Calling Him Lord

“…as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.” – Ephesians 5:24

In everything. For some, those two words are absolutely terrifying, and they must be caveated into meaninglessness in order to protect wives from abusive husbands. For others, those two words are license to tyranny, as they Biblically badger women into giving up their personhood and individuality and opinions and personality and to simply become a statue shaped by their personal Pygmalion’s wishes.

And neither of these alternatives deals faithfully with the Text.

So let’s explore both the fulness and the boundaries of Biblical submission and authority within marriage.

Inescapable Vulnerability

In our opening passage, the Greek word for “submit” means, surprisingly, to submit – to come under the authority of – to obey. Scripture enjoins Christian wives to have an obedient attitude toward their husbands. This includes the gentle and quiet spirit of deference that should characterize them always in their relationship to their husbands, as well as their yielding to him in making final decisions where they disagree.

In an extremely victim-focused culture (sometimes rightly so, and sometimes wrongly so) we have very strong allergies to anything that smacks of vulnerability. But vulnerability is inescapable in life, and in some situations- particularly situations involving authority- especially so. This is one of those. God has instituted within marriage an authority structure that means, inherently and inescapably, that the wife is in a vulnerable position. Her husband has the authority to tell her what to do, and she is called to submit to him in everything. To those of you who are now furious about what you assume I mean by that, grab your bottle of chill pills and a tall glass of ice water and give me a second. We will cover the caveats. But first we need to start by dealing honestly and unashamedly with what the text says.

For in this way the holy women of former times, who hoped in God, also used to adorn themselves, being subject to their own husbands, just as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord; and you have proved to be her children if you do what is right without being frightened by any fear. – 1 Pet. 3:5-6

Ladies, be careful who you marry, because that man will be your lord (or master). You will be under his authority, and owe him your obedience. I’m using these words intentionally, knowing that they will be extremely offensive to modern sensibilities, because these are the words that the Bible uses, and we should see God’s Ways as a cause to glory and not to grimace.

God has constructed marriage in such a way that the authority of the husband is supposed to be a shelter, a blessing, a benevolent and protective monarchy within the home. The husband should be a refuge for the wife and children, as he bears the weight of authority and responsibility. And he should also be given the respect corresponding to such an office. Thus far for the “shoulds”.

This is much like the authority of a police officer, in that a cop is supposed to be a protective blessing who is watching over the community to protect them from harm. But this authority can be misused, and it doesn’t matter if the cop was a jerk- you still have to pay the ticket.

So it is with husbands. There is no way to remove the vulnerability from the role of wife. (Husbands have vulnerabilities too, like the possibility of ending up wishing they could move into the attic, but that’s not what this post is about.) And we should not try to remove the vulnerability. If we do, we will caveat away the glory. This is God’s design, and it is good and beautiful. But it is essential for ladies to consider wisely who they marry.

When it comes to accepting the vulnerability of submission, I would encourage the primary consideration for a young woman assessing a suitor to be this simple question: is the work of God evident in his life? All of this talk about submission and vulnerability can lead to paralysis for ladies. I don’t want to risk being under the authority of some man. But we are called to walk by faith and not by sight. Whoever you marry, he is not going to be perfect, and he is going to mess some things up. But if he has a true and living walk with the true and living God, it’s all gonna be OK. You can trust that God knew what He was doing when He built marriage this way.

And don’t look for 40-year-old maturity in a 20-year-old man. A young husband will be just that- young, and he will have a lot to learn. Most men, even the most well-intentioned men, will tend toward either under-authoritarianism (where you may end up wishing he would step up) or over-authoritarianism (where you may end up wishing he would back off). Neither is better or worse- the goal, for the husband, is to live in submission to Christ and to wield his authority for the good of his people; erring in either direction is harmful.

At the end of the day, ladies, if you marry a man who is bearing the fruits of the Holy Spirit, you can submit yourself to him in everything and trust that God will sanctify your husband- and yourself- into a beautiful picture of Christ and the church.

But there is one more vulnerability that we must address:

“In the same way, you wives, be subject to your own husbands so that even if any of them are disobedient to the word, they may be won over without a word by the behavior of their wives, as they observe your pure and respectful behavior.” – 1 Pet. 3:1-2

This command requires faith and time under extremely unpleasant circumstances if we are going to apply it honestly. There are so many stories of bad- even genuinely abusive- husbands who were broken by wives who obeyed this command, and it is glorious to see God keep His promises and either deliver his daughters from tyrants or bring tyrants into submission to Jesus.

Our culture wants to immediately caveat away any meaningful application of this command and just get her out of there. But if we are going to claim to be people of the Book, then we would do well to put our money where our mouth is. We walk by faith, we cast ourselves on the grace of God, and we expect to see great things.

