, I know we’re all going to sin. Their obligation remains, but it bears it. It brings out a responsibility to us to act honorably.

Let me just say that I think one of the most important ways—one of the most important responsibilities—since the privilege goes first to—and being reverenced. Mothers can enhance reverence by themselves showing reverence for their husbands, right? I mean, so child’s at home, got mom and dad, and mom kind of carps at dad. What’s the kid going to do? He’s going to confront mom, right? That’s what’s going to happen.

Now, the husband the same way. He could undercut respect for his wife, but you know, in terms of the placing it first here, it seems like one of the things we don’t want to do is model irreverence for the authorities that God has established over us or in the context of our relationship. And that’s important to note here.

Parental authority is not unconditional. It’s theological. Again, it’s set in the context Leviticus 19 of holiness. So parents are enjoined to act in a holy way. Luther puts it this way: “Implied in the commandment is not only the behavior of the child to the parent or the citizen to his leader, but also the behavior of the one in authority to the one under his authority. Those in authority must recognize that they exercise authority in God’s name and that they have serious obligations of obedience to God and to their charges.”

The fifth commandment is particularly to be stressed among the young and the common man so as to assure that they remain orderly, faithful, obedient, and peaceable.

Matthew Henry says this about—let’s see—the other thing that the parent is supposed to do with both of these texts is to develop a sense of reverence for the sanctuary and the keeping of the Lord’s day. Right? So one of the general obligations that the text says is—when it ties together parents and Sabbath—the parents. One of the things they’re most required to do is to show reverence for the Lord’s day.

Parents that show contempt for the Lord’s day are going to probably end up creating children who show contempt for their parents because they’re tied together here once more. And the way this is actually laid out for us in verse 29 is a reminder of this:

“Do not profane your daughter and make her a prostitute.” They’re put together. They’re the same thing. Okay.

Now, tricky phrase. Clearly there’s sexual reference to prostitution, but these words are broader than that and used in a broader sense. Let’s start with “profane.”

What does profane mean? Well, our word “profane” comes from *profanos*. *Pro* means to be in front of something. *Fanos* refers to a temple or a place of religious rights. And so to be profane is to be in front of the church. That may sound good to you, but that’s not good. You’re supposed to be inside the church. So to be profane means to be outside of the temple. Okay? And in the Old Testament, you know, this is the way the word was used. It was like being unclean. You were outside. You were out there somewhere.

And so to be profane, to raise children, to profane our children is to see their essential identity as outside of the church, outside of the temple. That’s profaneness.

A prostitute—a prostitute is a word that means on one hand hiring out sex for wages, but it’s used in a much broader sense than that. And in the scriptures it’s used for spiritual prostitution, right? So it has an ethical component to it, a religious component. And whenever we take somebody who’s a Christian and you know if they engage in sexual activity outside of marriage, that’s this word for prostitution, rudeness or whatever you want to call it.

But it also is true that when our children take actions, taking the faith and mixing it up with something outside of the faith, that is to prostitute the faith. Okay? So when you prostitute a thing, you mix it. And as a result, this word—the Hebrew word for prostitution—has attached to it the context of dissolution, breaking, busting down. Okay? It’s like adulterating something. When we get to the seventh word, we’ll talk about adultery. And if I take, you know, a piece of gold, I can adulterate it by putting together some base metal with it. I can kind of break it down or dissolve it by prostituting it with some base metal. Okay, so that’s kind of the idea here.

What does it mean?

Well, I think what it means is that we have an obligation to—in the words of Paul in Ephesians 6:3—raise our children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Now, here’s how it comes together. The nurture of the Lord is the *paideia* of the Lord. That’s the word used in the Greek in the New Testament. And it doesn’t just mean instruction. Admonition is more like instruction and rebuke. But nurture—there’s people today, a large book written on this subject of *paideia* of God, and it refers to inculturation is what this author says. Doug Wilson has picked this up as well, and other men have.

And the idea is you’re to provide a cultural ambiance of the Lord. The Lord’s culture is how you’re supposed to raise your kids. Okay? And what they had in Ephesus was not the Lord’s culture. What they had in Ephesus was a Greek/Roman culture.

