Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Ephesians 5:21-22 on Biblical Submission

Pastor Dennis Tuuri

The reading of his word and the exposition of it. I’m going to focus today on Ephesians 5:21 and 22, but I want to read it in its more extended context for various reasons. So I’m going to actually read from verse 15 of chapter 5 through verse 13 of chapter 6. So please stand for the reading of God’s word from the book of Ephesians.

See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore, do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation, but be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord, giving thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another in the fear of God.

Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, as also Christ is head of the church, and he is the Savior of the body. Therefore, just as the church is subject to Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that he might present her to himself in a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish.

So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church.

Nevertheless, let each one of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth. And you fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord.

Bondservants, be obedient to those who are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, and sincerity of heart as to Christ, not with eye service as man pleasers, but as bondservants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, with good will doing service as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that whatever good anyone does, he will receive the same from the Lord, whether he is a slave or free.

And you masters do the same things to them, giving up threatening, knowing that your own Master also is in heaven, and there is no partiality with Him. Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Therefore, take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all to stand.

Let’s pray. Lord God, it’s our desire to stand firm in the Lord Jesus Christ throughout the length of our days. We thank you, Lord God, that you tell us in these texts that we can do that. We can be empowered by you. Help us, Father, to understand these scriptures. Help us not to bring preconceived notions that are of our own making and not of your Spirit’s making to the text. Help us to understand it and rejoice in it and be transformed by it. In Jesus’s name we ask it and for the sake of His kingdom. Amen.

Please be seated.

We have an odd coincidence of days today. This is the first Sunday in Lent. We had an Ash Wednesday service here Wednesday night and a meditation on the suffering of the Savior. Lent comes from the word lengthen, refers to the lengthening of the days as we move toward Resurrection Sunday. But this is also the Sunday before Valentine’s Day. So you know, do I preach a sermon on suffering or do I preach a sermon on marriage? Well, so that’s right. One is the other. And I only say that partially kidding.

You know, we’ve talked about this before, but C.S. Lewis in his book *God in the Dock* has an essay on the pastor and the lunch, and he says the Christian family is always talked about as the greatest place on the face of the earth. And it can be at moments, but more often than not, the Christian family, he says, is one of the worst places on earth because it’s where men feel free to be men, which means they feel free to sin. And our homes can frequently not represent what God wants us, what God says our families can be like. And that’s not okay. I mean, it’s not okay. We want to transform that. And part of the way we transform it is by His word.

But if you’re in that situation, don’t misunderstand anything I say today. You know, all the families here, all the relationships here, whether it’s husband and wife or friends, they all go through trials, tribulations, and sufferings. We sin against each other all the time. And so this text is important to get us not to do that as much, but also to get us to understand what God is doing in these relationships in spite of our sinfulness. And I think that’s what I want to talk about today.

Submission. It’s the four-letter word submit. It’s actually a six-letter word, but it’s kind of the four-letter word of much of our culture today, not just the feminist movement. You know, last time I preached on this explicit topic, this text, I had a joke title: “How to Make Your Wives Submit.” And the idea was, you know, the whole sermon was about how husbands should love their wives because that’s what the text says.

And then many of you know this story already, but then when I was involved in the anti-gay marriage thing, some union rag was talking about how horrible the people that were behind this were. And the only thing they could come up with on me, which I was pretty happy about—probably I didn’t do too much digging in my past—but the only thing that came up on me was “he preaches sermons like ‘How to Make Your Wife Submit.’”

So, not realizing either they didn’t listen to the sermon or didn’t want to represent it in its truthfulness, which is that you can’t do that. And we’ll see that again today. You can’t do it. And you can’t encourage submission through love. And that was the point of my last sermon.

