Wives and Husbands 22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. 28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Let me start by saying that this passage is for everyone no matter your marital status. Remember that it was written to the Church (specifically to the congregation or congregations the worshipped in Ephesus, but we know that the Holy Spirit meant it for all Christians in all places and all times). The reason its so important that Christians get marriage right, including what they teach about marriage, even if they are not married themselves, is that it was instituted by God to teach us something about Himself and to give us a picture of our identity in Christ, both individually and as the Church universal, as the Bride of Christ.
For that reason, that we are considered the Bride of Christ and He is the Bridegroom, Paul starts with instructions to the wives. He tells wives to be submissive to their husbands as to the Lord because their role in the marriage should show people how our position and posture should be as the Church before Christ. Out of love, we give up our personal identity before to take on the new identity given to us by Christ. We choose, since love requires a choice, to put to death our personal ambitions to follow the leadership of Christ. However, Christ does not make us mindless automatons in the process and loves to communicate with us and hear what is going on with us, how we feel and what we desire--especially as we desire more and more to please Him and our desires become His desires. Our desire should always be to assist Him in His mission (to be His "helpmate" in the way that Eve was to Adam), to have an intimate (though not sexual) relationship with Him, and for everything that we do to be about exalting Him and making Him look good. Men need much the same thing from their wives in a marriage. They feel loved when their wife trusts them with the leadership role that God has given to them, works alongside them to help them with the things that are most important but maybe they are not best at (complementarianism), and when their wife honors them by speaking in a positive way about their character and their work to others. It is usually obvious to others when two people are married because of how they respond to each other when they are close to each other and how they long for each other when they are apart from each other, and it should be the same way with us and Christ--though the marriage has not happened yet, so we are more like the couple that longs to be married and can't get enough of each other. I'm sure you know the type. That's really all that Paul has to say to the wives, and we make much--probably way too much--out of these few verses. Like in the Garden of Eden, the responsibility falls on the man (in this case Christ) for the marriage and health of the relationship. We make a commitment to each other before God and men in a marriage covenant "for better or worse"--for so many people today that is simply a lie, and it ruins the way that people think about the covenant that God makes with us because we then start to believe that God is just as faithless in keeping His covenant as we are in keeping our covenants. Part of our problem here is that we, at least in the Western world, think that the decision to get married is a decision we needs to be driven by our emotions and because we feel romantically drawn and attached to someone. While it's true that this intimacy that is the closest intimacy in human relationships that we can have to model the intimacy that God has for us and within the Trinity and is an extremely important part of marriage, the act of intercourse should not be the primary reason to get married, because what happens when the person no longer "turns you on" or you are no longer able to perform as the man? If that is the foundation that your marriage is built off of, then it is not built to last. Paul tells us that the foundations for our marriages needs to be the kind of sacrificial love for each other that Christ had for the Church and that the intimacy is something that comes as a result of us both loving each other completely and fully in this way. (see verses 25-27). It is the responsibility of the husband to care for his wife in the same way that Christ loves and cares for the Church. While not directly voiced by Paul here, I have to imagine that there are a few things Paul is trying to say here. First would be the idea of women being treated as second-class citizens at the time, and that's not something that we saw in the life and ministry of Jesus. While there are some roles and responsibilities that God has given specifically to men (apostles and elders for example), God did not make Eve inferior to Adam--in fact it is clear in Genesis that a different word is used for how God made both Adam and Eve and he "fashioned" both of them as he made Adam out of the earth and made Eve out of a rib from Adam's side (a part of Adam's side to show they would be separate yet equal, and that she was made from the part of him closest to his heart). There should not be any spousal abuse either Personally, I think the time to see that and deal with it is before the marriage and that the proper remedy for such violence against others is something much different than divorce and belongs in the hands of law enforcement, the courts, and the other authorizes that God has given to us as ministers of His justice here on earth. Typically, I like the ESV, but I'm going back to the NASB as a more word-for-word translation of an Old Testament passage on marriage and divorce because an important phrase seems to have been eliminated by the translators for the ESV--this is not to say that I think the Word of God is fallible, just that the people responsible for translation sometimes have their own agendas, in this case softening what the Word of God said about divorce. In the book of Malachi, specifically chapter 2, we see that the nation of Israel is going to be judged for becoming like the pagan peoples around them and one of the things we see God upset about is their corruption of marriage and their system of easy divorce and the mistreatment of wives by their husbands. Malachi 2:13-16 New American Standard Bible13 “This is another thing you do: you cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and with groaning, because He no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand. 14 Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. 15 But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a godly offspring? Take heed then to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against the wife of your youth. 