Walk Together in Marriage
By Dr. Michael A. Milton
“Be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love.” - Ephesians 5:1-2
If there has ever been a time when we needed divine guidance on marriage, now is that time. Mercifully, the Bible is filled with God’s truth about this most essential institution. Consider the truth and life from the devotional thoughts in Ephesians 5:1, 22-33. Here the Apostle Paul is applying the love of the Lord Jesus Christ to wives and husbands in marriage. Now this passage contains two admonitions: one for the wife and one for the husband. And they're both grounded in that anchor verse, Ephesians 5:1-2a: “Be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love.”
Paul writes to wives in Ephesus, “Submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is head of the Church, His body, and is, Himself, its Savior. Now, as the Church submits to Christ, so, also, wives should submit in everything to their husbands.” If the Apostle’s teaching sounds unequivocal, it is undoubtedly because Paul had to use precision short of terseness. Why? One might opine that it was because Ephesus, like other pre-Christian Asia Minor and Southern European pagan religions, emphasized female deities and the complicating (and degrading) role relationships that the sexually-charged religion produced. However, others believe that the issue is deeper than culture. Humankind after the Fall was (and remains) infected with predictable dark dispositions that must be addressed: the fallen female can be inclined to misuse her feminine influence to beguile. In contrast, the fallen male defaults to his greater physical strength and consequent “tribal” dominance to "lord it” over the woman in brutish and violent ways. Mankind’s (male and female) fallen condition is interminably unjust and invariably disastrous.
Mercifully, the gospel reverses such pathologies of the fall and exalts the beauty of the complementary relationship between men and women, in general, and husbands and wives, in particular. Like so much in Western Civilization, such quant customs as opening a door for a woman or the more dire “law of the sea” of placing women and children on the lifeboat before men are manners and practices born of Christian theology—actions that reinforce the teaching of the gospel, and, therefore, serve to strengthen society. The confusion or loss of such customs is certainly linked to a decline of Christianity’s influence.
Paul calls men to “husband” their wives—to cultivate lives of honor: “Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself up for her that He might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word so that He might present the Church to Himself, in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.”
The exhortations to the wife and husband are equally extraordinary and, similarly, demanding. The directives are to be understood in the context of a prevailing metaphor: the relationship of Christ and the Church. Because the Lord Jesus loved the Church by dying for her, believers need not be coerced into submission to Christ. Rather, as divine love motivated the supreme missional act of the Son of God to leave His royal robes of heaven, come to earth to suffer and die on a cross (e.g., John 3:16), so, too, a Spirit-wrought response of love captures the wills of sinners, and grace compels them to repent and believe. Isaac Watts expressed this submission:
“Were the whole realm of nature mine that were a present far too small. Love so amazing and divine demands my soul, my life, my all." (Isaac Watts)
There are, at least, two theological truths that allow for the commands to wives and husbands to be fulfilled.
Love and Law
When we receive the soul-transforming epiphany that grace precedes and prompts obedience to God we are released from the tyranny of a “works-based religion.” We are, then, released (and “re-wired”) to embrace the Law of God by enjoying of the love of God. Thus, the metaphor is a signpost for marriage: a husband initiates a sacrificial Christ-like love for his wife. The wife responds in a total “sweet surrender” to her husband. The metaphor with scriptural roots in the Song of Solomon is clearly acknowledging, at once, a spiritual, covenantal, and physical intimacy that is unparalleled in human relations.
Union in Christ
It is funny to imagine: theologians, dressed like 18th-century British archeologists, in a safari hat and tropical khakis, running hither and yon at night, with a net in one hand and a mason jar in the other, trying to catch the moonlight. Yet, the scene is not far from the reality of theologians attempting to express the glorious revelations of God’s Word. No revelation is more wondrously inexplicable than the doctrine of our “union with Christ.” To be united to our Lord Jesus in salvation is to become one with Him (without our becoming divine or Christ diminishing His deity). Thus, the Lord prayed, “I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfectly one” (John 17:23 ESV).
Intersecting Faith and Life:
Paul said of our union in Christ: “This mystery is profound” (Ephesians 5:32). Yet, this is not the kind of mystery which is a riddle. The Apostle means that the revelation is an incomparable vision: “too good to be true,” we might say. Biblical marriage is the cornerstone of civilization. Should we deny or diminish the institution of marriage as revealed by God we demean humanity, and desecrate the gift of And, yet, the illustration closest to perceiving our union in Christ is a man and a woman living in holy matrimony. What if we acted as if that were so?
Further Reading:
- Hampshire, Robert. “What is the Biblical Definition of Marriage?” Christianity.com. https://www.christianity.com/wiki/christian-life/what-is-the-biblical-definition-of-marriage.html
- Mailhot, Jake. “What Is Biblical Marriage? Foundations, Definition, and Principles.” Bellingham, WA: Logos.com, 2019. https://www.logos.com/grow/what-is-biblical-marriage-11-essential-principles/
- Milton, Michael A. Sounding the Depths: When the Saviour Prays for His People. Evangelical Press, 2013.
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