This section of the Tidings is written by youth and for youth. Its purpose is to address the concerns and difficulties that youth must face in an honest and straightforward way. I hope this article shows a better alternative to how the world tells us we should behave. Instead of going to television, media, or the playground for guidance we will instead turn to God through the Bible. In turning to the Bible, we do so with this belief in mind: the Bible is true and is a practical guide to the situations that we are presented with on a daily basis.
An important issue
I have thought for a long time that the most important subject that Youth Speaks could address is the command, “Honor thy father and mother.” I can remember my days in middle school: grades 6 – 8, a very difficult and hormone driven pre-adolescent age. It suddenly became very unfashionable to honor your father and mother.
Every other “joke” I heard on the playground started with, “Your mama…” Your hero was no longer supposed to be your father, instead, it became Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, or Hulk Hogan.
I remember really struggling at that age. I wanted to fit in so badly. I started using bad language, as well. I found it much easier to laugh about foul language than be concerned about its moral implications. It was very common to hear my friends talk about how lame their parents were, and about what they would try to get away with behind their Mom and Dad’s back.
Well, not much changed in high school. In those years, we start seeking for independence, and wanting to form our own identity separate from our parents. Suddenly Mom and Dad can’t relate, and they can’t understand. It’s easy to shut out the advice of our parents, and instead take the advice of our friends. Our friends understand us, and perhaps more, they tell us what we want to hear.
If you can relate with this, don’t think you’re unusual. This is a collective experience. My high school chemistry teacher had an interesting perspective. He was an older man and died 2 years after teaching my class. While he enjoyed teaching chemistry, he was one who would ramble off on any particular subject if you just got him going. Such was the case one day when he leaned over the black experiment table, raised at the front of the classroom and said, “I bet you think your pretty smart don’t you? Enjoy it! At age 18 you’ll be as smart as you’ll ever be.” At this point my classmates and I looked at each other, wondering where this one was going. He continued, “After 18, you begin to become more stupid, and your parents start to get smarter!”
His point was simple yet clever. As we go toward our late teens and early 20s, we think we have it all figured out, that no one understands us, and that our parents are clueless. After 18, we can begin to see where our parents were coming from. I’m told that after you have your own children, the real eye-opener occurs.
Topics
With these next series of Youth Speaks articles, we hope to address different aspects of honoring your father and mother:
- Practical importance
- The first commandment with promise
- In appreciation of mothers
- How to honor
- Lessons from proverbs
- The commandment to parents
- Christ as the example
- Honoring parents not in the truth, lessons from Jonathan
- God as our Father
The death penalty
For the space left in this article let’s look briefly at the relative importance of honoring your father and mother. God doesn’t mince words when it comes to this commandment. To get an idea of its relative importance let’s look at the various laws of Exodus 21. I hope this next point will not be too morbid. It should remind us of why we should care so much about this subject.
Here is a list of the things that are punishable by death, as listed in Exodus 21:
Exodus If however, the bull has had the habit of goring Neglect and 21:29 and the owner has been warned but has not kept it Manslaughter
penned up and it kills a man or woman, the bull must be stoned and the owner also must be put to death.
If I asked you to tell me the one that doesn’t belong from the following list, what would you say?
- Beating up a pregnant woman and making her miscarry
- Murder
- Cursing your Mom and Dad
- Kidnapping someone and selling them into slavery
These all sound like awful things but we probably wouldn’t put cursing our mother and father on the same level as the others. Certainly our modem courts do not. All of the above are deemed serious crimes that would bring many years in jail and or execution of the offender, except one. There is no punishment for cursing your Mom and Dad. A domestic disturbance warning is perhaps all you would get.
Yet God doesn’t see it that way, does He? God takes this very seriously. Again, I don’t mean to be morbid, but I do mean to make the point that according to God this commandment is not trivial. It is also a commandment we can adhere to right away. We may envision ourselves doing great things in the ecclesia. We should have vision, but we should also be conscious of what we can do right now. No matter what age we are, we must honor our father and mother in all that we do. We will discuss shortly what that means. For now we should just ask ourselves the question, “Are we honoring our father and mother? If so, how? If not, why not?”
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One