Ephesians 5 · Passage · Marriage in Its Trials
Submit to One Another
The passage stands in Paul's letter to Ephesus, after his call to sing and give thanks and before his word to children and slaves.
Only 1 Corinthians uses Paul's word mystery as often as Ephesians does, six times each.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
- The passage
- Ephesians 5:21 to 33
- Book
- Ephesians
- Hold in memory
- Ephesians 5:25, Ephesians 5:33
Summary
Paul asks believers to yield to one another in reverence for Christ, and he then gives a wife and a husband each a duty. The wife yields to her husband as the church yields to its Lord. The husband loves his wife with the self-giving love of Christ, who died for His people. Paul then calls the union of husband and wife a profound mystery about Christ and the church.
- Paul gives the husband the place of head in the home and measures that place by Christ.
- The call to wives in Ephesians 5:22 continues the command to all believers in Ephesians 5:21.
- Readers have long disagreed over how far the mutual submission of Ephesians 5:21 reaches and over what Paul means by head.
Filled with the Spirit
Ephesians 5:15 to 20 calls believers to walk wisely, to redeem the time and to give thanks for everything.
Submit to One Another studies Ephesians 5:21 to 33, the apostle's instruction to a wife and a husband. It belongs to the trial of marriage, because a marriage is tested most in the daily matters of yielding, loving and keeping faith that this passage addresses.
Its question is what Paul asks of a wife and of a husband, and on what ground he asks it. It gives each duty beside its pattern, the readings of two disputed words, and the household of the ancient world in which Paul wrote.
Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to reckless indiscretion. Instead, be filled with the Spirit.Paul sets drunkenness against the filling of the Spirit, so the life he goes on to describe is the life the Spirit gives.
In the Greek text the command of Ephesians 5:18 is followed by a chain of participles: speaking to one another in psalms, singing and making music, giving thanks, and submitting. The submission of Ephesians 5:21 is the last participle in that chain.
Each Duty and Its Pattern
Paul moves from the wife to the husband and ends with the first marriage of Genesis.
Every duty Paul gives a wife or a husband stands on something Christ is or does for the church.
| Who | What Paul says | The pattern of Christ and the church |
|---|---|---|
| The wife | “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” | “as the church submits to Christ” |
| The husband's place | “the husband is the head of the wife” | “as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior” |
| The husband | “Husbands, love your wives” | “just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her” |
| The husband | “husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies” | “he nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church” |
| The man | “a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife” | “I am speaking about Christ and the church” |
Wives and Husbands
Paul speaks first to wives and then, at greater length, to husbands.
Ephesians 5:22 has no verb of its own in the Greek text, so its word to wives borrows the verb of the verse before it. Paul uses the verb again in Ephesians 5:24, where the church is the one who submits.
Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible (1832), limited the words “in everything” to “every lawful thing; for it is not intimated that they should obey their husbands in any thing criminal”.
to sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a glorious church, without stain or wrinkle or any such blemish, but holy and blameless.These verses give the purpose of Christ's self-giving, which a husband's love is called to share by seeking his wife's good.
“Holiness and glory are inseparable. ‘Cleansing’ is the necessary preliminary to both. Holiness is glory internal; glory is holiness shining forth outwardly.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on Ephesians 5:27Reformed
The next verses compare the wife to the husband's own body. Matthew Henry explains the sense in which the two are one.
“The wife being made one with her husband (not in a natural, but in a civil and in a relative sense), this is an argument why he should love her with as cordial and as ardent an affection as that which he loves himself.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on Ephesians 5:28Puritan
Nevertheless, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.Paul gathers the whole passage into one duty for each partner, love for the husband and respect for the wife.
The verb for the wife's respect is phobeo, whose first sense is fear and which Strong's definition extends to awe and reverence. Its noun phobos stands in Ephesians 5:21 for the reverence all believers owe to Christ.
Matthew Henry, Ephesians 5:33
The Households of Paul's World
Aristotle named the same three pairs of the household that Paul addresses.
Aristotle, in the first book of his Politics, wrote that household management has three parts, “one is the rule of a master over slaves”, “another of a father, and the third of a husband”.
Paul's household in Ephesians 5:22 to 6:9 takes the same three pairs, wives and husbands, children and fathers, slaves and masters. Aristotle describes the rule of the head of the house, while Paul speaks to each member in turn and grounds every duty in the Lord.
