[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus, amen.
Dear Saints of God, wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives. This is the wisdom from St. Paul, and we want to consider it this morning. Paul begins his table of duties, how we are to live as Christians in this fallen world. But let’s take a couple of steps back, and then we’ll get a bit of a running start at it.
Last week we heard St. Paul from Ephesians chapter 5, verses 8 to 10, where he’s talking about how the Christians are like light in this world of darkness. Paul says, “At one time you were darkness, but now you are light. In the Lord, walk as children of the light.” That’s an amazing name that St. Paul has by the Holy Spirit for you and for me: children of the light. For the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true. And try, says St. Paul, try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord.
The Lord Jesus has given us a new life and he has placed us in this world to live that new life as light in a dark place. We live in the midst of darkness, and we feel it. And I know that you all feel it creeping in more and more. We know that there is something wrong with the world. It seems like it’s getting darker and darker. How are we to live then in the midst of this darkness?
Paul, in this section, is giving us the beginning of what we call the table of duties. And we find this in a number of places in the Scripture, including 1 Peter. I’ll give a few verses from that a little bit later. Also, Paul writes to Timothy, same sort of thing. The basic idea is that our love, the way that we live, looks different depending on our calling.
So Paul writes to wives and to husbands in chapter 5, verses 22 to 33, and then to children and to parents in chapter 6, verse 4, and then to bond servants and masters in chapter 6, verses 5 to 10. And this again is the basic idea that how your love looks, the shape of your love, depends on your calling. It depends on your office. It depends on your place in this life. God, who is a God of order, has ordered this world in various institutions, and He’s placed us in those institutions with different roles to fulfill.
In the language that I think we like to use today, there’s a leader and then there are those who are led. But the biblical picture is that there’s a head and then a body.
Now one of the things that I want us to consider this morning is that we, in our day and age, for whatever reason, are really laser-focused on the leadership part. We’re focused on the head much more than on the body. We’re focused on those who have authority rather than the difficulty of being under authority. We focus on that authority figure rather than being under them, and this is skewed from the biblical picture. The Bible wants us to think about what does it mean to be under authority or under order.
So as an example, we focus, just in the church, you know the church is divided up into preachers and hearers. That’s how Luther divides it up in the small catechism, the table of duties there. There are those who preach and those who hear. And we really focus on the preacher and not much on the hearer. Ross just finished a class on preaching. He had to go and practice. He had to write a bunch of sermons. He had to get graded on that. But I would suspect that while we’ve all taken classes up here on how to preach, no one has taken a class on how to listen to a sermon, which probably is what we need because it’s actually harder to listen to a sermon than it is to preach it.
That’s maybe a secret that I’m not supposed to tell you guys, but that’s why I had to become a preacher, because I could never sit still to listen. We focus on the giving but not on the receiving. We focus on the authority but not on being under authority. We focus on the ruling but not on the submitting. But this is how it is in the church: we are to focus on what it means to be under order. In the church, there’s preacher and hearers. In the state, there’s rulers and citizens. In the family, there’s husbands and wives. There are parents and children. At work, there’s boss and worker. And while we are always focused on the head, the Scriptures focus us on the body.
So let me just give you a couple of examples from Peter, his table of duties. He says to all Christians, “Be subject, be submissive for the Lord’s sake to every human institution” (1 Peter 2:13). Servants, he says, “Be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle, but also to the unjust” (1 Peter 2:18). Likewise, Peter writes, “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, so that even if some do not obey the word, they may see your good works” (1 Peter 3:1). In other words, every Christian is called to submit to the work of submission.
I think this is highlighted in St. Paul in two ways. First, can you notice the order that Paul addresses those to whom he’s writing? He speaks first to wives and then to husbands. He speaks first to children and then to parents. He speaks first to bondservants and then to masters. And second, that word “submit,” which causes us so much heartache in chapter 5, verse 22, is not even there in the Greek. If you just see it in the bulletin, are you looking at the text there? If you were to just read it in the Greek, it says this: it simply says, “Wives, to your own husbands as to the Lord.” The word, the verb submit is not even there. You have to pick up the verb from the previous verse, 21: submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.
In other words, St. Paul assumes that every Christian, in one way or another, is submitting to someone, somehow, and that starts to take a specific shape when it comes to our vocations. Let me give you the whole flow of the text, Ephesians 5, verse 15, all the way to verse 24, and hear how it goes.
St. Paul says, “Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. Do not get drunk with wine, that’s debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit. Address one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord in your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, to your own husbands, as to the Lord.
For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church’s body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.”
The Greek word for “submit” is the word “hupotasso,” which means “hupo,” it means under, and “tasso” means order. And so probably the closest English we could get to it is subordinate, but all of these words, for whatever reason, sound terrible to us, and we’ve got to work through that.
