Preached · May 13, 2018
Welcome Back
Hey, everybody. I'm back. Welcome back. Thank you. My wife and I had a baby boy about five weeks ago, and it's been going really, really well. Wesley Evan Parrott is just about as perfect as you can ask for for an infant. He does all the things that infants are supposed to do, namely eat and sleep and poop. And our daughter Audrey is doing all the things that two-year-olds are supposed to do, which is push every boundary in every way all the time. So my wife and I have not had a full night's sleep in those five weeks. So there's no saying what today's sermon could be about, or what could come out of my mouth. Really, really exciting for you all. It's good to be back. This is my first day kind of back at it.
So what we're doing is we're finishing up the book of Ephesians. We're going to spend three more weeks in the book of Ephesians—this week and then the last two Sundays of May. And then in the summer, June and July and August, we will be camping out in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' kind of manifesto for what kingdom life is all about. The Sermon on the Mount is really the place where Jesus lays out how we are meant to live our lives in the world.
Now, I've been at Good News for about eight years, and I have this habit, kind of given to me, of preaching really difficult sermons. I've preached on homosexuality. I did a Q&A on sexuality in general. That was fun. Back in February of 2012, I preached a sermon called "Jesus and Divorce, or the Worst Valentine's Day Sermon You Ever Heard." It was February 12th. Well, today we're continuing on in Ephesians chapter 5, and the name of today's sermon is "Wives, Submit to Your Husbands, or the Worst Mother's Day Sermon of All Time." Don't know how the calendar landed like that.
I've actually been excited. We planned out the sermon schedule back in January, and so we knew this was coming up. And this sermon was actually going to be a couple of weeks earlier, but some things got pushed back. I was actually going to come back early just for this sermon from paternity leave, because I love this passage and I love this topic so much. It's important, it's crucial, and it's always misunderstood. It's misunderstood, it's misapplied, it's used in ways that are hurtful and destructive. And so it gets to be my honor, my privilege, my pleasure to be able to talk through this passage today.
Ephesians 5:21–25
So we're in the book of Ephesians chapter 5, verses 21 through 25. Let's go ahead and all stand up for the public reading of God's Word, and then we'll enjoy a word of prayer. This is what God's Word says:
[Ephesians 5:21–23 not captured] Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.
Let's pray. Almighty God, we thank you for your Word. We thank you for the privilege of reading it and enjoying it together. Now, Almighty God, we pray that your Holy Spirit would be in this place overflowing, that we might hear your Word and understand it—and not just understand it, but obey it, Almighty God. God, may we take a passage that's been abused through the centuries, and may we come to it with soft eyes, fresh eyes, open hearts, unplugged ears, that we might hear what you really have to say to us today. We pray these things in the name of Jesus, and all God's children said, Amen.
So Ephesians 5: wives, submit to your husbands; husbands, love your wives. A famous passage, a passage that can get misused in many, many ways. And there are ways it can be misused that are obvious and harmful and hurtful when it comes to abuse. And there are ways it can be misused and misapplied that are much more subtle, much more acceptable, much more what you're used to hearing, maybe on Christian radio or Christian TV.
I want to give you a few examples. Here's one from John Piper. It says:
God intended the man to bear a unique responsibility for leadership in relation to women. Men were there first, and so you bear, men—you bear first responsibility to lead and to protect. Biblical headship refers to the husband's divine calling to take primary responsibility for Christlike leadership, protection, and provision.
That's John Piper. Here's another quote, from Martha Peace and The Excellent Wife:
God has chosen to place the wife under the authority of her husband.
Or another book, The Good Wife's Guide: Embracing Your Role Is a Help Me by Darlene Schatz. She says:
Husbands get the final say, the executive vote. Women are more likely to suffer emotional turmoil, while men stop to consider logistics.
Here's another quote. This is from a professor and therapist, James Hurley. He says:
A wife is to continue to live a godly life even with an abusive husband. Her willing, suffering love for her husband shows the willing, suffering love of Christ.
In other words, if you have an abusive husband, you need to stay in the home and bear it silently. These are ways that things like Ephesians 5:21 can get misused. And yes, you heard me—misused. Because we hear things like "men need to be the leaders in the home," "man is the head of the household," things like that. But I want to say to you, that is a misreading of Ephesians chapter 5.
And so today, I'm going to warn you, it's going to be a lengthy sermon. We're going into Bible-teaching mode. We're going to be in the Word, verse by verse. And we've got so much to uncover that we're not even going to have a closing song. But this is crucial stuff that we need to get right when we talk about husbands, wives, marriages, and life together as brothers and sisters in Christ in general.
