God’s Plan for Marriage (Pt. 2)
Text: Ephesians 5:21-33
By: Ken McKinley
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Marriage was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden, it’s not the invention of man. In-fact; I think we could make the argument from Scripture that marriage is the basic institution from which all other institutions (ie. The Church, the State, Schools, etc…) come from and are based upon. This is where we get that saying, “as goes the home, so goes the church, and as goes the church so goes the world.”
And if we look at our text we see the Christian marriage can only be understood in the light of the relationship of Christ to His Church. As Christ is the head of the Church, so too is the husband the head of the wife, and as the church is to voluntarily submit to Christ, the wife should also voluntarily submit to her husband. As Christ sacrificially loves the Church, so too should the husband ought to love his wife. Those are the two primary duties of husbands and wives. Love sacrificially and submit voluntarily.
But we need to look at this a little closer, because if we just leave it at that, I don’t know that we’ll actually get it into our spirits.
During the time of Jesus, the Jewish men had a prayer. It went something like this, “Thank you God, that I am not a Gentile, a slave, or a woman.” Gentile men had pretty much the same view and treated their women as property, not as equals. About the only ancient culture that didn’t do that was Sparta, as the Spartan men looked upon their wives as better than any other culture. But the Bible says in Galatians 3:28 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female, we are all one in Christ.” What that means is that we are equal before God in respect to our being, but we are given different responsibilities. It is similar to the roles within the Trinity – there is equality in being among the Godhead, but different functions, so to speak. And so the Christian wife is to submit to her own husband (notice it’s her OWN HUSBAND); and she is supposed to do this “As unto the LORD.” In chapter 6:1 children are to obey their parents in the Lord. There is a rule and order in everything that God does and in all of His institutions.
So what exactly does it mean to submit?
Well in a nut-shell it means to relinquish ones rights in a voluntary manner. And notice that Scripture doesn’t say, “Wives submit to your husbands if you think he is capable.” It doesn’t say, “Wives submit to your husbands if he gifted and talented.” There are no qualifications given other than he should love the wife sacrificially. It has nothing to do with one being superior or inferior to the other; in God’s eyes man and woman are co-equal as persons. So the reason for this is a functional difference in roles. Think about it like this – if a police officer pulls up behind your car and tells you to pull over, you would comply. But why? He’s a regular guy just like the rest of us, he’s a normal human being. So why do we submit to his demand? Because we understand he has been given a role and authority by the state and local authorities. Now the difference is that the state invests its authority in the police officer, God Himself invests authority in the husband. But on the flip side, just as the state expects the police officer to behave himself and follow certain standards of conduct, God also expects the husband to behave himself and follow certain standards of conduct.
Now I know that some of you might be thinking, “Well what if my husband wants me to commit sin? Do I have to submit to him then?” And the answer is no. Peter makes that clear in Acts 5:29 when he is being tried. He says, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” And so wives submit yourselves to your own husband.
But let me just say this: A submissive wife is not a passive wife. Husbands and wives complement and complete each other. A wife should not be passive, but should have the right to express her views. Believe it or not, we men don’t know everything. So within a Christian marriage there must be discussion, communication, consultation and sometimes compromise. On the other hand, the wife should not act independently as Eve did in the garden. Communication is a two way street.
Now if you guys thought you were going to get off easy today, hang tight, yours is coming. Verse 21 says we are to submit one to another, so yeah guys, we must also submit to our wives. So what are we supposed to do? What’s our job as husbands? Well we already touched on it. We are to love our wives just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her. So the wife is to submit to her husband and we see in the last line of our text, she should respect him as well. But believe it or not husbands have a greater demand placed on them. We must love our wives as Christ loves the Church. And how did Christ love the Church? He gave Himself up for her. In the Greek, this is given in the direct imperative, what that means in Oklahoma laymen terms is that this isn’t a suggestion it’s a command. The word for “love” is agape. This love that Christ is demanding is an unconditional, sacrificial love.
