Marriage Shaped by Scripture. Not Culture
by Mike Siszka
Ephesians 5:22-33
22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, 23 because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything. 25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her 26 to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. 27 He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless. 28 In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30 since we are members of his body. 31 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. 32 This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church. 33 To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.
Ephesians 5:22-33 is famous for being uncomfortable to discuss. Yet, this is God’s Word, so the question arises: Why are we uncomfortable with God’s truth? We must first unpack the source of this before understanding what God intends for us to take from this text. The first three verses are particularly challenging to hear in our modern equality-driven American society.
22 Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, 23 because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.
When reading the Bible, we must learn to strip away our personal and cultural bias, leaning into what God wants us to hear. American culture, which elevates the self, dismisses the word submission. To submit is to give up your freedom, admit inferiority, and denounce your own truth. This cultural notion of submission does not line up with the biblical definition of submission. So, how did we get here when the majority of Americans still claim to be Christian?
Culture often develops over hundreds or thousands of years. The particular line of intellectual thought germane to this discussion is postmodern power theory. While its explicit form is relatively obscure outside university halls, postmodern thought is deeply intertwined with American culture.
Postmodern power theory views power as deeply embedded in every relationship between individuals, institutions, and society at large. The suspicion is always: why are you making this claim, and how do you benefit? This creates a cynical suspicion toward human interactions where stated moral reasons can be interpreted as attempts to increase power and control wrapped in a veil of morality. We will explore that claim more deeply in the context of Scripture later in this article. For now, you’ve probably heard some of these claims across many social issues.
I am using my religious beliefs to speak out against homosexuality, but that is simply a justification for why I hate a certain group. What I actually want is to oppress that group. I feel abortion is wrong not because I believe all life is sacred, but because I don’t want women to have control over their own bodies.
Through that lens, marriage becomes the ultimate power struggle with men and women fighting for control in the relationship. The Bible becomes a text that a patriarchal society uses to justify, from God Himself, why men should be in charge. However, just as interpreting the Bible is outside our personal and cultural bias, we must learn to read it as a whole, not three verses at a time.
In this case, we don’t have to look far for the context. The rest of this passage gives way to a counter-thought and details the husband's role in marriage. Even the very next verse demands a different interpretation. Before we can define biblical submission, the context needs to be examined. Who is the wife submitting to, and why is that submission different from the cultural definition we just discussed?
25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her
Notice that the language is not even for the husband to lead. It is to give himself up. Let's go over the brief timeline of Christ giving Himself for the church:
God incarnated Himself as man to experience the world and its hurt as we do. He lived the perfect life and, despite that, was led to a humiliating, unjust, painful, and early death. That wasn’t enough. Through this death, He bore the weight of all mankind's sin. Imagine the weight you would feel if you had to bear responsibility right now, in the ultimate sense, before God the Father for every sin you committed last week. That weight would crush us all. Christ took on all sin for all time absorbing the cost onto Himself. Christ didn’t come to rule or to conquer, at least in the human sense; He came to serve:
“For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). Christ’s direct message to the apostles in Matthew 20:26 reads, “Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.”
This isn’t a text describing why it is morally justifiable for the women to submit and the husband to rule. It is describing how two different genders should interact with one another in the context of marriage.
Now the stage has been set to interpret this text in accordance with our lives from a biblical standpoint, rather than a culturally biased one. Let's answer two questions more explicitly: What is biblical submission? What responsibility comes with the instruction for the husband to give himself up for his wife?
Biblical submission is not forced obedience, but a trusting and purposeful reordering of the will toward what is highest. It is not a loss of self but a finding of one’s self. This form of submission, as we will see, only makes sense when headship looks like the cross. We can break that definition into its parts, looking first at submission as a trusting and purposeful act. Let's look at a few verses describing what Jesus did when He gave Himself for the church.
Philippians 2:5–8
5 Adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, 6 who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited. 7 Instead he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, taking on the likeness of humanity. And when he had come as a man, 8 he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death—even to death on a cross.
