The Architecture of Anarchy Text: Exodus 21:17
Introduction: The Unraveling of Worlds
We live in an age that prides itself on its rebellion. We celebrate the revolutionary, the iconoclast, the one who "speaks truth to power." Our entire educational establishment, from kindergarten to graduate school, is a massive engine designed to produce rebels without a cause, teaching the young to question every authority, dismantle every institution, and mock every tradition. But in our mad rush to tear everything down, we have forgotten a simple, architectural principle: you cannot remove a load-bearing wall without bringing the whole house down in ruins.
The family is the first and most fundamental load-bearing wall of any society. It is the first government, the first church, and the first school. And the structural integrity of that wall is maintained by one great principle, enshrined in the Fifth Commandment: honor your father and your mother. When that principle is abandoned, when the very headwaters of societal order are poisoned with contempt, the entire downstream culture becomes toxic. You cannot have a healthy nation populated by families where the children despise their parents. It is a sociological and theological impossibility. All the chaos you see in the public square began as quiet insubordination at a dinner table somewhere.
This is why the case laws of Exodus, which can seem so harsh and alien to our sentimental modern ears, are in fact a profound mercy. They show us what God thinks is important. They show us where the load-bearing walls are. We are tempted to read a verse like our text today and recoil, thinking it disproportionate. But our reaction is not a measure of the law's severity; it is a measure of how far we have drifted from God's blueprint for a sane and stable world. We think cursing your parents is a misdemeanor, a bit of adolescent sass. God identifies it as a capital crime. The disconnect is not with God's law, but with our own moral compass, which has been spinning wildly for generations.
We must therefore come to this text not as judges of it, but as those under its judgment. We must ask what kind of a world God intended to build with a law like this, and what kind of a world we have built by ignoring it. This is not some dusty, irrelevant statute. This is a diagnostic tool for a sick society.
The Text
"And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death."
(Exodus 21:17 LSB)
The Gravity of the Crime
Let us be very clear about what this verse says. The word for "curses" here is not simply about using foul language in the presence of your parents. The Hebrew word, qalal, means to treat as light or insignificant, to belittle, to hold in contempt, to revile. It is the direct antithesis of the word for honor, kabod, which means to treat as heavy or weighty. To honor your parents is to give them the weight and respect their God-given office deserves. To curse them is to treat them as nothing, as disposable, as meaningless. It is an act of verbal and spiritual violence. It is an attempt to annihilate their authority with your mouth.
This is not about a fit of temper from a five-year-old. This law, like the one concerning striking a parent (v. 15), presupposes a level of mature rebellion. This is a deep-seated, settled contempt. It is the heart of a revolutionary. The one who can look at the very source of his life, the man and woman God used to bring him into the world, and revile them, is capable of any anarchy. If he will not honor the authority that is closest, most immediate, and most natural, he will certainly not honor the authority of a magistrate, a pastor, or God Himself. This sin is the seedbed of all societal collapse.
The Lord Jesus Himself demonstrates the abiding importance of this principle. When He confronted the Pharisees, He charged them with setting aside the commandment of God for the sake of their man-made traditions. And which commandment did He use as His prime example? This very one. He quotes both the positive command to honor and the negative penalty for cursing: "For God commanded, 'Honor your father and your mother,' and, 'Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die'" (Matt. 15:4). He shows that their clever "Corban" rule, which allowed them to declare their assets as dedicated to God and thus unavailable to support their aging parents, was a direct violation of the Fifth Commandment. They were, in effect, cursing their parents by treating them as insignificant, and they were doing it under a veneer of piety. This shows us that the principle is not just about outbursts of rage, but about calculated, deliberate dishonor.
The penalty assigned is death. This is what our modern sensibilities choke on. But the severity of the penalty is God's way of teaching us the severity of the crime. By making this a capital offense, God is placing it in the same category as premeditated murder and kidnapping. Why? Because this sin is a form of societal murder. It is an axe laid to the root of the tree of civilization. A society that tolerates this kind of rebellion is a society that has signed its own death warrant. God is simply saying, "You must execute the source of the rot, or the rot will execute your entire culture."
The Theonomic Principle
Now, the moment you say that this law is good and just, someone will immediately ask if we should start executing rebellious teenagers. This is a deliberate caricature, a "poison pill" as some have called it, designed to make the whole project of taking God's law seriously seem ridiculous. But we must be more thoughtful than that. The application of God's law in a civil context requires wisdom and prudence. Judgment begins with the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17). We have centuries of work to do just getting our own ecclesiastical house in order. We excommunicate for adultery far too rarely; we are a long way off from seeing a righteous civil magistrate deal with it.
But this does not mean we get to dismiss the law itself as no longer relevant. The moral standard of the law is unchanging because God is unchanging. The law remains the perfect standard of justice. What this law tells us is that high-handed, settled, public contempt for parents is a crime of the highest order. A truly Christian republic, one that had been discipled for generations, would recognize this. Its laws would reflect this. It would not necessarily mean a mandatory death penalty in every case, just as it didn't in ancient Israel. But it would mean that the society takes the authority of parents with the utmost seriousness, and has legal structures in place to defend it from anarchic assault.
Our problem is that we have inverted everything. Our society actively sides with the rebellious child against the parents. Our public schools teach children that their parents are bigoted and backward. Our courts will emancipate a minor who wants to live a life of sin against her parents' wishes. Our culture produces an endless stream of entertainment in which the parents are clueless buffoons and the children are the witty, enlightened heroes. We are not merely failing to enforce this law; we are enforcing its opposite. We are subsidizing the very sin that God says will destroy a nation. We are cursing ourselves.
The Gospel for Rebels
So where is the hope? Are we all under a death sentence? In a word, yes. "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). Who among us can say that they have perfectly honored their father and mother from the heart, at all times, without fail? Who has never treated their parents' instruction as light? Who has never harbored a bitter or contemptuous thought? The law, in its perfect strictness, condemns us all. It shows us our sin. It drives us to despair of our own righteousness.
And that is precisely where the gospel meets us. The good news is not that God has lowered His standards. The good news is not that He has decided that cursing parents isn't such a big deal after all. The good news is that the death penalty required by the law has been fully and completely executed. It was carried out on a hill called Golgotha.
Jesus Christ, the only Son who ever perfectly honored His Father, took upon Himself the curse for our dishonor. He was reviled, mocked, and treated as insignificant so that we, who reviled our parents and our God, might be forgiven. He took the death penalty we deserved. "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree'" (Gal. 3:13).
This is the only solution for rebellious hearts. It is not therapy, or better communication skills, or a government program. It is the blood of Jesus Christ. When a sinner is confronted by the righteous requirements of a law like this, and sees his own failure in its light, he is prepared to flee to the cross. And when he is washed in the grace of God, he is not then freed to go back to his rebellion. He is freed from his rebellion. The Holy Spirit writes the very law he once broke upon his heart. He is given a new desire, a supernatural ability to begin to truly honor his father and mother, not out of slavish fear, but out of grateful love for the God who saved him.
Therefore, let this law do its work. Let it terrify the proud rebel in all of us. Let it expose the anarchy that lurks in our hearts. And then, let it drive us to the only one who can save us from the penalty of that rebellion. Let it drive us to Christ, in whom the law is fulfilled and rebels are made sons.