And what we have in America today is no longer a Christian culture. There’s some aspects of Christian culture left. If you would ask somebody 50, 60 years ago, “What difference does it make if you’re a theonomist or not in terms of public policy?”—not much, some differences. But the culture reflected maybe 70, 80 years ago. But if you ask now, what it means now—things are completely different. Why? Because children weren’t raised in the culture of the Lord. They were raised in the culture of America, and the culture of America is primarily taught and referenced, reinforced in all kinds of ways through the public school system and through the modern culture.

Now, when we profane our children, it’s to put them outside of the temple. And when they’re outside of the temple, it’s equating that activity with prostituting them, debasing them, mixing them down with base metals so that they would dissolve—essentially is what the word means. Okay.

So I think what this verse tells us is that the obligation of parents is to raise their children in the culture of the Lord.

How do you do that? Well, that’s the $64 million question, isn’t it? And some would argue you can’t. That Paul gives us a command that can only be partially fulfilled in the short term. Where are you going to find a Christian culture in Ephesus? You got a small group of Christians meeting, for instance? Where’s the Christian culture? Are they supposed to form a ghetto culture? No. Jeremiah reminds us we’re to seek the peace and prosperity of the city. Supposed to be involved in the world around us, right?

So where’s the Christian culture? It isn’t here yet. America used to be here pretty much. Now it isn’t.

So what it means is that God points us to the future. He says that in order to raise your children in a Christian culture, in order to raise your children and not profane them by putting them outside of the temple—the temple’s the environment, the culture of God. That’s what it represented, right? It didn’t mean they had to be in the literal precincts of the temple, but they had to have their lives formed around the culture that flows out of the temple. Okay, that’s what Leviticus 19:29 is talking about.

And when we—what we’re supposed to do is seek a Christian culture for our children. And when we instead just dismiss all of that and raise our kids without trying to keep them, develop a Christian culture, we’re really prostituting them.

So what does it mean? It means that we have to develop the sort of culture that we can obey Ephesians 6:3 in its fullest sense. In the context of—we have to recreate the culture. We got to build it back up.

Now we didn’t plow the ground, but there it is. We got to grow a new lawn. It’s going to take a while to do it, but that’s our job.

And you can do it in part now, right? What does it mean?

It means—well, you try to raise your—this is why people are homeschooling, why they’re private schooling, while alternatives to the educational system, even the higher educational system, are being sought. Alternatives to the culture that we see around us. You know, we don’t want to flee from all of that, but we want to be very careful that we prepare our children to correctly interpret the pagan culture around us that we have to live in the context of. That’s where we live today.

So our job as parents—and in this text, it’s placed, you know, at the same level. These are the only two sections of Leviticus 19 about the fifth word. And what it tells us is: children, reverence your parents. Parents, nor to be seen as reverential. Raise your children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

And when you take them and allow them uncritically to engage the culture around and to be dissolved by the culture around, you failed to do what you’re supposed to do. A parent who tolerates, doesn’t try to stop, has sees no distinction between a non-Christian culture and a Christian culture, fails this test.

And it’s the only test put forward in Leviticus 19 for what we’re supposed to do as a result of the fifth commandment. The test is: Are we going to commit to raising our kids inside the temple, inside the culture of the Lord?

And as I said, it’s imperfect. It’s difficult to do, and it’s—you know, it can’t be done anywhere near perfectly right now. But it is our job both to build a Christian culture and to do whatever we can to help our children not become profane where their minds and their hearts now are thinking in terms of the culture that’s godless around us as opposed to the culture of Christ that we’re trying to inculcate and see develop.

Now, if we profane our daughter, we prostitute our daughters and then what happens as a result of that is what?

“Lest the land fall into prostitution and the land become full of depravity.”

See? It’s not just about, you know, the parent and the child. The Bible says that as a culture—Christian culture does this properly, the land is blessed. But as a Christian culture fails to do this, the land becomes prostituted itself and depraved.

You know, it’s interesting because it’s a little chiasm, right? So: “Don’t make profane your daughter, you’ll cause her to be prostituted. The land will be prostituted. The land will be depraved.” Profanity at the middle, prostitution, and depravity at the other ends. The culture becomes depraved.

What is “depraved” mean?

Well, depraved is a word in the Hebrew that’s used to talk about devising wicked plans. And Proverbs talk about how the evil are always plotting against the righteous. That’s depravity.

And so what happens when a Christian—when the Christian church or community brings their children up in the culture of a non-Christian perspective, outside of the nurture of the Lord, what we expect to see is a rise in prostitution, sexual impurities, and sexual impurities that will affect the land. And the end result of that is depravity, where the land now begins to plot against the righteous.

