Adorning The Gospel: Submission in Marriage
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
-Titus 2:3-5, ESV
Last time, we looked at the importance of submission to the elders of our churches, bosses in our workplaces, and leaders in our communities. We will now look at submission within the family, covering marriage this time and the relationship between children and parents next time. Submission in its most general sense is choosing to live sacrificially by putting the needs of others and their ultimate good ahead of ourselves motivated by a healthy fear of God and following the example of Christ, which as I noted in my leadership paper is willful, selective, and active, not implying inferiority in the slightest. In most cases submission involves a hierarchy, so it is also an affirmation of the authority that God gives people in certain positions so that they can fulfill the responsibilities He has given them, so submission includes honoring and obeying people in those positions in accordance with Scripture. Finally, submission is not passivity, blindly following, silence without objection, or accepting abuse. In our submission, we reflect Christ and adorn the Gospel, so it is very important in every sphere, including marriage.
Foundation for Submission in Marriage
Marriage is the oldest social institution, even predating the Fall. The manner in which God created Adam and Eve laid the foundation for the family as an institution with male headship. God placed the husband in the position of head of his household, giving him responsibility over his family and therefore the requisite authority to obey God’s commands regarding his family. This means that even before the Fall, marriage was not an egalitarian partnership but a hierarchy of two people of equal value but differing roles. Last year, we looked at the beauty of this model as well as the roles within it: the husband’s roles of head, provider, protector, and pastor, and the wife’s roles of helper, crown, disciple, and home-builder, noting that the wife’s roles are within the context of the husband’s. Since husband and wife become one with each other, this hierarchy has far less “vertical distance” than other relationships, but it is still a hierarchy with a clear leader, so there must still be submission with respect and some level of obedience. As a single man, I approach this topic with much trepidation and will stick to what Scripture clearly teaches so that what follows is from Scripture and not my opinion.
Before looking at the nature of this submission, we need to acknowledge the vast chasm between our current situation and Paul’s. As we saw recently, feminism has been detrimental in our culture, but feminism cannot exist without the abdication of men. While women have most often been oppressed by men throughout history using force, we have followed Adaminto oppressing women as he did during the Fall. Rather than taking initiative to protect his wife, he abdicated and with much cowardice and selfishness put her in the vulnerable position of directly confronting the devil. Instead of crushing the Serpent to protect his wife he remained passive, forcing Eve to take on a burden she was not created to bear. In that moment, Eve was “wearing the pants” only because Adam had taken them off and someone had to wear them. But only God decides who wears the pants, and He gave them to Adam. So while Eve took the first bite, God held Adam responsible for the Fall (Genesis 3:9, Hosea 6:7, Romans 5:12-21, 1 Corinthians 15:21-22). This is the responsibility of representation God gives to every leader: to assume a leadership position is accept that burden. Part of that burden is that when a leader makes a decision—and inaction is a decision—the followers suffer the consequences. The burden of responsibility God has placed on every husband as head of his family is immense. God requires of him selflessness, sacrifical love, understanding, gentleness, nurturing, cherishing, teaching, and servant leadership to the standard of none other than Jesus Christ Himself. Any man who understands this will approach marriage with utmost humility. He knows he is in no position to lord anything over his wife. Sadly, most men in our day do not understand this. They abdicate and then blame women just like Adam, failing to see their own massive role in our current woes.
Masculinity initiates and femininity responds, so while feminism is sinful rebellion against God’s created order (Genesis 3:16), it is in large part a response to the truly toxic “masculinity” of abdication: husbands have not properly ruled to squash that rebellion and return the family to following God within His created order. Such rule is not harsh, as that would be unbiblical. A husband must rule with kindness, gentleness, sacrificial love, and understanding, but he must still rule with strength that blesses his family. He should rule in such a way that his wife and children rest and flourish under his authority, that his authority becomes a place of refuge, peace, and blessing for them. Because so many men in our day have not done this, many women have been forced to bear burdens meant for men: being the primary or sole breadwinners, making difficult family decisions alone, and managing a home completely without help. As a result, many women are exhausted and frustrated. This is only exacerbated by the constant state of fear they endure because of the lack of good men—those with a healthy blend of strength and virtue—leaving only weak men and predators. Many women in our churches—married and unmarried—desperately long to be led, protected, provided for, nurtured, and cherished by good men who can remove those burdens. They long to submit to a man in the way we are about to discuss, but some facets of that submission are extremely risky in our society. Wives must be wise as serpents and innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16) when approaching submission. The commands of Scripture regarding submission are timeless, but the way in which modern women should apply them is at least partially contingent upon men stepping up, rejecting passivity, accepting their God-given responsibility, and becoming godly men. That context must drive our discussion.