So there are three things we need to talk about to get this right. Number one, what submission is and isn't—that's in verse 21. Number two, what headship is and isn't—verse 23. Number three, what it means to give up, in verse 25. So if you're the note-taking type, this is the outline for the day: submission, headship, and giving up.
Submission
So number one, submission. Any John Cena fans out there? What is submission in the Bible? What does it look like? What does it not look like? Well, submission—in verse 21, this is what it says:
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Submit to whom? One another. So at the very top of our passage, we've got this command, this imperative, that we are supposed to submit to one another. It's not a popular word, submission. It's not something that we really enjoy doing. But from the outset, Paul, the author of Ephesians, writes to the church and says, brothers and sisters, all of you together, this is what I need you to do: you need to submit to one another. It starts from the outset, from a you to a you, to a one-another kind of submission.
And this is the top, the beginning of the passage. So everything we read afterward follows this command. Everything we read following verse 21 is subservient to what we read there: that if we're going to submit, we need to first begin with submitting to one another.
And Scripture actually defines submission really well in Philippians chapter 2. We read that in humility, we need to value others above ourselves, not looking to our own interests, but each of us to the interests of others. And this is a pretty good definition of submission: that we need to value others as people more important than me, and to look at their values and their interests and what they're into as something higher than my own interests. This is what submission is. Submission is a willingness to look at someone else and say, let's do what you want to do; let's be about what you want to be about; let me look to your interests, the things that you care about, and see that as first place and my own as second place.
Verse 21 says, submit to one another—and why are you going to do this? Out of reverence for Christ. Now, you may read that and think, well, we're doing this because Christ told us to; we're doing this because Christ is in charge, Christ is the boss, we need to do this because Christ is Lord. And that's part of it. But Paul's going beyond that. He's saying, I want you to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ because Christ Jesus did it first.
So if you continue on in Philippians 2, it says you need to have the same mindset as Christ Jesus, who made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant. You need to submit to one another, every person to every person, looking to the interest not of yourself but of someone else, because Jesus did it first. Jesus is the author, the pioneer, the forerunner of our faith. And he was the one who trailblazed the way of submission, trailblazed the way of looking to someone's interest as more important than his own. Jesus himself says this about himself in the book of Mark:
[…]
And so right here, out of the very lips of Jesus Christ—our Master, our Lord, our Savior—he spells it out. And so verse 21 is the beginning of this passage. We have to keep it in mind for the rest of the passage, or else we're going to screw it up pretty big.
Household Codes
Now, if you want to really understand what's going on in verse 21—and actually, it's a really long sentence that goes from verse 21 all the way through chapter 6, verse 9—then we need to talk about household codes.
So you ever go to Hobby Lobby and see those signs that you put over a foyer or a laundry room or a dining room, and it says like "Rules for the House"? You know, "We play hard, we work hard, and we put down the toilet seat," something like that. I need to visit Hobby Lobby more often. But you know what I mean—rules for the house: these are the things we do, these are the things we don't do. Usually it's playful.
Well, in Greek and Roman and Jewish society, they also had household codes. And sometimes it was a tablet that you'd actually put in your home that explained what the household code was. And these were crucial for civilization, because empires were made out of cities, and cities were made out of oikoses—out of the household, the home. And so if your home was disordered, that meant the empire was going to be disordered. So it was in the interest of the government, the interest of the empire or the king, to make sure that every house followed the household code. So a bunch of different cultures had them, and they all followed some pretty strict guidelines.
So here are some examples. This comes from a philosopher named Philo. He was Jewish. This is part of the Jewish household code:
[…]
This is Dionysius. He's a Roman. Can't live with them, can't live without them. He says:
A wife is a virtuous wife if she is in all things obedient to her husband.
That's the Roman household code. Here's Aristotle, Greek:
The male is by nature fitter for command than the female, as the free man rules over slaves, in the same manner in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child.
And finally, the Jewish historian Josephus writes:
[…]
So when you read something like Ephesians chapter 5, what Paul is doing is following in the tradition of Jews and Greeks and Romans. He is writing his own household code for Christians. And you may even see in your Bible a heading that says "Instructions for Christian Households." So Paul is following on in this tradition of writing a code for Christians—how households, how homes are supposed to behave—that would include wives and children and slaves and masters and fathers and husbands.
But you're going to know very, very quickly that Paul sounds very, very different than his contemporaries, because he begins with something that's unprecedented: submit to one another. From the get-go, there's an acknowledgment of Jesus, the kind of person Jesus was, the kind of life Jesus lived, as well as a commitment to mutual submission—each person to each person. You do not find that in any household code, Greek, Roman, or Jewish.
