If you’d like to follow along in your Bible, turn to Matthew chapter 22. We’ll read verse 21. The context is the Pharisees asking Jesus about paying taxes. And you’ll remember they wanted to catch him in a trap, either a trap with the Romans or a trap with their own laws. Uh, and so they ask, uh, is it lawful to pay taxes? And so remember he asked them for the coin and that he said, whose face is on it, their Caesar. And so, uh, in chapter 22 of Matthew verse 21, uh, their response to his question, Caesar’s head is on that coin. And Jesus said to them, therefore render to Caesar, the things that are Caesar’s. and to God the things that are God’s.
And then Romans chapter 13 is our main reading and 13, one through 14 reminds us of Paul’s view of the Christian’s duty in the world. Remember, there are two important things, context to remember. In the Old Testament, all the laws relating to obeying parents or obeying kings or civil laws, those sorts of things. Those were all related to Israel as a nation, Israel as a theocracy, a God ruled nation. Then we come to Christianity in the context of the Roman empire. And if you remember your history, there were some pretty rotten Roman emperors.
And yet, what does God tell us through his word, especially through Paul? fear God and honor the King, even if it’s a rotten one. We live in a world that loves to rail on authority. We have children who disrespect their parents publicly. We have political shows every night and all day long railing on our political leaders, and maybe they deserve a little bit of fuss. But in the end, it’s disrespectful and it does not honor the fifth commandment. And so tonight we want to think about that.
So Romans chapter 13 says, let every person be subject to the governing authorities for there is no authority except from God. And those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, whoever resist the authorities, resist what God has appointed and those who resist will incur judgment.
For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good and you will receive his approval. For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath. on the wrongdoer. Therefore, one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God’s wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reasons you also pay taxes for the authorities, our ministers of God attending to this very thing.
Pay to all what is owed to them, taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed. Amen. This is God’s word tonight. We’re thinking about the fifth commandment, which we have not read yet, but it says simply in Exodus 20, that we are to honor our father and our mother. So that our days may be long in the land that the Lord, your God has given you. Paul will echo this command in Ephesians chapter six, when he says parents, Children, obey your parents for this is well pleasing to the Lord. So what is God’s will for us in the fifth commandment?
And it is simply this, that we show honor, love and faithfulness to our father and our mother and those who are in authority over us. We submit ourselves with proper obedience to all their good teaching, to all their good discipline. And this is really good, especially if you’re apparent. You’ve been there, done it. We also are patient with their failings. We know there are many. And for by their hand, God wills to rule us. So in our study of the Ten Commandments, we are moving from the vertical commandments, how man is to relate to God. Now we move to the horizontal commandments, how man is to relate to one another.
And so we have honor our father and mother. Do not commit murder or adultery or theft. Do not lie and do not covet. And before we had our commandments toward God, I’m the Lord, your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt. No other gods before me, no graven images. Don’t take my name in vain and remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
So, We want to remember tonight as we move to these horizontal commandments that the New Testament teaches us that King Jesus rules this world. He rules this world through three main institutions. And those three institutions are the church and the home and the state. We just read in Romans 13, how Jesus rules the world through the state. There is no King on earth who has not been given his seat or his scepter, except that it was given to him by King Jesus. Parents have the authority of God, the authority of Christ to rule in their homes. And then the church has been given the keys to the kingdom.
Remember when Jesus asks Peter, he asked the disciples, who do people say I am? And they said, oh, you’re Elijah, you’re John the Baptist come back from the dead. And then he looks at Peter and says, who do you say I am? And he says, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus says to him, yes, you’re you’re right. And on this rock on you, Peter, will I build my church? And he says, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
And so one of the doctrines of the church is the keys to the kingdom. God rules his church. We’re good Presbyterians, so we believe God rules his church through the plurality of elders in the ascending courts of the church, through the session at the local church, the Presbytery, the regional church, and through the general assembly or the national church. And we believe those church courts are given to us by God for the rule of his people. And so in the Bible, you see very clearly, I think, three institutions. that God uses, Jesus uses to rule his people, the church, the home and the state.