Submission in Marriage
When we consider that context, it is unsurprising that most American Christians flatly reject the idea of submission within marriage. Many churches have embraced egalitarianism and therefore use the “cultural cop-out” to avoid submission. Even many churches that claim to embrace biblical masculinity and femininity hold significant caveats and limitations on the subject. Yet Scripture clearly teaches that the wife is to submit to her husband. This is what Paul tells Titus:
Older women likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.
-Titus 2:3-5, ESV
The term “reviled” is literally “blasphemed”, so Paul is saying that wives who are irreverent, slanderers, drunkards, and not self-controlled, home-focused, kind, or submissive to their husbands are actually committing blasphemy. Kendall Lankford discussed this here and here, so all I will say is that God takes the wife’s conduct just as seriously as the husband’s. Scripture describes the adulteress and foolish woman as loud and wayward (Proverbs 7:10-12, 9:13) and chastises quarrelsome wives (Proverbs 21:9,19, 25:24, 27:15). Yet these traits are considered virtues in our culture. Paul’s similar exhortations to Ephesus (1 Timothy 2:9-15,5:5-14) and Corinth (1 Corinthians 11:2-16, 14:33-36) suggest that this is not a new problem. Throughout the Gospels and Acts, we see women featured prominently, which should be unsurprising since Scripture teaches that women have the same dignity, value, and access to God through Christ as men. But some women took this new-found equality to be an inversion of the old order in marriage. Still, these women did not abandon the created order wholesale as we have. Scripture is telling us just like them to display the headship and submission that reflects Christ and the Church. The husband like Christ bears the responsibility as head while the wife like the Church (Christ’s Body) responds to and amplifies the husband’s provision so that together they accomplish the Cultural Mandate:
First, the head (in this case, the husband) orders or structures the whole body for its purpose through his presence, words, and actions, and empowers the members of the body to fulfill their calling. Second, the head maintains the body’s boundaries, represents the body to other bodies, and is responsible for the well-being of the body as a whole….First, the body receives the initiating presence, words, and actions of the head and refines them by providing feedback, input, and counsel to the head. Second, the body glorifies the head’s efforts and makes them fruitful by keeping in step with the head, carrying out the head’s will and extending and amplifying the whole body’s influence in the world.
Joe Rigney, Leadership and Emotional Sabotage: Resisting the Anxiety That Will Wreck Your Family, Destroy Your Church, and Ruin the World, Moscow, ID: Canon Press: 2024: 28-30.
This bears little resemblance to most marriages today, so it will take immense effort from both men and women to model the relationship between Christ and the Church in marriage. In my post about relationshipsand my marriage series last year, I put the burden mainly on men, and this case is no different. However, the current state of men and the responsibility they bear does not absolve wives of their duty to obey Scripture by submitting to their husbands. We must always remember that our obedience to Scripture is never contingent on anyone else. Just as the sinful tendency of husbands is to domineer or abdicate, the sinful tendency of wives is to usurp and disrespect their husbands.
Respect and Obedience?
