Marriage #6: An illustration of true authority and submission

In Mark 1:15 Jesus said: ‘The time promised by God has come at last! The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!’ In other words, the rule of God has come and you must submit to God’s rule. To most people today that does not sound like good news! Our view of authority is mostly negative. At best we put up with authority. Most of the time we resist it. We want to run our lives our way without interference.

But the Bible tells us that God’s rule is good news. God’s rule brings freedom, blessing, justice and peace. It is a rule of love. It is actually self-rule that leads to conflict, tyranny and slavery.

How does marriage illustrate the truth about authority and submission?

In marriage there is to be loving authority and joyful submission. The Bible says: ‘Wives, submit to your husbands … Husbands, love your wives.’ (Ephesians 5:22, 25) And so marriage – especially Christians marriages – should show what loving authority is like and that to submit to loving authority is a blessing.

Now in our culture, where authority and submission are viewed with such suspicion, we need to spell out clearly what this means.

It is God’s will for wives to submit to their husbands.

In the same way, you wives must accept the authority of your husbands. Then, even if some refuse to obey the Good News, your godly lives will speak to them without any words. They will be won over by observing your pure and reverent lives. (1 Peter 3:1-2)

Notice first what submission does not mean:

• submission does not mean agreeing with everything your husband says
  - for the wife of 1 Peter 3 believes Jesus is Lord whereas her husband does not
• submission does not mean not trying to change your husband
  - for the wife of 1 Peter 3 is trying to convert him through her godly life
• submission does not mean a wife gets her spiritual strength from her husband
  - for the wife of 1 Peter 3 cannot gain spiritual strength from her husband
• submission does not mean acting out of fear
  - for the wife of 1 Peter 3 is told ‘do what is right without fear of what your husbands might do’ (3:6)

Nor does it mean passivity. The young woman in the Song of Songs is vocal and active. In fact, she takes more initiative in the Song than the man. There is a high degree of complimentarity, mutual respect and dignity.

What then is submission?

Wives, 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 Saviour of his body, the church. 24 As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything.
25 Husbands, 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. (Ephesians 5:22-30)

The first things to say about this is that submission and love are very close. Both mutual love and mutual submission are commended within the wider body of Christ of which they are members (5:2, 21). But they cannot be synonymous since in Ephesians 5 the relationship between husband and wife is compared with the relationship between Christ and the church. My relationship to Christ is not a mirror of his relationship with me. Christ does not submit to me!

So here is how I define the respective roles of wife and husband:

• the wife puts her husband’s will before her own
• the husband puts his wife’s interests before his own

This captures, I think, the similarities in their respective attitudes. But it also captures the difference in their roles. It gives the husband a lead role, but a lead role defined by the cross – one which seeks the good of the other rather than self-interest. It also captures how their respective roles correspond to the roles of the church towards Christ and Christ towards the church.

‘Submit to one another’ in 5:21 is important. But it is not the ‘heading’ of the section on marriage, but the climax to the previous section. Although most English translations hide this, ‘submitting to one another’ is one of four participle sub-clauses qualifying the command to be filled with the Spirit (the NIV hides this badly by making it a separate paragraph). Paul says, in effect: ‘Be filled with the Spirit, by speaking to one another … by singing in your hearts … by giving thinks to God … by submitting to one another.’ So the husband does not submit to the wife in the same way that the wife submits to the husband.

Men and women are equal. But equality does not rule out complimentary roles or headship. Otherwise we cannot have a proper doctrine of the Trinity. The persons of the Trinity are equal in terms of their being (their ‘godness’). But the Son subordinates himself to the Father: he puts the will of the Father before his own (John 5:19; 8:28 etc.) This is the point Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 11:3.

My ‘formula’ does not say, ‘The wife puts her husband’s will first. The husband puts his wife’s interests first.’ Both of them have a higher allegiance and a higher purpose: to submit to Christ and seek his glory. This means, for example, there will be times when the wife challenges her husband or rejects his will in order to be obedient to Christ’s will. It means there will be times when the husband puts his wife’s holiness before her happiness. So a further refinement is:

• the wife puts her husband’s will before her own – but not before Christ’s will
• the husband puts his wife’s interests before his own – but not before Christ’s interests

Biblical teaching on this issue runs contrary to the spirit of our age. But the answer is not to make the Bible conform to our worldview, but to make our worldview conform to that of the Bible – to be counter-cultural.

This does not mean, to anticipate the ‘What about …’ scenarios, we must defend all the abuses of male headship over women. Quite the opposite! The big issue is what it means to exercise authority. Our problem is we understand authority in the image of Satan’s lie rather than in the image of God’s rule. In the Garden of Eden Satan portrayed God’s rule as tyrannical. So we think of authority as repressive and restrictive. But God’s rule is liberating, life-giving and loving. Men believe the lie when they abuse authority; women believe the lie when they reject headship. Men abuse authority over wives because they are self-interested; wives reject submission to husbands because they are self-willed.