Colleen and Nikki talk through Ephesians 5:22-33. This is the famous passage that tells wives to submit and husbands to love and echoes the Lord Jesus and His Church. Transcription by Gwen Billington.
Nikki: Welcome to Former Adventist podcast. I’m Nikki Stevenson.
Colleen: And I’m Colleen Tinker.
Nikki: Today we’ll be looking at Ephesians chapter 5 verses 22 to 33, where Paul continues his discussion of how the church is to live in light of the indicatives we learned in the previous chapters. This section deals with God’s design for marriage and the way it reflects the mystery of the church in Christ. But before we get started, let me remind you that if you have any comments or questions for us, we’d love to hear from you. You can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can also visit proclamationmagazine.com to view past online articles, archived magazines, stay updated with the ministry news, and sign up for weekly emails from LAM. You can also find a place to donate there should you choose to do so. Also, did you know that Former Adventist Fellowship has a YouTube channel? If not, be sure to check it out, as it contains a treasure trove of videos, and while you’re there, be sure to subscribe. Don’t forget, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and we’d love it if you’d leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. So, Colleen, we’re talking about marriage today. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.] Indeed.
Nikki: That was an uncomfortable one for me to talk about in Adventism. I think I liked just sort of avoiding those sections of Scripture. So, I have a question for you.
Colleen: Okay.
Nikki: Can you talk about what family roles looked like to you when you were in Adventism and what you thought about these kinds of sections of Scripture and how they intersected with what you saw in reality.
Colleen: Interesting question. Yes, this section from Ephesians 5 is – I read it, definitely read it, and I always was troubled by that word “submit,” “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” As a kid, my mother took that submit thing very seriously, but it was in the sense of my Dad was supposed to look like the head. She always wanted to make it look like she was doing what he was doing or submitting to him in public, but I remember her saying to me, “Yes, he may be the head, but the neck turns the head.” So it all ended up being an issue of manipulation behind the scenes. Clearly, as I remember my parents’ relationship, my mother was outspoken to the point of angry sometimes when she wanted to be sure my Dad made the decision she wanted him to make. It was kind of a confusing thing. I asked Richard what he thought about this whole submit thing and husbands loving wives and wives loving husbands and what the role of a married couple was to be when he was an Adventist, and he said his understanding was that a husband and wife should be 100% equal, pure egalitarianism. He said, “I never understood that I was supposed to even consider leading my family. Everything had to be negotiated and equal,” equal ideas, equal understanding, so that actually that understanding left him with a sense of sort of a vacuum, like the two parties in the marriage could be barging ahead together side-by-side, but with different opinions about how they were going to do it. As an adult, working with professional Adventists, especially in the academic field here in Southern California, I saw a lot of the outcome of these attitudes. I remember working with a lot of Adventist men who were very bright, very outstanding in their professional fields, but were in some sense weak men, and they, almost to a man, had very professional, strong Adventist wives who, while they might have been quiet around them in public, nevertheless did not lack any sense of where they were going. So there was always a sense of – I would never really know the words for it, but I think I could actually say there was a feminist undertone to Adventism, where you’d give lip service to these ideas in Scripture, but they’re really just ways of talking about something that doesn’t look like the Bible says it looks, so that women were manipulative and strong and determined and led the family from the position of being, as my mother would have put it, the neck. The husband was the “head,” who stood out in front and everybody knew him, but he sort of did what the wife had him do in the background. How about you, Nikki? What did you think of this whole idea?
Nikki: I think I didn’t hear people talk about wives submitting to husbands outside of a joking context. So if it came up, it was because somebody was cracking a joke. You know, “Hey, submit.” I didn’t hear it taught in any kind of lifestyle teaching. I just don’t remember hearing that. What I do notice now, as a believer, and it’s more obvious on this side of it than it was when I was an Adventist, we don’t have the battle of the sexes humor in the church. I don’t hear – my brothers in Christ, I don’t hear them putting women down. I see them respecting and honoring and loving women. My goodness, on Mother’s Day?
