Ephesians 5:21–33; 1 Peter 3:7

Bible Studies for Life
Associate professor of divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University

‘To Love and To Cherish’
Ephesians 5:21–33; 1 Peter 3:7

Understanding Submission
“Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is head of the wife as also Christ is head of the Church.” “Husbands, love your wives, just as also Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her.” Let us be reminded also that humanity was created in God’s image (Gen. 1:27). Unless and until we recover something of the theological significance, wonder and mystery of marriage, our attempts to find the divinely intended satisfaction it is meant to provide will continue to fail. Marriage is meant for us, but it was created by and still belongs to God.

Marriage is meant to reflect God Himself, His character and His love. Where God’s claim upon marriage is neglected, marriage becomes the scene of trouble rather than the source of joy. What should be a beautiful model of the relationship between Christ and the Church becomes instead a cauldron of hurt and grief. The two indispensable ingredients to a divinely intended and healthy marriage are submission and love. Here we see clearly how marriage reflects the relationship between Christ and the Church. Christ, though equal with God, emptied Himself, became obedient and gave Himself up for the Church. The Church, in loving gratitude, responds to Christ, her head, with submission and respect.

Understanding Love
But what does it mean for the husband to love his wife? Too often, Jesus’ command to love one’s neighbor as oneself is wrongly understood as including a command for us to love ourselves. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Instead Jesus was cutting through the hypocrisy that lurked behind the feigned ignorance about what love requires. Jesus stripped away the cloak of pretense with the injunction, “Just love your neighbor as you already love yourself; we know you possess great expertise in self-love!” Paul used a similarly powerful device in our focal passage: “He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hates his own flesh, but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the Church.” Utter and comprehensive love for our wives, the same kind of love we unthinkingly and without hesitation bestow upon ourselves. “Submission” is a bad word in a culture recently enamored with the quest of self-esteem and habituated to the pursuit and exercise of individual rights. But in Jesus, submission becomes a beautiful and powerful thing because through it, the only true God takes on human flesh, suffers and dies for sinners and, in so doing, not only rescues us from hell but also models for us what true freedom and authentic human life are. The husband who refuses to submit to God’s command to love his wife and the wife who resists God’s loving command to submit to her husband cut themselves off from the blessings marriage was meant to provide.

Understanding Respect and Honor
At the heart of this teaching is a piece of one of the deepest paradoxes of the Christian faith itself: Whoever would save his live will lose it, but whoever loses his life for Christ and the gospel will save it unto eternal life. This paradox becomes tragic when it is resisted because by seeking our own way, by making our own personal happiness our chief aim, we lose the happiness and joy we were created to enjoy. Peter characterized the treasure squandered by such rebellion against God’s revealed will in this way — we give up, as married couples, the benefits of being “joint-heirs of the grace of life.” Furthermore recalcitrant husbands can expect their prayers to be hindered. God’s admonitions to husbands and wives regarding marriage are not helpful hints for making marginal improvements to the otherwise more or less fair to middling marriage. No, God’s instruction is grounded in the divinely created, permanent reality of marriage itself as certain and stable and unmovable as the laws of physics. Neglect of such loving commands grounded in reality can only lead to heartache and, ultimately, marital shipwreck.

But when we do embrace God’s truth about marriage, we embark upon a wondrous divinely intended adventure of love between two people. “This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the Church.”