But let’s just make this point here. Let’s settle in on this: that a big part of our Christian life, and this grows out of the fourth commandment, “Honor your father and mother,” a big part of our Christian life is learning how to rightly be submissive, to rightly submit, to rightly live under the order that the Lord has put in place. It’s to learn the art and the discipline and the beauty of submission.
Now, a couple of points on this. Number one, we are all submitting one way or another according to our vocation. Even the king who’s ruling over a nation submits to his own father and mother according to the fourth commandment and to his pastor. Every pastor submits to his own pastor and is ruled by other people. All of us have parents to whom we submit, and so we start our lives in that submissive posture. And everyone, in every vocation, no matter what, everyone submits to God.
Now this should include the understanding that submission is not simply passive. It’s not simply letting something happen to us. But it is what we are called to actively engage in: submission. We are to pursue a life of submission, of honoring those in authority over us.
Now, third, and we made this point before, but just to make sure we say it clearly, that our submission takes a particular shape according to the purpose of the institution in which we find ourselves. So just, for example, to take the example of the church. Jesus has instituted the church for the distribution of the good news of the Gospel, the forgiveness of sins, both in the word read and preached and also in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the sacraments administered.
So the Lord establishes an order in the church. There are preachers and hearers, and your submitting to me as your pastor looks a lot like what you’re doing now, listening to me preaching. Do you see that the shape of submission is connected to the purpose of the institution? I can’t charge you guys taxes. I can’t tell you what fees to pay. I can’t send you to certain schools. That’s what the government’s role is, and that’s what the parent’s role is to the children and so forth.
So the shape of submission takes shape according to the purpose of the institution. Submission for children to parents looks different than submission for workers to their boss. Submission of citizens to those who rule over them looks different than the submission of wives to husbands. We have to understand then what happens when those different shapes of submission come into conflict with one another. And I think this is what we like to think about as well.
Because you say, “What happens, pastor, when I’m trying to submit to one person, and they say that I should sin?” For example, what if my parents are pickpockets, and they say, “We want you to help us join the family business by stealing that guy’s pocket watch,” right? Now I have the command of God to honor my father and my mother, but I also have the command of God to not steal, so what do I do? The answer is that I submit to God whenever any earthly authority to which I am under submission would have me sin.
Now, remember the martyrs. They’re our example here. The emperor would come along and the emperor would say, “You have to worship me instead of Jesus. You can’t say Jesus is Lord, you have to say Caesar is Lord.” And the Christians who are commanded to submit to every rule would say to the emperor, “No, I cannot submit to your command to sin.” Now we like that part because we’re American and kind of rebellious, right? We like it when we can resist the authority that’s over us.
But then the emperor would say, “Well, okay, fine, if you won’t offer that pinch of incense and say, ‘Lord Caesar,’ then you have to die. I’m going to feed you to the lions.” And the Christians would say, “Fine, I’ll submit to you there.” Because after all, it’s not a sin to be eaten by a lion. It’s not a sin to go to prison. It’s not a sin to be burned. It’s not a sin to have your head cut off.
Now, it was certainly a sin for the emperors and the rulers who treated the Christians so poorly, but vengeance is the Lord’s, not ours. So we submit wherever we can. It’s part of the wonder of being a Christian. And there’s a lot of wonderful stuff here. But here we have to face the fact that this word, in fact, all of these words—submit, submission, subordinate, to be subject—all of these scrape against our 21st-century American ears. Or to maybe say it another way, these words scrape against the darkness that St. Paul was talking about earlier. We walk in darkness.
I want to take a little detour. I hope you all will come with me on this. It’s a little bit wandering off the path, but I think it’ll serve us well because I want to think a little bit about the particular shape of darkness that is in our own culture that chafes against this particular verse. Because even before we get to the word “submit,” we find that our culture is offended by the word that comes before it: Wives. Husbands. These are the realities that our world is fighting against. Our world is trying to forget what it means to be married, what it means to be a father and a mother, what it means to be a man and a woman. That’s the darkness that we face. That’s the darkness to which we are called to shine as lights in the midst of.
When I was in Chicago a couple of weeks ago for the Issues Etc. Conference, I got to spend a little bit of time talking to Robert George, who’s a professor who thinks and writes a lot about marriage and the state of our culture, and he made a point as we were in conversation there that all of the big questions that we face in our culture today, all of the kind of the front of the culture wars, all the big things that we’re trying to face go back to one particular doctrine, in fact one particular heresy. He said all of it comes from Gnosticism.
Now stick with me here. Gnosticism is that old ancient heresy that keeps coming back. It’s the basic idea that the physical world is bad, and that the spiritual world is good, and I am a human person because of my spirit, in fact, because of my consciousness, or even my self-consciousness. And the inner life that we have is the true life, and the outer life is not. In fact, it’s the bad part of life. It’s something that has to be overcome.
