Wives (Part 2 of 2)

Most of us will push back against the Truth for Life weekend. What is the chief end of marriage? The chief end of marriage is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. What is the chief objective of a wife? The same. And of a husband?

The same. In other words, in the expressed terms of this verse, for the wife to live in the light of this text—wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord—for wives to live in the light of this text is, I suggest to you, ultimately about the gospel. Now, in a way that I hope will prove both understandable and helpful, I want to gather all of my material under four words. Number one, piety is really another word for godliness.

If what it meant to be pious or to understand the nature of an all-pervasive sense of God had to do with some esoteric experience whereby we went off on our own into the woods and cogitated, that would be one thing. But no, the poor wife is confronted by piety while she is confronted by her husband, by her unruly children, by her own personal challenges. And she opens her Bible and is confronted by such a striking, straightforward statement—"Wives, submit to your husbands as is fitting in the Lord." Now to the second word, and the word is mystery. In order to get to this mystery, you should turn, really, to the parallel passage in Ephesians 5. Paul says, speaking of marriage and quoting from the Old Testament, for this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

And then here's our mystery. This is a profound mystery, but I'm talking about Christ and the church. The essence of it is simple—that the mystery of the initiative-taking love of Jesus and the joyful submission of his bride in the church to his love is mirrored in healthy biblical marriages. A healthy biblical marriage is in some measure supposed to allow somebody to get a greater grasp of the gospel. In fact, Ferguson refers to marriage as a domestic cameo of grace—a domestic cameo of grace—and goes on to observe that in the marriage relationship, a gospel drama is being portrayed in a unique way through a human relationship.

Now, ladies, wives, here you have it in a simple sentence. As daunting as it is, search the Scriptures to see if what I'm telling you is accurate. When a wife expresses submissive love for her husband, she is depicting how a believer responds to the Lord Jesus. When she doesn't, she is confusing the issue and marring the gospel. Now, the husband, as we'll see next time, is called to love and to care for and to protect his wife, as Jesus does the church. But the wife—it's the wife we're concerned with—the wife is to illustrate how someone who comes to believe responds to Jesus' love and does so with deep and joyful submission. Our good friend Dick Lucas says, the significant truth about a Christian woman's relation to her husband is that it mirrors her commitment to her Lord.

Yeah, maybe it does. Maybe the same disgruntled attitude of an unsubmissive wife to her husband simply represents her disgruntled, unsubmissive attitude towards Jesus Christ as Lord. Third word is authority. Authority.

Why is the wife to submit to her husband? Who says? God says.

Now, that's the beginning and the end of the conversation right there. When you read these verses in Colossians 4—indeed, when you read the whole of the New Testament—it becomes immediately apparent that God has established in society, both in government, in the church, and in the family, what is referred to as a subordinationist ethic. A subordinationist ethic. We sang the Navy Hymn this morning. A number of the ex-Navy types were really giving it big licks and were very happy about it. And I'm glad that you were happy.

I enjoyed it too. But every one of those individuals understands the subordinationist ethic, understands that it is impossible to have order on a ship without unmitigated commitment to be obedient to the word of the commander. The captain of the ship rules, reigns, has to, if it is to prevent absolute mayhem and confusion.

The same is true in an orchestra, the same is true in a sports team, the same is true in government, the same is true in a home. And that subordinationist ethic is worked out here, isn't it, in these four statements? You will notice that the subordinate role comes first in each occasion—wives to the husbands, children to the parents. In fact, it comes out far clearer when you go to Ephesians 5. But the only way that human society can work without disintegration is if it works according to God's divine order. This is not the time or the place.

We'll come to parents later. But this is why it is not some casual issue when, apparently, intelligent young parents encourage their children to call them by their first name and to pay them no undue deference by dint of the fact that they are their children. That is an attack at the very heart of a subordinationist ethic. Which, if that ethic is grounded in the very being of God, which it actually is, insofar as within the Trinity you have subordination, not on account of inequality but on the basis of equality—equal within the Trinity, coequal, coeternal, and yet playing the role, taking the part, lining up underneath. Because that's the way it works. Now, contemporary actions against this very notion—and there are many—are no surprise. Sinful human nature has never liked this idea. But there is a logic in it, and let me point it out to you.

You may not accept it, but let me at least point it out to you. The husband is the head. That's the phrase that's used in Ephesians 5.

We flip between them, but it gets tedious. The husband is the head, not because he is bigger and stronger, but because God has constituted the order of the relationship in this way, and God has done so for his purposes. The reason for a wife's submission is because ultimately she submits to Christ—the same Christ who has given the role of authority and leadership to the man. Now, you see, this removes chauvinism.

