Many people today seem to believe that the Law of God, as summarized in the Ten Commandments, is somehow subchristian. To an extant this is true, as is shown by Paul’s exhortation to children in his letter to the Ephesians. Paul alters the Fifth Commandment in order to apply it. The original words as written by God’s own finger are, incredibly, no longer an accurate statement of God’s promise to His children in regard to how they act toward their earthly parents. The original command came with a promise for long life in the Promised Land of Canaan; the Pauline revision promises long life even to those in Ephesus—and to Christians living anywhere else on earth.

Paul has articulated his fundamental principle for making this alteration elsewhere. In the letter to the Romans, he states, “For the promise to Abraham or to his descendants that he would be heir of the world [Greek: kosmos) was not through the Law, but through the righteousness of faith” (4.13). God promised Abraham a particular piece of land, and the Law put boundaries around it, but Paul tells us that the piece of land actually was a token of the whole cosmos. Now that Christ has come, the token is no longer needed because the full inheritance has been given.

However, when most people treat the Decalogue as subchristian, they usually mean something very different from the Apostle Paul. Some say that the Law was not for the Church, but for Israel. Some say that the Ten Commandments taught salvation by works and, in a roundabout way, also communicated that salvation must be by grace because, once anyone attempted it, they would soon discover Law-keeping was impossible.

Paul’s letter to the Ephesian children should give us second thoughts about such suggestions. In the first place, the Apostle Paul states that Christian children are under obligation, according to the Mosaic Law, to obey both their parents. Secondly, the Apostle Paul explicitly motivates such children to do so by saying that God will reward them—a reward he finds in the original Fifth Commandment, even though he changes the scope of that reward (to include the whole earth including Ephesus, not just Palestine).

Read the rest at Theologia » Paul’s Use of the Decalogue in Ephesians 6.1-3.