SERIES: Faith Under Fire
Learning to Live Long and Well
Well, the Lord has delayed His return, so let’s jump into our Scripture passage for today. It includes my life verse: “Wives, be submissive to your own husbands.” (Just kidding!)
(1 Peter 3:1‑7) “Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, {2} when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. {3} Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. {4} Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight. {5} For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful. They were submissive to their own husbands, {6} like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her master. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.
{7} Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”
Friends, a marriage license is just a learner’s permit, and anyone who thinks he or she knows it all is as foolish as a 16-year-old who thinks he’s equipped to handle Kellogg east of Rock Road at 5:00pm. In our text today God wants to offer us some continuing education. Some, I suspect, may cringe at this passage because a red flag pops up immediately in our passage–the red flag of submission.
Submission is clearly one of the most maligned and least understood concepts in the Word of God. Back in the 90’s when our Southern Baptist friends at one of their national convention issued a rather bland statement about the Christian family that happened to use that nasty word “submission,” there was an uproar of gigantic proportions. Nothing else they did or said got any coverage, but that was on every network newscast.
Promise Keepers never talked about submission in any meeting I ever attended, but when they talked about husbands treating their wives with love and respect, the radical women’s movement started to hyperventilate out of fear of some hidden agenda. Aha! Men are going to love their wives into submission, which is even more sinister than beating them into submission, because it is so subtle.
Now interestingly, there is almost no one who disputes the sad state of the American family today. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at the alarming statistics on divorce, single‑parent homes, working mothers of small children, unmarried mothers, crack babies, child abuse, etc. and realize that we’re in deep trouble. Sadly, none of the experts seem to know how to fix it, except to provide more federal dollars for child care. Yet they are generally certain of one thing–God has no business sticking His nose into our affairs and telling us how families should operate–even if He is the Creator and the one who thought up families in the first place!
Yet the Creator has stuck His nose into our affairs, and He has given us some short and rather simple instructions about how families work best, and how the individuals in those families will find the greatest fulfillment and happiness. Peter is going to address both wives and husbands, and if some women are uncomfortable with the first part of this lesson, just wait—the husbands will get theirs, and he won’t be easy on them!
Learning to live with those in our family. (3:1-7)
I begin today with a proposition that comes directly out of the Bible passage I just read:
Christian wives have the responsibility to be submissive to their husbands. (3:1-6)
Last week we saw that Christian citizens have the responsibility to submit to authority in government, and Christian employees have the responsibility to submit to authority at work. There is a parallel responsibility in the home.
This requirement is parallel to the Christian citizen’s responsibility to government and the Christian employee’s to management. The parallel is easily picked up simply by reading verses 13 and 18 of chapter 2 along with the first verse of chapter 3: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men …. Slaves, submit yourselves to your masters with all respect …. Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands.” If you’re going to accept what the Bible says about the other two areas, then you ought not reject what it says about the home without good reason.
Now you’ll remember from last Sunday that the commandment to be submissive to government and management is broad but not absolute.
It is broad but not absolute. This one too is broad. It applies to marriages in which the husband is kind and considerate, but also to those in which the husband is a jerk. In fact, it is clear that Peter’s principal concern here is the woman who lives with a disobedient husband–not necessarily a jerk, but one who at the least is not measuring up to God’s standards.
But even though this commandment to submit is broad, it is not absolute, any more than the previous commands were. The principal limitation on human authority in any situation is that “we ought to obey God rather than man.” As we saw last Sunday, if there is a contradiction between a command of God and an order of the government or an employer, then the believer has the right, perhaps even the responsibility, to refuse. And I think that applies in the home as well. No wife is obligated to follow her husband into sin, for example.
We also noted last Sunday the basic rationale behind the Bible’s teaching on submission.
Its basic rationale is that God is in control. If it weren’t for the sovereignty of God over human affairs, any expectation of submission of one human being to another would be a pure power play. After all, if there is no final authority, it’s every man for himself. The only interest that makes any sense is self-interest. But if God can be relied upon to put His own limits on oppressive behavior and to eventually balance the books, then submission makes sense.
But I want to go further than we went last Sunday in discussing the meaning of submission, because the home is so much more personal than government or work. If we don’t get this right, there is the possibility of great harm coming to women, children, and the home itself.