Now we live in a culture that’s trying to get rid of the home and the church and only have the state and the individual. And I think as we’re looking just politically at the rise of socialism, socialism highly views individuals and not families. And it has a very high view of the state. And so we want to remember what the Bible teaches.
God gives us the church, he gives us the home, and he gives us the state. It is a delegated authority by Jesus to those institutions, and he gives each a tool for their job. When we read Romans 13, we recognized and heard that God gives the state the sword. Peter says in his letter to the New Testament church that The state is to commend what is good and punish what is evil. The sword is the tool of the state to enforce the good of society.
We do not live in a day where capital punishment has much standing as it used to. But you read through the Old Testament and there were capital crimes. There were crimes that required restitution. There were crimes that required being exiled or banished or put outside the Commonwealth of Israel. And so lots of laws around the world are built based upon those.
But the sword is meant to deter evil. And so the moms and dads, well, the state has the sword, the church has the keys, but moms and dads, have what we all feared, and that was the rod. Withhold not correction from your children. Spare the rod, spoil the child. So we have the church, the home, we have the state. The state bears the sword, the home or the parents bear the rod, and what does the church bear? It bears the keys to the kingdom.
There’s another set of language related to the fifth commandment that does not appear in the Heidelberg here, but it does come up in the Westminster, shorter and larger catechism. It categorizes people as superiors, inferiors, and then equals. Just say you have a coworker, or maybe you’re in the military or on a police force, and you have a fellow officer or a fellow coworker, and you have the same rank. you would be considered equals and you owe each other mutual respect. But sometimes we find ourselves in positions where maybe we’re the boss, we’re the manager, we’re the president, we’re the mom, we’re the dad, we’re the school teacher, we’re the police officer. We are the superior and someone will be an inferior. If you’re a police officer, it’s the citizen, and you’re the officer of the law, so you have authority over them to enforce the law.
Parents over their children. School teachers over the students. And you begin to get the picture. So there’s superiors, inferiors, and equals. The Westminster larger and shorter catechisms speak of that. And it also speaks of degrees of age. and degrees of maturity and degrees of gifts. And so perhaps we are around people that maybe have a superior intellect. Just by nature, we sort of sit under them. We wanna hear what they have to say, those sorts of things. Or perhaps those older than us, we give them deference.
Remember what Paul says in his letter to Titus, teach the younger men to respect the older men. And in the case of Titus and Timothy, both young men, young pastors, Paul tells them both to be careful when you rebuke an older man. And so these are just some of the little nuts and bolts of what we want to think about tonight. But we want to remember that a society will hold together When there is a pecking order, and when that pecking order is respected, the societal glue, as it were, will hold things together.
I think we’re living in a time where there is very little societal glue. There’s a high level of disrespect. There is basically no difference in degree between parents and children. Parents are actually afraid of their children in most cases, and so they just coddle them and hope that there’s no mutiny on the ship.
Um, but we want to remember what God promises with the fifth commandment. There will be long life. And there will be prosperity, uh, when there is obedience and when there’s honor and when there is respect, and that’s not just with parents and children, it is with citizens and leaders. It is with, uh, workplace environments and all the rest. We want long life. We want prosperity. for God’s glory and for societal good. Think of two instances where King David had the authority to take care of business, let’s just say.
Remember when God had rejected Saul as king and David was on the run from Saul because Saul was not happy that God had removed his Holy Spirit blessing from him. to be king over Israel. And he had chosen David, the little runt of the litter from Jesse’s batch of boys. And so David came in from keeping the sheep. And Samuel said, this is the one man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. And so David’s rise to the kingship took a long time because Saul pursued him. Saul wanted him dead.
And you remember all those Psalms, maybe a lot of them are in the fifties where David is in hot water because Saul is hunting him down. And there’s one occasion where a Psalm is written where David is in a cave and he and his friends are way in the back of the cave and they go towards the front of the cave to the mouth of the cave. And there is Saul. Let’s just say reading a magazine in the reading room, as you might call it, euphemistically. And what did David’s buddy say to David? Now is your chance. This will end his tyranny over you. And David says, I will not touch the Lord’s anointed. Saul was wicked. Saul was evil. Saul had thrown a javelin, a spirit, David. Saul had pursued and hunted David’s life. David felt like a hunted deer. a hunted wild animal. And he said, I will not touch the Lord’s anointed.
