| Home Making |
Chapter 5 |
Page 5 |
Remember who this Child was. It was over his birth that the angels sang their song: “Glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, good will to men.” He was the eternal Son of god. He had made all the worlds. He had adorned the heavens. Him all the hosts of glory obeyed. Yet he humbled himself, veiled his glory, and dwelt in a lowly home of earth for thirty years. He submitted himself to earthly parents and obeyed them. Then he wrought himself with his own hands to help support the home. No details are given – just this one word; but we can easily fill out the picture for ourselves. We see, for thirty years, from infancy to full manhood, this holy Child exhibiting toward his parents the most perfect dutifulness, obedience, honor and helpfulness. He obeyed them, not by constraint but cheerfully, all these years. He did his part well in the making of that home.
This example is the answer to the question of this chapter; and what is it but this, that the great duty of childhood in the home life is to obey? He was subject unto them. Although he was the Son of god, yet he learned obedience to human parents. He did their will and not his own. He had entered upon the affairs of his heavenly Father. In the temple he had said, “Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?”* Yet immediately after saying this he went back to his own home to take and keep for eighteen years more the place of a child. Hence we conclude that the Father’s business for him all those years was subjection to his earthly parents. That was the work which was given him to do for that time. He had come to the earth on a great mission, the greatest ever undertaken or performed in the universe, yet the place in which he was prepared for that mission was not in any of the fine schools of the world, but in a lowly home; not at the feet of rabbis and philosophers, but with his own mother for his teacher. What an honor does this fact put upon home! What a dignity upon motherhood!
It would seem that no argument after that was needed to prove to children the duty and the dignity of obedience to parents. We take our place far back in the history of the world; we stand under the cloud crowned, fire wreathed Sinai, and amidst its awful thundering we hear the voice of God proclaim: “Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” But even all these scenes of majesty – the voice of Jehovah, the burning mountain, the cloud and the thunder – did not give to this command such sacred authority, such solemn importance, as when Jesus, the Son of God, for thirty years in a lowly home on earth, submitted himself to human parents and obeyed their commands.
Does any question ever arise as to the authority of this divine word in the Decalogue? This picture of Jesus obeying it in that Galilean home is sufficient answer.
*The Revised Version renders it “in my Father’s house,” but gives in the margin as the literal rendering “in the things of my Father.” Alford says: “Primarily in the house of my Father” but we must not exclude the wider sense, which embraces all places and employments of my Father’s.”
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