Colleen: Uh-huh. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.] The first time I was at a church on Mother’s Day, I was just in tears over the amount of love and respect that the men in the church gave to women, whether they had borne children or not. And it’s the same with women. I don’t hear most Christian women slamming and shaming and mocking the intelligence of men.
Colleen: Right! I don’t either.
Nikki: But that kind of humor, which is in the world, it permeated the social circles I walked in in Adventism.
Colleen: Oh, yes. I think that both of us have a lot of reactions to this passage since becoming Christians. But so people understand what we’re talking about, let’s read the passage and then back up and talk our way through it. Do you mind doing that, Nikki? Ephesians 5:22-33.
Nikki: “Wives, subject yourselves to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the body. But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her, so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless. So husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are parts of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church. Nevertheless, as for you individually, each husband is to love his own wife the same as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.”
Colleen: Such an interesting juxtaposition of marriage and Christ and the church, which is a really significant thing. I never understood how much reality is being explained in this passage, as an Adventist. This first verse, “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord,” is, right off the bat, where I used to get hung up. And I have to say that now I see that you can’t read that verse without coming into it from the previous verses because beginning with verse 18, and we discussed this in the last podcast, we hear from verses 18 to 21 what Paul is saying to church members in the Body of Christ at large about submission and being filled with the Spirit. Do you mind just refreshing us, Nikki, with 18 to 21, and then we’ll talk about that?
Nikki: “And do not get drunk with wine, in which there is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your hearts to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to our God and Father, and subject yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ.”
Colleen: And then the very next verse is, “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” And it’s so interesting that if we really look at this and look at the grammar, the grammar of this indicates that this is a mutual submission in 21.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And it starts with 18, where we’re to be filled with the Spirit, and then, after that comment about being filled with the Spirit, the grammar says that the command is followed by a series of participles in the Greek, so that being filled with the Spirit is followed by speaking, singing, making melody, giving thanks, and ending, in verse 22, with submitting, wives submitting to husbands. So it’s a continued string of commands that’s based on being filled with the Spirit. So it’s not just coming out of the blue and saying, “Wives, submit to your husbands.” It’s in the context of being filled with the Spirit and each member of the Body is to be filled with the Spirit, performing these acts of worship, submitting to one another in Christ, and wives to their husbands, in Christ is the implication. Nikki, what was your take on this as you read this? What was Paul saying here?
Nikki: Well, again, this verse 21, where he says to subject yourselves to one another, the words mean be submitting yourselves. This is an ongoing thing, and the Greek means to properly arrange yourself under God’s arrangement. So this is in obedience to God’s order and His way that He’s determined for us, the way that He created us, really, to be. So it’s like you said, it’s an obedience. The supply is given through the Holy Spirit.
Colleen: Exactly, and that’s actually well put. It’s also interesting, before we just move on from this passage of wives submitting, we need to talk through the common objections to this, the things that I had in my head as an Adventist. One of the most common ways people who don’t like the word “submit” or who don’t understand this biblical context, they will say, “But look at Galatians, look at Galatians 3:28, where Paul says, ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ So if there’s no male nor female, how can we say that wives are to be subject to their husbands?” I just have to say, that passage in Galatians is talking about in Christ. When we are made alive and born again and placed in Christ, we are spiritually equal. We are not less valuable than the men. We are not less spiritual or less gifted or less loved or less possessed of the inheritance that’s promised. We are all equal in Christ. But this passage in Ephesians isn’t talking about our equality before the Lord; it is talking about an order of organization so that we can live in this physical world. So we can get a little more sense of this order by looking at 1 Corinthians 11:3, where Paul says, “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” So from this passage we can see it’s not talking about inequality, because Paul or no other Christian would ever say Christ is less than God or is not equal to God. He is God, fully, one substance. He has all the same attributes. He is not unequal to God, and yet there is an order even there, and Paul is saying that when we’re in the church, born again, as part of the Body of Christ, we can begin to understand that there is an order that God has given us as humans. The head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God. This is simply an order or a set of roles for the functioning of the Body. And I just want to say that this image of the head and the body is such an interesting one because if you think about your own body, the head is not detachable. It’s part of the body. We don’t set the head down and the body walk away and then the head give long distance directions to a body that’s off doing its own thing and needing to be reined in. No! The image of a body with a head is an indivisible thing, it’s an indivisible organism, and that’s what we are when we are in Christ. Christ is our head. And here Paul is saying that in marriage, that same image of the body, or one flesh, is true of a husband and wife, indivisible. They’re not at odds, they’re not competing, it’s one body functioning together. One is the head, one is the body, and it’s one flesh.