Then there’s that time where Shimei, who I have in mind is the Ernest T. Bass of the Old Testament. If you watched Andy Griffith, you know who Ernest T. is. He, you know, it’s me, it’s me, it’s Ernest T. and he throws bricks through windows. Well, Shimei is that obnoxious bystander on the road. And when King David and his entourage are passing by the road, Shimei is being earnest tea to David.
And what did David’s people say? Hey, you know, we can take care of this. You know, we got a tarp, right? The mafia, we’ll put them in concrete. We’ll do something. We’ll take care of business here. And David says, absolutely not. Perhaps God has sent him. And perhaps God has told Shimei to curse me. And so if he is the Lord’s instrument for my cursing, who are we to say to Shimei, what is this that you are doing? And so boundaries are something that we must actively and voluntarily, and perhaps because of duty, respect.
Most of you have grown up in the South. I know we have a few relocated Yankees and other sorts around here. But in the South, it used to be that if men were sitting and a lady walked in the room, what did the men do? They stood up. If a lady reached out her hand to shake your hand, what did you do? You shook it. But if she held it back? You don’t reach out yours to shake.
We have these societal cues, these societal things. When I was growing up, it was yes ma’am, yes sir, no ma’am, no sir. We had to behave right away, all the way, and in a happy way, or else. And the or else you did not want. There’s not much of that, but just like the sword, was a deterrent or is a deterrent with the state, or the keys to the kingdom are a deterrent in the church, the rod, or in our household, it was the belt. That was your deterrent. And that alone kept you on your, minding your Ps and your Qs.
Well, in the covenant community, in the household of God’s people in Israel, and then in the household of God’s people in the church since the New Testament, But also out in the world, it is very obvious and very true, it is written into nature, I do believe, that obedience and respect and boundaries really work.
There is this British headmaster, they call her Britain’s toughest school teacher or something like that. Her name is Catherine and I can’t pronounce her last name. But I’ve seen her over the years on TV, and she runs a school in London, and the children are not allowed to talk in the hallway. I know some of you are teachers, some of you have done substitute teaching, you’ve been in the schools. The hallway is the zoo, right? When kids get out of class, they get a moment just to go nuts, go crazy. Well, in her school, you don’t talk in the hall. In her school, when the teacher walks in the room, the students quietly stand and respect.
If a teacher has a problem with a student, the parents must back the teacher and not the student. How many of you school teachers had a problem student and when their parents came, your principal or your supervisor folded like a cheap blanket? The student is right, the parents are right. We don’t want the PTA after us. And so what’s a teacher to do when all authority has collapsed?
Well, this lady believes that adults know better than children and that schools should operate with clear boundaries, clear hierarchies, teachers should command absolute respect. And so they have these societal customs and protocols and their school has high marks, their grades are high, their test scores are high.
The community is a sweet place to be. Some of you remember in the 1980s, watching the Cosby show. And you remember what Bill Cosby would say to his children, I brought you into this world and I can take you out. Right. And every parent loved to hear that because they would then echo it. But actually what he said is really true.
We read it just a little bit ago from the book of Exodus chapter 21, where it says, if a child curses his father or mother, he should be put to death in the old covenant. If a child was persistently cursing their parents, disobeying their parents, that child would be brought by the parents before the elders.
And often that would end in capital punishment. I don’t know how often that happened, but my guess would be not very much. There would be those who were rebellious. We might call them what the spawn of Satan. You know, if you really don’t like someone’s kid, call them a child of Chucky. Y’all know that reference. I’ve been around some. There are just sometimes the really bad children. But I imagine that was quite a deterrent. I imagine that did some good.
This whole idea of teenagers, I think it’s Elizabeth Elliot who said many, many years ago, where did the term teenager come from? Where did this stretch of adolescence come from? where parents fully expect our children for about six or seven years to be totally rebellious and unrelenting in their misbehavior. Where did that come from? You’re either a child or a young adult, and an adult And so to categorize and to give a name, to give a term, and I know that age has emotions and crazy pituitary gland things and whatever else there is.