Christ says in John 10:18 “No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have the right to lay it down, and I have the right to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”
We see that within the Godhead, submission comes from a love and trust from the Son to the Father. Scripture paints submission not with a loss of dignity, but with Christlikeness. Hebrews 12:21 gives us a reason for Christ’s submission to the point of death on the cross, “For the joy set before Him, He endured the cross.”
The joy Christ looked toward is the same one we all have, to spend an eternity in the presence of God surrounded by many brothers and sisters made perfect. We will experience a joy so immense that it is unfathomable in our current form. This again shows distinctly that biblical submission springs forth from love and trust through sacrifice for a greater joy and purpose. This brings us to the next piece of our definition: the reordering of our will.
Romans 12:1-2 paints a picture of what reordering our will looks like and what will come of that as we align closer to God’s will. “Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.”
Submission to Christ transforms us not into something lesser but into something greater. It is not a destruction of our will but the act of pointing our will toward that which is true. Luke 9:24 brings home this reordering: “For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”
Now the question arises, if following Christ is the best approach to life and will make us true and pure, why is it so difficult? One answer, at least in part, is that the difficulty in following God is giving up all the things you could be for the one thing you were meant to be. We resist out of perceived limitation. Submission feels like restriction, not growth. With Christ, that couldn’t be further from the truth. He does not desire to control us or limit options, but wants us to experience the absolute best. A father teaching his son not to touch a hot stove isn’t limiting his choices; it is saving him from destruction. Likewise, submission to Christ in the context of the cross is to reorder our will toward the ultimate joy of being aligned with and eventually in the presence of the Father.
The husband's role as the head is to be a Christ-like example for the wife and eventually children. It is not to limit or stifle the wife’s growth, but to make decisions he genuinely believes are best for his wife. This is why biblical submission occurs in the context of the cross: It is when the husband is willing to absorb the costs, pain, and humiliation without demanding repayment. Without this, the husband does become a tyrant demanding submission, not a Christ-like example drawing in the wife’s love and respect.
The rest of Ephesians 5:22-33 gives us more detail into the husband’s role in marriage.
26 to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. 27 He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.
Even verse 26 has some problems from the modern view of relationships. To make her holy is not a form of moral policing where the husband controls her holiness. He is, however, responsible for never being the reason she struggles to pursue a pure and holy life. He is there to remove unnecessary burdens, create safety for growth, and model Christ-like character. The husband is to sacrificially lead his wife to sanctification.
Yet, that doesn’t complete his role as a Christ-like example. It can be easy to focus on sacrificial love both in what Christ did and in our modeling of Him. That still misses the point, which verses 28-31 expose.
28 In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, 30 since we are members of his body. 31 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.
Here we have the tender side of love. Christ was not merely a stoic who came to Earth to do a mission. He did not ignore the feelings, thoughts, and desires of others so that He could absorb the sins of the world and have it be over with. No, much of the Gospels show Jesus’ unbelievable tender love for the people He encountered. His direct care, compassion, and sorrow for what afflicted them on Earth was paramount to His ministry.
The husband’s role, likewise, is not merely to grind and go to work and deal with problems so his wife doesn’t have to. It is also to treat her with the tender kindness that one might show his own body. It isn’t enough just to remove problems and bear the burden, but to actively care for her in day-to-day life. This means being attentive, compassionate, sweet, and emotionally available. From Colossians 3:19 we get, “Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.”
So in this context, what does a wife submitting to her husband look like? First, it does not mean husband and wife shouldn’t discuss decisions in the context of their family, and it doesn’t mean the husband is always correct. Submission in this context means the wife chooses to support, respect, and align with her husband’s leadership, trusting his commitment to Christ-like sacrifice even when she is in disagreement with his choice.
See, there it is! The man wins in the end; everything prior was just moral justification for that final sentence.
