Ephesians 5:21-33 Marriage Glory St Mark’s 10.9.17 https://youtu.be/8oRRJ_bfANg
Introduction
A lot of Christians are stressed by the pressures of the SSM issue, but I believe it is a time of kairos opportunity in the sovereign purposes of God for us to relearn what marriage is ultimately all about. There is no better reading than Ephesians 5:21-33 to bring this clarity because it is this passage that teaches human marriage is not an end in itself but exists to reflect the relationship between Jesus as Bridegroom and the Church as his Bride. The passage illuminates the nature of this relationship by testifying to the radically different roles of husbands and wives. Wives are called to submit to their husbands in everything as the Church submits to Jesus, and husbands must love their wives in the same sacrificial manner as Jesus loves the Church. These differences cannot be imaged in a same-sex marriage.
If you have 2 men the Church as Bride cannot be symbolised, and if you have 2 women Jesus as Groom can’t be reflected. Such marriages cannot bear testimony to the eternal destiny of the Church as Christ’s Bride (Rev 19). This highlights that ultimately the SSM debate is not about human rights nor about family values but about the identity of Jesus Christ. In promoting a form of marriage based on Western democratic values Satan’s goal is to blur the distinction between Christ and the Church. If he can con the true Bride into resisting Christ’s will as her Head she will stop radiating his saving glory and fewer and fewer people will come to accept him as Lord and Saviour (Eph 3:21).
Whilst all this is true, none of this can make any sense unless we are a church like the Ephesians who have just been commanded to “be filled with the Spirit” (Eph 5:18) and who have the Word of Christ (cf. Col 3:16) powerfully working in their midst. This is not a teaching for the secular world.
Exposition
v. 21 “submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ”.
Spirit filled believers will submit to one another. Exactly what this will look like in advance no one can say, but the key to such loving self denial is that it is to be done “out of reverence for Christ”. We honour Jesus as we submit to his will in relation to another believer just as Jesus exercised a holy submission to his Father’s will going to the cross (Mark 14:36; Heb 5:7).
22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour.
Christian wives are addressed first because though in a socially inferior position to men in the ancient world they are seen by God as people with authority to make choices in Christ. Whatever a women might claim about her love for Jesus you can tell how a woman really trusts to Jesus by looking at how she submits to her husband. E.g. Christian leader on the phone to his wife, herself a leader, people could hear how she was harassing him, and he was bowing to it. Both parties were grieving the Spirit of God because they neither were submitting to God’s order in their marriage.
In opposition to secular feminism Christians know “power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Jesus said this! And he said it with sovereign authority because “he was crucified in weakness, but lives by the power of God” (2 Cor 13:4). Willing godly submission by wives will always release God’s presence and power into a marriage. Since this counsel has nothing to do with culture, law or tradition but is totally grounded in the life of Christ it is relevant to every age.
When Paul compares the “headship” of the husband to that of Christ over the Church he makes it clear that to be “the man of the house” can have nothing to do with domineering behaviour. Anything that a husband does that does not look like Jesus is not the headship this passage is referring to. What then does male headship in marriage look like? Earlier in Ephesians we read that God “put all things under his (Christ’s) feet and gave him as head over all things for the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.” (Eph 1:22-23). As the goal of Jesus’ Headship over the Church is to bring her to fullness and maturity this must be a husband’s goal too.
24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
The wife who lives in voluntary, joyful, free and grateful submission to her husband images through marriage the wonderful subordination of the church to Jesus. Where a decision has to be made that the couple cannot agree on the woman should submit to her husband’s position, as long as this doesn’t contradict the teaching of the Bible. (In practice in mature marriages this is a very rare occurrence.) “Submission” in marriage is a free act between equals; it is not “obedience” (different Greek word used cf. Eph 6:1, 5).
The directive that wives submit to husbands as the Church submits to Christ becomes dreadfully difficult for women if they are a part of a church that has lost the glory of submitting to Jesus as her first love (Rev 2:4). Because there is confusion about who really rules the Church in post-Christian nations it is inevitable that confusion reigns over the nature of marriage. There is only one way out of this mess; we must be re-illuminated through the cross.
25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.
No husband can lay down his life sacrificing his own egocentric ambitions for his wife unless he is filled with “the eternal Spirit” who took Jesus to the cross (Heb 9:14). Christ’s eternal qualities can only be imparted into a marriage through a husband by the Spirit’s power. Australia desperately needs Spirit-filled marriages but marriages can only be Spirit-filled when husband, wives share a vision of the eternal Marriage.
Paul tells us that in the End Jesus will present to himself a glorious holy spotless Bride free from any sign of guilt and shame. The visions of Revelation help us understand what this will look like. In chapter 21 we see the Bride “the wife of the Lamb” coming down from heaven radiant with the glory of God and bejewelled with precious stones (Rev 21:9ff). This Bride is completely transparent so that the splendour of God’s presence shines through her (Rev 21:18, 21). This is not a Fantasyland image but prophetic speech about ultimate reality we can begin to experience now. Sometimes people refer to Donna as a “jewel” or a “gem”, and at times when I have been praying for God’s glory to grow in our marriage I have “seen in the Spirit” something of the radiance of the eternal Bride of Christ through my wife (Rev 1:10).
