About eight years ago, we were preaching through the book of Ephesians at our Church. I was excited to tackle one of the passages that gets taken out of context the most: Ephesians 5:21-33. This is one of the longest passage in the Bible on marriage and when taken in context, it provides a beautiful picture of a wonderful union. Since today is Valentine’s Day, I wanted to revisit this topic. I’m fortunate to be a part of my own perfect union. Not perfect in that my wife and I always exemplify perfection in our own lives or towards one another, but we live within the bounds of this perfect aspirational form that God established, Christian marriage.
21 And further, submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
22 For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. 24 As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.
25 For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her 26 to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 27 He did this to present her to himself as a glorious church without a spot or wrinkle or any other blemish. Instead, she will be holy and without fault. 28 In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as they love their own bodies. For a man who loves his wife actually shows love for himself. 29 No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church.30 And we are members of his body.
31 As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” 32 This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. 33 So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
The first verse here is usually skipped. People want to get right to verse 22 so they can complain about “wives submit to your husbands.” But if you skip over 21 then you fail to see that the passage is in the context of mutual submission, as in “submit to one another out of reverence to Christ.” Not because our spouse is so amazing, but because of who Christ is and what He’s done for us.
Mutual submission looks like this: I will leverage all that I have, my power, energy and resources for the benefit of my family. This is an amazing picture of sacrificial love. Someone who leads, loves and serves their family with their best interest in mind. Why do we do this? Not because they deserve it. Not because we are such great people, but out of “reverence for Christ”. We do it to show our respect and honor for Christ.
After it establishes the pattern of mutual submission, it lays out teaching for the wife. It says it right there in the verse, for wives. This passage doesn’t say, “Husbands, tell your wives this”. Rather, it is a message from God via Scripture for the wives. Now, this is a prickly verse, often misused, but what are these Godly women submitting to?
Picture a man like this: Imagine you’re married to a man who genuinely believes you are the most fantastic person on the planet. He’s crazy about you. You have no doubt that your happiness is his top priority. He listens when you talk. He honors you in public. To use an old-fashioned term, he “cherishes” you. He’s not afraid to make a decision. He values your opinions. He leads, but he listens. He’s responsible. He’s not argumentative. You have no doubt that he would give his life for you if the need arose. You never worry about him being unfaithful.
Now, who would have trouble following a man like that? It’s easy, perhaps natural, to submit to someone who genuinely has your best interest in mind. There’s no fear. No reason to resist. Conversely, anyone who has your best interest in mind has in effect submitted to you. That person has chosen to leverage him- or herself for your benefit, basically saying, “You first.”
Next, God does the same thing for husbands. He doesn’t tell wives, “Tell your husbands…”, no in a much better way, God has a message directly for the husbands. The message is this: How do you feel about your body? Do you feed yourself, take care of yourself? Then this is how you should treat your wife, who is now a part of you.
“The husband who plops himself down in front of the TV and orders his wife around like a slave has abandoned Christ in favor of Archie Bunker. Christ bound himself with a towel and washed the apostles’ feet. If you want to be a Christian husband, copy Jesus not Jabba the Hutt.” – John Piper
Even while he was on his knees washing their feet, no one doubted who the leader was. Nor should any Christian husband shirk his responsibility under God to provide moral vision and spiritual leadership as the humble servant of his wife and family. This is leading out of love.
32 This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. 33 So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Ephesians 5:32-33
The mystery is this. Christ and the Church don’t reflect marriage, marriage reflects Christ and the Church, with the Church submitting to the leadership of the one who wants nothing but the best for them and who will act only their best interest and Christ modeling that kind of sacrificial love. Man loves his wife as he loves himself and the wife respects her husband, thus the man gets what he was designed to need and the wife gets what she was designed to need.
This was God’s plan from creation. By creating a person like Adam, yet very unlike Adam, God provided the possibility of a profound unity that would otherwise have been impossible. There is a different kind of unity enjoyed by the joining of diverse counterparts than is enjoyed by joining two things just alike. When we all sing the same melody line, it is called “unison,” which means “one sound.” But when we unite diverse lines of soprano and alto and tenor and bass, we call it harmony, and everyone who has an ear to hear knows that something deeper in us is touched more by great harmony than by unison.
The sound of Christian marriage is like this sound of a beautiful harmony, 2 things that are the same, but different, coming into sync with one another. This doesn’t happen automatically, rather it happens over time as God uses our marriage and our spouse to hone us into His likeness. Helping us to grow closer to Him as we grow closer to one another.
Seeing God 