Nikki: This is actually – like you said, this is talking about something indivisible. This is – I think, and I don’t know how to explain this, and so I hope you all can be patient with me. I understood for the first time, as I was studying this, that this is one of those passages that tells us what’s true about ourselves, and so when we get to 23 here, where it says “For the husband is the head of the wife,” it’s almost as if he’s starting to tell us what’s real about our very nature now.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: He says that “The husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the Body.” In the Greek that word for “head” is also used when talking about the head chief stone, the cornerstone. I know, for me anyway, in my marriage, so much of the way things go in the family is related to how my husband is doing. And I can see that kind of cornerstone, that kind of headship, that where he is trickles down into how things go in the home. Do you know what I mean?
Colleen: Absolutely. It does in my marriage as well.
Nikki: And I know that I am wired in such a way. I feel like as if God has created me to look to my husband for the things that Scripture says he is responsible for. In the same way that he looks to me, there’s just this natural way that God created us to need each other, and we can ignore that, but when we do, everything goes haywire. It’s almost as if this is true whether we express it or not, and I think as an Adventist I felt like passages like this were telling us what we were supposed to do so that we could be a witness. I didn’t see it as Scripture telling us what is true about how God created us –
Colleen: Yes. Yes.
Nikki: – and how we’re to live on the basis of what’s true. I don’t know if I’m making sense.
Colleen: Yes, I agree.
Nikki: And this seems to line up even with the statistics we see in sociology, unrelated to the church. The homes that are fatherless, the statistics there are very grim.
Colleen: You know, that reminds me of something a psychologist said to me actually decades ago. He was a very bright man, and he said in his experience he sometimes asks his clients, “Do you think if only one person in a marriage is psychologically healthy, if one is more emotionally needy or unhealthy and one is more healthy, do you think the marriage is stronger if the healthy one is the woman or the man?” And he said, most people say to him, “Oh, if the wife is strong it’s a healthier marriage.” But he said that is absolutely not true. A marriage can be much stronger and survive and function much better, if only one is healthy, if that healthy one is the husband, that he provides a stability, and as you were putting, that cornerstone idea that holds the family unit together, that holds the marriage together, and I can only say it’s something the Lord built in because, as Paul is saying here, this issue of husbands and wives and the relationship between the husband and the wife and the husband being the head, like the cornerstone, the one that holds things together and the wife being the body, who submits in a coming along and maybe even giving up one’s rights for the sake of the other sometimes, but never as a silent partner, but as one who says, “Okay, you have the responsibility to care for this, and I will let you do that.” But this picture is a picture of Christ and the church, and it’s interesting to me, one of the things that really struck me studying this, is that the relationship of Christ and the church is something eternal. It existed before we did. This is a permanent, eternal relationship. God didn’t say Christ is the head of the church and we are His bride or His Body in order so that we would understand that through what we know of marriage. It was the other way around. Christ and the church is the eternal reality, and God gave humanity marriage so that we would have some understanding of what already exists. This is a real thing. This is a very real picture of what Christ and the church is. It’s not just, well, a metaphor so that you can sort of understand. It’s actually a shadow of the real.
Nikki: I think what was kind of new to me this time, looking through this, is that we’re not talking about best practices. We’re talking about fundamental reality. I don’t know, it’s given me a greater appreciation and greater respect and even desire to help my husband in this because this is a big job. This is a big deal, and we have here – it says, “As Christ also is the head of the church, He Himself being the Savior of the Body,” this is a big charge for the husband. It’s significant. It shows the weight of the responsibility that Christ has for the church and compares that reality to the husband’s accountability before God for his wife.