I know that’s a difficult time, but I love what Elizabeth Elliot said. You’re either an adult, a young adult, or a child. And I think I’m attributing that to the right person. But in the Old Testament, the fifth commandment was a societal blue. You obeyed your parents, and that was that.
We’re living in a world without it, and we’re living in a world without it, and it is wreaking havoc on society. You have teachers who, schoolteachers, used to work for 30 years. Now they can’t stand to stay in a school for more than a year or so, and they even change professions. That used to be a lifelong possession. Now it seems to be a court-ordered sentence or something to go teach in the schools.
Our family’s involved in a Christian school and there’s difficult kids in those as well. But fathers and mothers are desperately needed to teach children and grandparents are needed to teach grandchildren what it means to live for God, what it means to obey those in authority over us. And what is needed? Well, Church family discipline begins with just teaching what is right.
If you don’t teach what is right, you can’t bop somebody on the head and say you did wrong. And so discipline first and discipline for I think most of the long haul is simply teaching what is right. And you commend what is good and you punish what is wrong. And the punishing what is wrong should happen very little.
Because if you teach and reinforce and all the rest and God gives grace, family discipline, family order is often not negative. And these are the things that will make church and family and society go really well. I think Wayne is teaching the young parents Shepherding a Child’s Heart by Ted Tripp, and there’s a little statement of Trippism. We learned it in our church 20 some years ago, and we learned it with a whole other generation of parents.
His little phrase is, right away, all the way, and in a happy way. So if a child does not obey right away, that’s delayed obedience, and that’s disobedience. All the way, do the job completely. If you do the job or whatever you’ve been told to do incompletely, It’s disobedience. In a happy way, if you do it begrudgingly or with a hump or a grump, that’s disobedience. And so right away, all the way in a happy way, obey or else. That would simply do it. That would change our culture, wouldn’t it? It is tiring. It is exhausting. Been there, done it. But it does pay off. I can tell you a million times over, it does pay off.
And I think, quite honestly, it takes a mom staying at home for those first five years of the child’s life. We’re also living in a time where there’s not much generational living. Kids grow up, they go to school, they gotta live in New York City, they gotta live in D.C., they gotta live somewhere else. And so we don’t have the societal glue of generational families as much as we used to. We move away and we scatter.
There is a fact among ministers, and especially among ministers who will plant a church, that you will succeed as a minister, you will especially succeed as a church planter if you are near your family support group. Now, that’s assuming your family support group, you know, are normal, sane, and happy contributing members of society. It’s good to be in a generational living situation. It’s good to be near extended family. You also, I think, have to consider with this whole fifth commandment, what about aging parents?
When I was a kid in the 70s and early 80s, my mom’s mother, we called her Gran, Gran Cook. Mom was born when Gran was about 45. So when my mom was 32 or 33, Gran was, what, in her 80s, she had, I can’t remember my math right there, but she had Alzheimer’s. Those days, Great Depression people didn’t save enough money for living in a retirement home or an Alzheimer’s wing. And if there was one, they were pretty scarce. And so what did we do with Gran? Well, she had four children, and so everybody got her for three months out of the year. But we got her for the summers.
And I’ll tell you, it was very interesting having an Alzheimer’s grandmother in your house. She would chase our neighbors out of the yard with her broom. In fact, one of our neighbors from back then is one of my neighbors now. And I said, hey, do you remember when my grandmother chased you out of the yard with the broom? And he said, how could I forget?
But Grand Cook lived with us. And that was part of respecting that older generation. Just been through it with my parents. What do you do when they need you? Well, you go, you make time, you do that. I think that’s part of honoring your parents. What about when parents are rotten parents?
We think of the command that Peter and the apostles give in the book of Acts. We must obey God rather than men. There are sometimes children who grow up in a home that’s ungodly and sometimes ungodly requirements are made. And if we follow Jesus, we must obey God rather than men.