Headship
Okay, so we've talked about submission and about household codes. Let's continue on and talk about headship. Verse 22 says, "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands." Now let's stop right there. If you have a New American Standard translation, you're going to notice that the word "submit" is in italics. And the reason it's in italics is because in the original Greek, the word "submit" is not there. Now, the translator isn't just adding words for the sake of it. What they're doing is grammatically referring back to verse 21. Like I said, verse 21 is the header of this passage: submit to one another, everybody submit to each other. And then Paul is going to start listing a bunch of examples, and so the translators fill in the word for you. Wives submit—just like verse 21 is about submission—wives submit to your husbands.
Continuing on, "as you do to the Lord." Verse 23. So we start with everybody submitting to one another, and then Paul starts listing a bunch of examples. Wives, this is what you're going to do; husbands, this is what you're going to do; children, this is what you're going to do; fathers, this is what you're going to do; slaves, masters, and so on.
So the reason that Paul gives for this submission from wives to husbands is the idea of headship, because the man is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church. Well, I'm going to tell you something. When you think of the word "head," you're going to think of it very, very differently than the way a first-century Jew, Greek, or Roman thinks about the word "head." When we think about the word "head," we think about the head of an organization, somebody who's in charge; we think about authority and power and rule. But if you actually look at the way that "head" is used in Scripture metaphorically, it's used in a different way.
Let's go to Ephesians chapter 4. Paul says that if we speak the truth in love, we're going to grow to be mature into him who is the head, that is Christ. So we have growth language. That's interesting. Let's go to Colossians 2. Paul writes about some people who have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body grows—and then there are some words about ligaments and sinews and bones, but the point being that the head is the one from whom the whole body grows.
What's going on here? Well, heads were not seen as particularly important things in Greek and Roman culture. Actually, if you were to be a dead body in Egypt and you were to be mummified, they would take a hook up through your nostril and pull the brains out through the nose, because they were seen as wasted space. Not really important. The head was basically just kind of sitting up on top of the body, and where intelligence lay was in the heart, according to Aristotle—but it definitely was not in that squishy matter that we threw away when we mummified bodies.
The head, rather, is seen as the place of growth. It's the Greek word kephalē. Kephalē can be translated as head—the thing that sits on top of your body. It can also be translated as source, or the place of unity. So, source, like the headwaters of the Mississippi. Now, are the headwaters in charge of the Mississippi River? No, but they are the source of it. It's the place where it begins, the place where the Mississippi grows from. And so we see similar language in Scripture, where Christ is the head of the body, and that is how we grow. So the idea would be that if you took the head of a person and planted it in the ground, it would grow out like an onion, with arms and limbs and body coming out from it. That was how the head was seen. It's the source, and it's the place where all things come into unity.
So we see this in Ephesians chapter 1—this is one of Pastor Brandon's first sermons from the book of Ephesians. Christ is going to bring unity. Remember this word? Anakephaliosistai. Christ is going to bring unity. And you hear the word "head over everything" and you think, okay, Christ is in charge. And I'm not denying that Christ is in charge, but that's not what Paul's talking about:
God has appointed him head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.
There's no words about authority or leadership or who makes decisions. In that passage, the language about headship, and about anakephaliosistai, about unity, is about fullness and filling and growth. That is what headship in the New Testament is about.
Headship and the Trinity
So, to get into this even a little bit deeper—told you it was going to be a big day—we're going to talk about the Trinity. Now, if you were here with us for Palm Sunday, we talked about the Trinity then: that the Trinity is about the unity of God, that they are equal in power. They are equal in might. They are equal in will. They do not will different things from one another; they will the same thing together. And they are also equal in power and authority and rule. So the power and authority that God the Father has is the same as the authority that God the Son has, which is the same power and authority that God the Spirit has.
They are not one in charge of the other, because sometimes we can get it in our minds that God is somehow in charge of Jesus, and Jesus is in charge of the Holy Spirit, and it's just like the beginning of the corporate ladder—and maybe one day Christ is going to have an overthrow of the Father or something like that. It's not like that. This is how Jesus talks about it in Matthew chapter 11. Jesus says:
All things have been committed to me by my Father.
Everything that the Father has, Jesus has. John chapter 5 says this:
The Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.
Or Philippians chapter 2:
God exalted Jesus to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name.
Not every name except God—but every name. God exalts Jesus the Son above every single name. This is actually one of my favorite passages, Hebrews chapter 1. You get God the Father talking about Jesus in this way. It says, about the Son God says—so this is God talking:
Your throne, O God, will last forever and ever. A scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom. In the beginning, Lord, you laid the foundations of the earth.
