Wives, Submit

The Line Before the Famous One, and the Heavier One After

The Verse on the Wall

Wives, submit to your husbands. Few verses get pulled out faster, or land harder, or have been used to keep more people quiet. It has been read over women told to stay in homes that were hurting them. It has been used to end every argument before it could start, because how do you argue with a wife when the Bible just told her to submit. For a lot of people it is the verse that made Christianity sound like a system for keeping women in their place.

And here is the strange thing. That verse is real, it is in there, Ephesians 5:22, and yet the way it usually gets used would have confused the man who wrote it. Because Paul did not write a sentence. He wrote a paragraph, a long one, and the famous line sits in the middle of it. Crop out the one line and you can make it a club. Read the whole thing and it becomes something almost nobody expects.

So this is the tool again, the one about reading the rest. Except here we need it twice. We need the sentence that comes right before wives submit, the one that almost never gets quoted alongside it. And we need the part that comes after, which is longer, heavier, and aimed at somewhere most people never look.

Now, this is contested ground, and good believers land in different places on what it all finally means. I am not going to tell you where to land. I built a whole series on women in Scripture and gave that question the room it deserves. Here I just want to do one thing. Hand you the whole passage instead of the cropped line, so that wherever you land, you are landing on the text and not on the slogan.

What the Text Actually Says

Start with the sentence right before the famous one, because it sets the whole thing up and it almost never gets read out loud with it. Ephesians 5:21. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. To one another. Then, without even starting a new sentence in the original language, Paul goes on, wives to your husbands, and later husbands to your wives, children and parents, slaves and masters. The wives submit line is not a standalone command dropped from the sky. It is the first example under a heading that says, to everybody, submit to one another.

Now I want to be fair, because this is exactly where the honest debate lives. Some readers say that opening line means the whole thing is mutual, that submission runs in both directions and the roles are equal. Others point out that across the New Testament these household lists always tell wives to submit to husbands and never the other way around, so the opening line cannot simply erase the pattern. Both are serious readings held by serious people, and I am not here to crown a winner. But notice what both sides have to admit the second they read verse 21. Whatever submit means here, it is happening inside a community where Paul just told everyone to defer to one another out of reverence for Christ. That frame is sitting right there on the page, whether you like where it leads or not.

Now put it in its own world, because that is the other tool. In Paul's day there was a standard form for this kind of writing, a household code, and you can find the same form in Greek and Roman writers. They all assumed the same thing. The man ran the house with absolute authority, and the wife and the children and the slaves existed to obey him. Submission flowed one way, upward, always. That was simply the air everyone breathed.

So watch what Paul does inside that familiar form, because it is not what his readers expected. First, he speaks to the wives and the children and the slaves at all, addressing them directly as people who can choose, as moral agents, which the standard codes barely bothered to do. And second, and this is the part that would have stopped a first century reader cold, he spends far more breath on the husband than on the wife, and what he tells the husband is staggering.

Here is the part nobody puts on a wall. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). Gave himself up. Died for her. Paul takes the man who held all the cultural power and tells him to spend it the way Christ spent his, all the way to a cross, for her good. He says love her as your own body, nourish her, cherish her. In a world that treated a wife as property, Paul looked at the man holding every card and told him the call on his life was to lay them all down in sacrificial love. The longest and hardest assignment in the whole passage does not land on the wife. It lands on the husband.

So feel the distance between that and the way the verse usually gets swung. The slogan picks the four words that fall on the wife, wives submit to your husbands, and quietly drops the line before it that says everybody submit, and drops the much longer charge after it that tells the husband to die for her. A passage that asked the most of the powerful gets cropped down into a leash for the less powerful. That is the hand at work. Not the text. The crop.

I am not going to tell you that settles the roles question, because it does not, and honest people will keep working out what submit and head finally mean inside a marriage. That is a real conversation and it deserves far more than a blog post. But this much the whole passage makes certain. Whatever it asks of a wife, it asks even more of a husband, and any reading that lets a man use wives submit to dominate his wife while ignoring love her like Christ died for her is not reading the passage. It is reading four cropped words.