Christianity is so uncomfortable to many in our culture not because it is the opposite of mainstream ideas, but because it addresses them, acknowledges their truths, and exposes their falsehoods. Return quickly to the postmodern view on power and how that influences our roles and actions in relationships. Many of our relationships are built to some degree on power. Not all of our decisions are pure. Likely, all of them have some ulterior motive behind them. An example from my own life bears witness to this. I am not a vocational pastor, but my church offers some opportunities for members of the church to preach and go deeper into the Word. This article is based on a sermon I was fortunate enough to preach. A postmodern claim could be that I desired to preach because I wanted to look holier than I am so that I could get something else. I wanted people to believe I was a better person or had some special knowledge that moved forward my agenda for seeking power.
There is some truth in that claim. The first time I preached, certainly one reason was to try to impress a pretty Christian girl I liked.
Yet, the problem with the postmodern theory is that there was more than one motive: I also wanted to be a bigger part of the church; I wanted to learn more deeply about the Scriptures; I wanted to push myself to be uncomfortable and to grow. Since then, God has used that initial experience to bring about a much deeper understanding of the Word and faith in my life.
The Bible addresses all of that, gives us where that fracture occurred, and explains how to heal the brokenness in our relationships. When man and woman were created in Genesis 2, they were to be joined together and become one flesh. Man and woman were to live in perfect harmony, not identical in their roles and responsibilities, but equal in worth before God. Then, sin enters the world in Genesis 3 when both man and woman disobey God.
The fall of man and entrance of sin have left every action tainted with desires that are not pure. And that fracture, in modern times, has called forth a sin-corrupted response by both males and females.
Much of modern feminism has defined female flourishing in terms historically associated with male achievement. Equality is increasingly measured by women gaining the same positions of political authority, corporate power, income, status, and independence traditionally held by men. The underlying assumption is often that any difference between the roles of men and women must be evidence of inequality, and therefore something to overcome. This is why a common refrain is that women do not need men; independence from men is presented not merely as possible but as a mark of liberation. From a Christian perspective, this does not heal the fracture between the sexes but deepens it. Men and women cease to see their differences as complementary parts of an ordained whole and increasingly see one another as competitors for the same roles, authority, and power.
From the male side, we have the response to feminism. The alpha male has become a popular figure in podcasts and across social media. They have amassed huge followings of young men who are tired of hearing they are oppressive power-motivated tyrants trying to uphold our patriarchal society. The alpha male could be described as a man who believes money and strict competence solve all problems and that discipline and stoicism are true manhood. They are trying to restore the meaning of masculinity and reassert the difference between the sexes. This response, however, puts the man and his abilities rather than Christ at the center.
Women answered the fracture by seeking independence from men. Men have answered by seeking enough power that their authority cannot be questioned. Both responses rely on power.
Ephesians 5 seeks to heal that fracture in a Christ-centered way. Through Christ, we can enter back into a proper relationship. We can cease the desire to dominate one another and focus on a Christ-centered union. Taking a look at the final verse, Ephesians 5:33, we see, “To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.”
This does not show a struggle for power or domination. This shows a husband who is willing to sacrifice and suffer for the good of his wife and a wife, knowing this, having a trustful adoration and desire to submit to the husband’s headship. Nothing in this is involuntary oppression. That is what the entire marriage ceremony is for. It is for the husband to publicly announce, “No matter what, I by my own free choice will do everything in my power to give you the best and make you more like Christ.” Similarly, the wife publicly announces that, of all the men, “I have chosen you to be my head and lead me on this sanctification process.”
Something worth repeating, as it is the entirety of the Christian life, is that we must conform not to the world but to Christ. Through Christ, we can heal our broken relationships into the fullness of His perfect love. This means looking to the example Christ gave us through His words and ministry. It means reading and praying daily for understanding. It means humbly submitting ourselves to Him and His word in our lives, thoughts, and actions before any proper submission or headship in the context of Christ makes sense. A Christ-centered marriage is a beautiful, true, and noble union. Do not let the world convince us that portions of the Bible are wrong or outdated. If we are uncomfortable in any portion, we must look to our own flaws and ignorance. For this is the Word of God, not man; do not be fooled. Place your trust, hope, and life in the Word, as we all cleanse ourselves from the worries of the world and strive to be joined to Christ.