<p>6:1 <i>Children, obey your parents in the Lord. For this is right</i>- Given the predominance of slaves, children and women in the early churches, we are to imagine the house church meetings with plenty of women, nursing mothers, kids running everywhere. Eph. 6:1 and Col. 3:20 seem to suppose that children would be present at the church gatherings and would listen attentively to what was said. But &quot;in the Lord&quot; may mean that this obedience is not simply because parents are parents. It could be a continuation of the theme of respect for the sake of being &quot;in Christ&quot; which was developed at the end of chapter 5. Believing children should obey their parents &quot;in the Lord&quot;; or perhaps, for the sake of the fact that they are &quot;in the Lord&quot;, seeing them as the manifestation of the Lord Jesus. The whole passage in 6:1-3 is a strange allusion to Jacob; &quot; Jacob obeyed his father and his mother&quot; (Gen. 28:7) by going to Padan Aram (actually he fled there, but the record frames it as if he did so purely out of obedience to his parents and from a desire to find a wife in the Faith). Because Jacob did this, God promised him at Bethel that it would <i>be well</i> with him (Gen. 32:9 = &quot;that it may be well with you&quot;, Eph. 6:3), and he too was given the Abrahamic promises of living long on the earth&nbsp; / land (= &quot;the... commandment with promise&quot;, Eph. 6:2). Thus Jacob's fleeing to Padan Aram is seen by the Spirit in Paul as a righteous act of obedience to faithful parents, which resulted in him receiving the promises. And yet his flight was rooted in fear, and at the time he did not accept the promises as relevant to him, neither did he believe Yahweh was his God (Gen. 28:20). And yet the positive side of Jacob (i.e. his obedience to his parents) is seized on and held up as our example.</p>