Now if you think about it, this is contrary to what the world thinks of when they think of love… oh sure they would say this is what they mean, but in reality the world is talking about a self seeking, self satisfying love, a love for self, where all our needs are met, but our text is saying that this love should be a self sacrificing love, a love where all of our wives needs are met, even if ours go un-met.
And guy’s let me just tell you this; you can’t do it without Jesus Christ. Only Christians can love like this. The worldly are self-centered. But Christians are commanded to deny themselves take up the cross daily and follow Jesus. Agape is the kind of love Christ has for us. One of the best stories in the Bible that demonstrate this is the book of Hosea. Hosea married his wife (Gomer) because God commanded him to, but Gomer was unfaithful to him and started shacking up with other guys. Hosea still took care of her though, he even sent her money to live on and food to eat. But Gomer sank so low in her sin that she ended up being sold as a prostitute and slave, and she was sent to the market place in Samaria to be sold. Hosea showed up and paid the maximum price for her, 15 pieces of silver as well as a measure of barley in order to redeem her. He brought her home, clothed her and told her, “I still love you and you are my wife.” Jesus paid more than silver or gold to redeem us, even though we too were unfaithful and rebellious. He gave His own precious blood in order to redeem us. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down His life for His friends.”
So we are to love as Christ loved… look at verses 25, 26 and 27 (Read)
We are to love, just as Christ loved the church – He loved us from all eternity, in eternity past. God looked upon us and saw our fallen, sinful condition, and while we were unlovable He loved us. Romans chapter 5 lays it out for us. It says we were powerless to save ourselves. We were like Lazarus in the tomb, dead in trespasses and sins. We were ungodly sinners, like the thief on the cross, worthy and deserving of our punishment. We were enemies of God. You see, Jesus loved us not because we were worthy of His love, He loved us not because we were lovely, but in order to make us lovely. That’s what verses 25, 26, and 27 tell us. He loved us, and gave Himself for us, in order to cleanse us and make us holy.
And so in verse 28 Paul says husbands “ought” to love their wives in the same way. This actually isn’t a suggestion, it’s actually Paul saying, “If you are a Christian, if you are in the body of Christ, if you have been born again and given a new nature, a Christ-like nature then loving your wife as Christ loves the church should be one of the fruits of that change and should be one of the evidences that prove it.”
We are to love them as part of our own bodies. Jesus loves the Church because we are the body of Christ, and the Bible tells us that when a man and woman are married they are to become one flesh. Eve was created after Adam, and OUT of Adam. Adam even said, “This is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
The principle Paul is trying to get across is that we should treat our wives the way we want to be treated.
So Paul says, “Husbands love your OWN wives, and Wives respect your husbands.”
We see right there that there is a fundamental difference between husbands and wives, between men and women. Women need to feel loved, men need to feel respected. And again I would say, that saying this will only go so far, these things need to be shown.
You see, I could go for weeks on end without getting hugged or hugging someone, but need that physical contact. To be honest with you all, I’m one of those guys who would when challenged, tell my wife, “Honey, I told you I loved you when I married you, and nothings changed.” But that doesn’t cut it in the real world. Our wives need to be told that we love them, and shown that we love them. And ladies your husbands need to be shown respect.
God’s design for marriage pictures the husband loving his wife the way Christ loves His people and the wife responding to her husband the way the people of God should respond to Christ. This plan came even before creation, that’s why Paul reaches all the way back to Genesis 2:24, then look what he says in verses 31 and 32 (read). What this means is that in God’s plan marriage was designed in the beginning to display Christ’s relationship to His people.
Husbands are not Christ, but we are called to be like Him, and the specific point of this is that we are called to love our wives sacrificially and even suffer for her good, even if she is the one who is causing the suffering. Wives; you are to respect your husbands and submit to their authority as they are loving you sacrificially.
I think that if more married couples did this, we would see far less divorce.
Prayer and Invitation