Colleen: I never saw that as an Adventist. This is – like you said, I love what you said, this is not about best practices. This is about a reality that we are called to live. I do believe that this is something that is implicit in the whole nature of marriage that God gave man when He first created man and woman. And in some very real sense, this spiritual oneness, this relationship that reflects the reality of Christ and His people, was marred when Adam and Eve sinned. So just as they were disconnected from God, that disconnection disconnected them from each other in some significant way. And Paul is now talking to the church saying, “You’re believers. You need to start living reflecting the reality of who you are in Christ.” And he’s not saying here wives are to view their husbands as they view Christ. He’s saying that in Christ your job is to submit to your husband as to the Lord, but this is something we do in obedience to Christ, not something to do because our husbands are our Christs.
Nikki: Yes. They’re our brothers in Christ, and we give them that honor on the basis of their identity in Him. You know, here in verse 24 where it says, “But as the church is subject to Christ, so also the wives ought to be to their husbands in everything.” I got to thinking about that because, like you said, sin has marred everything, and even within the Christian world you can pick up five different books on biblical marriage and get five different sets of advice on what these passages actually mean.
Colleen: So true.
Nikki: When I think about what is the relationship of Christ and the church, I start realizing that the church submits to Christ as head in everything. He is Lord. He is the arbiter of truth. You can’t push a metaphor too far, and I hope I’m not doing that when I say that Scripture goes on and fleshes out for us what our relationship with Christ looks like, and it shows us that this doesn’t mean we have no voice or mutual relationship.
Colleen: Right.
Nikki: We don’t become void robots when we enter into this relationship with Christ. On the contrary, we go to Him because He is merciful and sympathetic and compassionate, and we go boldly before the throne because of who we are in Him and to Him.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: And in our marriage, God designed us to relate to one another, and He tells the husband in other parts of Scripture – I can’t grab the text from my memory right now, but that husbands are to honor their wives as the weaker vessel. They’re called to be compassionate.
Colleen: Um-hmm. 1 Peter 3.
Nikki: Thank you! Oh, 1 Peter 3 is such a good chapter. So we go to the Lord with our desires and our needs and our concerns, and we don’t go so that He can patronize us. We go knowing that He loves us and that He’s taking care of us, and it settles us.
Colleen: Yeah!
Nikki: Right?
Colleen: Totally!
Nikki: It settles us to be able to go before our God with these things. And the same is true of me when I can go before my husband, and he’s compassionate and he’s listening. Something about that interaction is very settling, and it creates a security that I believe only comes in a biblical marriage, in a marriage that’s in Christ.
Colleen: I agree. Something about being born again, Pentecost, bringing our dead spirits to life through trust and faith in the Lord Jesus, has undone so much of the effects of the curse of sin. It doesn’t mean we’re taken out of this broken world yet. It doesn’t mean we’re out of our mortal tents yet, but it does mean that we have spiritual life in Christ and the ability to relate to one another with that same life in Christ so that we are able to respect and love and honor and submit in ways that we couldn’t before we were born again. And yet, as you said, marriage is a gift from God that protects society, even among the unbelieving.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: It protects society. But when it is in a believing couple, it is even that much richer, and it becomes something for the glory of God and the building of the kingdom. Another thing that really hit me about this passage, and I know that this might be controversial with some people, but I realized in reading this – about the distinct roles between husband and wife, it’s not an egalitarian relationship, they have distinct roles – this helps me understand why the argument that same-sex marriage cannot be justly considered a valid marriage. Because God created male and female back at the very beginning of all things, He created male and female in His image, and because that was the first marriage, and because of what this says about Christ and His church, we can understand that marriage has to be between two people who are both alike but unalike. We are humans marrying humans. We’re very much alike in that sense. We live in this world, we live in a physical world, with spirits that can know God, with spirits that can sense the Holy Spirit in each other, but we are also unalike. There is a difference between male and female that is not just nurture. It’s in our natures. Males have brains that develop differently than females. We have different ways of relating to reality. We have different perceptions, different ways of thinking, we just don’t process information in the same ways. And those are the points where we sometimes have our greatest disagreements and misunderstandings between us, because we really are fundamentally different in a way. And yet the Lord gives us Himself to help us learn how to treat each other with honor and respect in those situations. But here’s the thing with Christ and the church, He is like us, He became a man. But He is also unlike us. He is God. And yet He says He is the bridegroom and we, the believers, are the bride. We’re alike but unalike. And marriage between a man and a woman is a way of reflecting that similarity and dissimilarity at the same time. And God asks us to live with that, trusting Him, so that the two of us together can reflect the reality that God intends. Then we come to verse 25, where we move into what the Bible is telling husbands about loving their wives. Nikki, what does Paul say here in 25? What is he saying when he says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.”?