So this six-letter word submit. It reminds me of when, you know, Nietzsche and then I think later Time magazine, you know, the big time “God is dead.” And you know, Christians freak out. Well, some gods are dead. Some gods need to die as gods. And the God that was dead in the mind of Nietzsche or Time magazine may or may not have been the God of the scriptures. Okay. So it’s the same thing here with submission. If we articulate the biblical truth about what submission is, what it teaches to us, not just in husband-wife relationships. We just read the word to submit to one another in everything.

If we understand what that is and people still reject it, well okay fine, but much of the antithesis to submission in American culture is against a false view of submission that really isn’t found in the scriptures. So I want to talk about that some today.

I’m going to talk about, after this short introduction, basically five things. First of all, that biblical submission represents a reversal of the curse. So if we understand the importance of this idea, biblical submission represents a reversal of the curse. Secondly, I’m going to say biblical submission is an emblem, a picture of the gospel itself. It’s, you know, what’s the gospel? Well, it’s all found in biblical submission. We’ll see that.

Third, I’m going to say that biblical submission unleashes power for victory. Okay? Power for victory is involved in biblical submission. Fourth, I’m going to say that the context for submission in marriage is mutual submission to one another, husband and wife. Mutual submission. And then finally, I’m going to say that submission is voluntary in the Bible. There’s a voluntary nature of biblical submission. Whether it’s to each other, to the government, to your employer, to somebody else, whatever it is, biblical submission is voluntary.

And that’s kind of how we want to proceed then. So it’s a reversal of the curse. It’s a picture of the gospel itself. It’s powerful. It is found in the context of mutuality of submission, and it’s voluntary. So it’s mutual and voluntary.

Now in this text, I’m going to kind of focus a little bit on verses 21 and 22. We have here, and this is the reason why I read it in context. We have kind of an interweaving. We have a couple of things here. First of all, in verse 21, submitting to one another in the fear of God. That obviously goes back to verse 20 and the verses that lead up to it. So he’s describing the Christian life and he sort of then says mutual submission in the body of Christ is what it’s all about. And so that takes us back to the previous section, but it also points us forward to the next section. It links together. And then in verse 22 it says, “Wives to your own husbands as to the Lord.” The word submit isn’t even in that verse. It’s implied from the verse that just preceded. It’s following that verse. So you can’t rip these two apart. They’re bound together in the very writing of the text of scripture. So the submission that’s called for of the wife in verse 22 is linked to this mutual submission. And to do anything other than that is to rip it out of context totally.

In the Christian world a lot of times what you’ll hear is, well, there’s a complementarity of the responsibilities of husband and wife. They say this: husbands are supposed to love; wives are supposed to respect their husbands. And there’s some degree of truth to that, but I think it’s more fiction than it is fact. It’s more fiction because, first of all, the command of the wife—and it is a command that she’s to voluntarily engage in—is not respect. That’s the last verse in this section. And when he sums up the roles of husband and wife, he says that wives should relate to their husbands with the proper sense of respect or fear. Where is that? That’s in verse 33 in Ephesians 5.

This is the summary statement. So he says mutual submission, and then he says husbands and wives what they’re supposed to do. Then he says children and dads what you’re supposed to do. Then he says servants and masters what you’re supposed to do. So the section here of husbands and wives ends with verse 33. “Nevertheless, let each of you in particular so love his own wife as himself, and let your wife see that she respects her husband.”

Well, that word respect is *phobos*—phobia, claustrophobia, fear of small places. It’s fear. Now, it has an idea of respect or reverence, maybe a better way to put it. But a lot of wives get kind of hung up on this because they’re told they’re supposed to respect their husbands, by which they think they’re supposed to list a bunch of qualities that he has that make them respect him. That’s not what’s going on here. That’s completely wrong from my understanding of the text.

And this fear here actually is kind of a bookend to what we just read. Verse 21 doesn’t just say there’s mutual submission. Verse 21 says submitting to one another in the fear of God. And it’s the same word. So fear of God at the beginning, and at the end of the first section the wife is to fear the husband. There’s a mutuality of fear. If you want to redefine it as respect, I think that’s a big problem because it doesn’t catch the connotation of the word correctly. It seems like admiration to people. That’s not what the text says.

