21Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives and Husbands
22Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
25Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— 30for we are members of his body. 31"For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." 32This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Dig Deeper
In the middle of our basketball season one year, we got a new student who had just moved to Wisconsin from Texas. On his first day, the kid immediately came to me and said that he wanted to join the basketball team. We did allow that in the middle of the year for move-ins but he had to be a student for two weeks before he could practice and then had to practice for another two weeks before he could play. During those first two weeks he came to two games that we had. He also came to our game film sessions that we had as a team the day following the games. Throughout the films, this guy was extremely critical of everything about the team. He criticized the way guys played, the decisions they made, and always pointed out how much better he would do it. He even tried to tell me how I wasn’t coaching this team right and should have had them playing a whole different style of basketball. That all changed when he actually began to practice with the team. He lasted about three days and it became very obvious that this young man was not a good basketball player at all. He was quick to criticize everything about that team, but he was, himself, a train wreck as a player and wasn’t even put on the team.
At first glance, that story may appear to have nothing to do with today’s passage, and in a sense it doesn’t. Why did I tell it then? Simply because this passage is one of the most criticized that Paul ever wrote. There are many people in our culture today who completely rip this passage apart, to the point that some claim it is sexist, hateful, and shouldn’t even be considered. Others are not quite that intense in their criticism, but still feel that this passage is demeaning towards women and written by a very unenlightened man from a backwards culture. Yet, before we entertain all of the criticisms that are launched from our cultural perspective, we should first consider the track record that our culture has in marriage right now. More than fifty-percent of marriages end in divorce, and the state of marriage in our culture in general is either a tragedy or a joke. Are we really in a position to discount what Paul has to say because we might not like it at first glance? The obvious answer is ’no’, but beyond that, we must also understand that most of the criticisms of this passage are unfounded and based on misunderstandings.
Usually the most objectionable concept in this passage comes when Paul says that wives should submit to their husbands as to the Lord, and that just as the church submits to Christ, so should wives submit to their husbands in everything. Submission is often considered an offensive topic in our culture, but it needn’t be, especially when we consider the full context of what Paul says here. The Greek word for submit, hypotasso, literally means "arrange under." Recent attempts have been made to translate "submit" as "be supportive of," "be committed to," or "identify with," but none of those claims simply hold any water. The biblical concept of "submit" speaks of surrendering one’s rights and making one subject to another. What is often lost is that Paul calls for all believers to submit to one another. Not only that, he also puts forth the caveat that we are to submit to other believers when they are acting in accordance with and in reverence for the life of Christ. Submission to one another, then, is a crucial ingredient in the Christian life for the community in which all believers are living in submission to Christ. Without mutual submission we cannot fulfill our calling as God’s people. In fact, submission is an act of strength based on genuine and trusting love for the other person. It is a decision that we make concerning the worth of another person. It is one of the ways that we die to self and rise in the life of Christ. Submission to one another, then, is no different than loving one another, something that Jesus said would mark out his people (John 13:34-35). In fact, we can, in a biblical sense, submit to those that we are leading by loving them and considering their needs above our own. Submission is about consideration and love not power and control.
Paul has called for a general life of submission in believers and now will begin to give specific examples of how that will look as it relates to husbands and wives, parents and children, and even slaves and masters. What is often missed for those who get upset or nervous about the call for wives to be subject or submit to their husbands is that husbands are called to have, not any mere human as their role model, but Jesus Christ. The church submits to Christ and has become his bride, not because Christ forced the church or overpowered it, but because he gave himself completely and sacrificially for it. Christ interacted with the church with complete self-abandoning love. This is what Paul calls husbands to do in a mutual relationship of love and submission.
Paul says that the husband is the head of the wife in the same way that Christ is the head of the Church. It is probably most accurate to understand "head" here as "responsible for" in the sense of leadership and love. Thus, while he calls for wives to submit and husbands to love, there is no real difference between the two concepts when they are mutually lived out.
It should not be missed that Paul lived in a world where women were often devalued, degraded, and even considered impure by men, who saw the natural bodily functions of women as a potential to make them unclean every month. Rather than rejecting the wife as impure, unclean, or dangerous, Paul exalts women by seeing it as the job of the husband to bring them into full purity, just as Christ does with the Church. The husband’s role is to, at all times, let his wife know that she is love and valued, while the wife’s role is to let her husband know that his role is respected and valued. The relations and roles are mutually complementary not identical. The husband takes the role of leadership in the same way that Christ did, in the context of complete self-giving and self-sacrificial love, while the wife takes the role of partner by submitting to that love and leadership, just as the church does. This is where the role of the church truly helps us see what Paul had in mind for wives. The church is submissive to the love and sacrifice of Christ and chooses and allows herself to be led and purified by that leadership. It is, again, a mutual relationship that Paul envisions for husbands and wives as well. So, why does he reserve submission for women and love for men? He doesn’t. He has already called all Christians to submit to one another, the call for wives is merely a special reminder for women who might, in their new status in Christ, feel that they didn’t need to submit to anyone, as well as a reminder to men that they needed to go beyond the societal expectations of marriage which did not necessarily include loving and being tender and compassionate to one’s wife.
Just as we cease to be truly autonomous individuals as we become members of the body of Christ, so Paul appeals to Genesis 2:24 to make the point that a husband and wife truly belong to one another. They have become one flesh and should approach the world and their relationship with one another with that in mind. The Bible is clear that that there will be no marriage in the age to come (Luke 20:35) because marriage is really a pointer intended to teach us about our relationship with God. Thus, Paul says that the union between Christ and the church is the real mystery (or thing that has been revealed) that marriage only points to. Marriage is not the point itself, but is intended to teach us about God. Thus we see the real purpose of Paul’s mention of Genesis 2:24. God’s intent all along in creation was to have the Messiah leave his home and find a bride for himself with which to be united, namely the church. Marriage is a wonderful gift in and of itself, but all the more so because it teaches us about our relationship with Christ. Learning to submit to and love one another is so vital in a marriage, because there is far more to it than just our relationship with one another, it is all about learning to become united with Christ.
Devotional Thought
As we have seen, the New Testament teaches that marriage is a vehicle that God has used to teach us more about Him and our relationship with Him. If you are married, what have you personally learned about your relationship with God through your marriage? What have you learned about your marriage from your relationship with God?
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