Nikki: Well, he’s calling them to self-sacrificial love. As I was thinking about this, I was remembering some conversations that Carel and I had when we first got married, or actually even right before we got married. We were talking about what married life would be like. And I told him, “I don’t want you to have a Harley.” He wanted a motorcycle. “I don’t want you to have a Harley.”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: I had a lot of family who worked in the medical field, and they said, “Do not ever ride a motorcycle,” and that stuck, and I said please don’t.
Colleen: Uh-huh.
Nikki: And especially if we have kids, not until they’re 18. So he tells me for his daughter, our youngest, for her 18th birthday he’s getting a Harley. [Laughter.]
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: You know, we would joke a lot about – in our first years of marriage, about how different life would be if we weren’t married and what it would look like to be a single man and able to just ride his bike into the sunset. [Laughter.] What I’m seeing here in this verse is that in another way husbands not only add a wife to their life, but they subtract things from their life as they take on this covenant relationship. They’re being called to care for and be accountable for this woman. You know, just as Adam should have stopped Eve from even talking to the snake –
Colleen: Yes, he should have. He was there.
Nikki: – our husbands, our brothers in the Lord are held to that accountability for their wives, and so being a husband isn’t just adding that décor. It’s subtracting certain things and living the life that God calls them to. It’s giving up the privileges of only worrying about his needs and desires, and it’s committing himself to another person as to his own body.
Colleen: This command for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her is a command that is a more extreme expression of devotion than the wife is called on to make. And I think that’s important to remember because for some reason we have come to see the word “submit” as a self-erasing idea. Okay, erasing all that I want, erasing my ideas, erasing my desires, I’m just going to submit, like that play The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare. There is a line in there where this hard-headed woman finally says to the man who is pursuing her and trying to break her spirit, “My hand is ready, may it do you ease.” No, that’s not what this is about. That’s not what “submit” means. “Submit” means you’re the body attached to the head. You work together. The head is taking the brunt of everything, and it’s a more extreme expression of devotion, but it’s the same kind of devotion, it’s on the same scale. Each one is a form of self-denial. The husband’s is more extreme. It’s not self-erasing, it’s not self-abnegating. It’s self-denial for the sake of the marriage, for the sake of the other. And sometimes I think my husband has a huge responsibility before the Lord because of being a husband, and I need to honor that and pray for him and ask the Lord to give him strength and wisdom from Him. Because this is not an accident that the Lord has assigned it this way, and this is a representation of the church, and as believers we are really under the responsibility of realizing our marriages are for the glory of God. That’s really what they’re for, as believers.
Nikki: And that’s a hard thing to wrap your head around. I mean, it was for me, coming to faith at 30, because I thought marriage was for me. You know?
Colleen: [Laughter.] Yeah.
Nikki: It was going to be wonderful and fun and romantic, and we can, you know, whatever, grow old together.
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: It was all about personal pleasure. And it’s not the same as – that’s not the picture that Scripture gives us.
Colleen: No.
Nikki: These are our brothers in the Lord, and as we see the weight of the responsibility God’s given them, like you said, we want to pray for them and come alongside them and be that helper –
Colleen: Yeah, exactly.