So this idea that, you know, husbands are to love their wives and wives are to respect their husbands, I think it’s basically a problem because respect isn’t the word, it’s fear. And it relates. And when we see that the fear of the wife for her husband is related back to the beginning of the text where it’s the fear of God and we’re all supposed to have that, there’s a mutuality of submission. There’s also a mutuality of the fear of God.

Now having said that, you know, the wife is given this duty of submission. So if there is a complementarity, it would be: husbands love your wives and wives submit to your husbands. That would be what it would be. Even that, so that’s okay. But even that, you know, makes us begin to think. And people actually tell you this: that wives aren’t called to love their husbands. Well, that’s ridiculous. I mean, older women are supposed to teach the younger women explicitly how to love their husbands. And so that’s wrong on that side. And on the other side, men think they’re not supposed to submit to their wives. And that’s wrong because verse 21 says there’s supposed to be a mutuality of submission.

So you know, I’ve been watching movies the last couple of weeks, some really good ones. I saw *There Will Be Blood*. I saw *No Country for Old Men*. These are very interesting movies, and I really like them. And then I’m watching this TV series *Lost*, which is back. And what I like about these things is they make you think. They make you think. Tommy Lee Jones is a character—no, I’m not going to give it away—but Tommy Lee Jones is in *No Country for Old Men*, and you sort of have to look at him differently in this movie.

Well, when we come to this text, we have all these preconceived sort of notions going on. And what I’m asking us to do is say, well, what does the text say? Let’s sort of think about it a little bit like it’s one of these great movies and think about that.

I’m going to close that door. I have a talking caller ID in my phone. Nice for me, but when the doors open, not too nice for you. Okay.

So there’s this—that’s what we want to do today is sort of step back a little bit and not take the normal categories to it, and we want to critique a little bit of ways we’ve kind of thought about it or some people have said it. And finally, I want us to remember, as we get into the details of what I’m going to be talking about, the New Testament is revolutionary in the proper sense of the term. It’s—we talk about this at the Lord’s Supper. God is doing something radically different from the Greek and Roman culture and radically different than the perversions of Judaism at this time.

And you know, without giving away the whole thing here, let me just say, for instance, one of these things about stepping back and thinking about the text without your presuppositions. I have noticed it, and I think you probably have noticed it too, that in these relationship commands—whether it’s in Colossians, which is the kind of the smallest, short form of the household code so-called, where it says these same things that Ephesians does but in little summary fashion, whether it’s here, wherever it is—it begins with the wives before it gets to the husbands. It begins with the children before it addresses the dads. It begins with the servants before it addresses the masters. Why would that be? It’s something worth thinking about. I think it’s something worth thinking about, and I think it sets us up to properly understand these verses.

And the Roman culture was one of *paterfamilias*, you know, which is kind of a joke—”Oh brother, where art thou”—but that’s the idea. *Paterfamilias*, the father could take out kids if he wanted. He could literally execute them at certain times in Roman culture. He was the head. Women were inferior. They were kind of like, you know, ways to have kids and stuff, but they were seen as really inferior in their essence to men. And Judaism by this time—Josephus, if you read him, you’ll find out that again there, they had misinterpreted the Old Testament to say that women were inferior in some way.

And this is why this relationship difference, this submission thing has to occur. Well, in Rome particularly, but also in Judaism, if you addressed members of the household, you would address them through the dad because he’s *paterfamilias*, you see. Well, what does Paul do? He goes right to the inferiors—functionally speaking, not in terms of essence, but that side of the relationship. And he addresses them directly. He doesn’t say husbands, do this with your wives, and he doesn’t even say husbands first and then wives, which is what we’d sort of think. The husband is representing Christ, he does what he does first, the wife does that in response. And you can make a case for that. But Paul goes out of his way to place the wife, the child, and the servant first. That’s revolutionary at the time he wrote this.

