A Sunday school class was discussing King Solomon. People pointed out that though Solomon had been so wise, he made some foolish choices. Finally, the teacher asked, "Are we picking too much on Solomon?" One older saint replied wryly, "Ah, with all those wives, he was used to it!"
We’re actually not here this morning to pick on you wives. In fact, we want to honor you today, especially those of you who are also mothers. So Happy Mother’s Day!
But the comment of that student in that Sunday school class does point out just how difficult it is to have a good marriage. Good marriages don’t just happen, they require hard work.
This will be the third week we’ve spent looking at Ephesians 5:21-33. Two weeks ago we discovered that God created marriage as a physical picture of the spiritual reality of the relationship between Christ and His body, the church. And then last week, we spent some time focusing on the role of the husband in the marriage relationship and saw how that we are to love our wives in the same way Christ loved the church, with a sacrificial love that focuses on meeting the needs of our wives, even when that is at great expense to us personally. This morning we’re going to focus on the role of the wife.
Before we do that, however, I want to remind all of us that the Bible is very clear that marriage is not a necessary pre-requisite for our joy and for an abundant life. God very often calls his children to a life of singleness, either for an entire lifetime or for a season of time. And if that is the case, it is far better to remain single than to marry the wrong person just for the sake of being married. But even if you are single, I believe that some of the principles that we’ve looked at in Paul’s discussion of marriage can be modified a bit and applied to our other relationships.
Before we get to our Ephesians passage this morning, I thought it might be helpful to go back and see why Paul needed to write so extensively to husbands and wives about how to fulfill their God-given roles in marriage. I think that process will also help us to understand why our culture today has so completely perverted the marriage relationship and why these Biblical principles face such ridicule and scorn.
In order to do that, we need to go back to the very beginning of the marriage relationship in the Garden of Eden. Let’s begin near the end of Genesis 1:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27 (NIV)
What I’d like you to see in this verse is that when God created man in His own image, He created both male and female. That’s a crucial point because it clearly shows that men and women were created equal when it came to their personhood and their dignity. That doesn’t mean, however, that God didn’t create them with different characteristics or roles.
And then we come to Chapter 2 and we find the description of the very first marriage.
For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
Genesis 2:24 (NIV)
God’s original design for marriage was very clear – one man and one woman together for life. That is the kind of marriage that Paul has in mind in Ephesians 5 when he describes the mystery of how marriage was designed by God to picture the relationship between Jesus and His body, the church. But the problem was that when sin entered into the world, it had a devastating impact on God’s design for marriage. After Adam and Eve sinned, God revealed to each of them the punishment for their sin. In addition to the ultimate penalty – they would both now die – there were some further consequences that would affect the man and the woman separately. Let’s pick up in Genesis 3 as God speaks to Eve.
To the woman he said, "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you."
Genesis 3:16 (NIV)
Because of our limited time this morning, I want us to focus on the second part of that verse since that is the part that bears directly on marriage. There has been some disagreement about what God meant when he said that Eve’s desire would be for her husband. But I think we can get a pretty clear picture of the meaning if we look at the only other place the word “desire” is used in the Old Testament:
If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it."
Genesis 4:7 (NIV)
The word translated “desire” in both those passages is from an Arabic root word that means “to seek control”. That meaning is quite obvious in Genesis 4:7 where God is telling Cain that sin desires to take control of his life. So, as a result of her sin, God’s curse upon Eve, and subsequently on all wives is that they will have a desire to control their husbands. The fact that is a curse makes it clear that God’s original plan for marriage did not anticipate that the wife would try to control the husband within the marriage relationship.
I’m reminded of the true story of one couple who was meeting with their priest to sign some papers prior to the wedding. While filling out the form, the man was reading a few of the questions aloud when he came to the question that asked, “Are you entering into this marriage upon you won free will?” As he looked at his fiancé, she said, “Put down yes.”
Once when Mark Twain was lecturing in Utah, a Mormon acquaintance argued with him on the subject of polygamy. After a long and rather heated debate, the Mormon finally said, "Can you find for me a single passage of Scripture which forbids polygamy?" "Certainly," replied Twain. "’No man can serve two masters.’"
But let’s look also at the second part of the curse – “and he will rule over you". The word translated “rule” is a word that means to “dominate” or to “reign over”. It literally described installing someone into office. I’m convinced that this is where the conflict in marriage began. As a result of the fall, the God-ordained roles of the husband and wife were perverted so that the wife tried to control the marriage and the husband responded by becoming the overbearing ruler.
There is an interesting passage in 1 Timothy that gives us some further insight into how God’s original pattern for the marriage relationship was distorted by sin.
A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.
