The two commandments before us are unique among the Ten. Only the Fourth and Fifth Commandments are not prohibitions. God prohibits idolatry, blaspheme, adultery, theft, and the others because He knows that we will commit such sins when given the opportunity. Likewise, He commands us to rest and to honor our father and mother because He knows that we will not do those things naturally.

The text of the Fourth Commandment in Exodus 20:8-11 reads:

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

The catechism states that this commandment requires that on the Sabbath day we spend time in public and private worship of God, rest from routine employment, serve the Lord, and others, and so anticipate the eternal Sabbath.

I have always found this commandment striking. What kind of God commands His people to rest one day each week? How obstinate must we be to rebel against such a command? The truth is that we like to work more than we like to rest because we like to act like we are masters of our own fate. We tend to find our security and even identity in our activities because we tend to equate action with control. As long as I am doing something, the often-subconscious reasoning goes, then I am at the steering wheel of my own life. Even idleness falls under this category since it is the willful choosing of some nonwork activity. It is a kind of inactive action, an assertion of self-will.

Yet our perpetual need for rest is a continuous reminder that our labor will never be as fruitful as we might desire. Our need for rest is limiting and rest itself is a reminder of those limits. We hate rest because it dispels the myth that we are more than human, that we are more than created things. Rest is dreadful because it uncloaks our mortality. It screams to us that there is one God, and we are not Him.

The concept, therefore, of taking a day of rest should not be flippantly neglected. Our notion of only using vacation days to rest simply does not work. Fourteen days off work cannot effectively replace the fifty-two that God has prescribed for us. In fact, we may benefit from viewing the Sabbath day as a prescription. Can we live without observing this weekly pattern? Of course, the majority of people throughout history have done just that. Yet I believe that the question is not must we but should we. Should we weekly take a day of rest? Why would we not? Sure, not working is harder than it looks. Resting requires planning. It requires a degree of work beforehand. Resting is a discipline. It is not always easy, but it is good. Like prayer and reading the Bible, resting does not always feel delightful in the moment, but these disciplines are for our benefit. Work, therefore, at learning to rest, particularly on the Lord’s Day.

In Christ, we honor the Lord’s Day as we celebrate the resurrection of Christ together and proclaim that He will one day come again, and we set aside that day for physically resting in Christ. Yet this pattern is not burdensome. It certainly requires discipline, but it is not arduous for us. Even the fact that we now worship on the first day of the week should remind us of our gospel rest in Christ. We begin the week by resting before we work. Similarly, we were saved to do good works and faith without works is dead, but these works come after our justification once for all in Christ. We rest and then work, not the other way around.

The Fifth Commandment reads: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). This requires that we love and honor our father and our mother, submitting to their godly discipline and correction.

Honor is not a synonym for obedience. Paul does command children to obey their parents (Ephesians 6:1); however, this commandment was not given specifically to children. The Ten Commandments were spoken by God to the entire nation of Israel. The Fifth Commandment, therefore, is for the young, the old, and all ages in between. For children who are still under their parents’ household, obedience is an immediate application of this commandment, but honor entails far more than simple compliance to commands.

Instead, honor means to revere, to esteem, to respect, and to value. Both Calvin and Watson, although using different wordings, describe three components of honoring our parents.

First, we revere them. We give them a place of value in our hearts and minds. We do not relegate them to the background of our concerns.

Second, we obey them. As I’ve already noted, children under their parent’s home have an immediate command to obey. For we who are under our own household, this still means, as Watson says, “harkening to their counsel.” We are no longer bound to obey our parents directly, but we should still give ear and value to their words.

Third, we are to love them. We should have affection and compassion towards our parents throughout life, yet we could especially consider the necessity of loving and caring for them in their final years. Just as our parents loved and cared for us throughout our earlier years, so should we love and care for them throughout their last ones.

The honoring of parents is crucial, in part, because, as Augustine said, “If anyone fails to honor his parents, is there anyone he will spare?” Our parents are our first neighbors, our first relationship with other human beings. The adage that how a person treats their father or mother reflects how they will treat their husband or wife may be too narrow in scope. How a person honors their parents will indicate how they also honor others.