Honoring your mother and father must have been of utmost importance for God to have included a commandment to do so in the original Ten Commandments that He gave to Moses. In order of importance, the first four commandments pertained to our relationship with God. The fifth commandment pertained to our relationship with our parents. The final five commandments pertained to our relationship with other people.
Because God stressed the importance of honoring your parents in His original Ten Commandments, the people of those days made a point of reminding everyone how important it was. Several verses in the Old Testament attested to it as follows.
Exodus 20:12 God said: “Honor your father and your mother: that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God gives you
Exodus 21:17 “he that curses his father, or his mother, shall surely be put to death.
Leviticus 19:3 God said: “You shall reverence every man his mother, and his father, and keep my Sabbaths: I am the Jehovah your God.
Leviticus 20:9 “every one that curses his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he has cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.
Deuteronomy 5:16 God said: “Honor your father and your mother, as Jehovah your God has commanded you; that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you,
Proverbs 23:22 Says: Listen to your father that begat you, and despise not your mother when she is old.
Jesus Himself quoted God’s Word in order to emphasize its importance and what punishment was set forth by God for those who failed to obey His Commandment.
Jesus said: “God commanded, saying, Honor your father and mother: and, He that curses father or mother, let him die the death. (Matthew 15:4)
Moses said, Honor your father and your mother; and, whoever curses father or mother, let him die the death: (Mark 7:10)
The commandment to honor one's human parents is compared to honoring God. Since there are three partners in the creation of a person (God and two parents), honor showed to parents is the same as honor being shown to God. Because honoring parents is part of honoring God, it does not depend on the worthiness of the parent, even if your father is wicked and a sinner, you must reverence him. When God gave us the commandment to do so, He did not qualify it by saying whether or not the parent was worthy of honor or not.
In Deuteronomy, a procedure is described for parents to bring a persistently disobedient son to the city elders for death by stoning Deut 21:18-21 “If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, until he dies: so shall you put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.”
Of course this method, which all today believe was very harsh, is not and can not be practiced in our present society. But one can understand how effective it was to maintain discipline back then. After all, God looked at the dishonoring of a person’s parents as being an evil thing and we all know who is responsible for the evil in this World.
It cannot be determined what Jesus thought of this punishment as it relates to this problem in the day He was here, but without a doubt He would not speak against anything what the Father commanded to do, simply because He knew whatever the Father decreed was a just thing to do. When Jesus stated that “the guilty person should die the death”, one could wonder if He was referring to the death of stoning, or the punishment being the judgment of “the second death”, which will be introduced at the end time.
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