You know, some people say, “Well, they got to have these household codes in here because, you know, Rome was worried and Judaism was worried and Christianity was trying to say, ‘No, we’re just like you. Don’t worry. We’re going to keep family structures together like you Romans do and like you Jews do.’” Uh-uh. I’ll believe that for a second. What we have in the New Testament is the kingdom has arrived in full. Now the new creation has come. And in the new creation, we have a relationship. We have the basic building block of culture. We agree with, you know, Rome on that and with Aristotle and other philosophers that you have to have a godly Christian family to have a godly culture. But that godly Christian family is seen as having individuals in it who are directly addressed by Paul.

And this isn’t the only place, of course. I mean, the Old Testament already did this. Proverbs was written to young boys—at least the first part of it—and in the New Testament in 1 John, you know, he writes to the young, the little children, to the young men, then to the dads. There’s a directness. Now, yeah, he tells kids to obey your parents, but he’s talking directly to them. Okay, that’s revolutionary.

So as we come to this text, we don’t want to just sort of read the common stuff into it that we bring, you know, the context of the way America works or the way the Romans worked or the way the Jews worked at the time of Jesus. This is revolutionary sort of stuff. Okay.

So let’s then talk a little bit about the elements that I just spoke about. And first, we want to see that this is a reversal of the curse. What do I mean? And I’m going to talk now specifically about the husband-wife relationships. And what I mean is that the curse—God’s punishment—or no, God’s chastisement. Oh, I should say one other thing before we get into this idea of submission. The specific word is *hupotasso* or *hupotassō*, and that’s the word that’s used here about mutual submission, submission of wives to dads, etc.

By the way, that’s another thing that’s revolutionary about the instruction to the wife. She is not told to obey the husband. Now, you’re going to tell me, well, over there in 1 Peter, you know, it says that, you know, we’re supposed to have Sarah as the example for wives who obeyed her husband and called them Lord. That’s true, but it doesn’t say Sarah who all of her life did nothing but obey her husband. She’s an example. So the emphasis is on the submission word, not upon obedience.

Now kids, they’re supposed to obey. So wives are treated as full adults in the context of the Christian message. They’re not told to obey. Their primary job is to enter into this voluntary mutual submission that everybody’s supposed to do. And we’ll talk about—you know, we don’t want to get rid of the fact that she’s commanded to do that, but we want to put it in a proper context.

Well, the whole idea of this submission that’s being talked about, the first place it’s used in the New Testament, and you know, there’s kind of a thing in exegesis of the Old Testament, New Testament. You look for first occurrence of the word and sometimes it’s significant, sometimes it isn’t. I think it is here. The first usage of the word *hupotasso* or submit is the text that we preached on a couple weeks ago. Do you remember Jesus at the temple, 12 years old, and his parents come get him and he goes back? And we’re told in Luke 2:51 that he went down with them and came to Nazareth and was subject—who was it?—*hupotassoed* himself, got in submission to them. But his mother kept all these things in her heart.

Well, that helps clear it up with big bold symbol, right? Because Jesus is in no way inferior to his parents. He’s part of an order of functional inferiority we could say, but when we use the term inferior we start to think wrongly. Jesus is placing himself under the order that is the home order that he is supposed to do, and he’s a model for our children about that. But Jesus by this time—reasoning with the men in the temple, etc.—he probably knows a lot more about the Bible than they do. This is the man that created the world. He brought them into existence. Okay, Jesus Christ did that, and he is voluntarily *hupotassoing* himself the same way that wives and we are to do to one another. He’s doing that in the very first usage of the term.

So it’s the first Greek usage plus it’s this first picture of somebody subjecting himself to somebody else who’s in authority in terms of an ordered relationship. And it should immediately tell us that every other time we read the word, we don’t want to make the same stupid mistakes, the sinful mistakes that the Romans and the Jews at this time made. We don’t want to bring into this term something that somehow makes us think that wives are inferior in intellect, ability to follow God, devotion to God, whatever it is. You see, they’re like Jesus. Think of it that way. In terms of the relationship of Jesus to his parents, the wife is put in the same context as Jesus, not the parents. Jesus was superior, and many wives are superior in many ways. So that’s not what’s going on in biblical submission.

