God & Christ, husband & wife - submission.
I have heard many sermons that try to water down and explain away the term "submission" in the Bible
as it relates to husbands and wives. After one such sermon I wrote a letter to the preacher to share what
I believe the Bible clearly states on the subject.
Dear Brother,
The family, as God Almighty instituted, is certainly under attack and the need to spread the knowledge of the original design and purpose for this covenant between husband and wife has never been so urgent as today. The family is a clear reflection of the spiritual condition of the man and the woman who share in its life. The family is in crisis because men and women are in crisis. With this in mind I beg for your attentive patience as I share with you these thoughts of mine.
I was at our Fellowship gathering last Sunday when you treated the subject of relationships with special emphasis to the ones within Christian marriage with your sermon entitled “Submitting to each other”. I found your talk overall helpful but I would like to share with you some concerns that have risen within me as a result of your message.
The focal point is your brief discussion on verse 22 of Ephesians chapter 5 where the Word of God says:
” Wives, subject yourselves to [your] own husbands as to the Lord”.
In teaching, you mentioned the absence of the word “subject” or “submit” in the Greek Text. You also said that the introduction of such word in your hearer’s Bibles is assumed by the use of the same word in the previous verse. That does concern me for various reasons, which will become evident as my letter progresses.
First of all I noticed, that you went to great lengths in trying to explain the position of verse 21 as to whether it belonged to the end of the previous phrase or was the beginning of the next. You did explain the various possibilities. In doing so you gave the hearer the freedom to think and choose. This is why I was dismayed when you did not do the same for verse 22 when you mentioned, quite categorically, that the word “subject” or “submit” is not in the Greek Text.
You should have made your hearers aware of the fact that this word is not found in the Nestle Greek Text but it is found in the Received and Majority Greek Texts. Furthermore it is a known fact that of the 600 manuscripts containing Ephesians only 2 omit the word in question.
No Ancient Versions omit this word, and no Church Fathers quote v.22 without it except 2 only. So we can safely state that more than 90% of existing Manuscripts contain this verb in one form or another. With all due respect I submit to you that a teacher in your position should have mentioned that fact and left the congregation to draw their own conclusions. A little more exegesis would have not confused us.
Now, it could be possible that you did not know about this discrepancy between these Greek Texts in which case I would think that anyone who teaches the Word of God, before making such drastic statements concerning the original Texts, should thoroughly familiarize himself with all the variants on that particular section of text before coming to doctrinal conclusions that can affect people’s lives to such a degree as this particular point can . I am sorry to say that, in my opinion, on this specified point you failed to be fair to the Scriptures and to your audience.
The thing is that in the overall tone of your talk you did give the impression that the wife is subject to the husband and you did expressly say so, but mostly within the concept of mutual submission to each other, hence the title of your sermon, and not on the express command the Holy Spirit gives to wives to be subject to their own husbands in everything.
On the top of that having introduced a doubt in the mind of the church regarding the veracity of this particular text, you caused the godly concept of family order, to be greatly diluted.
As an addendum to our bulletin we received some notes to your sermon and in these under the heading “ The marriage application” you write that husbands need to submit to their wives as a sister in Christ and out of reverence for Him. To prove this point you used Eph.5:21 and 1Pet.3:8. Let’s consider Ephesians 5:21 were Paul says:
”Being subject to one another in [the] fear of God”.
Your idea being that both husband and wives should submit to each other. Now even if v.21 is the beginning of the next phrase, upon considering it, we can easily see that even in this case the apostle gives the wife a double command because v.22 does say, only to the wives, to submit to their own husbands.
Now looking at 1Pet.3:8, I would really like to know how v.8 can be isolated from the context of the overall discourse. Peter has been writing from v.1
“Likewise wives, submitting yourselves to your own husbands…”
and bringing Sarah’s example in v.5 he continues
“For so then indeed the holy women who were hoping on God adorned themselves submitting themselves to their husbands as Sarah obeyed Abraham calling him lord…
Then Peter calls on the husbands to
bestow honor on the weaker vessel, the female, that their prayers may not be hindered.
