Image A
Recently I had yet another conversation with someone online that was sparked by an umbrella illustration (see Image A) called the “Biblical order of the family.” And on the surface, I can understand why some may look at it and think that it’s a solidly biblical illustration. However, I do not believe the Bible agrees with this illustration. It suggests that God’s ideal for the marriage/family relationship is for wives to be “under” their husbands, because they are the “head.” By the time I finished having a very respectful conversation with my friend, who shared the image, and others who chimed in, the Holy Spirit brought light and clarity from the Scriptures. I’d like to share these insights with you in the hope that they will similarly bring edification by posing the probing question, “Are wives beside or under their husbands?”
God is love, therefore He is a relationship of Three co-eternal, co-equal, utterly selfless, other-centered divine Beings united in perfect oneness. Therefore when He made humanity in His image of love they were to reveal this co-equal, selfless/other-centered oneness in marriage/the family unit that would multiply many times over, filling the earth with His love. This would manifest God’s Kingdom of love on the earth through humanity. See 1 John 4:8; Gen. 1:26-27; 2:22-25.
However, when sin tragically broke this ideal, God predicted, not prescribed, the dysfunctional consequences that would affect marriage and families in Genesis 3:16...
“ ...You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you.”
The mere fact God had to say/describe this to Eve, meant that He had established a different ideal before sin! However, the Good News of the Gospel is that Jesus is restoring us into His image by His grace, which includes the ideals of Eden. That’s why Paul could radically declare this counter-cultural statement in Galatians...
“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female – for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”
These were the oppressive, dominate/rule over the other, walls that characterized the ancient world and many places around the world still today. The Gospel breaks down these walls and unites us as equals in Christ.
This, moving to the ideals of Eden through the Gospel of the Kingdom, gets applied by Paul in Ephesians 5, which is where so many get confused, as illustrated by “Image A” above, from my perspective...
“...and submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. ...because the husband is the head of the wife as also Christ is the head of the church – he himself being the savior of the body. But 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 for her In the same way husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”
The context is the loving oneness and mutual submission, like the Godhead, that the Gospel restores us to. Paul then applies it to marriage, in a way that seems like it’s mirroring the dysfunctional male headship model of the world, as a result of sin, but if you look closely, he’s flipping this broken paradigm on its head! He calls for wives to submit to their husbands as “the head”, but then he quickly redefines the world’s understanding of male/husband headship as self sacrificing love. How did Christ demonstrate His self sacrificing love? He humbled Himself and submitted Himself to the death of the cross for the salvation of His bride, the church, His wife! The context is mutual submission in loving oneness. This is Paul’s brilliant way of taking the dysfunctional paradigms of our world and moving it back to the ideals of equality in Eden through the Gospel!!! The apostle Peter gets even more specific about the equality of husbands and wives in 1st Peter 3:7…
“In the same way, you husbands must give honor to your wives. Treat your wife with understanding as you live together ...but she is your equal partner in God’s gift of new life. Treat her as you should so your prayers will not be hindered.””
Image B
Peter instructs husbands to give honor to their wives and to treat them with understanding as equal partners. This was so important to the Holy Spirit, who inspired Peter’s thoughts on this, that he said even the husbands prayers would be hindered if he operated outside of honoring and understand his wife as an equal partner! It’s hard for us in the 21st century to appreciate just how radical and counter-culturally revolutionary this statement was in the 1st century. Woman were considered 2nd class citizens, next to slaves and whose testimonies would not even hold up in court no matter how true it was! This was the culture of the day when it came to women and wives, and in many places still to this day, that had resulted from the broken, dysfunctional results of sin introduced in the garden of Eden. It is not God’s ideal! God’s ideal, especially for marriage, is in Genesis 1-2 and Revelation 21-22. The epic, unfolding story that flows between these “book end” chapters in Scripture is how God is restoring the earth and its human relationships back to the ideals He created through the redemptive implications of Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. What many have not yet realized is that this Gospel of the Kingdom is subversive to the broken, sinful human systems of this world, which God is restoring back under His reign of love. One of these broken systems, which God originally created and the Enemy has perverted, is the inequality existing in marriages, which was originally designed to reflect the love, equality and mutual submission of the Godhead. Wives are to be beside their husbands and not under them. Therefore, Image B reflects the marriage ideal of Eden as God intended it and which He is currently moving us back to through the Gospel of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ, which should be the interpretive lens of the follower of Jesus anyway. I hope this is helpful to you in your understanding of, journeying towards or current experience of the beauty of Biblical marriage as God intended it.
*Originally posted April 16th 2020
CJ Cousins
Follower of Jesus, Husband, Father, Pastor and budding Author.
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