I love this little statement. Now that I’m sort of on the backside of parenting, I love the little statement that says we should be patient with our parents’ failings. You know, sometimes children make the joke, families make the joke that they gotta go through about 10 years of therapy after their parents, and maybe the parents need some therapy too after dealing with some children. But we’ve got to honor and obey and care for our parents, but also give them the benefit of the doubt. We need to remember that they are finite.
They are not God. They are children of Adam. And what was Adam’s biggest failure in the garden? He failed as a father and a husband by not protecting his family from the forbidden fruit. And so we need to remember with our parents, we need to remember that they will often fail us, but they’re not Jesus, they’re not God, and they are not meant to be. Sometimes we need a fresh start. We need to start over. We need to go to our kids and say, hey, look, I was a pretty crummy mom, a pretty terrible dad.
Would you forgive me? That’d be something, wouldn’t it? And I bet in most cases, the kids would say, yeah, been waiting. Well, maybe not say that, but it’d probably be a big relief. One of the experiences I had with dad in his last few months, maybe back in February or so, he died in April, we’re riding somewhere and he’s kind of thinking about maybe some of the not so great parenting moments.
And he wanted to talk about it and I said, how about we don’t? How about we just trust that the Lord has given us everything we needed? And I think it gave them a little relief. I sure didn’t want to talk about it. But that was a sweet moment, I think. Here we are. You’re 75. Here I am. I’m 49. Yeah, that was a long time ago.
It’s hard to be a parent. And you are going to goof it up. And you’re probably going to cause your children great grief. They’re probably going to need counseling and therapy. you know, whatever else, we sort of joked, but you know, we are weak and we have failings, but what does it say that comforts us? It is by their hand, God wills to rule us.
So a couple of things to think about just to, I don’t know, leave here happy and obeying where we should. One thing to remember is that God is wise. When he made the state and the home and the church, He made those for our good. He made them for societal good. He knows that the world has fallen and he knows that those institutions need a tool. The church has the keys to the kingdom. The state has the sword, parents have the rod. He knows that the world has fallen and there needs to be a way, a means to encourage righteousness.
So God is wise, the world has fallen. A third thing to remember is that Eve’s curse and the curses that are attached to it are real. Remember when God was dishing out curses after the fall, he told Satan, you’re going to crawl on your belly and eat the dust.
He told Adam, you’re going to work hard and there’s going to be thorns and thistles. You know, you’re going to whack your thumb with a hammer. You’re going to plow and sow and it’s not going to rain. You’re gonna look for a harvest and there won’t be one. It’ll be by the sweat of your brow that you work.
But the curse he gave to Eve is twofold. He said, there’s gonna be pain in childbearing. And I think, you know, it hurts to have a baby, but I think it hurts to have children. But also remember, she said, your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you. And what God was saying is your husband will be your superior. You will be his inferior.
Y’all are not equals in the pecking order. And so one of the things we have seen over the centuries of life is people just don’t like living in submission. Look at social media. I hate my boss. Look at evening political pundits. We hate our president. We hate our senators. We hate our governors. They’re terrible people. What are they thinking? What are they doing? We just rail on and hate those in authority over us.
Eve’s curse is real. We will not like somebody being the boss over us. And unless you go out and start your own company, you’re probably going to work for somebody. And they’re probably going to have their failings as our catechism reminds us. So God is wise. The world has fallen. Eve’s curse is real. And finally, there’s only one thing that will solve all of this. And it’s come Lord Jesus.
Come quickly, come make all things new and he will put back creation into the order he gave it. When we live with God in the new heavens and we live with one another in the new earth, there will be no curses. There will be no dishonor, no disrespect. There will be no injustice from a bad boss or a bad political leader. There will be no corruption for God himself will rule and he will rule perfectly and the world we live in will be wonderful.
And so we want to look forward to that great day. Let’s do pause and ask God for his help. Lord, we thank you for the chance to think about the way you have ordered this world. Forgive us when we have not honored those over us. Forgive us when we’ve not been a good superior or a good inferior. Or we’ve been an unfaithful equal. Help us to think through our several relations in this world and to be honorable and to do right by others for your glory and the good of those around us. And we ask it in the name of Jesus, our great savior. Amen.