Okay.

So now I want to talk about this reversal of the curse. Turn. Well, you can either turn or just listen. In Genesis 3:16, here’s the curse. Here’s—well, curse. Here’s God’s judgment upon the woman. “To the woman He said, ‘I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception. In pain you shall bring forth children. Listen, your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you.’”

So your desire is for your husband. He shall rule over you. Now this is a big verse. There’s a lot of controversy, contention about it. I know what I think it means, and I do it based on the very verse that comes just a few verses later in Genesis 4:7. God is talking to Cain and he says, “If you do well, will you not be accepted? If you do not do well, sin lies at the door and its desire is for you.” Same word.

So, you know, I think that one implication of God’s judgment upon fallen man—once man rebelled against God, you know, things happen that aren’t good. Men’s vocation gets way more difficult. Jesus comes to reverse the curse as far as it’s fun. Well, what happens to male-female relationships is that God judicially imposes a desire of the woman, I think, to dominate her husband, to take and reverse the order, the structure of the household that God sets up. So the sinful effect on women of the curse is that they desire to dominate husbands the same way sin is crouching at Cain’s door and wants to strike out at him.

And men will be ruling over wives. The sinfulness that they now have, the sin nature, is demonstrated in a wife not correctly ordering herself in the context of male leadership in the home, and the husband not correctly leading by way of love but by rule and authority. Now that’s what happens with the effects of the curse. Jesus comes and the new creation is brought to completion. The curse is being rolled back, and we see in the mundane instructions of Paul to homes we see the reversal of this. We see that wives will now properly order themselves voluntarily in the context of the structure that is the home, and men will not rule over or dominate women. Men will love their wives and lead in that way.

So when we read that the woman is to fear the husband, you know, it doesn’t mean she’s supposed to fear him because he gets angry. And I will bet you that more often than not in many of our homes, that’s what wives do. It’s wrong. It’s sin to have husbands dominate, rule over, make their wives fearful through sinful anger. That’s really bad. That’s the fall. God says, “No, women are to have a reverence, a fear of God, an appreciation for him and how he’s ordering the world that will drive them to voluntarily submit themselves to the government that God has established in the home with the man as the leader. Okay?”

So that’s what’s going on, and it’s a reversal of the curse. So when we see Rome and Judaism the other way around, they’re still doing what Genesis 3 says. Those, you know, wives are being ruled over with authority. They’re seen as inferior. Women are battling their husbands. And so you got the Caesars’ wives poisoning people and stuff. Everything’s all messed up. It’s the culmination of the curse. And Jesus comes and pours out His Spirit that renews the earth. That’s the context in Ephesians 5: being filled with the Spirit.

And in homes that are filled with the Spirit of God, wives voluntarily submit to the leadership of the husband. They get in the order of the family that works that way. You all are doing it right now. You’re voluntarily submitting to me. You’re listening to me. You’re voluntarily submitting to the choir director when you all sing together and one of you doesn’t decide to sing this and one sing that. You know, you’re voluntarily. It’s the same thing in the home.

So it’s the reversal of the curse itself. I believe that’s what’s going on.

Secondly, biblical submission is not just a reversal of the curse. It’s actually a little picture, an emblem, you know, a little representation of the gospel itself. And again, this is why Greek ethics are transformed by it because the gospel has come. What’s the gospel? It’s not that we can be saved. That happened in the Old Testament. That wasn’t the good news, the new news. The gospel is that Jesus Christ has come and things are changing.

Now, part of the gospel is salvation for us. Sure. But this is where, you know, in the New Testament, you got this Greek stuff and then you got the Hebrew and the Old Testament. And one way to kind of link the two sometimes is the Septuagint, which is a Greek version of the Hebrew Old Testament. Okay?

