The biblical command to honour your dad cannot be a licence for dads to be horrible knowing that their christian children have to suck it up and honour them. You are called to honour your dad. But the type of dad your dad is shapes the ways and the extent that you honour him. A father has a wide range of biblical commands as to how he is to live in general, and in particular, how he is to live as a dad. These commands matter to both the father and the child.
Some of you have great dads. Some of you definitely do not; they abandoned and/or abused you. Given this, how can the biblical command “Honour your Father” apply to all of us (Exod. 20:12; Deut 5:6)? Below are nine short points which will, hopefully, help you.
By the way, I know that the command is to “honour your father and your mother.” However, I was asked to write an article for Father’s Day, so I will only refer to fathers in this article. What I say applies equally to honouring fathers and mothers.
First, Many Evangelical Churches and Ministries Need to Repent
We have often, far too often, talked in church as if everyone had a terrific Dad. Our advice and exhortations naively assume this. This has the unintended consequence of creating needless guilt and putting heavy loads on people whose fathers were terrible.
The call to repent also applies to churches and pastors who become aware of how much some in the congregation have suffered under terrible fathers and react by going to the opposite extreme. We become silent on Fathers Day, and all other times of the year. Worse, sometimes churches like this will talk as if there are mainly bad fathers! If the first mistake is to close your eyes and ears to those in our midst who have suffered under terrible fathers and therefore give poor teaching; the “reactive” mistake is to close our mouths on the subject at all, acting as if there is no command in the Bible about honouring Fathers, and thereby depriving the church of any teaching on the command to honour fathers.
Ignoring a biblical command does not make it go away or become irrelevant. It just impoverishes preachers and hearers alike.
Second, Being a Father Is an Inherent Honour
You are to honour your father because, in a sense, to adapt a phrase about marriage from the Book of Common Prayer 1662, “fatherhood is an honourable estate instituted by God in the time of man’s innocency” and therefore inherently worthy of being honoured. If you read Genesis 1 and 2, you will see that the Triune God created human beings male and female with the intent that a man and a woman would marry and have children. Becoming and being a father to your children was a key aspect of God’s creational intent. The fall, recorded in Genesis 3, means that every aspect of your experience is touched, in small and large ways, by sin. However, while sin affected every father, it did not remove the inherent honour of being a dad. This is woven into the created order.
Okay, how shall we then live? How do we honour great dads and terrible dads and every dad in between? How do we honour dads in this “already/not yet” time between the resurrection of Jesus and His return? My remaining points will address this.
Third, the Call to Honour Your Father Is a Call to a Certain Posture That Leads to Wise and Beautiful Action
The Bible was written in a particular time and place. But in the providence of God it was written for every people group in every time and place until Jesus returns.