Scripture is clear that wives are to submit to their husbands, and we have already seen that submission includes respect and obedience. Respect is explicitly commanded of wives (Ephesians 5:33) regardless of how well or poorly their husbands fulfill their responsibilities. Contrary to what culture celebrates, it is sinful for a wife to disrespect her husband—publicly or privately, to his face or behind his back—just as it is sinful for her husband to be harsh and abusive or passive and lazy. She must show him honor even when calling him to repentance or invoking the elders or civil authorities against him for his harshness or passivity, just as he must show her kindness and sacrificial love even when calling her to repentance for her sins. The term for respect is literally “fear”, specifically meaning reverence here since wives are not to fear anything: “For this is how the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves, by submitting to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord. And you are her children, if you do good and do not fear anything that is frightening” (1 Peter 3:5-6). The term “lord” that Sarah uses for Abraham (Genesis 18:12) is a term of great honor for men with status and authority, especially in diplomacy. Aside from Bathsheba using it of David regarding royal succession (1 Kings 1:17), Sarah’s use of the term is unprecedented. Yet Peter holds her up as an example after exhorting wives to display respectful and pure conduct in the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, even to husbands who disobey Scripture (1 Peter 3:3-5). Does this mean wives should call their husbands “lord”? Some do, but what is important is not the title but the underlying attitude of honor. A wife should treat her husband as a distinguished gentleman and ensure the children do likewise. If he does not display the traits of a distinguished gentleman, her conduct should inspire him to become one. Being insulting, quarrelsome, slanderous, and undermining are all dishonoring and therefore sinful and counterproductive toward that goal despite being common in our society. Finally, just as in other arenas, a lack of submission in marriage makes the Gospel appear ugly. Since marriage is to reflect Christ and the Church, a wife who disrespects, belittles, quarrels with, or otherwise undermines her husband is showing disdain for Christ Himself. It should be no surprise then that women in churches that belittle Jesus by making him effeminate would treat their husbands who represent Him in the same way. The American Church must repent of this rampant sin.
Obedience in marriage is a bit more complicated. Wives are to submit to their husbands in everything just as the Church submits to Christ in everything (Ephesians 5:24), but the extent of obedience in that submission depends greatly on the husband. Christ is the only perfect Head, so we only owe Him complete obedience. No husband is a perfect head, so no husband can require complete obedience from his wife. The better he reflects Christ, the more obedience to him will coincide with obedience to Christ, so his wife’s godly submission should include more obedience. The worse he reflects Christ as head, the less obedience from his wife will be appropriate. So if a husband thinks his wife’s submission is lacking, he should start by looking in the mirror. Nevertheless, submission still includes some level of obedience even in difficult situations, as we see with Sarah. The obedience of Sarah is perhaps best described as following: she followed Abraham throughout his wanderings and prioritized the good of the family, even in Abraham’s foolish plan to protect himself that left her vulnerable in Egypt (Genesis 12:10-20) and with Abimelech (Genesis 20). Therein she demonstrated immense faith in God to take care of her even when her husband didn’t. In that way she is an example to be emulated.
But wives must not put God to the test to deliver them as He did Sarah. The abdication of men is so severe and widespread that there will be times in which women married to weak and foolish men (which would include abusive men) should respectfully refrain from putting themselves in undue danger by following them. When discussing the purpose of roles within marriage, I likened the relationship between husband and wife to the relationship between a military officer and senior noncommissioned officer. While the officer has the authority, the two lead as a team. Part of the senior noncommissioned officer’s job is to advise and even at times respectfully oppose the officer—and officers disregard that advice at their own peril. The wife follows in much the same way, such that the couple is in unity as a team even while there is no ambiguity about who is head. But while the officer holds the authority, the senior noncommissioned officer has much more influence. The wife likewise has great influence over her husband, so Peter tells wives to win over their husbands with respectful and pure conduct (1 Peter 3:1). When combined with proper biblical instruction and discipleship in masculinity, a wife’s submission in this way may be sufficient to inspire her husband to move out of his passivity and accept his God-given responsibility to lead. If he doesn’t, she must use wisdom in limiting how she follows him while still maintaining respect for him. Regardless, the wife’s godly submission adorns the Gospel.
This is extremely difficult in our day, which husbands need to recognize. Peter continues: “Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered” (1 Peter 3:7), In light of this, husbands need to provide sacrificial love, selfless leadership, constant protection, and ample provision to make their wives’ submission a joy and not a burden, recognizing that despite the hierarchy in this life they are equally heirs of salvation. Husbands must be cognizant of the impact of their decisions—or lack thereof—on their wives and make decisions accordingly. Finally, they must honor their wives and ensure their children do the same (Proverbs 31:28-29), praising them for everything they do that often goes unappreciated. The more the husband does this, the easier and more natural his wife’s submission will be. Plus, as a representative of Christ, he is blaspheming the Bridegroom if he is abusive or passive but portraying Christ as beautiful if he loves his wife as Christ loves His Church. As husband and wife better reflect the relationship between Christ and the Church, they will adorn the Gospel. Therefore, while submission looks different within marriage, it is still crucial and still involves honor (from both spouses) and some level of obedience. The better submission is displayed in marriage, the better it will manifest in the children (both physical and spiritual), which we will cover next time.