This removes the strutting peacock approach of man. This removes manipulation and tyranny on the part of men who've got the thing completely, absolutely, totally wrong. And it brings the wife, as she seeks to live under the all-pervasive presence of God, as she seeks to live in the context of the mystery of God, it allows her to open her Bible or to go to sleep at night or to exercise the responsibilities of the day by recognizing that ultimately her submission is to Christ alone, and that her submission to her husband is, as a result, if you like, of a delegated responsibility entrusted to the man according to God's constitution, in a mysterious way, and for the end of God's own purposes. Now, that divine order is disturbed when wives seek to rule their husbands and refuse his leadership, and it is equally disturbed when husbands tyrannize their wives, often to the point of enslavement. How grievous it is to hear wives tell of how they were unable even to go and make a visit to their sister, or to welcome somebody into their home, or to withdraw money from a bank account, because they were in enslavement and in fear to the tyranny of their husbands.

Now, there is no question that it is very easy to get this wrong. The devil loves when we get it wrong, but that does not mean that with God's help we shouldn't set about the task of getting it right. Now, I must come to my final point, but let me say one more thing before I do. Any attempt to suggest that the submission of a wife to her husband can be discovered trouble-free—any suggestion of that must be coming from somebody who's never been married, or certainly somebody who has not read the early chapters of Genesis. Because it is impossible to deal with this issue except in the light of creation and the fall and redemption. You see how vital it is that we view our marriages, if you like, theistically. Or that we view the whole question theologically.

Now, trust me, all the other good stuff will fall in line. All the other bits that you wanted to talk on tonight that I'm not giving you—all that other stuff—will take its place in a far more perfect environment than could ever be imagined if you, wife—the next week, we husbands—if we will go simply and humbly to the Scriptures to recognize that God's concern is a redemptive concern, that all of the focus of God is on redeeming a people that are his very own. And when he establishes marriage, he establishes it as a mirror image of Christ and the church so that it might become an evangelistic vehicle, so that we might be seeing unbelieving people becoming the committed followers of Jesus Christ, whether we're having a good week with our husbands or not.

That's the issue. Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel, he says. Speak if you have to, Francis of Assisi said. But in your marriage, if you'll do these things, your children will say, Oh, that's how it's supposed to be! And your neighbors will say, What in the world happened to you? I have never seen such weirdness in such a lovely way!

Are you soft in the head? God made Adam and Eve, and it was fine. He made them inequality, but he gave them distinct roles.

You will remember that. Distinct roles. If everything had continued as it was, Eve would have been absolutely super as a helper for Adam. There wouldn't have been any problem whatsoever. She'd have been perfectly content, and Adam would have gone along nicely. But then the serpent comes, and in the fall, Eve listens to the serpent's voice rather than to her husband's voice. And Adam listens to his wife's voice rather than to God's voice. And as a result, the relationship between them is disrupted, and order is replaced with disorder, and clarity is replaced with confusion. And the expectation from that point on is that Eve now has a desire or a design for her husband.

You say, Well, there can't possibly be anything wrong with that. Well, the fact of the matter is that it comes in the same verse as the word is, I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing. With pain you will give birth to your children.

This is part of the disruption by way of the fall. And your desire will be for your husband. The word that is used there, the phrase that is used there, is the same phrase that's used in the following chapter concerning sin being at your door. It desires to have you, but you must master it.

And in the disruption of the fall, one of the implications is that a woman, by nature, desires to master her husband. I'll get him. I'll get him sorted out.

I can fix this character. And so it goes on. And all these years have it passed since the Garden of Eden. And every husband knows that the decision that was made in a moment in time by Eve has become the habit of a lifetime. And that's not to be unkind.

That's just to be honest. In the creation we have perfection. In the fall we have disruption. And when Christ comes as the second Adam, then the effects of the fall are reversed. Because Jesus as the second Adam obeys where Adam failed to obey, and Jesus bears the judgment that Adam deserved. And one day, the promise of the Bible says, there will be a new heaven and a new earth when everything that is disrupted and fractured and spoiled and twisted will be put to right. When Jesus moved through Galilee and Judea in his earthly ministry, he gave hints of this transformation, didn't he, in his miracles? He restored sight.

He gave back a voice to someone who was mute. He put relationships back together again. And in all of this, he was establishing the mystery of this restorative process—a mystery which was then to be revealed in the church. And in that liberation from decay, in the smoothing out process of everything that sin has rumpled and distorted, it is supposed to be seen in Christian marriage. You see, countercultural Christianity in America for the last twenty-five years—let's just be dead honest—has been about protesting, picking up our particular political agendas and hammering it out, whether in the front of a store or in the front of a clinic.