This requirement (of submission) must be examined carefully to prevent abuse.
The meaning of submission. Not everyone understands this command correctly. Submission can perhaps best be defined simply as “accepting one’s proper rank or place in a line of authority.” In the home God has assigned the husband the responsibility of being the head and the wife is to recognize that authority. However, several important facts need to be recognized up front.
First, this command is not addressed to the husband but to the wife. In other words, Peter does not say, “Men, make your wives submit.” This is an action the wife should choose on her own.
Second, the submission urged is not of women to men but of wives to husbands. There is nothing in the Bible that limits the role of women in business, in education, in government, or the military. There is nothing that justifies lower pay for women than men for the same work. There is nothing that requires the husband to be the breadwinner and the woman to stay home. But in the home the wife is to recognize the authority of her husband. What does that entail?
Does it mean the wife is to comply with all the husband’s wishes?
Does it mean the wife is to leave all the decisions to the husband?
Does it mean the wife is inferior?
The answer is “no” to all three.
I have in the past used an analogy to help describe the husband’s authority in the home. Who is the head of any corporation? Generally it’s the CEO, the Chief Executive Officer, sometimes the Chairman of the Board. You almost never find a company with two CEO’s or two Chairmen of the Board, because the buck has to stop at someone’s desk. A business consultant told me that there are a few companies today that have co-CEO’s. Sometimes it is done purely for public relations and one of the CEO’s is actually in charge. But whenever it is attempted as an actual working model, it fails miserably, according to this consultant.
Is the CEO superior to the other officers and employees in a corporation? No. Does he get everything he wants? Not in a healthy organization. Does he make all the decisions? Of course not. I suspect Charles Koch makes fewer than 1/10,000 of 1% of all the decisions at Koch Industries. Without doubt the COO, the Chief Operating Officer, makes far more decisions than he does, and the middle managers make even more. But when an issue has been discussed and debated by everyone involved, and no consensus emerges, then Charles Koch has the privilege and the responsibility to make the decision.
Well, in a Christian home God has appointed the husband as the CEO (and frankly, I like to think of the wife is the COO, the Chief Operating Officer). That doesn’t mean he is superior to her or that all his wishes should be met or that he should make all the decisions. In fact, in healthy homes the husband and wife will make most decisions together. Some entire areas the husband may delegate to his wife and some perhaps even to the children. But if, after discussion and debate, there is disagreement on a matter, and if a decision must be made, the husband is given the responsibility by God to make that decision and the wife is to submit her will to his.
But it’s impossible to fully understand this instruction unless we also consider . . .
The motive for submission in the home. A question that often arises in our American minds when we are asked to do something is, “Why should I?” And here I think the first and best answer to that question is, “Because God says so.”
God requires it. If you look back at verse 13 of chapter 2 you see an important phrase: “for the Lord’s sake.” “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every authority instituted among men. . .” Then in 3:1: “Wives, in the same way be submissive . . .” In a parallel passage in Colossians the Apostle Paul makes the same point when he states in 3:18, “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.” Since God knows us better than we know ourselves, and since He wants His children to be happy and fulfilled, we are compelled, it seems to me, to accept His revealed will in this matter.
But there is a second motive offered by Peter there in the first verse:
It provides the only opportunity many women have to lead their husbands to Christ. I believe it is an easily demonstrable fact that women come to faith in Christ more readily than do men, perhaps because they are generally more spiritually sensitive. The result is that many women attend church by themselves, or even if their husbands come with them, the men are less concerned about spiritual issues. It was no different in the churches to which Peter wrote in the first century.
Women who come to know Christ know instinctively that their husbands would be better off if they, too, would come to have a vital personal relationship with God, if they would study their Bibles, and if they would pray more on their own. And so those wives have a tendency to “share” with their husbands. That’s a nice way of saying they “preach” at them, and some of these women are very skilled at homiletics. When that doesn’t work they leave Christian books lying around the house, tune all the pushbuttons on his car radio to Christian stations, stick The Daily Bread in his shaving kit when he goes out of town, and other not-so-subtle ways of saying, “Get with it.”
