The Submitting Wife

 DEVOTION

THE LETTER TO THE EPHESIANS

THE SUBMITTING WIFE

Eph 5:21-33

21 Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. 22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. 28 In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body. 31 "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."   32 This is a profound mystery — but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

NIV

Right on the heels of submitting or honoring each other and having mutual respect for each other, come these instructions particularly to the wife and the husband, as an example of us and Christ. However, it does still apply to our earthly marriages. What we need to do is examine the earthy relations between a wife and a husband and then see how that applies to the bride of Christ and the husbandry of Christ. Although this instruction about a wife submitting to her husband as to the Lord was given to the wives in Ephesus, we apply all of the scripture to our lives today. However, this might have been relevant in certain times of history when societies were mostly patriarchal, it seems that our current society has rejected that concept for its bent toward equality, which may have put more strain on marriages than it should, as this concept of equality has invaded the marriage. We do know that God established this relationship at the very beginning of creation creating man from the dust of the ground, and creating woman from man, for the purpose of walking side by side through life. Yes, God made woman to be a help mate to man, but as He took a rib from Adam rather than a bone from his head or his feet, we see this as a sign that woman walks at the side of man, rather than in charge or at the feet of man.

Nevertheless, there is still this instruction regarding the wife submitting to the authority of her husband in the same way she submits to the authority of Christ in her life. As Christ is the head of the Church, so the man has to be the authority in the marriage. What we have witnessed over the years is that many men have abdicated their authority in the marriage leaving their wives unprotected and vulnerable to the influence of the world and having to take control of marital matters in the household. We are seeing a phenomenon in our culture with the statistics that more women die from heart attacks than men do. This may be due to women taking on more worldly responsibilities than God designed for them and thus living with too much stress. If the wife is to submit or honor and respect her husband, it would behoove the husband to live in accordance with the responsibility God gave him. We think it would be difficult, especially in our current culture, for a woman to respect a man if he is not living up to his responsibility, thus we think all the burden lies on the shoulders of the man. Yet, the wives still must respect and honor their husbands as they would the Lord, yielding all authority in the marriage to their husbands.