Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
Read Chapter 6
Ambrosiaster
AD 400
This law is given to children: Since their parents are the enablers of their existence, they are to obey them. The principle is that they reverence those through whom they exist.
Honour thy father and thy mother (which is the first command with promise), that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest be long-lived on the earth."
It is not clear whether this saying means that children are to obey their “parents in the Lord” or that in the Lord children are to obey their parents. I take it both ways. We are to obey those parents who gave birth to us in the Lord, as through Paul and the apostles they were spiritually born, and do what they say. And we should submit in the Lord to our own parents, from whom we were born according to the flesh, performing all their commands that are not contrary to the Lord’s will. .
Paul has spoken first about the husband, second about the wife; now he moves along this path to children. The husband is responsible for the wife. Both the husband and the wife are responsible for the children…. He speaks to children in an infant voice. He is well aware that if husband and wife are well disposed according to the commands he has laid down, there will be little difficulty in eliciting the cooperation of children…. But what if the parents command foolish things? Generally parents do not command foolish things. But if they should, the apostle has a remedy when he says that parents are to be obeyed “in the Lord.” They are to be obeyed in whatever way they are not offending against God. .
As a man in forming a body, places the head first, after that the neck, then the feet, so does the blessed Paul proceed in his discourse. He has spoken of the husband, he has spoken of the wife, who is second in authority, he now goes on by gradual advances to the third rank— which is that of children. For the husband has authority over the wife, and the husband and the wife over the children. Now then mark what he is saying.
Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is the first commandment with promise.
Here he has not a word of discourse concerning Christ, not a word on high subjects, for he is as yet addressing his discourse to tender understandings. And it is for this reason, moreover, that he makes his exhortation short, inasmuch as children cannot follow up a long argument. For this reason also he does not discourse at all about a kingdom, (because it does not belong to the tender age of childhood to understand these subjects,) but what a child's soul most especial...