Now I’m not challenging the sincerity of these women. Their hearts ache for spiritual union with their husbands. But most of those methods don’t work; in fact, they can actually be counterproductive. Look again at what the text says: “Wives, in the same way be submissive to your husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives. . .” Stop there a moment. Ladies, you cannot talk your husband into the Kingdom of God. Maybe someone else can, but you cannot. You have to learn to talk without words. You need to find a whole new language that is behaviorally based. I think Ruth Graham, who died 10 years ago, got it right when she said, “It is my job to love Billy. It is God’s job to make him good.”
This involves, first, being submissive to your husband. That will say more to him about your faith in God and your trust in Christ than all the sermons you could ever preach. Second, let your husband see purity and reverence in your life. The term “see” in verse 2 in the original is actually a term that suggests keen and careful observation, not a casual glance. As a spiritually disinterested husband observes his wife’s godly behavior, his heart will eventually soften toward spiritual things. Barclay refers to such a lifestyle as “the silent preaching of a lovely life.”[i]
Third, put more focus on inner beauty than outer beauty. Now that’s not what our society says; in fact, it’s not even what a lot of Christians say. What does Peter say? “Your beauty should not come from outward adornment . . .” Now intuition tells me what he really meant is “Your beauty should not come only from outward adornment . . .” Some of you remember me saying over 40 years ago, “If the barn needs paint, then paint it.” But outward beauty without inner beauty is nothing but a shell.
Ladies, this is a time-tested way to make yourself beautiful. It’s how the holy women of old did it. The famous woman of Proverbs 31 is summarized this way: “Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting; but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.” There’s a service organization called Job’s Daughters. I don’t know much about it, but I think I know where they got their name. If you look at the end of the book of Job you find that he had three daughters in his second family–Jemimah, Karen and Keziah, and it says, “Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters,” referring evidently to their physical beauty.
Peter would rather that women become Sarah’s Daughters. Sarah was submissive to her husband Abraham. She even called him her master. Now guys, don’t get any big ideas here. It ain’t gonna happen! And I don’t think that’s Peter’s point, anyway. The way a woman becomes a daughter of Sarah is to “do what is right and do not give way to fear.” Do you wonder why that last phrase is there? I think it’s because submission entails a significant risk, and many women are afraid to try it. After all, a less-than-godly husband might take advantage of your desire to obey God and become a tyrant. You can’t do this unless your hope is in God (verse 5). But you know something? It’s always a bigger risk to disobey God than it is to obey Him.
Christian husbands have the responsibility to earn the submission of their wives or pay a price.
I thought long and hard before I stated my point that way. The last thing I want to communicate, ladies, is that if your husband hasn’t earned submission, you don’t have to give it to him. Your responsibility stands even if he fails at his. Yet, I think, men, that we have no moral right to expectsubmission unless we are fulfilling our responsibility. At the very least, a husband’s loving, caring, sacrificial approach to his wife’s well‑being makes her responsibility of submission much easier.
Look again at verse 7: “Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.” What I see here is that a Christian husband has three key responsibilities, besides the well-known one from Ephesians 5, “Husbands love your wives.”
A Christian husband must be considerate of his wife. This command is parallel to one we find in Col. 3:19, “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.” Apparently even in the first century it was a fairly common problem for husbands to get cross with their wives, even brutal with them. Sometimes it may be because he doesn’t understand her mood swings; he may not understand her thought processes; he may feel he doesn’t get the respect at home he gets at work; he may get tired of hearing her say, “Why don’t you stop and ask for directions?”
But whatever the case, bitterness and resentment are unacceptable responses. A tone of voice that might be overlooked at the office, may bring instant tears at home. Be considerate. He needs to know her deepest concerns and fears. He needs to provide her the safety and security of his love as she works through those things.
A Christian husband must treat his wife with respect as the weaker partner. Peter adds something here that is easily misunderstood. I can hear it now, “If that isn’t chauvinistic, I don’t know what is!” But let’s stay calm. This has nothing to do with weakness of character or intelligence. He is not speaking morally or spiritually or even psychologically. A lot of women are tougher than their husbands. It simply means that a woman has less physical strength and perhapsthat she is more emotionally sensitive (praise God!) In a society which expected women to do a lot of heavy work and ran roughshod over their feelings, Peter simply says, “treat them with respect.”
A Christian husband must treat her as a spiritual partner. Here’s the actual statement: “Treat them as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life.”
Don’t be spiritually condescending to your wife.
Don’t act like her priest in the home.