None of these things are irrelevant or should be set aside in any way. But coincidentally, Christian marriages have been dissolving at the same rate as pagan marriages. Premarital sex continues to escalate at a phenomenal clip. At the same time, the church continues to triumph itself by declaring the lordship of Jesus and so on, and pastors are inundated day and daily with the dissolving, disrupting marriages as a result of the plane of disobedience of men and women to the dictates of the Bible—irrespective of how they feel.

Fact or not, disturbingly true fact. But the countercultural impact of the church as being indicative of the restorative impact of the gospel as a result of who Jesus is and what he has accomplished and where we're moving to is supposed to be a microcosm of the self-giving love of Jesus and the joyful submission of the church to his loving embrace, seen in the way my mother responds to my dad and in the way my dad exercises love and care and protection for my mom. Is this a little of how Jesus loves us, Dad? You were so nice to Mom today. Man, Dad was a real bear today, wasn't he, Mom? I was surprised you didn't just chew him out. Why didn't you just give him it good, you know? Well, honey, I felt like it, I can tell you.

But, you know, nothing would have been accomplished. And I want to tell you, you see how it goes? Finally, liberty. The non-Christian mind looks on at all of this, especially a verse like the eighteenth verse, and says, This is the ultimate in tyranny. This is a dreadful bondage.

Anybody that's prepared to even tinker around with this is dafter than a brush handle. What you need to do is get out from underneath that kind of religious hocus-pocus and come out into the real world and enjoy freedom where it's to be found. How's it looking?

How's the alternative coming across? Now, we don't need to cow away from the challenges that come our way. True freedom is found in all of our Christian lives by obedience to what God has made absolutely clear in the Bible. Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 10.5 in a phrase. He talks about taking every thought captive. Taking every thought captive. What does that mean in particular terms for a wife? Well, I guess it means when you read some of those magazines, you've got to take these thoughts captive. You've got to go bury them somewhere.

There's so much nonsense in them. All of those things saying, you know, it's about time. How long have you been married to that joker?

Goodness gracious, twenty-six years, and he'd been a pain in the neck for twenty-five of them, and that's the last twenty-five. Don't you think it's about time you made a run for it? A head for the hills?

Before finally gravity takes over everything and you finally just drift away into oblivion. Don't you think that you ought to take a second stab at it somewhere? Isn't there somebody else that could light your flame and coast your fire and so on? That's the way it goes, isn't it? How do you respond to that as a wife?

I don't know. I suppose you can only take every thought captive to Christ. You can only say, No, this is not the way I need to think about things. In the seventeenth century, a man by the name of Ferguson put it as follows, A wife can never discharge her duty in any measure of conscientious tenderness towards her husband, except she have a high esteem of the Lord Christ, and be in the first place subject to him. That so from love to him she may submit to him. So, you see, it's the him with a capital H that's the issue.

Although most of the books on marriage suggest that it's him with a wee age that's the issue. We start at the wrong place. We conjugate the verb to be in English, don't we? I am, you are, he is. In Hebrew it conjugates in reverse.

He is, you are, I am. Is it too simplistic to say that that reverse conjugation is the very issue that is being addressed here? We start in the wrong place. No wonder we go so badly adrift.

And the final word to another Ferguson, this time in the twentieth century. And our thought is liberty, isn't it? He writes, marriage then is not a recipe for the subjugation of the wife, but a blueprint for her true freedom in a healthy, loving relationship. Here, the wonder, power, beauty, holiness, and transformation of the gospel can be seen not just by her husband, but by her children, and by her neighbors. We tell the gospel story as we live out a loving Christian marriage.

That's Alistair Begg with a message titled Wives in our Truth for Life weekend series called The Christian Family. You might be interested in knowing that as you listen to Alistair's full sermons, you can follow along with written transcripts. You'll find a transcript for each message you hear on Truth for Life when you go online to truthforlife.org.

The link will take you directly to our homepage. You'll immediately see the image of the day's message, and to the right you'll see a transcript prompt. When you select it, you'll be able to view the transcript and scroll through the text as you listen to the sermon. Now this weekend is the last time we're mentioning a book called God's Bible Timeline, the big book of biblical history. This is a colorful, brightly illustrated book that presents the entire story of the Bible in a sequential timeline. The book contains a series of 18 timelines that trace biblical history from one era to the next so you can see what happened during specific periods. The illustrations make the timeline easy to follow. There are charts and maps and pictures that help the Bible come to life for you. God's Bible Timeline is a book that your whole family will enjoy reading.

You can find out more and see some sample pages when you go to our website. Visit truthforlife.org. I'm Bob Lapine with a question for husbands. Do you really love your wife? Hear why your love may or may not be all you think it is next time on Truth for Life Weekend. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.