“For wives, this means submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For a husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of his body, the church. As the church submits to Christ, so you wives should submit to your husbands in everything. For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her to make her holy and clean, washed by the cleansing of God’s word. 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. 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. No one hates his own body but feeds and cares for it, just as Christ cares for the church. And we are members of his body. As the Scriptures say, “A man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and the two are united into one.” This is a great mystery, but it is an illustration of the way Christ and the church are one. So again I say, each man must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.”
Ephesians 5:22-33 NLT
Paul always has a point to make. His theology is always holistic in the fact that it is never given for the sake of teaching alone. There is always an application to be gleaned. In Paul’s culture, the idea of Husbands loving their wives was profoundly alien in nature. Husbands kept mistresses for loving and wives were had for political gain or to create offspring. Jesus had already taught the strange idea, but Paul explains it.
In noting that Christian love is to be pervasive in our interaction as the body of Christ, he starts to outline its application at the core point of societal interaction. This point, is of course, marriage.
All interactions, even marriage itself must be necessarily submitted to the Christian ethic. Christ must be redefine and transform all things. Love of our spouses is not only a physical transformation but a mental and emotional undertaking. To be fully Christ like, one must be willing to drop the veneer of Christian fellowship and bring him into the home.
JOSH McGARY. COM 