Our heritage as Christians is strewn with people- men and women both- who suffered unjustly under all manner of tyranny, and did it without complaint for the glory of Christ.

Did we think there wouldn’t be a cost?

The Moment You’ve All Been Waiting For

Now we turn to the bounds of submission. We should start by acknowledging that the Biblical commands to submission are commands given to women. While the Bible does clearly acknowledge, affirm, and even assume the authority of the husband, it never grants husbands the authority to demand or coerce the wife to do anything. God commands her to voluntarily submit to her husband, but He does not give the husband permission to bend his wife to his will (whether by physical force or by manipulation or yelling or anything else). To the contrary, the commands to husbands urge loving our wives (Eph. 5:25-30) and treating them with understanding and as an equal recipient of the grace of God (1 Pet. 3:7).

Does this mean that a husband should never discuss this topic with his wife? Not at all. That would be part of “washing her in the water of the Word.” Sometimes there are rebellious women who need to be confronted with Scripture. Sometimes there are good women who are being unsubmissive in a particular area and need to be confronted with Scripture. Husbands can, and should, do so. But they should do so lovingly and gently, and if she will not listen then they should follow Biblical processes to continue to deal with the issue, and not resort to tools of the flesh like manipulation or argumentativeness- certainly never to aggressive behavior, which would be a complete destruction of the picture of Christ and His church.

(Also note- just because the husband has a particular duty to wash his wife in the water of the Word does not at all mean that there are never times for the wife to respectfully confront her husband, nor that she is not also instrumental in his sanctification and growth, both actively and passively.)

Next, we must remember that no human authority is absolute. The most clear application of this is that a wife should never submit to her husband if he is commanding her to sin (Acts 5:29). However, this is not the only caveat we need here. A husband can sin against his wife in other ways than simply by commanding her to rob a bank, and Scripture gives us roadmaps for how to deal with sin (Matt. 18:15-20). A husband sinning against his wife is still a person sinning against another person.

This also means that we must understand freedom of conscience. A Christian wife has her own personal relationship with Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:28), which relationship ranks high above her relationship to her husband. He is in no way a mediator between her and her Savior. Part of the proper recognition of this reality is the acknowledgement of- and respect for- her conscience. There are issues of conscience that are not black-and-white, but are nevertheless sin-or-not (Rom. 14), and a husband must respect that. If a wife cannot do something in good conscience before God, then he should not tell her to do it, and if he does, she is duty-bound before God to refuse to obey. She answers to a higher Authority, and One Whom a wise husband will have no desire to challenge.

Does this open the door to a rebellious wife making everything a matter of conscience in order to eviscerate the duty of submission? You bet it does. And if she does, the husband should follow Biblical processes to confront her sin. There are vulnerabilities everywhere- more on that later. The goal is not to remove the vulnerabilities, but to deal with them Biblically.

Furthermore, there are times where a husband is being a fool, and a wise wife circumnavigates his folly. Abigail did this, and saved her husband’s life (temporarily). There is no way to read this story as Abigail being in submission to her husband’s wishes; she clearly was not, although she was seeking his good. This was portrayed for us as evidence of her virtue and wisdom, not of her rebellious feminism (1 Sam. 25).

It is also essential to recognize that the submissive deference of a Godly wife does not at all mean that she cannot think for herself, or disagree with her husband. It is possible both to disagree and to have a genuine heart of obedience at the same time. And any man who has no interest in listening to and learning from and being influenced by his wife- who simply wants to stamp his image onto her- that sort of man is a fool, and should repent of his arrogance.

Lastly, a wife needs to know her recourse, and it is the duty of a Christian husband to make sure that she does. This is part of loving our wives, men. We know that we are sinners, and we should desire to protect our wives from the sinner who has the most potential to harm her- ourselves.

The wife should be able to approach her husband, to confront him, to discuss with him. She should know how to Biblically pursue conflict resolution, and how to get counsel from others if necessary. She should do all of this respectfully, but if she fails to do so that is no excuse for her husband to ignore what she is trying to say. And, at the furthest extreme, she should know- and the husband should make sure that his wife knows- who she can call if she needed to get help.

And no, I don’t mean “I give you permission to call these two specific people that I know will back me up in every situation.”

There should be involved church elders, a close-knit brotherhood and sisterhood within the local church, Godly family members, etc. that both husband and wife know that they can call and speak to freely if necessary- and who will come calling every once in a while just to see how everybody’s doing. All human authority requires accountability.

An Ounce of Prevention

A husband who is failing to love his wife is a man who is in violation of Scripture. This is a sin that can reach a threshold where it should be addressed by the church, and in severe cases this would include church discipline. There is also a point at which abuses of authority enter into the jurisdiction given by God to the state (Romans 13), and the authority of that jurisdiction should be honored and invoked.

