Ephesians 6:4

And ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord.

In this matter of making basic human obligations to be reciprocal rather than limited to the ones required to obey, the Christian religion swept away the whole philosophy of pre-Christian ages. In Ephesians 5:25, Paul laid it upon husbands that they must love their wives, even as Christ loved the church enough to die for it! Here he confronted parents, fathers particularly, with their obligations to their children. They must instruct and discipline them "in the Lord," having the most urgent respect to the rights and feelings of the children. A moment later, he would thunder the obligations of masters toward their slaves (Ephesians 6:9). The epic nature of these admonitions is seen in the fact that in the society of Paul's day, wives, children and slaves had no rights.

STATUS OF WIVES; CHILDREN AND SLAVES

All women, wives in particular, were in practical fact the chattels of their husbands, without economic or rights of any kind whatever, subject to divorce or abuse upon any pretext and without recourse or protection of any kind. What Christianity has done for women has been extolled in the songs and literature of all nations; but the same glorious transformation of the status of children and slaves was also achieved by those sacred Scriptures before our eyes in this very chapter. See my Commentary on John 4:27.

The rights of children were also non-existent in ancient society:

A Roman father had absolute power over his family. He could sell them as slaves, work them in the fields, even in chains. He could take the law into his own hands (he was the law), punish as he liked, and even inflict the death penalty on a child![6]

The notion that a father had any obligation toward a child simply did not exist in non-Jewish elements of ancient pagan society. As a result of the prevailing attitude, many unwanted or despised children were exposed at birth to the elements, wild beasts, or other forms of horrible death.

It was exactly the same way with slaves.

A slave is no better than a beast; the old and sick must be thrown out to starve; when a slave is sick, it is a waste to give him rations; masters had power of life and death over slaves; Augustus killed a slave for killing a pet quail; Pollio flung a slave alive to the savage lampreys in his fish pond because he dropped and broke a crystal goblet. One Roman nobleman's wife killed a slave because she lost her temper. Slaves used as maids often had their cheeks torn, their hair torn out, or were branded with hot irons at the caprice of their heartless and cruel masters.[7]

Now, it was to a world which from the remotest antiquity had operated upon such principles as these, regarding wives, children and slaves, that the great apostle of Christianity thundered the mighty oracle of these magnificent chapters. In the name of Christ, he asserted the obligations of husbands, fathers and masters, thereby announcing the character of the basic rights of wives, children and slaves. In all literature apart from the word of God, where is anything that compares to what is taught here? No wonder this letter has lived two thousand years; and, as for the nonsense that it was not written by Paul, one may only ask, "Who, in the name of God, could have written it except Paul?"

[6] William Barclay, The Letters to the Galatians and Ephesians (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1954), p. 208.

[7] Ibid., p. 214.