1 Timothy 2:11-14 (NIV)
By the time Paul wrote his letters, including both 1 Timothy and Ephesians, there was a full-fledged women’s liberation under way. In one of his famous “Satires” the Roman author Juvenal wrote about women who were shaving their heads and going around bare-chested with spears in their hands, and trying to prove that they could do everything men did. So Paul has to write to believers in order to instruct them how to deal with the impact of that movement which was impacting both their marriages and the way teaching was taking place within the church.
We obviously don’t have time to address the issue of women teaching in the church this morning. We’ll have to leave that for another time. But I do want us to focus on Paul’s commentary on the sin of Adam and Eve. We can correctly infer from what Paul writes that in the original marriage relationship, Adam was to be the head and one of his duties as the head was to protect his wife from being deceived. When Eve rebelled against the headship of her husband, she became vulnerable to Satan’s deception.
Although we obviously need to be careful about speculating when the Bible is silent, I think that I can make a pretty good case that Adam and Eve both sinned before they ever ate the fruit. Eve had obviously violated God’s design for marriage by rejecting the headship of Adam. She was deceived not just in taking the fruit, but also in her view about the headship of Adam in their marriage relationship.
But before we’re too hard on Eve, it’s also apparent that Adam had somehow failed in his role as the head. From Genesis 3:6, we know that Adam was with Eve when she ate the fruit, and yet for some reason he did not exercise the kind of loving headship that we discussed last week that would have protected the virtue and purity of his wife.
Let’s look at one more passage from another of Paul’s letters before we get to our passage from Ephesians.
Now I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.
1 Corinthians 11:3 (NIV)
This verse is written in another section of one of Paul’s letters where he addresses the roles of men and women in the church. Like the passage in 1 Timothy and our passage in Ephesians 5, what Paul writes is heavily influenced by the culture which was trying to erase the Biblical distinctions between the roles of men and women both in marriage and in the church.
When we look at this passage, no one argues that the head of every man is Christ. I have yet to hear of any Christians’ Liberation movement demanding equality with Christ! We also don’t have any problem understanding that God the Father is the head of Christ. Jesus was committed to carrying out the will of His Father and so He took on flesh and blood and died on a cross and rose from the dead in order to carry out His Father’s eternal plan. We have no problem accepting that Christ is the head of the man, and the Father is the head of Christ, so why do we have such a hard time with the principle that the husband is the head of the wife?
That distortion and perversion of the roles of men and women, husbands and wives, that began back in the Garden, can essentially be traced back to one root cause – focus on self. In their efforts to prove their self-reliance and exalt themselves, women have rebelled against their God-ordained role, even to the point that in some cases that desire to control has erupted into outright hatred and disdain for men. And that same distortion has led to men who have abandoned their God-given role as the head who leads by his sacrificial love. Instead, in their selfishness they have attempted to subdue and control and exploit women in an attempt to fulfill their own private desires.
So when Paul writes to his readers about the fact that marriage is a picture of the relationship between Christ and the church, he has to also address that fact that the marriage relationship had been perverted by those attitudes. And so he writes about how a husband and wife can relate to each other in a way that restores marriage to it’s the way it was originally created by God before it was distorted by sin. Let’s read our passage with that thought in mind.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church - for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery - but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Ephesians 5:21-33 (NIV)
Last week we focused on the husband’s role in this process, so let’s briefly focus on the wife’s role this week.
THE COMMAND: WIVES SUBMIT TO YOUR HUSBANDS
...Wives, submit to your husbands...
...so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything...
One of the reasons this principle has been so rejected in our culture is that many people feels that this somehow degrades or lessens the value of women. But a proper understanding of what Paul is writing here actually shows that Paul was very much elevating the worth of women.
In order for us to understand how that is the case, we first need to understand the nature of marriage in Paul’s day. Paul’s readers would have been influenced by three different cultural views of marriage:
• The Jews
The Jews did not hold women in high esteem. When a Jewish man prayed, he would thank God that he was not a Gentile, a slave or a woman. By the time Paul wrote, a Jewish wife was considered a servant and the predominant rabbinical teaching was that a man could divorce his wife for almost any reason at all, but the wife did not have that same right.
• The Greeks
In the Greek world wives merely cleaned house and bore legitimate children for their husbands. There wasn’t even a formal procedure for divorce because the husband had no need to go through any legal procedure in order to get rid of his wife.
• The Romans
Divorce was not the exception, but the norm. Marriage was essentially nothing more than legalized prostitution. A man would marry a woman, stay with her until he tired of her and then marry someone else.
So when Paul comes along and writes that men are to love their wives as Christ loved the church, he is elevating the value of women far above the cultural norms of the day.
The principle of women submitting to their husbands is also rejected because of an improper understanding of what the word “submit” means.
