LAW HOMILY: Your Days May Be Long

Every week we go through the law of God because we want to understand what God has to say to his people. We want to understand how we can love this God and obey what he has said in his word and thank the Lord by what the finished work of Christ has done and by his spirit that we can now grow in our obedience, sanctification, and all of those things.

Today we will be on the fifth commandment. Every week we go through one of the ten and this week it's the fifth. Exodus 20 verse 12 says, Now there's a promise actually that's stitched into the framework of the fifth commandment that if you are a people of honor then we will have a long and prosperous life in the land.

And as far as promises go, we don't truly believe that. Not really. In the respectable reformed traditions, which we are a part of, we tend to believe that this promise was allocated to national Israel or we believe it in the way that we would believe the warranty on a used car.

And to be fair, we have many reasons to be apprehensive. We have Benny Hinn in white suits promising your barns will overflow if you only offer him a small check of any amount. We've heard the promise of prosperity from men who rob widows and orphans.

So when Moses says that long days, and when Paul actually says that it shall go well with you, the word lands on our ears like a Joel Steen sermon. And there's something that's true in this. We are right to flinch at the wolves.

We're right to hold onto our doctrine carefully and make sure that we believe the Bible rightly. But in flinching at this command, it has cost us something. While we are guarding the back door against the Kenneth Copelands of the world, the front door has swung open and a different lie has walked in.

The lie that God's promises about long days and welfare in the land are not really true. Just a frame around a picture and really nothing more. And in that, we've traded a vulgar belief for a respectable unbelief.

And we've called that transaction spiritual discernment. But it was actually not discernment. It was still a kind of unbelief in the promises of God, not by adding to what God has said, but by subtracting.

The Heidelberg Catechism addresses it this way. It does not say that God will make you rich. It says that he is pleased to add long life. He is pleased. He's not contractually obligated. There's a difference between a vending machine view of the father and who the father really is.

There's a difference between the contract and the covenant. The televangelist offers you a contract, do X and you will get Y. God at Sinai offers you a relationship, a fatherhood. Both involve promises, but only one of them is true.

And in rejecting the dross, we actually don't need to throw out the gold. So for a moment, I just want to let us listen again, afresh what Moses actually said, not honor your father and mother and a parking space will open up, not honor your mother and you will retire at 55.

He said that you, you, your, your plural, which by the way, I, every time I get a chance, I like to say in the South, we say y 'all, and it is actually more grammatically appropriate and correct because you know that you're in the second person plural.

So he said that y 'all's days may be long in the land that the Lord, your plural, God is giving you plural. So the promise then is corporate. It's collective. It's, it's national before it's even personal.

It concerns a people who are under the authority of God. And in that way, it is not a blank check for long life for sister Susie who honored her mother. This is a promise that a society that honors its fathers and mothers, a society that at the bedrock of it has honor in it will endure for centuries.

And it's also a promise that society that despises honor and is fractured will be carried away. Now there is the objection. Many might say, right, but I knew the godly woman who honored her parents and died of cancer at 34.

And I'm sure that, you know, of the crotchety old Ebenezer who lives down the road from you, who is living cantankerously at 97. But it's here that we must remember that again, the contra, the promise is not a contract that pays out in identical ways to every saint or sinner.

It's the shape of how God deals with the world. He deals with peoples and households and generations based upon how they approach this concept of honor. The honoring son may die young and still leave behind a name that will never fade.

A name that his grandchildren will rise up and call blessed. That's the kind of long life that God is promising. A life that does not end when the body does because the honor plants it at his mother's knees, bears fruit through his children's children's children.

The mocking son may pile and lose his sons or keep his sons and watch them despise him with precious or precise contempt in his days. The books eventually balance. They do not always balance on the schedule and time horizon that we would set.

So in that way, we see that God places a blessing upon peoples who honor, especially honor him. And by honoring him, it makes us honor everything else and everyone else and everyone who's in authority.

So where does that leave us? Well, we're often not a people of honor, are we? We often are disrespectful and cold and unkind and persnickety. We often are a people who use our words to harm or who use our actions to curse.

We are a people who have implemented a grumbling, complaining spirit where we use to to make ourself feel better that we might be a notch better than the next guy. We struggle with this so much more than we actually realize.

We are a people who have at the very bedrock of who we are built most of our identity upon what we're not. And then in that identifying it with harsh tones and words. The Lord says here if we are an honoring people that he will extend and give long life and not just life physically, but life that endures.

And the only reason that this is true for us is not because of us. Because our dishonor deserves actually the curses of God. Our disobedience deserves the wrath of God. So the only reason that this promise is true is because of the finished work of Christ.

Moses could look forward to it. We look back to it, but we celebrate that even in our sin, God's promises are true. And how much more faithful is God that in Christ our days actually are lengthened eternally so in him.

So let's pray. Let's ask the Lord to forgive us. Let's ask the Spirit to help us. And let's grow as people of honor. Amen.