A Husband’s Love For His Wife and Christ’s Love For the Church
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, 27 and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. Ephesians 5:25-27 (NIV)
‘Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her’ (5:25). Paul’s word for ‘love’ is agapao, the God-kind of love, the unselfish love that does everything for the other’s ultimate good, and the love that was perfectly modelled by Christ when He laid down His own life for the Church. In a marriage, this love will make a husband willing to lay down his own will and pleasure to genuinely bless his wife.
Christ died for the Church ‘to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word’ (5:26). We normally distinguish justification as an act from sanctification as a process but the tense tells us Paul meant something different. ‘Cleansing’ is literally ‘having cleansed’ meaning the cleansing happened first but ‘to make her holy’ is aorist tense. This ‘making her holy’ was a single act and not a continuing experience. So the ‘making holy’ and ‘cleansing’ are both single acts. If the ‘cleansing’ was first, the ‘making holy’ immediately followed. We are ‘cleansed’ from the old and consecrated to the new. How? ‘…by the washing with water through the word’ (5:26) or more literally, ‘by washing and word.’ Most commentators relate the ‘washing’ to water baptism and the ‘word’ to the gospel.
Having cleansed His bride and having made her ‘holy’, the heavenly Bridegroom’s plan is ‘to present her to himself’ (5:27). This will take place when Christ returns to take His bride to Himself. She will be ‘a radiant church.’ Our word for ‘radiant’ is endoxan (literally: in glory). Because doxa normally means the glory of God, the open manifestation of His otherwise hidden being, so too the church’s true nature will become apparent. On earth she may be seen stained, despised and persecuted, but one day she will be seen for who she is, the bride of Christ, ‘without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless’ (5:27). She can only be unaffected by sin (‘without stain’) or age (‘or wrinkle’) by His sanctifying and renewing work; ‘holy and blameless’ (5:27) repeats the phrase first used in 1:4. This is the whole purpose and goal of Christ’s work (cf. 2 Corinthians 11:2; Colossians 1:28).
And to the husbands, you are to demonstrate love for your wives with the same tender devotion that Christ demonstrated to us, his bride. For he died for us, sacrificing himself to make us holy and pure, cleansing us through the showering of the pure water of the Word of God. All that he does in us is designed to make us a mature church for his pleasure until we become a source of praise to him – glorious and radiant, beautiful and holy, without fault or flaw, a bride fully prepared for him Ephesians 5:22-27 (The Passion Translation)