And this Greek word for submission, *hupotasso*, it’s the translation of a phrase in Psalm 8:6. And Psalm 8:6, we’ll see it here in a minute, is referred to in a usage of *hupotasses*, *hupotassos*, *hupotassā* over and over and over again. But Psalm 8:6 says this: “You have made him to have dominion over the works of Your hands. You have put all things under his feet. You have *hupotassed* everything under the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Jesus comes. Now, this is—I’m referring to man, but man fell, so things were not. Now the wife is trying to overturn him and yada yada. Now Jesus comes, and the gospel is that as the second Adam and as King of the world, now he is. God the Father has submitted all things under the feet of the Lord Jesus Christ. Okay.

Now this is picked up in 1 Corinthians 15. Look at 1 Corinthians 15 beginning at verse 25. Turn there please.

1 Corinthians 15 beginning at verse 25. So what is the gospel? What is the gospel of the kingdom? The reign of the King Jesus. What is it? Verse 25. “He that is Jesus must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.” Verse 27. “For he has put all things under his feet.”

That’s Psalm 8. See, this word he has put is translated *hupotasso*—brought to submission, everything under Christ. But when he says all things are *hupotassed* under him, it’s evident that he who *hupotassed* all things under him is accepted. Now when all things are *hupotassed* to him, then the Son himself will also be *hupotassed* to him who *hupotassed* all things under him. Over and over and over, submission, submission, subjection.

And so the gospel is that Jesus Christ has come. God the Father has given all things under him to be put in right relationship to him. And Jesus Christ himself is in right relationship and turns it all over *hupotassing* it to the Father. So again, Father and Son are equal, right? But the Son submission submits to the order of Father and Son relationship in this as well.

I guess what I’m saying is the gospel is that everything now progressively in time is being rightly ordered. Rightly ordered, reconciled, which means reconciled in the context of an order and a structure of relationships. The fall is every man for himself, judges. We see that every man doing what’s right in his own eyes. The gospel is that Jesus Christ comes and now he reigns at the right hand of the Father. The kingdom has come. Everything in the world is being put to rights. And part of that is correctly ordering everything under the Lord Jesus Christ.

So submission is what it’s all about. That’s what 1 Corinthians 15 says, picking up on Psalm 8:6, the gospel. What it’s all about is submission, correctly ordering things. So again, that helps us to see we don’t have some sort of tyrant God. What we have in the heavens is a relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in mutual submission to each other. And that’s why we can talk about mutual submission in relationships.

But in that mutual submission, there is an order. And Jesus Christ submission is in subjection to the Father voluntarily. The text made that real clear in 1 Corinthians 15. That’s a voluntary submission. So, you know, we get it all wrong if we see God as like an individual unitarian sort of thing, compelling everything, and the gospel is he’s going to force everybody to be right. That isn’t it. The gospel is that God is a God who brings things to their proper order, which is this submission, and it’s a submission that has to be seen as voluntary in its essence. Okay? Because that reflects the Trinity.

The Lions were at a homeschool conference in Salem, I guess, and there was a speaker there who was a member of a CRC church in North Carolina, and he was talking on a trinitarian life. And he wanted to know how many people in the audience had heard of the word *perichoresis*. So they did—three of them, Zach and Matt and—yeah, let me know. Some of you have heard it. You might have forgotten it. What is it? It’s the mutual indwelling of each other of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And it’s related to this idea of submission. *Perichoresis*, the mutual indwelling of each other, living correctly, although in an ordered community, but correctly with mutual submission. That’s what the gospel is. Everything’s going to become like that.