This must be re-stated practically. It should go without saying that pornography use, sexual abuse (i.e. being violent or cruel toward his wife in the bedroom, or any kind of sexual activity outside of the marriage covenant), drunkenness, beating the children, embezzling company money, planning a robbery- these things would obviously be just cause to get the church, and in some cases the state, brought into the situation.

But it is possible for a husband to be unloving to his wife in ways that aren’t dramatic black-and-white sin, and a faithful church will still get involved. I’m not talking about average, everyday sins that we all commit, or we would all be under church discipline. I’m certainly not talking about a “me too” believe-all-women inquisition. I am saying that if a husband has a life-pattern of being a micromanaging jerk, or he won’t listen to his wife’s concerns, or he won’t be reasonable in his expectations, or he is angry all the time, or he is chronically passive and refusing to lead the family or discipline and disciple the children- these are all things that would be appropriate catalysts for the Matthew 18 process, because a husband failing to love his wife is a sin, and Jesus tells us what to do about sin in Matthew 18.

Somehow it seems that this step has been missed in our understanding of jurisdictional authority, and we have somehow concluded that the husband’s authority gives him license to do whatever and to demand whatever he wants so long as it isn’t clearly and explicitly black-and-white sin. But if the Bible gives us commands like “love your wives” and “respect your husbands” and “don’t exasperate your children” then we should expect that we are going to need to deal with failures of love and respect that aren’t quite as dramatic as adultery or abandonment or coming home drunk and punching the kids.

The authority of the pastor to watch over souls (Heb. 13:17) is going to require involvement. The responsibility of the brotherhood to hold one another accountable (Gal. 6:1) is going to require uncomfortable conversations. Scripture doesn’t say we need to wait until the sin goes nuclear before we deal with it. And folks, if we only start the treatment after the patient is in the ICU, the mortality rate is going to be much higher.

Vulnerabilities Everywhere

So what does it all mean? How do you know if this particular thing your husband is doing is abusive, or if this particular thing your wife is doing is rebellious, or whether you have justification for church discipline, or whether in your situation you should call the cops?

I have no idea! I’m just some random blogger!

There is a crying need for patience and longsuffering and prayer and battle-forged relationships, personal, intimate relationships within the church of Christ. In every area there is always the opportunity to err either to the right or to the left.

On one side there is the danger of rushing straight to the caveats rather than embracing the vulnerability of God’s design here. This applies to both husband and wife. If you have a conflict or a problem, have you taken the time to pray? Have you taken the log out of your own eye? Are you just looking for some spiritual varnish to paint over selfish desires, so that you can do what you want and feel justified about it? Have you embraced the vulnerability demanded by love, husband, or by submission, wife? Are you walking by faith and waiting on your Father to act? Don’t rush to fix by human means what God is doing behind the scenes.

But on the other hand, there is the danger of a gnostic over-pietism that does not deal in terms of reality or make use of the structures that God has put in place for the protection of victims (and, again, this could be the husband or the wife!). There is a time to get help. I cannot tell you when that time is. You need to be in prayer, and in the Word, and in church. You need to ask your pastors, your Christian brothers and sisters, your parents. You need to embrace the previous paragraph and be willing to endure. But you also need to know that getting others involved is not necessarily giving up on doing things God’s way- in fact, if we do it correctly, it is part of God’s design.

Don’t make decisions about these things based on a book or a blog or a podcast or a post. Don’t do it. There are entire internet forums of angry bitter people (many of whom are angry and bitter because they really were sinned against in horrible ways) complaining about abuse that will give you all the justification you could ever want for skipping over the Biblical principles we discussed in the first part of this post. And there are books and blogs and podcasts that, whatever their intentions, give the impression that there is not really much of a place for anything we covered in the second part of the post. Check all of that- and this post right here too- against the Bible.

But in contrariety to all of the internet noise stands the local church of Jesus Christ. We need to be involved in one another’s lives. In person. So many of these problems simply never need to reach a 10, and if there are brothers and sisters present to speak Biblical wisdom into a conflict they could diffuse it when it was just a 3. We need to talk about things openly and freely and honestly, and seek to build one another up and to bear one another’s burdens.

Sin likes the dark. The church of Jesus should be a fellowship of flashlights.

In Conclusion

The church must faithfully preach the Biblical pattern for authority and submission within marriage, in the face of a feminist culture that will hate us for it- and we must preach it as a positive and glorious good, vulnerabilities and all, not as an embarrassing footnote hidden under caveats. But, if we are to be truly faithful, we must preach it with a well-rounded Biblical understanding of the depravity of man and the Christian process for dealing with that depravity.

This is necessary if our marriages are to be a faithful picture of Christ and His church, and if we are to prevent the enemies of God from having justified reason to condemn the people of God.

#Complementarianism #Patriarchy #Feminism #Manhood #Marriage #Egalitarianism #Womanhood