Ephesians

Counsel to Husbands

In Ephesians 5:25-32, Paul takes aim at husbands. The key phrase here is, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church.” Everything beyond that phrase is clarification.

There is probably no word in our modern language more misunderstood than this word love. It is used to describe everything from lustful passion to patriotic emotion. There is great room for confusion when the same word can be used to say, “I love God,” “I love my wife,” and, “I love pizza.”

Paul defines this word with the statement that husbands should love their wives as Christ loved the church “and gave himself up for her.” Paul calls husbands to an all-encompassing, self-sacrificing love. A husband is not the slave-master, the cruel, demeaning overlord of the wife. He is the self-sacrificing servant of the wife! That is love!

What Paul is describing once again is mutual submission—the wife submits herself to the husband in accordance with her role, and the husband submits himself to the wife in accordance with his role. The form of submission is different because the role is different, but the principle is the same: mutual submission, just as Paul expressed in Ephesians 5:21: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.”

The example of Christ is our model as Christian husbands. The apostle Paul says, “In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body.” Again, Paul raises the example of Christ. He loves us and continually gives Himself up for us because we are part of Him, and we belong to Him. We who are Christians are part of His body in this amazing mystery. To substantiate his point, the apostle quotes from Genesis 2:24: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31).

That is not simply beautiful language. There is a profound reality behind this: A husband and wife are not just two people rooming together. Their lives actually do blend into one another. They actually become one. The husband and the wife are one flesh. This truly is, as Paul says in Ephesians 5:32, “a profound mystery.”