The Church enters into her stunning eternal glory by Jesus “having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word”. Spirit filled preaching of the Word of God that reveals the power of the sacrificial blood of the cross to cleanse from sin and shame enables churches, husbands and wives to see themselves as pure and holy in the sight of God (e.g. John 15:3; 1 Cor 6:9-11). Without such revelation all this language of glory is completely theoretical.
Practically speaking glory in marriage like the glory of Christ in the Church (Eph 3:21) involves sharing in the deepest intimacies of being. This total sharing is the “one flesh” of marriage (Gen 2:24; Eph 5:31). It requires mutual transparency and honesty free from any of the shame and cover up that has plagued human relationships since the Fall in Eden (Gen 3:7-8). Such radical honesty about life’s struggle and failures comes from the power of the gospel. JY to people who confide in me what they haven’t shared in their marriage e.g. “Go home and tell your wife about your porn problem, financial decision etc.” Sadly, even Christian leaders can live as if sin still stained their lives. I went to the website of the founder of a denomination recently and all the details of his life story were there, except his adultery. The exhortation to “confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed” needs to happen in marriages (James 5:16).
28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body.
Once again Paul makes it clear that Jesus is the source and substance of his exhortation to husbands. The Church is Christ’s Body as she shares his risen glorious life and is centred on and submitted to him. As the Christ supplies everything the Church needs for her upbuilding in love (4:16) husbands are to tenderly care for and provide for their wives as they do for their own bodies. The declaration, “He who loves his wife loves himself.” powerfully testifies to the level of oneness in marriage. As the Church overflows with the love of Jesus; under the loving influence of her husband a man’s wife becomes like his body, not something to be used or abused but an expression of his loving care.
31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.”
Husbands should love their wives because they are an integral part of who they are. Paul is quoting from Genesis 2:24; marriage means leaving your previously closest bonds and becoming united, personally, socially and sexually, with your spouse in the closest of all human relationships. The old King James Version memorably translated Genesis 2:24 like this; “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Where is no full “leaving” e.g. if mother-in-law is still powerful, there can be no full “cleaving” in marriage. This sort of problem also impacts life at the Church level. Paul could boldy say, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.” (Phil 3:8) i.e. he has left everything for Jesus. But many Christian leaders have not left behind their worldly ambitions for safety and security. Only as husband and wife agree to let go of the things of this world can their marriage point to what is beyond this world. Only to the degree we cling to Christ can we cling to one another in a holy and healthy way.
v.32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.
The term “mystery” in the New Testament means something once hidden but now revealed in Christ. The spiritual mystery revealed to Paul about marriage is far beyond all natural comprehension. Through the lens of Christ’s sacrificial love in the cross we can see that God’s purposes for marriage were always that husband and wife share in Jesus’ loving embrace for his Bride the Church. Earthly marriages were not designed to simply be like the heavenly marriage (analogies) but to share in the reality of the eternal covenantal bond between Christ and his Body. Only through such a prophetic understanding can marriage be understood as something more than a social or cultural reality that can be altered by human will. This is the tragically missing dimension in the SSM debate today, missing because the Church has largely failed to look and live like her heavenly Bridegroom.
Paul ends this passage with something all married people know. 33 “However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.” The sort of love wives need is the sacrificial love of Jesus, and the sort of respect to be given to men is an honouring of the place given to them by God as leaders in a marriage. Neither love nor respect can ever be “earned” they are part of how God has arranged things.
Conclusion
Our struggle over marriage is a struggle to understand how God shaped his Son into being the perfect loving Bridegroom of the Church (cf. Heb 2:10). Let me illustrate.
I sensed the Lord have me utter some prophetic words to pray over a soon to be married man recently; words which actually sum up the gospel. I prayed for him to experience the reality that marriage has a unique crucifying capacity and a unique glorifying capacity. Out of all regular human relationships, whether you are female or male, marriage can put to death your own personal selfish interests and transform you in love into someone like Jesus. This is ultimately what marriage is all about.
If the biblical message about marriage is a message about the power of the gospel then the current SSM crisis is a sign of God’s judgement on a culture that has lost its way, and it has lost its way because the Church has failed to be its light by not fully submitting to Jesus as Lord, Head and Husband (Matt 5:14; Acts 13:47). There can be only one way out of this terrible confusion; we need a spiritual revival formed out of a deeper revelation of the sacrificial love of the cross. This will no doubt provoke a quite different crisis, persecution, but this crisis will be well worth it for it won’t be a judgement but a blessing through which the Church as the Bride of Christ will begin to love Jesus as he deserves.