David Would Not Touch Him and David Would Not Follow Him

A man in his forties drove his father home from a hospital appointment and did not say the thing he had come to say.

He had rehearsed it. He had a list, and every item on the list was true, and he had been carrying most of it since he was nineteen. His father had been wrong about a great deal, and some of it had cost people, and the man in the driving seat had spent two decades paying part of that bill without ever sending an invoice.

They talked about the traffic. He walked his father to the door. And driving home he was angry with himself, because it felt like cowardice, and he could not work out why it also felt like the right thing.

He had run into something Scripture is careful about and most of us are not. There is a difference between honoring a man and agreeing with him, and almost nobody is taught where it runs.

The commandment with a promise attached

The fifth commandment is short and it is unusual:

Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee. (Exodus 20:12, King James Version)

Paul points out what is remarkable about it: it is the first commandment with promise (Ephesians 6:2). And notice what it does not say. It does not say obey your father and mother forever, and it does not say agree with them, and it does not say pretend they were right.

Honor is a different word from obedience, and Scripture uses them differently. Children are told to obey (Ephesians 6:1). Everyone is told to honor. The obedience has a season. The honor does not.

You have been given two different instructions, and Scripture has never once collapsed them into one. Ephesians 6:1 says children obey and Ephesians 6:2 says honor, in consecutive verses with different words, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction usable in an actual car with an actual man.

That distinction is the whole of this, and it is the Spirit rather than a clever definition who makes it usable in the room where it matters.

A man who did both at once, for years

David is the clearest case in Scripture of somebody honoring an authority who was wrong, dangerous and actively trying to kill him.

Twice he had Saul at his mercy. In the cave he cuts off the skirt of Saul's robe and then his own heart smites him for doing even that (1 Samuel 24:5). His men tell him this is God handing Saul over. And his answer is not that Saul is a good king:

The LORD forbid that I should do this thing unto my master, the LORD's anointed, to stretch forth mine hand against him, seeing he is the anointed of the LORD. (1 Samuel 24:6)

Read what David is and is not doing. He is not obeying Saul. He is not in Saul's army, not at Saul's table, not doing what Saul says. He is in a cave, hiding from him, because Saul is wrong and David knows it.

And he still will not touch him, and he calls him master, and later he weeps over his death and forbids anyone to celebrate it.

Honor is not agreement, and it is not submission to what is wrong. It is a refusal to destroy a person you have every right to be angry with. David held both for years, 1 Samuel 24:6 has him call a man who was hunting him his master, and Scripture never once suggests he was being weak about it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person's hand down when they have every right to raise it.

You are able to be out from under something and still not lift your hand against anybody, and those two have never once been in conflict. 1 Samuel 24:5 has David's own heart smite him for cutting a robe, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person tender in the middle of being right.

The twelve year old who said the true thing and then went home

There is a moment in Luke that shows the same shape in miniature.

Jesus, at twelve, stays behind in the temple. His parents search for three days and find Him among the teachers, and Mary asks why He has done this to them. His answer corrects them:

How is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business? (Luke 2:49)

He does not soften it and He does not apologize for it. He says the truer thing, plainly, to His own mother.

And then comes the next verse, which almost nobody quotes with it:

And he went down with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject unto them. (Luke 2:51)

He said the true thing and then He went home and was subject. Both. Neither cancels the other.

You are able to say the true thing and go home the same evening, and one has never once canceled the other. Luke 2:49 and Luke 2:51 sit two verses apart with no apology in between, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies both halves in the same person on the same day.