And finally in v.8 how can you extract from
“Live in harmony with one another”
the doctrine of the husband to be submitted to their wives? I am sorry, dear brother, the Scriptures do not state that husbands must submit to their wives. On the contrary in many places and by different writers the Holy Spirit states the exact opposite.
You cannot pick one verse (Eph.5:21) and use and misuse it to promote what the majority of other Bible verses disprove. Few examples follow:
- Eph.5:23-24 …”Because a husband is head of the wife as also Christ is head of the Church. But even as the Church is subject to Christ, so also the wives to their own husbands in everything.”
-1Cor.11:3, “But I want you to know that Christ is the Head of every man, and the man is [the] head of a woman, and God is [the] head of Christ.”
- Also 1Pet.3:1, “Likewise, wives, submitting yourselves to your own husbands….”
v.5 “submitting themselves to their own husbands.”
-Titus 2:5,”….Discrete, chaste, keepers at home, good, subject to [their] own husbands, so that the Word of God may not be blasphemed.”
The call on the husband is far greater in sacrifice than just submit, it is to love. And because of love the husband is called upon to forgive first, die to self first and give himself up to death first for his wife’s sake.
The wife is not called to do that, the husband is. The Church did not die for Christ, but He for the Church. The husband is called upon by God to exemplify Christ’s attitude toward the Church and the wife is called upon to exemplify the Church’s attitude toward Christ.
It’s on the basis of this very prerogative that the husband is required to sacrifice first. In God’s order there is equality of value but not equality of roles. The fact that Christ submitted Himself to the will of the Father as Son, to be obedient even unto death, did not diminish the fact that He was co-equal with God, see Phil. 2:6. So the woman, being equally valued in God’s sight to the male in her nature as female, nevertheless submits herself to the husband in her role as wife.
Concerning the order of authority in the family, God’s order stands: the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church. She submits to her own husband as the Church submits to Christ.
Christ gave Himself up on the Church’s behalf (Eph.5:25) but that does not imply that He submitted Himself to her. On the contrary, because of that great love, the Church subjects herself to Christ. The same should be in the family - because of the love we pour on our wives, in return, they willingly submit themselves to us as husbands.
As Christ’s sacrifice brought to life the Church so the sacrificial love of the husband brings the wife’s submission to life.
Now if we fail as husbands, are our wives therefore free from submitting to us? 1Peter 3:1 provides us with the answer:
“Likewise wives, submitting yourselves to your own husbands, that even if any disobey the Word, through the behavior of the wives, without word they will be won observing your pure behavior in fear”.
So as you can see even the argument of submitting to each other on the basis of being brother and sister in Christ fails because the Scriptures teach submission of the wives even to unbelieving or disobedient husbands. Obviously wives should not do anything contrary to God's word even when their husbands, Christians or not, suggest to do such things.
I might be wrong but I do not recall any mention of Eph.5:23 during your message. There Paul affirms that the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the Church and reading on you’ll find verse 28 where the Word states that the husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies - that verse is the antidote to cultural male superiority. Anyone concerned with husbands' misuse of power should point that verse out and not try to rearrange God's established order.
In closing let me say that these points, in your talk to our church, weakened these biblical truths in the lives of married couples and aspiring ones.
God’s authority is the single most important factor in the universe; it is exalted and magnified through our voluntary submission, hence the glory. God has decided that His authority, which satan, the fallen angels and man disobeyed, would be established through the obedience of the Son which would bring to fruition the submission of His Bride, the Church.
I do not know the intentions of your heart but I sense that for the sake of counteracting a potential widespread abuse of patriarchal despotism you have gone in a way, even if involuntarily, which undermines that authority instead of working at fashioning the husband’s role after the image of Christ Himself. We don’t touch, even slightly, God’s appointed order of authority but, in Christ, we work to chisel and mold the characters of those who hold such authority so that they will reflect the sacrificial virtues of our Lord Jesus, the Son of God.
Yours in Christ
Jan
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