Don’t play God in her life.
Recognize that both of you are spiritual pilgrims.
And what happens if a Christian husband doesn’t take Peter’s advice? He risks having God turn a deaf ear to him. Here’s how Peter concludes: “So that nothing will hinder your prayers.” I hear many people saying from time to time, “I just don’t feel like my prayers are going any higher than the ceiling. “ There may be a variety of reasons why an individual finds himself in such a spot. But at least one possibility for men is offered right here.
Learning to live with those in our spiritual Family. (3:8)
The “finally” with which he introduces verse 8 doesn’t mean he’s coming to the end of his epistle. Rather he is concluding the section on submission to proper authority. And he concludes it with five excellent pieces of advice that make mutual submission a lot easier. “Finally, all of you–whether a believing government official or a private citizen, whether labor or management, whether wife or husband–live in harmony with one another.” That’s the first item.
Live in harmony with one another. Do you have any idea how important to God unity is in the Body of Christ? All through the NT rings this plea for Christian unity. But it is more than a plea. It is a statement that no one can really live the Christian life unless in his personal relationships he is in harmony with his fellow-believer. The NT never treats unity as an unnecessary though highly desirable spiritual luxury, but as something essential to the faith.
As I have often said, unity doesn’t mean uniformity or unanimity or even union. Rather, it occurs, as Barclay writes, when “powerful tensions are held together by an over-arching loyalty, and strong antipathies of race and color, temperament and taste, social position and economic interest, are overcome in common worship and common obedience.”[ii] \
Be sympathetic. The term in the original language simply means to “feel deeply with.” One of the most neglected commands of the Bible in the church today is “Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep.” (Romans 12:15) All one has to do is to look at the sparse attendancethat is so common for weddings and funerals to see evidence of this. How often do we really try to enter the feelings of other people? When others hurt, do we hurt? When they enjoy life, do we feel good about it? When God blesses someone we know with material prosperity, or a promotion at work, or election to some office at church, or some honor at school, do we rejoice with them or feel jealous?
Love as brothers. The word here is not agape but philadelphia. It describes true friendship. Are you cultivating friends? Are you being a friend? Jay Kessler, President of Taylor University, has said that one of his great hopes in life is to wind up with at least eight people who will attend his funeral without once checking their watches. Knowing Jay, I suspect he will have more like 8,000. Do you have eight who will do that?
Some people clearly make friends easily and quickly. They have never met a stranger. But some struggle to make friends. We have a lot of acquaintances, but we may be short on friends. Let’s not excuse ourselves by saying, “That’s just who I am. I’m a private person. I have to build walls around myself to keep from getting hurt.” Those walls may keep some hurt out, but I suspect they keep even more hurt in. Some of us need to give a lot more attention to making friends.
Be compassionate. This is close to the sympathy mentioned earlier, but it has more to do with actions than feelings. Some people are sympathetic to a fault. They cry when a leaf falls off the tree, to say nothing of the death of an acquaintance. But they don’t do anything about it. They don’t write the card, fix the meal, stop by and cry with the one grieving.
In our day, with so much tragic news broadcast so frequently and so widely, we have become accustomed to hear of other people’s sufferings, and we tend to be superficially hardened and fail to do even what we can. But God says, be compassionate.
Be humble. We live in a day of self-promotion, self-assertion, and spiritual celebrities. Anyone can have his own web site and shamelessly promote himself. Anyone with skills beyond the average can, through skillful marketing, become an “expert.” But God says that part of learning to live with those in the Family is to be humble.
Having exhorted us to learn to live with those in the Family, Peter then turns to …
Learning to live with those outside the Family. (9-12)
9 Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult. On the contrary, repay evil with blessing, because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. 10 For,“Whoever would love life
and see good days
must keep their tongue from evil
and their lips from deceitful speech.
11 They must turn from evil and do good;
they must seek peace and pursue it.
12 For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous
and his ears are attentive to their prayer,
but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.”
The Command: Repay evil and insult with blessing. Peter may not be thinking only of actions directed at us by unbelievers. Sadly, there may be times when you will also be treated in an evil way or be insulted by another believer within the Family. And if that happens, the same advice applies: “Do not repay evil with evil or insult with insult, but with blessing.” But having said that, I cannot help but believe the principal application Peter has in mind is the abuse Christians have to endure because they are aliens and strangers, spiritually speaking, in the world.