Well, there you go. That’s the history of the 20th century in a nutshell right there, isn’t it? I think it is. That’s what happened here. The Christian church kind of gave up on the idea of a Christian culture. People today don’t even think it’s possible. Shouldn’t work for it. And as a result, they don’t fulfill the obligations to raise their children encultured in Christ. Instead, the kids are given up to—or allowed to be part of a profane (which doesn’t mean swearing—it means outside of the temple) kind of activities. Their mindset gets set like that. The country falls into sexual sin. And then what happens in the next order of things is the kind of conspiracy and wicked plans against the righteous.

So we see a rise of anti-Christian sentiment in the world and in America. And Christians are mocked, Muslims are defended, yada yada. It’s all rather obvious at this point, right? Where it all leads. This is where we’re at.

But what isn’t obvious is how we fix it.

And what we’re trying to do in a week is to vote. That’s good. That’s proper. But the great way to turn this around is the fifth word. It’s to have children who are raised once more with reverence to authority. Because when that reverence is broken off, that’s when they become profane, polluted, and that’s when the culture turns desperately wicked.

Our job is to obey the fifth commandment: for children to reverence their parents and to parents simply put: to raise your children in the culture of Christ.

Yeah, I know it means you got to work for that culture. I know it’s hard. I know decisions I make every day about my kids are difficult ones. I’m always trying to figure out what the right thing to do is. And the guiding principle for those decisions has to understand the necessity of seeing a distinction between Christian culture and a profane culture. And we’re sitting over here. We want this. We can’t avoid this totally. But what we have to do is train our children to see in terms of these cultures and to desire as we do the manifestation of a Christian culture so that we don’t allow them, sanction them to go off into profaneness—outside of the temple of Christ, outside of a Christian perspective—and assume that perspective is their worldview as well.

Now, the fifth commandment is a commandment with promise. The promise is life. When parents refuse to raise their children as best they can in the culture of Christ, the end result is death. And not just death of the child, death of the culture. And that’s what we’re going through in America is some form of death.

But the opposite of that is that the commandment isn’t meant just as a negative. It’s not about punishing. The commandment shows us the way of life, the way of blessing. The promise is attached to this particular commandment because it is so central. The family is so important to the kingdom of God and receiving all the blessings and advantages that life in Jesus Christ brings.

God sets before us today as he always does: life and death. He says, “Choose life. Renew your commitment to be reverential, properly fearful and awe, and having a sense of dignity toward your parents.”

Young people, reverence your parents. That’s the path of life. To move away from that is to move into the profaneness and the depravity of the culture of death that we now exist in as a culture.

And he tells parents: Parents, renew your commitment today to raise your children in the culture of Jesus Christ as best you can. And we as a church are here to try to help with that as best you can. And don’t let them forget the antithesis, the warfare between these two cultures. Don’t let them become part of the culture that is profane and outside of Christ and have their minds and their thoughts turned that way. That’s the path of death.

But the path of life is to encourage them, assist them, help them to embrace the culture of Christ even in the midst of the culture of death. That’s how God brings resurrection life to our land again.

Let’s pray.

Father, we thank you for the fifth commandment. We thank you for families and we thank you for the tremendous importance of them. Lord God, may we be people who do indeed obey what your word has told us today. Help us today not to be those forgetful hearers who walk away and just forget what they see. Forget the conviction you brought to our hearts.

But help us rather, Lord God, to seek the power of your Holy Spirit to really convert ourselves in some of these ways. Help the young people here to renew their commitment even today, even right now in their pews, to be reverential toward their parents, honoring and obedient. And help parents today, Father, commit at right now to lead their children in an understanding of the two cultures, the two seeds, the warfare between the cultures, and help them, Father, to train their children in the culture of Christ, even while it doesn’t exist yet.

Help us to shoot for that, to vision it, and to take positive steps toward it, and thus experience life and blessing. In Jesus name we ask it. Amen.

Oh people, bless his sons in youth like sturdy strength and noble truth, like plants in vigor spring, whose daughters fair a queenly race are like the corner stones that grace the palace of a king, the palace of the king.

All people blessed when flock and field their rich abundant increase yield, and blessings multiply. With plenty all thy children share, and no invading foe is there, and no distressful cry, and no distressful cry.

Oh happy people, favored to whom the Lord—