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Why does the fifth commandment come with a promise and the others don’t?


Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother”—which is the first commandment with a promise— “so that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.”  Ephesians 6:1-3
            The first four commandments deal with our relationship with God.  If we ignore those, we break our relationship with God.
            The other six deal with our relationship with other people.  The consequences of those are pretty obvious (steal and kill lead to jail, adultery destroys a marriage, envy is the precursor to stealing and the heart of discontent).
            Honoring parents doesn’t seem to have a clear “or else” built into it, but if someone hates their parents it definitely trickles down into other areas—how they see God, how they deal with authority, family dysfunction, legacies of hate.  God presents Himself as our “Father” so we need to honor that title by loving our own father and mother. 
            It’s important enough to make the Top 10 list of Commandments so it must be important enough to mention and it must have a clear connection to other areas of our lives.