There is nothing more difficult required of us in all of Scripture than this right here. It isn’t normal for a child to be called a name without coming back with a worse one. Even a 71-year-old child, witness our President! It isn’t normal for a teenage boy to be shoved without defending his honor in a full-scale fight. It isn’t normal for a business man to get cheated without calling his lawyer. It isn’t normal for anyone to endure a verbal slight without working on a sarcastic response. Retaliation and revenge are buried deeply within the human heart.
Why then should we forego that natural instinct and respond instead by blessing those who persecute us? Well, Peter could have responded, “Because Jesus said so,” for he surely remembered that Jesus made a major issue of non-retaliation in His Sermon on the Mount. But instead Peter goes back even further–he goes back to the Psalms and tells us that God’s Word requires it.
The motive: God’s Word requires it (Psalm 34). See the word “because” there in verse 9? You should do this because to this you were called so that you may inherit a blessing. Respond witha blessing and you will inherit a blessing. “For . . .” and then he quotes five verses from Psalm 34. In essence this Psalm is his biblical evidence that the believer should repay evil and insult with blessing. “Whoever would love life and see good days must . . .” Must what? First, he must exercise …
A controlled tongue. “He must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from deceitful speech.” This is parallelism in Hebrew poetry–two ways of saying the same thing. Refrain from gossip. Don’t share confidential information. Refuse to pass on unverified comments as fact.
Now let me ask you, “How can controlling your tongue lead to a longer and better life?” Well, when you get right down to it, an awful lot of the trouble we bring upon ourselves is generated by our mouths–probably a good deal more than half. A lie demands another lie, and that still another. Slander generates an angry response, and pretty soon things explode. Second, he must exercise …
A controlled life. “He must turn from evil and do good; he must seek peace and pursue it.” I notice two important facts here. A good person is more than just a person who is not evil. I’ve known a lot of people who were not evil, but neither were they particularly good. I have also known people who were not really troublemakers, but they weren’t peacemakers either. Peace is something God wants us to pursue. We Christians ought not to be known for fighting and quarreling, nor ought we to become an unruly mob that is always agitating for one thing or another. Instead, we ought to be seen as peace-loving people.
And what sort of promise does God offer us if we exercise a controlled tongue and a controlled life?
The promise: God sees and listens and defends. “For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears are attentive to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against those who do evil.” He will protect us and He will defend us. And what is the result?
The result: a long and good life. And we’re back where we started. Do you want to live long and well? Eating healthy is helpful. Getting exercise is positive. Taking vitamins may be useful. Better yet practice the actions Peter offers here. These things may well stretch your three score and ten to four score or even five score.
Appendix: SOME COMMON OBJECTIONS TO THE BIBLE’S TEACHING THAT WIVES SHOULD BE IN SUBMISSION TO THEIR HUSBANDS
(Explanation: This document is an appendix to the sermon preached at First Evangelical Free Church on Sunday, March 14, 1999 entitled Learning to Talk Without Words.
1. New Testament teaching on wives’ submission is culture‑specific.
In other words, just as Paul demanded that women wear a head-covering when worshiping at Corinth (which was fitting in that culture but perhaps not in ours), so the expectation for wives to be submissive to their husbands was fine in the first century but doesn’t suit modern notions of the wife’s role.
Such a conclusion has several major difficulties. First, nothing in the passage itself suggests this was a temporary command for a specific situation. In fact, Peter goes all the way back to Abraham, which was as far removed time-wise from him as he is from us. Second, such an argument could be used to dispense with almost any command in the NT we don’t happen to like; in fact, that is exactly what is happening in the liberal church in regard to abortion and gay rights.
Third, Paul made the expectation of submission by wives to their husbands parallel to the expectation of obedience by children to their parents. In Colossians 3:18-20 he says in three, almost staccato exhortations, “Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord.” We should be cautious about calling submission a merely cultural issue unless we are prepared to dismiss the need for children to obey their parents, which comes right out of the Ten Commandments. Are the Ten Commandments culture‑specific too?