Colossians 3:18 to 19 and 1 Peter 3:1 to 7 give shorter forms of the same instruction. Marriage and the Household sets the four household lists of the New Testament side by side.
This Mystery Is Profound
Paul reads the first union of man and woman as a sign of Christ's bond with His people.
The words of Ephesians 5:31 come from Genesis 2:24.
Paul's word is mysterion, which Strong's glosses as a secret, from the silence kept by those initiated into religious rites.
“Rather, ‘This mystery is a great one.’ This profound truth, beyond man's power of discovering, but now revealed, namely, of the spiritual union of Christ and the Church, represented by the marriage union, is a great one, of deep import.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on Ephesians 5:32Reformed
The Bride and the Jewish Wedding traces the bride of Christ through the whole Bible. The Marriage Supper of the Lamb teaches her wedding feast at the end of the age.
Two Disputed Words
Four readings, each with its holders and the objection against it.
Ephesians 5:21: every believer to every otherMatthew Henry; John Chrysostom
“There is a mutual submission that Christians owe one to another, condescending to bear one another's burdens: not advancing themselves above others, nor domineering over one another and giving laws to one another. Paul was an example of this truly Christian temper, for he became all things to all men.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on Ephesians 5:21Puritan
Chrysostom, in his nineteenth homily on Ephesians, took the verse the same way and wrote, “Let there be an interchange of service and submission.”
Against it, the lists that follow speak in one direction, since children are told to obey their parents and slaves their masters, and the reverse is never asked.
Ephesians 5:21: the heading of the duties that followAlbert Barnes
Albert Barnes, in his Notes, Explanatory and Practical, read the verse as “Maintaining due subordination in the various relations of life”, a general principle the apostle goes on to apply to wives, children and servants. He added that Paul gives those in authority “solemn injunctions that there should be no abuse of power”.
Against it, the Greek word allelois means to one another, the word Paul uses in Ephesians 4:2 for “bearing with one another in love”.
Head: authority overAlbert Barnes; Adam Clarke; Wayne Grudem
Barnes explained the head of Ephesians 5:23 by the fact that Christ “rules over the church, and has a right to direct and control it”. Clarke called the husband “the head or governor of the woman” and added that “The husband should not be a tyrant”.
Wayne Grudem, in a survey of 2,336 uses of the word published in the Trinity Journal (1985), argued that it could mean “ruler” or “authority over” in Greek.
Against it, Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen argued in Christianity Today (1979), as Grudem quotes them, that “supreme over” was not among the meanings Greek speakers of the time knew for the word.
Head: source or originBerkeley and Alvera Mickelsen
On the Mickelsens' reading Christ is the source of the church, as the man was the source of the woman. They held, in the words Grudem quotes, that “A more common meaning was source, or origin, as we use it in the head of the Mississippi river.”
Against it, Grudem reported that in his survey “no instances were discovered” in which the word meant source.
Love and Respect
Paul holds both partners to the measure of Christ.
Chrysostom held that a husband who gave his life for his wife would still not have done anything like Christ, who gave Himself for a church that had turned its back on Him.
He asked how love can live where there is fear, and he answered that “she that fears and reverences, loves also”.
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- STEP Bible, Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0.
- STEP Bible brief lexicon of Extended Strongs for Greek (Tyndale House, Cambridge), CC BY 4.0, with the Strong's glosses.
- John Chrysostom, Homily 19 on Ephesians, tr. Gross Alexander, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1889)
- John Chrysostom, Homily 20 on Ephesians, tr. Gross Alexander, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 13 (1889)
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710), on Ephesians 5:21 and Ephesians 5:28.
- Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871), on Ephesians 5:27 and Ephesians 5:32.
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832 to 1869), on Ephesians 5:21 and Ephesians 5:23.
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832), on Ephesians 5:22 and Ephesians 5:24.
- Wayne Grudem, “Does Kephalē (‘Head’) Mean ‘Source’ or ‘Authority Over’ in Greek Literature? A Survey of 2,336 Examples”, Trinity Journal, new series 6.1 (Spring 1985), pages 38 to 59.
- Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen, “Does Male Dominance Tarnish Our Translations?”, Christianity Today, 5 October 1979, pages 23 to 29.
- Aristotle, Politics, Book I, Part XII, tr. Benjamin Jowett.
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