So how do you check this for yourself? Read the unit, not the line. Back up to verse 21 and read all the way through verse 33, out loud if you can. Count whose instructions run longer. Notice the word the culture expected, obey, and notice that Paul reached for a different one. A study Bible footnote will explain the household code form in about a paragraph. Do that, and wives submit stops being a four word weapon and goes back to being one line in a passage that asks a great deal of everyone, and the most of the one with the most power.

What This Means for Where You Are

The slogan keeps the four words that fall on the wife and drops the line before and the charge after. A passage that asked the most of the powerful got cropped into a leash for the rest.

Most of the people who quoted wives submit at somebody were not monsters. Some were repeating exactly what they had been handed, the cropped line, never having read the verse before it or the charge after it. Some genuinely believed they were defending God's design for the home. The breakdown, again, was not always the heart. It was the crop. Nobody handed them the whole paragraph, so they passed along the piece they were given, and the piece had been cut to fall hardest on the person with the least power.

And reading the whole passage does not embarrass the Bible. It rescues it. The cropped verse made Scripture sound like a tool for keeping women small. The full passage shows something far better, a picture of marriage where two people defer to each other out of reverence for Christ, and where the one the culture handed all the power gets told to spend it the way Jesus spent his, in love that goes all the way down. That is not a faith that degrades women. That is a faith that walked into a brutal world and told the strong to lay themselves down for the vulnerable. The Word was never the problem. The scissors were.

So the next time wives submit comes off the wall and into an argument, do not let it stay four words. Read the line before it and the long charge after it. Ask what it is really requiring, and of whom. You may still wrestle with what submission means in a marriage, and that wrestling is honest and good. But you will be wrestling with the whole counsel of God instead of a slogan somebody cut to fit their hand. Go read the paragraph for yourself.

Reflect & Respond

Had you ever read Ephesians 5:21, the line right before wives submit, alongside the famous verse? How does it change the frame?

Paul spends more words on the husband than the wife, and tells him to love like Christ who gave himself up. Why do you think that part so rarely gets quoted?

What is the difference between wrestling honestly with what submission means and using a cropped verse to win an argument or control someone?

Where have you seen a Bible verse cut down to fall hardest on the person with the least power? What might reading the whole passage have changed?

Sources

[1] "Selfless Marriage: Ephesians 5:21-33," CBE International, on mutual submission and the one-directional household codes of the ancient world. https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/selfless-marriage-ephesians-521-33/

[2] "New Testament Household Code," Wikipedia, on the Haustafeln form and the sacrificial-love charge to husbands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament_household_code

[3] D.A. Carson, "Husbands and Wives, Love and Submission," The Gospel Coalition, arguing the codes consistently direct wives to submit (the complementarian reading). https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/sermon/family-husbands-and-wives-love-and-submission-christ-and-the-church/

[4] David Guzik, Enduring Word Commentary on Ephesians 5. https://enduringword.com/bible-commentary/ephesians-5/

[5] Craig S. Keener, Paul, Women, and Wives (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992). On the first-century household codes; cheapest as a library loan or used copy.

[6] The Holy Bible, New International Version (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2011), Ephesians 5:21-33; Colossians 3:18-19; 1 Peter 3:1-7. https://www.biblegateway.com

Do not stop trusting the Bible. Trust it enough to move the hand. Somebody is almost always reaching in. A translator. A custom you never learned. A person with something to gain. Sometimes the hand means well. Sometimes it does not. Either way, it is not the text.

Read the Word in the time and the people it was written to. Notice where a hand, and not God, changed what you read. Then pray for the meaning the Lord put there, not the one you were handed. That is faithful wrestling with the Word.

Leaning on the Rock • Wrestling with the Word