A Wife’s Submission to Her Husband
Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. Ephesians 5:22 (NIV)
Paul has been outlining the new standards which God expects of His new society, the church, especially in terms of its unity and purity. These two qualities are indispensable to a life which is both worthy of the calling and fitting to the status of the people of God. He has told his readers that they need to be filled with the Holy Spirit (5:18) and that this on-going filling will show itself in their changed lives. They will find release in fellowship, worship, thankfulness and submission (5:19-21). Picking up this final outworking in submission, he moves on now to the new relationships in which God’s people inevitably find themselves, beginning with the practical, down-to-earth relationships in the home. Husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and servants were to be found in the earliest Christian congregations.
Detailed, practical instruction on Christian family life and on Christian responsibility in ‘employment’ seems to have been given by the apostles from the beginning (Colossians 3:18-4:1; Titus 2:1-10; 1 Peter 2:18-3:7). Teaching that emphasises personal relationship with Christ without any attempt to outline its consequences in terms of relationships with the people we live and work with, is incomplete.
‘Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord’ (5:22). Because there is no verb in Paul’s original 5:22, the call for submission in 5:21 (‘Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ’) is intended to carry over into 5:22, forming a bridge between two sections. This is probably why the NIV and other versions make 5:21 a paragraph in itself. The Greek verb for ‘submit’ in 5:21 is a present participle (i.e. ‘submitting’) as were the verbs in the verses preceding this one: ‘speaking to one another’ (5:19a), ‘singing and making music’ (5:19b) and ‘giving thanks’ (5:20). All four participles depend on the command to ‘be filled with the Spirit’ (5:18) and describe the consequences of the Holy Spirit’s fulness. A Greek participle could sometimes be an imperative (command) and pretty clearly here, the demand for mutual submission leads on to the submission asked for wives, children and slaves.
What is beyond question is that the three areas of relationship that follow are given as examples of Christian submission. Wives are addressed before their husbands and told to ‘submit’ to them (5:22); children are mentioned before their parents and told to ‘obey’ them (6:1); and slaves are addressed before their masters and similarly are told to ‘obey’ them (6:5).
For wives, this means being tenderly devoted to your husbands like you are tenderly devoted to the Lord Ephesians 5:22 (The Passion Translation)