In this series of blogs, we’re highlighting and contrasting the differences between the current post-Christian culture’s understanding of marriage with the Christian’s view.  Today, we begin a cluster of blogs on the dynamic of SUBMISSION from all standpoints—Christ’s, the husband’s, and the wife’s.  In a day when the current perception of “submit” is demonized, trashed, debunked, and demoralized, the Scriptures vibrantly present it as one of the most important dynamics in the marriage relationship.  Yet, unless it is understood in the proper order—originating first with Christ, and then flowing subsequently to the husband who is next called to submit and to follow Christ, it won’t be understood or effectual.  Consequentially, as the wife sees her husband following Christ’s leadership, she “submits” (comes under) God’s mission as given to the husband and to her in the marriage relationship.

Someone has intuitively observed that the national anthem of hell is, “I did it my way.”  The danger surrounding human autonomy is that it prevents many people from seeing the freedom that God wants them to experience when they live under His lordship.  That is why Christ’s call to die to self (Matthew 10:38-39, 16:24; Mark 8:34, Luke 9:23-24, 14:27) remains the most important summons that anyone can heed, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer states so aptly in his The Cost of Discipleship (London: SCM Press, 2001, p44):

The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world. It is that dying of the old man which is the result of his encounter with Christ. As we embark upon discipleship, we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with His death—we give over our lives to death. Thus, it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ…When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die. It may be a death like that of the first disciples who had to leave home and work to follow Him, or it may be a death like Luther’s, who had to leave the monastery and go out into the world. But it is the same death every time—death in Jesus Christ, the death of the old man at his call.

Dying to self in order to receive and to experience God’s best is crucial in order to understand the elegant and mysterious (the word Paul uses in Ephesians 5:32) meaning presented by the apostle in Ephesians 5:21-33.  Submission to God and to one another is only possible when Christians first die to themselves and then choose to come under the mission of God (submission) for their lives.

That is the root understanding of submission (ὑποτάσσω).  Most Greek lexicons and dictionaries define it in military terms as “to line up under” or “to subordinate,” necessitating an act of internal organization and arrangement around a forward-moving operation.  Paul presents it as a necessary part of Spirit-filled Christian living, critical for marital success, peace and happiness, modeled after the submission of Christ to his heavenly Father in the fulfillment of his divine mission.

In this “submission dynamic,” Christ begins the process.  Repeatedly, Jesus spoke about his “mission” from the Father, as several examples from John’s gospel (among many from the gospels) testify:

• 4:34, “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.”
• 5:17, 19, 23b, Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.” Jesus gave them this answer, “I tell you the truth, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does…He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father, who sent him.”
• 5:30, “By myself I can do nothing; I judge only as I hear, and my judgment is just, for I seek not to please myself but him who sent me.”
• 7:16-18, Jesus answered, “My teaching is not my own.  It comes from him who sent me.  If anyone chooses to do God’s will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own.  He who speaks on his own does so to gain honor for himself, but he who works for the honor of the one who sent him is a man of truth; there is nothing false in him.”
• 7:28-29, Then Jesus, still teaching in the temple courts, cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I am from.  I am not here on my own, but he who sent me is true.  You do not know him, but I know him because I am from him and he sent me.”
• 9:4, “As long as it is day, we must do the work of him who sent me.  Night is coming, when no one can work.”

The writer to the Hebrews picks up on the sending nature of Christ’s mission in 10:7: “then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—I have come to do your will, O God.’”  These passages and others like them reverberate that Christ was sent on a mission to fulfill his Father’s sovereign plans as a servant.  In this operation, the incarnate Son of God comes under the Father’s mission to complete the work that he was sent to do so that the Father would receive the glory.  This is the starting biblical portrait of submission.  It directly involves the organization and prioritization of plans under the mission of God for the advancement of his kingdom through his church.

This is where proper role-relationships begin in the biblical understanding of marriage, and the husband must first understand this.  Biblical submission does NOT start in its practical understanding and application with the wife.  It starts with the husband seeing the submission of Jesus to His heavenly Father, and then patterning his obedience and submission to Christ, and to God’s will/mission for his life, home, and marriage.  If the husband will first see Christ’s submission to God the Father, and then pattern his submission to Christ, his marriage would almost overnight be changed.

Next blog: Why has this been so difficult to grasp?