Nikki: – that we’re called to be.
Colleen: And just by the way, that word “helper” that is first used in Genesis, where Adam is naming the animals, and he finally realizes there’s no one like him, there’s no helper that fits him, and God puts him to sleep, creates Eve out of his rib, and when Adam wakes up he gasps. He knows that he has that helper that’s fit for him. “Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh,” and it’s so interesting that from the beginning the wife was made out of the husband, out of a deep sleep that in a sense prefigures death, and now in the New Covenant, the church is formed out of Christ through His death, through His death and resurrection the church is formed from what Christ has done, and we are placed in Him. There is such an interesting parallel here that forever unites human marriage with the image of what God has done in Christ and the church. And as believers we can’t begin to completely explain this, but we know it’s true because the Spirit confirms that this is bigger than we can see.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: In fact, Paul goes on in 26 and 27 to say what it is that Christ has done for the church. He said in 25 that Christ loved the church, gave Himself up for her, and then “so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, that He might present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.” I’ve always thought this is such an amazing passage. Christ Himself takes responsibility for cleaning us up. [Laughter.] You know?
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: We trust Him, we’re born again, we become part of His bride, part of His church, but He washes us with the water of His word. He presents us to Himself. We don’t present ourselves to Him. He presents us to Himself, having done all that’s necessary so we’re spotless and blameless and perfect, exactly what He needs as His Body.
Nikki: You know, as I was looking at this passage, I was thinking about the fact that we actually see all of the Trinity at work in our sanctification. Here we see Jesus washing His bride, and in 1 Thessalonians 5:23 and 24 it reads, “May the God of peace Himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept complete, without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Faithful is He who calls you, and He also will do it.” And we know from the Gospel of John, it’s the Father who calls us. So we see the Lord sanctifying us. We see the Father sanctifying us in the high-priestly prayer, “Your word is truth, sanctify them in the truth.” We’re sanctified by the word and by the indwelling Holy Spirit. The entire Trinity is at work in this. It’s pretty cool to see that.
Colleen: And it’s interesting too that the Body of Christ is not just the women believers. It’s the women and the men.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And how we understand this, we don’t fully know. But I remember years ago, it’s kind of stuck with me, we were in FAF one Friday night, our Former Adventist Fellowship weekly Bible study. We were dealing with a passage that was referring to those who believe and have been adopted. I believe we were in Romans 8. We are called sons, sons of God. And the point is that the word “sons” in the Greek means heirs. That’s why that passage doesn’t say sons and daughters, because “sons” is the word for heirs, but even the daughters are heirs, so in that sense we’re all sons. And I remember Richard looking around and saying, “So women, if you have trouble being called ‘sons,’ just remember that we men are also part of the bride.” [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And these are things we can’t explain from our purely physical view of things in a physical world. But these are things that are eternally true. The Lord Jesus is cleaning up all of us who believe, making us spotless, perfecting us in Him.
Nikki: Can I point out here too that it says that Christ gave Himself up for the church so that He might sanctify her. In Adventism, Christ went to the cross to elevate the law, and then we got busy keeping the law so that we could be sanctified so that we could take our flawless characters to heaven. Here again we have, just in verse 25, 26, 27, He is the one who is going to present us to Himself in all our glory, in His glory –
Colleen: Yeah.
Nikki: – having no spot or wrinkle. This is something that He gave Himself up to do this for us. We are not left out there on our own to clean up our act.
Colleen: He doesn’t save us to take us to the law. He saves us because He has already fulfilled the law and taken its curse and broken that curse so that we can be alive in Him. From now on, as believers, everything that we read in the New Testament is what is our privilege as born-again believers, with His power and His Spirit enabling this to happen. And then we come to 28 to 30, where Paul says how husbands are supposed to love their wives as their own bodies, just as Christ also loves the church. It says, “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, just as Christ loves the church,” because we are members of His Body. So, Nikki, you were talking to me about some of your thoughts about this passage. Would you like to share some of those insights you had.