16 For I hate divorce,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “and him who covers his garment with wrong,” says the Lord of hosts. “So take heed to your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously.” So, spousal abuse should never happen, but divorce is not the answer. The answer here is for Christian men to love their wives as Christ loved the Church and then they will be willing to have much pain and suffering inflicted on them for the good of their wives and will want only good things for their wives. But what about the relationships where the man is not a Christian? How can the wife expect to submit to a husband who does not submit to the authority of Christ and can't possibly love her in the same way that Christ loved us because he is not filled with the Holy Spirit? For that question we need to turn to a different epistle what we'll cover at a later time, but I'll point to it now (I'm going to say with the NASB for the time being). I will not post all of I Corinthians 7 here, but encourage you to read it at this time. I will however point out a couple of things. First is that God forbids the Christian to marry an unsaved person and to be "unequally yoked." Courtship and marriage are not meant to be tools for evangelism. Second is that there is a real possibility that one person in the marriage gets saved before the other, and in the days of Paul there were a lot of women that were getting saved before their husbands. Paul told the person that was saved in the marriage to not divorce their spouse if they were already marriage but also to not prevent the unmarried spouse from filing for divorce if they no longer wanted to be married to the saved spouse after they had been saved and their identity and nature had changed. This is one of the only permissions given in the Bible for divorce and it is not permissible between Christians nor should it be initiated by the Christian. Never do we see in the Bible the reasons of "I just don't love him or her any more" or even "He or she is not the person I married" or "I think I would be happier with someone else." Jesus took on this idea of no-fault divorce head-on in The Sermon On the Mount. It's right there at the beginning of His ministry, but we just like to skip over that part of the Bible because it might "offend" people and we might lose church members. What good is it to have church members who won't read and come into conformity with the entire council of the Word of God? If someone gets huffy and leaves a congregation because the pastor faithfully preaches the Word of God, that person's problem is with God and the authority of His Word and not with the pastor. Matthew 5:31-32 English Standard Version Divorce 31 “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. I could go to many other places where Jesus taught about this topic and said the same thing and the people and his disciples said that this was a hard teaching and that it was better to just not get married. Jesus agreed that for some people, it is better to not get married, especially as the end of the ages comes, but that marriage is also a good and beautiful thing that should be encouraged, but it's not easy. I spent so much time focusing on divorce for because it's such a problem in today's congregations. I even took some time to point out that it's creeped into some of our more recent Bible translations and it was even an issue that caused divisions in the church such as the creation of the Anglican church when King Henry VIII wanted to marry and divorce as he please and the Church (what we would now call the Roman Catholic Church) would not permit to annul his marriage to his first wife. So, this is no trivial issue for Christians, especially since marriage is meant to reflect the eternal covenant relationship between Christ and His Church that we find in the Covenant of Redemption. In fact, that's where we left off in the text in verse 27. Let's jump back into today's text at verse 28. In marriage the two become one (the citation from Genesis 2 that says this will come up shortly in verse 31), so for this reason a man should love his wife's body as if it was his own body. Again, I think this is a prohibition on any kind of abuse--specifically physical and sexual abuse. We also have seen what I would believe to be a prohibition on what we might call emotional, psychological, or mental abuse in the admonition for husbands to love as Christ loves the Church, but I also think we find it here. If we are looking to the Greatest Commandments and we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength and love our neighbors (including wives) as we love ourselves, then all of the Law and the Prophets are wrapped up in these two commandments. These commandments tell us how to love perfectly and are there to keep us from sin and help us better display God's glory and holiness as we are made more and more into the image of God as we are sanctified and made in the image of Christ. The mystery of the two becoming one flesh is profound according to Paul, and it is something we probably won't fully understand or comprehend until we get to heaven, but somehow we will be one with Christ and since Christ is one with the Father and the Spirit, I think that we too will have perfect communion with all the persons of the Trinity. We will no longer be married or given in marriage in heaven because we will be married to Christ and will want no other spouse. While our human relationships pale in comparison to this, marriage is the closes thing that we can point to for both the eternal covenant, the unconditional, eternal, sacrificial love of God, and the intimacy and union that we have to look forward to that somehow God will take all that was divided (men/women, Jew/Gentile, and even God and men) and somehow make us one through Christ. This is something glorious to look forward to no matter what your marital status now, and it is something to be careful to portray correctly as marriage and family has been given to us by God as a way to show and tell the gospel to the world. Marriage was always meant to be an eternal union between a man and woman and for God to be in the center of the relationship. It existed before the Fall as we see in Genesis 2 and it is one of the things that is constantly under the attack of the devil as he seeks to redefine love, sex (both male/female and the purpose of the act we call sex), marriage and family. Divorce is now just about as prevalent in the Church as in the world, which should not be. If we love Him, we are to keep His commandments, even the ones that tell us to love our spouses unconditionally and eternally because that's the way that God has loved us. If you aren't willing to commit to this, then don't get married--Jesus says that and Paul says that too. We'll talk much more about this topic of marriage and family when we get to I Corinthians, especially chapter 7. However, we're not done talking about family here in the book of Ephesians and next Paul is going to address other important relationship that we have. First the relationships between parents and children and then between slaves and masters (probably best to think of this as the modern-day relationship between employees and employers). We'll tackle those two topics over the next couple of days as we make our way towards the end of the epistle to the Ephesians.
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Daniel WestfallI will mostly use this space for recording my "journal" from my daily devotions as I hope to encourage others to read the Bible along with me and to leave a legacy for others. Archives
January 2025
Categories
All
|