I read this week about three guys who were talking in a bar. Two of them were talking about the amount of control they had over their wives, while the third guy just remained quiet. After a while one of the first two turned to the third and said, "Well, what about you, what sort of control do you have over your wife?" The third man said, "I’ll tell you. Just the other night my wife came to me on her hands and knees." The first two guys were amazed. "What happened then?" they asked. "She said, ’get out from under the bed and fight like a man’."
As we saw two weeks ago, the word “submit” comes from a military term which means to be in the proper order. There is no idea of rank or of one person being superior to the other. In his book, What Paul Really Said About Women, John Bristow indicates that word could be translated “give allegiance to”, “tend to the needs of”, “be supportive of”, or “place oneself as the disposition of”. That certainly seems to fit when we look at the example of submission that Paul gives to his readers.
THE EXAMPLE: AS THE CHURCH SUBMITS TO CHRIST
...as to the Lord...
...Now as the church submits to Christ...
If, as we’ve seen the husband and wife are equal in value before God, why should a woman submit to her husband? First of all, Paul writes, she should do it as an act of obedience and love toward Jesus. When Paul writes “as to the Lord” he is not suggesting that wives are to treat their husbands as if he were Jesus – sorry guys! He is making the point that submission actually honors the one who established the relationship in the first place.
In verse 21, Paul began by instructing his readers to submit to one another. But that concept of mutual submission does not mean that we all submit to each other in exactly the same way. That is certainly illustrated in the relationship between Christ and the church. Jesus submitted Himself to His body with a servant leadership that cost Him His life. The church, on the other hand, submits in a different way by honoring Jesus as the head and by following His leadership.
The same thing holds true in a marriage. The husband submits to the wife by exercising servant leadership as the head of that relationship and by serving the needs of his wife. The wife submits by honoring her husband as the head and by following his leadership. I really like John Piper’s definition of the wife’s submission in marriage:
Submission is the divine calling of a wife to honor and affirm her husband’s leadership and help carry it through according to her gifts.
Submission does not mean that the wife is to be subservient to her husband, just going along with his every wish and desire. As I pointed out last week, these principles only work when both the husband and wife are both rightly related to God and they make Jesus that third strand in the cord of their marriage. So, if your husband is not a believer, and he asks you to do something that violates Scripture, you are certainly not to be obedient to your husband and disobedient to God. But even in that case, I believe it is still possible to follow this principle of submission. Look at this passage from Peter:
Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.
1 Peter 3:1, 2 (NIV)
Peter is obviously writing her to wives whose husbands are unbelievers. And how are they to win their husbands to the Lord? By being submissive to them. Let me give you a couple of examples that might be helpful here, whether your husband is a believer or not.
Let’s suppose that your husband is about to do something foolish or make a decision that will harm your family. You could still express your submission by saying something like this: “Honey, I know you’ve thought about this and I respect your leadership in your family, but I really don’t have a lot of peace about this decision. Could we discuss it some more when you have the time?”
Or if your husband asks you to do something you believe violates the Scriptures or your conscience, how about demonstrating your submission by saying something like, “Honey I appreciate you and your leadership in our family. But I really feel like what you are asking me to do would violate my beliefs and my conscience. So I’m asking out of your respect for me to think about this some more and re-consider your position.”
Now obviously there may come a time when you just have to refuse to go along with something your husband asks you to do because it would be disobedient to God. But I’m convinced that a lot of those situations could be avoided if wives would come to their husbands with a spirit of submission first.
Just as the husband’s command to love his wife is not conditional upon whether his wife deserves that love or not, the wife’s submission is not conditional upon whether the husband deserves her submission.
Ladies, what I’m going to say right now may shock you a little. But if you have husbands who are not deserving of your submission, then you need to change your husbands. But there is a right way and a wrong way to do that. Let me share two stories and see if you can figure out which approach I’m going to suggest.
At a convention with their wives, two businessmen who had been roommates in college crossed paths. They sat in the lobby all night talking. They knew they would be in trouble with their wives. The next day they happened to see each other. "What did your wife think?" "I walked in the door and my wife got historical." "Don’t you mean hysterical?" "No, historical. She told me everything I ever did wrong."
And then there is this story that was related by a pastor in one of his sermons:
I received an email this week titled, "Advice to be passed onto your daughter." Since I have a daughter, I read carefully, hoping to learn something. The first advice was, "Don’t imagine you can change a man - unless he’s in diapers." I’ve given counsel like that to wives. I generally say, "You can’t change your husband. You can only change yourself." Well, I’ve not told the whole truth. The whole truth is, "You can change your husband, but only after you have changed yourself."
Obviously the second approach is much more Biblical. Wives, if you want to change your husbands, then you must first make sure that you are submitting to your husbands in the same way that the church submits to Christ.
It’s not real popular in our culture today to speak of husbands loving their wives with a sacrificial, giving love or of wives submitting to their husbands. But if we want to restore our marriages to the way God created them to be, that is the only way we can overcome the consequences of sin on our marriages.