Now he walked through the four major fights that we’re having in our own age and showed how they’re all connected to Gnosticism. Number one, he said, abortion. The baby in the womb is not conscious, therefore has no value as a human being, and must be overcome by the choice of the mother, or the preferred language is the host, in order to avoid the slavery of motherhood. That’s the language of Margaret Singer. It comes under the ironically, well kind of wickedly ironic assertion that Jesus said, “This is my body.” And that’s used to defend the killing of the unborn because, after all, they’re not yet a human being.
Or number two, Dr. George says, consider euthanasia. If a person loses consciousness or they’re in intractable pain, then you are called to end the suffering, and you can do so by ending the sufferer. Problem solved. Or take the question of marriage and whether two men or two women can be married? He said, it’s not the body that matters after all, or marriage bringing forth life and children, but rather the internal state of how you feel. Love. I love, and that matters more than anything else, no matter what my body says.
Or, most recently, the question of transgenderism, and here I think we can see it most clearly, that my inside determines my reality and my external self, that is my body, must submit to my inner truth. That’s pure Gnosticism. I think Robert George is right in this articulation. In fact, and he’s a Catholic guy, I wanted to tell him that Martin Luther had the same insight 500 years ago, but I didn’t get to tell him that. But we should understand the phenomenon behind this attack, this Gnostic lie.
Now whenever we talk about these things, we want to speak clearly but also very compassionately because the more that these questions arise in our own culture, the more the darkness starts to seep in, the more people are wounded by it.
So, we know, you know, just with the question of abortion, you know people that have had abortions. They’re in your families, they’re in your neighborhoods, they’re sitting next to you in church, and to those who have committed abortion or have had aborted babies, we must say very, very clearly that Jesus died for that sin. That the blood of Jesus cleanses all sin. That what you’ve done is suffered for by Jesus and He, listen very carefully, He is not mad at you. That’s why He went to the cross. That’s why He suffered and died, so that He could call you His own, so that He could delight in you.
To those who are suffering the guilt and the shame of being part of conversations that are euthanistic, the same preaching is true also for you. This is why Jesus died. He didn’t just die for the small sins, He died for the big ones. For those who are, and this happens more and more, and I think we’ll see it more and more, for those who are tempted with homosexuality, to those who are tempted with what’s called gender confusion nowadays, euphemistically, to those who are tempted by these things, we must say very clearly that Jesus was tempted in every way like we are, which means that Jesus also knew this temptation, that Jesus also knew this suffering, that Jesus also knew this affliction, that Jesus knows what it means to live in this fallen world. There is no question about this, and Jesus forgives all of your sins.
Corbin, you’re gonna help me preach here in a minute, buddy. That Jesus died precisely, Jesus died precisely for the guilt that we bear, precisely for the shame that we suffer. Jesus died to spill his blood to cover you and to call you white and holy so that the church is a place of refuge for sinners, for all sinners. No matter how much the darkness we find outside and inside, all of it is covered, all of it is forgiven, all of it is carried to the cross, all of it stayed in the grave, all of it is forgotten. And when we stand before the Lord Jesus, we will stand in robes made white by His blood.
We must be absolutely clear about this. But we also must be absolutely clear that this darkness is darkness, and it leads to death. And as the darkness comes, it wants to drag us along with it. The devil in Gnosticism is not just assaulting creation; he’s assaulting the Creator. He’s not just assaulting your body; he’s assaulting the incarnate Son of God. The devil is going to wreck the house, but he waits until the children are home so that he can wreck it there.
So it is that God, the Son of God, is made part of the assault. This is what the devil wants us to forget, that God is in our flesh and that we will be raised to eternal life. But what God has done cannot be overcome. Now this is our hope. You say, “Pastor, look, it looks really bad. It looks like this whole conversation about abortion, it looks like it’s over. There’s no going back. The whole conversation about marriage, it looks like it’s over. There’s no going back. The whole conversation about man and woman, it looks like it’s over. There’s no going back. How can we stand against this rising tide of an addiction to death? What can we do when we face such huge and monumental problems? How can we possibly make a difference?”
The answer? Wives, submit to your husbands. Husbands, love your wives. Children, obey your parents. Parents, serve your children. Christians, support these godly institutions and rejoice that the Lord Jesus has placed us as lights in the midst of darkness, as beacons in the midst of the wilderness, as the only place to find both wisdom and hope in the midst of a crumbling world.
And when you find that the darkness is not only on the outside, but the darkness is also in your own heart, when you see yourself sinning against the commandment of God, when you see yourself failing to love and to serve, but rather to always loving and serving yourself and breaking God’s commandments, when you see that the darkness also is inside, then remember that you are the Bride of Christ, and He is our Husband, and He has cleansed us and washed us and made us pure and spotless and holy by the washing of the water and the Word.
He has taken all of your sin and all of your sorrow and carried it to the cross so that He might claim you in life and unto life eternal, so that all your temptation and all your trouble belongs to Him. And we joyfully submit to that. May God grant it. May God grant us His Holy Spirit, so that we find joy and wisdom in our Christian life of submission, and we find joy and peace in Christ, our Head.
May God grant it for Christ’s sake, amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.