Nikki: Well, him saying that no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, it made me think, you know, there’s an insanity to being careless with marriage. It’s almost like self-harm.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: There’s a dysfunction to not taking seriously what God has given you. I recently read a meme that said, “Women, we are one with our husbands, and if we turn on them, it’s as if we have an autoimmune disease.”
Colleen: [Laughter.]
Nikki: If the body turns on the head –
Colleen: That’s true.
Nikki: – it’s self-inflicting harm, and the same is true for a husband. If he doesn’t love his wife as he loves his own body, it’s self-harm.
Colleen: That’s a really great point. It’s hard to understand from our perspective, but the fact is we can know that this is actually true. And this is actually reflecting Christ and the church, and we know that the Lord Jesus would never harm or ignore or condescend to us as His Body, and that is the model for husbands to wives. And that kind of love and care causes a wife to know she is safe, to be secure, to be able to grow into the image that God created her to be. One of the things that I think is so interesting about this image, when I compare marriage to Christ and the church, the Lord Jesus gives us ourselves and our true identity when we know Him. It’s almost as if we don’t have to search for meaning any longer. We have meaning. We have an eternal identity. And this is somehow the image of marriage; a husband’s care for a wife provides an environment that allows that wife to become what God has created her to be so that everyone is growing in the Lord and helping each other grow in the Lord.
Nikki: You know that verse 29, “No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it,” I’ve found in my own marriage that the more willing my husband has been to be sympathetic and patient and compassionate, the more willing I have been to admit that I’m the weaker vessel. [Laughter.]
Colleen: Yes, exactly.
Nikki: And that I need that. As we both respond to the truth of what we’re dealing with and who we are, the more it builds trust and safe vulnerability and the greater the marriage becomes.
Colleen: And sometimes it seems counterintuitive because we think, you know, I have a right be to who I am. Well, yes, I do have a right to be who I am. In a sense, if I am ignoring that my true right is to be born of God and called a son or a daughter of God, that’s what defines all the other rights. Everything is different when I’m transferred out of the domain of darkness and placed into the kingdom of the beloved Son. That’s when I know who I really am, and when a husband, when my husband comes and sees me as his sister in the Lord, gifted by God to work alongside him, that’s when it makes sense how Christ helps us grow in Him and become more than we thought we could be. That’s where we begin to see that the marriage is greater than the sum of the parts because we have the Holy Spirit – as you said, the whole Trinity – alive in us, working in us to make us reflect Him.
Nikki: And can we just briefly address the fact that this is really hard to do when there’s conflict in marriage. When there’s trauma, when there is history, it’s really hard to hear verses like this –
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: – to think through verses like this, to hear people talk about verses like this, and to feel like it’s even possible to make this apply to our own lives. But that’s where I would take a wife, anyway, to 1 Peter chapter 3 –
Colleen: Yes, me too.
Nikki: – in verse 1, and actually I believe right before that he’s talking about how Christ went to the cross silently. And he says here, “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.” This is possible to do when you have a husband who isn’t obedient to the word because this submission is, again, arranging yourself under the order of God –
Colleen: That’s right.
Nikki: – under His order, His creative design for you. And so as we look over their shoulders and we submit to Christ and to His order, He empowers us to do what is needed, to love our husbands for Him, to be satisfied in Christ alone, to entrust our husband’s sanctification to the Lord.
Colleen: Yes.
Nikki: And He does work. He does work in that.
Colleen: He does. Sometimes I’ve thought there are so many reasons for these commands in Scripture. I have to get out of the way so that my husband isn’t just reacting to me because I’m making a lot of trouble. I have to get out of the way so that he’s free to react to the Holy Spirit instead of just trying to get away from my continual noise, because, you know, I do talk when I get upset. [Laughter.]
Nikki: [Laughter.]