God the Father calls the Son "Lord." God the Father says to God the Son: from the very beginning, from creation, you were there, you were in charge. God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit—they share equal power and authority.
This is what Thomas Oden, theologian, says in his book Classic Christianity. He says that eternal subordination—the idea that Jesus is forever subservient to the Father—
Eternal subordination fails to recognize Christ's return to equality with the Father in glory.
And we say "return" because, yes, Jesus did submit himself to the Father when he came down as a human being. But he returns to equality with the Father.
Eternal subordination has not been received by the church. It is heresy.
The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit—they are equal in power and authority.
Reading Headship Rightly
Now, why are we talking about this? Because there's another place where the word "head" is used in Scripture in the New Testament—that's in 1 Corinthians chapter 11. So if we understand what headship is about—if it's about source, if it's about unity—and if we understand that the Father is not over the Son, the Son is not over the Father, the Spirit is not over the Son, that they are equal in power and authority, then that changes how we read this verse:
I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, the head of every woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.
Whatever "head" means, it can't mean rule and authority, because that's heresy. The church decided 1,500 years ago that the Trinity is equal in power and rule and authority. This is what one theologian writes. She says:
Whatever "head" does mean, it does not mean that as God rules over Christ, Christ rules over man, and man rules over the woman—because we cannot claim that God rules over Christ in the first place.
That's not what the church has ever taught. New Testament scholar Scot McKnight says this:
Since the Father's relation to the Son is one of perfect union, eternally, and a relationship of order to love for the other, the notions of headship of Christ to the man and man to the woman are to follow suit.
They are about union and love, not hierarchy and authority.
So when you read headship in Ephesians—that the man is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church—you can't read authority, hierarchy, leadership into it. Headship in Ephesians 5:22 is not about who makes decisions. It's not about who's in charge. It's not about who has the final say. And for goodness' sake, it is not about who is the head of the household—because, secret, brothers and sisters: the word "head of the household" does not appear in Scripture. It is not a biblical phrase. It does not show up.
Actually, I'll prove it to you. Go to BibleGateway.com, type in "head of the household": zero results. Well, that's the New International Version. Maybe it's from that old-timey King James Version: zero results. Okay, what if we change it to "who leads the home": zero results. Okay, what if we talk about "who rules households"? Oh, here's a result. 1 Timothy 5: "so I would have younger widows"—that would be women—"marry, bear children, and rule their households." Uh-oh. Women are ruling the households. Now we have a problem.
So here in this passage we have the word oikodespoteō. So oikos being the household, the home; and despotēs, which is where we get the word "despot," a ruler. It means to be the house-ruler, or the house manager, the house leader. Hilariously, the King James used to translate this as "keep house"—you know, widows need to marry and buy a set of brooms. That's not what it says. So hilariously, the only time you ever get ruler or leadership language about marriage in the Bible, it's about women, not about men.
Now, here's the thing. It's also not about authority, because the Bible does talk about authority in marriage precisely one time, in 1 Corinthians chapter 7. This is what it says:
The wife does not have authority over her own body, but yields it to her husband.
Okay, some of you are used to that, but you've got to keep going. It says:
In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body, but yields it to his wife.
Sounds an awful lot like "submit to one another out of reverence for Christ." Mutual submission, in the same way. Marriage is about a coming together and a yielding of each other's authority to the other person. Headship is not about who makes decisions, who has the final say, whether or not women are too emotional or men are more logical. Headship is about a submission to union together.
Giving Up
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as you do to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body. As the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Now, I'm not denying that wives should submit to their husbands. They should. But you've got to keep reading. Verse 25. You've got to talk about what it means to give up:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.
Now, I've got to say, if you read this passage, Ephesians 5:25—husbands, love your wives—and somehow, some way, you get out of this passage "men, you're in charge; men, you get to make the decisions, you get the final say; women need to submit and husbands don't"—I have to ask, have you met Jesus? Because this is what it says: love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up.
Let me throw some more Greek at you. This is the Greek word paradidōmi. And what it means is to give yourself into the hands of another; to give over something into somebody else's power or use; to deliver to someone something to keep, or to deliver yourself up into custody.
So this is the way it's used in Scripture. Matthew chapter 11: Jesus says, "All things have been handed over to me by my Father." What the Father had, he gives to the Son, and it's now the Son's. Matthew 20: "We are going to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be delivered, handed over, given into the custody of the chief priests, and they will condemn him to death." Romans chapter 8: "God did not spare his own son, but delivered him over for us all"—paradidōmi. Galatians 2: "I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself"—paradidōmi'd himself—"for me." And actually, at the top of this very chapter, Ephesians chapter 5, verses 1 and 2: "Follow God's example, therefore, as his dearly loved children, and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us."