This is not to deny that there are major cultural differences between Peter’s day and ours. Women have legal rights and protections today, at least in Western cultures, that were never dreamed of then, and it is very doubtful Peter would deny to women the advantages our society offers. But he might ask them, “Are you really any better off, any happier, any more fulfilled because you have abortion rights, divorce rights, combat rights, etc.?” True biblical submission in the home is not a burden; it’s a blessing.
2. Paul was biased against women. This is an absurd statement that could only gain favor in a society that has gone absolutely to seed on personal rights. The fact of the matter is that Christianity in general, and Paul in particular, was a great liberator of women. In some radical Muslim countries today women are not only required to cover their bodies completely when in public, but they are also deprived of education, denied the privilege of driving a car, and forbidden to work outside the home–whether they have children or not.
I have seen the sad plight of women in some foreign countries and in tribal areas where Christianity has had very little impact. Believe me, there’s not a woman in this church who would prefer living there to dying here. And that’s at the dawn of the 3rd millennium! Things were even worse for women in the 1st century. Listen to William Barclay’s description of the plight of women in the ancient world:
In every sphere of ancient civilization, women had no rights at all. Under Jewish law a woman was a thing; she was the possession of her husband, just as much as his house or his flocks or his material goods were. She had no legal right whatever. . . In Greek society a respectable woman lived a life of entire seclusion. She never appeared on the streets alone, not even to go marketing. She lived in the women’s apartments and did not join her menfolk even for meals. From her there was demanded a complete servitude and chastity; but her husband could go out as much as he chose and could enter into as many relationships outside marriage as he liked and incur no stigma. Both under Jewish and under Greek laws and custom, all the privileges belonged to the husband, and all the duties to the wife. (Barclay, The Letters of James and Peter, 218)
Into that morass the Apostle Paul followed Jesus Christ in elevating the dignity of women, establishing their equality in the church, demanding that husbands treat them as fellow heirs of the gift of life, affirming their ministry gifts, and basically freeing them from the horrible oppression that was theirs in virtually every area of civilization.
Never was anyone further ahead of his time than Paul in his attitude toward women. In fact, the very reason he had to address wives on this matter of submission is that his teaching on Christian freedom was so successful that some were prone to take their new freedom a step too far by throwing out the baby of divine order in the home along with the bath water of male chauvinist oppression.
3. Submission entails inferiority. Let me ask a simple question, “Is Jesus Christ inferior to God the Father?” No, of course not, but He is in submission to His Father (taught in several passages, including 1 Cor. 15:28, where the term “made subject to” is the same in the Greek as the term “submission” in 1 Peter 3:1). If submission can be used to describe the One who is King of Kings and Lord of Lords, then it obviously has nothing to do with a lack of personal worth and value. All through our society we recognize equality of personhood while recognizing distinctions in authority. Why not in the home?
4. Some husbands don’t deserve submission. I grant that without objection. But that doesn’t change the fact that God requires it. Some government officials, some bosses at work, and some teachers at school probably don’t deserve respect or obedience either, but the wise person will respect their position if not their person. That’s why the motive Paul offers is so important: it must be done “for the Lord’s sake,” not because it’s deserved.
I must add, however, that some men are not only jerks; they’re dangerous jerks, and Peter is not telling women to submit to such husbands. If a woman is being abused, she should seek protection from her church, or if the church won’t provide it, from the courts. The Bible even permits divorce under certain limited circumstances.
5. Some wives are better leaders than their husbands. Again, I have no dispute with this observation. But perhaps that generates a follow-up question, “Why should the husband be the CEO in every family? If the wife is smarter, a better leader, and a better decision‑maker, why shouldn’t she be the head?” Because God says so (and I’m not sure we can go much further than that). God may have simply decided that to avoid bloodshed while husbands and wives battle it out for control, He would simply decide the issue in advance, so he appointed the husband in every home as the head.
But I suspect there is more to it than that. I suspect there is something about the way we were created that makes His arrangement work best. Sin has distorted everything, including our perception about what really makes us happy. That’s why we need to consult the Creator about such things.
But I will say this, when a wife is smarter, a better leader, and a better decision-maker, the wisehusband will encourage her to use her gifts of leadership, while not abdicating his position as the head of the home. I have seen some great examples of homes in which gifted women were freed up to be all God intended them to be, and their husbands were better off because of it.
DATE: November 26, 2017
[i] William Barclay, The Letters of James and Peter, 217.
[ii] Barclay, 226.