Colleen: And it’s not my right to do that as a wife. I have to say what I think. I have to say my opinion, but my job is not to harangue him or to be his Holy Spirit. Only God can do that, and I need to take myself out of the way so they can work together.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Here in verse 31, Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, and right here he takes us right back to the beginning of the Bible, to the beginning of creation, and he says all of this that he’s saying about husbands and wives is because of this. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” And I know it’s one thing to think about that when you’re getting married and you realize, “My loyalty to my spouse has to be my primary loyalty in my life,” but it’s also another thing to think about that down the road a few decades when you watch your own children grow up and get married and you realize this is their God-ordained job, to leave you, not to leave you in terms of not loving you or staying in touch or honoring you, but to leave you as their primary loyalty. A husband and a wife, their primary loyalty is to their spouse, and that’s a picture of Christ and His church.
Nikki: It’s a picture of the mystery that Paul was charged to teach to the church. He says in 32, “This mystery is great; but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.” This reminds me of our walk through Colossians.
Colleen: Um-hmm.
Nikki: He says in Colossians 1:25-27, “I was made a minister of this church according to the commission from God granted to me for your benefit, so that I might fully carry out the preaching of the word of God, that is, the mystery which had been hidden from the past ages and generations, but now has been revealed to His saints, to whom God willed to make known that the wealth of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles is the mystery that is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” This unifying of the husband and the wife becoming one flesh, it’s showing us this unification between us and Christ as He indwells His people and we become one.
Colleen: And it’s just important for me to notice that this picture that Paul is painting here is once again very specifically between husbands and wives.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: Because of this mystery of a husband and a wife and Christ and the church being images of each other, that the marriage is a demonstration and a shadow of and a picture of Christ and the church, because of that, variations on marriage that are so popular today, like sequential monogamy, same-sex marriage, uncommitted domestic partners, all of the discussion regarding fluid genders, all of these things cannot be the human echo of Christ’s eternal expression. Christ’s eternal expression as the head of the Body is fixed, and it is forever, and marriage, as God defines it and as God ordained it, is the thing that images that. Biblical marriage is given by God because it derives from the eternal reality of Christ and His church, and even if we don’t fully understand all the dynamics of this, we have to know that what it says here is true for reasons we may not even fully understand, but there’s a reason for it, and it is true, because God has said it is true. And then finally, “Each individual among you is to love his own wife even as himself, and the wife must see to it that she respects her husband.” One thing that strikes me about this verse is that even though Scripture does command wives in other places to love their husbands – and that’s absolutely a fact, we have to love our husbands – Paul here in this description is emphasizing that husbands are to love their wives and wives are to respect their husbands, and I find that interesting because, by nature, women love –
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: – women love. They kind of almost get maternal in their love. And by nature men tend to respect. It’s a little more egalitarian, well, like, you did a great job, you look good, whatever. There’s a respect thing that is admiration-based. But here Paul is asking men to do the thing that is not necessarily as natural, to love their wives. There’s a tenderness there. And for wives to respect their husbands, which doesn’t necessarily mean that they feel all gushy-gushy at every moment. It means they see who that man is in Christ and respect that.
Nikki: Um-hmm.
Colleen: And that’s our call, to respect what Christ has done. If you have not understood what it means to be part of the bride of Christ. If you haven’t experienced the Lord Jesus bringing you to life, bringing you into Himself through your faith in His shed blood and His resurrection, we ask that you deal with the Lord. Recognize that the Bible identifies your true condition, born dead, as it says in Ephesians 2, born dead in sin, by nature a child of wrath, and the Lord Jesus went to the cross for you, paid the price for your sin, and rose again to give you life, and we ask that you trust Him and that you allow Him to bring you to life, to seal you forever with His Holy Spirit, to be adopted by the Father, so you too can be part of the Body of Christ, with Him as the head, so you too can understand what it means to bring His Spirit and His power and His love and His respect into your marriage.
Nikki: If you have any questions or comments for us, you can write to us at formeradventist@gmail.com. You can visit proclamationmagazine.com to view past articles, archived magazines, stay updated with the ministry, and sign up for weekly emails. You can also find a place to donate there. Don’t forget to like us and follow us on Facebook and Instagram, and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. And join us next week as we begin walking through Ephesians 6.
Colleen: We’ll see you then.
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