This is a submission unto death. This is a submission that says, I'm not my own anymore. All of me for all of you. Everything I am is now yours. And so when it says "husbands, love your wives," it's not in contrast to submission. It's not saying wives need to submit and husbands don't need to submit, they just need to love. It's saying, wives, you just need to submit; and husbands, your call is much, much harder. Your submission is just like Christ's submission—one that goes to death.
Anyone who comes to this passage and comes away with the idea that husbands need to submit less, they don't know Jesus. Because the Jesus who gave himself up for you submitted to his death so that you might live. Headship, if it means anything for the man, it means the laying down of authority. It means you come into a relationship with a woman, in a society and a culture that's all too eager to tell you: be the boss, wear the pants in the family, be in charge, let me show you what real men are like when you watch this war movie or this wrestling match. Headship in Scripture says, in the face of what the world wants to tell you being a man is all about: no, be a man like Jesus was a man, and give yourself up—for the sake of your marriage, the sake of your wife, and honestly for the sake of women everywhere who need more men to lay down their rights for the sake of others.
Implications
So let's talk about some implications, because there are some big ones. First of all, I want to say something that has to be said. Spousal abuse is sinful and wrong and a crime. There are people, there are churches, who will use a passage like this to say, if your husband beats you, grin and bear it. They will say, if your wife doesn't submit, you have to make her so she's obedient. That is sinful, criminal, and wrong. And as a church—we've talked about this as pastors—we want to let you know that if you are in a situation where you are being abused, we will help you in whatever ways we know how. We will provide a safe place for you to stay, and we will get you in touch with people who can help you in the best possible ways. You don't need to stay in that situation. It's wrong. Men, if you find yourself in a position where you've been taught that this is right, that this is okay, that this is your privilege as a man, then you need to come and talk to us as well. And we will bring correction, and we will hopefully, by the grace of God, bring restoration.
Number two, marriage is a gift from God which offers us a glimpse into the life of the Trinity. Our Eastern brothers and sisters in the Orthodox Church talk about perichoresis, the divine dance—that there is this continual taking and giving, this continual submission of one into the other within the triune life. And when God gave us the gift of marriage in Genesis chapter 2, what God is doing is saying, if you live like this, you get a glimpse of what it's like to live in the Trinity. And all of us, all people who are invited to know Jesus, who know Jesus, are meant to live that kind of life—the triune life, the divine dance that says, your will above my will, your desires above my desires.
And so, married folks, you have a privilege and a responsibility, an invitation and a challenge, because you get to show us what it's like to live like God lives. And all of a sudden that gives you years of inspiration, that there's some work to be done in our marriages—because all of a sudden our marriages get to be a glimpse of the triune life to a world that desperately needs to see what that looks like. In a world that's all about my rights, and my privileges, and my point of view over and above anybody else's, marriage gets to be a place where we get to say, it doesn't have to be like that.
Because let me say this—some of us may be hearing a passage like this, "submit," "give yourself up," and thinking, that sounds hard, that sounds terrible. But Jesus says this is the best possible way to live. It's the most life-giving way to live. And I will tell you from experience, it's true. So, single folks, when you see an honorable marriage, point it out. Be glad for it. Write some stuff down. Say, maybe my marriage can be like that someday. And when you see a marriage that looks divisive and angry and mean, then you can rightfully say, that's not what God looks like.
Number three, marriage is a partnership, and the primary place where we practice submission toward each other. The Christian life is the call to be like Jesus. If we call Jesus Lord and Master, if we call ourselves disciples, that means we need to shape our lives to look like Jesus lived. And so marriage is a place where we get to practice discipleship. Marriage is a place where we get to practice living like Jesus.
There's a great organization called Christians for Biblical Equality, and they fight things like abuse and hierarchy and marital problems. They've got this great statement on their website about what Christian marriage can look like. It says:
In the Christian home, husband and wife are to defer to each other in seeking to fulfill each other's preferences, desires, and aspirations. Neither spouse is to seek to dominate the other, but each is to act as servant of the other, in humility considering the other as better than oneself. Spouses are to learn to share the responsibilities of leadership on the basis of gifts, expertise, and availability, with due regard for the partner most affected by the decision under consideration.
So let me say this. Men or women, if you've put yourself as the leader of the home, get out of the way, because you're in Jesus' spot.
Benediction
Brothers and sisters, would you go, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, who showed us the way of submission? Would you submit to one another as equals—brothers to brothers, sisters to sisters, and brothers to sisters? Would you show the world what it's like to live like God, and be the light of the world as you do so? Happy Mother's Day, and go in peace.