So you can either get with the program in your home and forego threatenings and anger and try to force your wife to do stuff. Now, you can forget that—that’s wrong—and you can have not too nice a time. Valentine’s Day won’t be all that happy for you, or it’ll be a little bit of fantasy in the midst of an otherwise darkened home. And wives can forget that this is what’s really important: a correct ordering of themselves. Not because they’re unequal, not because they’re less of a person, but because this is the way the fun, the world will function correctly if, in various relationships, you know, headship is demonstrating love and those that follow headship are demonstrating a voluntarily placing themselves in order in that relationship. And that’ll be blessing. And if you forget that stuff, well then your home’s going to just be, you know, fighting back and forth and continue to manifest that sort of stuff.

Romans 8:7 tells us it’s the essence of pagan man to not be subject to, not be *hupotasso* to the law of God. Now I got a survey from a legislator this week, Dave H. I thought it was so funny. He wants to know what priorities the legislature should have for the next session. And so one of the little boxes you can click on the internet is making college more affordable, creating good paying jobs for Oregonians. Government’s going to create good paying jobs for Oregonians. They’re going to make education affordable. They’re going to increase K through 12 school funding and improve education. It hasn’t worked so far. They keep increasing the funding and it doesn’t seem to improve it a whole lot. Making health care more affordable and accessible. You see, the state doesn’t, at this stage in our life, isn’t willingly subjecting itself to God’s law. So it wants to come up with law. And Christians follow this. We think that somehow law originates in the state. And we don’t think—that’s not true. But the gospel means that all the world becomes correctly ordered to other people. And in our relationships, we’re correctly ordered under God’s law, the representation of His rule in our house.

I had—had I done a coloring, had I done an outline this week, I would have put this. Angie just gave this to me, just because it was she just found it lying around, but I said that would have been perfect for today. This is the fall. This is a disorderly bedroom. It’s not ordered correctly. It’s not *hupotassed*. And the gospel is that this is going away and things are going to get ordered correctly. Blessed are the peacemakers who bring God’s order to our lives.

There’s an orderliness to the Christian home when wives recognize the relationship of her to her husband in terms of headship. There’s an orderliness in authority structures—home, workplace, etc. So it is. It’s a reversal of the curse. The cursed world tries to exercise force, rule by men and women in those in functional positions that should be yielding authority to people. They want to rebel and revolt. So that’s what the fall was. The reversal of that is having things in correct order. And this having things in correct order is really a picture of the gospel itself.

The gospel reverses the curse.

Now it’s power for victory too. This word *hupotasso* was originally, comes from two words, and one is a military term. So *hupo* means under, *tasso* means ordered. So *hupotasso* was a military term meaning to draw up in order of battle, to form, array, marshal both troops or ships. It meant that troop divisions were to be arranged in a military fashion under the command of the leader. In this state of subordination, they were now subject to the orders of their commander. Thus, it speaks to the subjection of one individual under or to another.

*Hupotasso*, listen, was also used to describe the arrangement of military implements on a battlefield in order that one might carry out effective warfare. So the term itself and its origins in Greek are a reminder to the family that they are God’s tool for dominion or victory. I think there’s a book by that name or something. And they’re not the only tool. Any place that is has proper order and relationship to it becomes a place of effectiveness for the battle. But the home particularly—we’re talking about that here. The point is that proper submission to authority is power for victory. It means you’re going to be more effective as a fighting team and squadron for the Lord Jesus Christ.

A church in proper order, a community, a Christian community in proper order, a family in proper order is effective and powerful for victory. And the verse is defeat if you don’t do that. That’s why I read the full context of Ephesians because after all these relationships are talked about, what does Paul then address in chapter 6? He talks about being prepared for battle, putting on the whole armor of God. If you don’t have, you know, the right relationship of husband and wife at Valentine’s Day, you’re not prepared for battle and you’re going to suffer more defeats than you are victories.

God says that the curse is reversed. The gospel is made emblematic, and victory is accomplished through the right ordering of things in the context of the home certainly, and also in other areas of life.

So it’s power for victory. Again, it doesn’t—you know, if, and that means that if we take a foreign definition of what submission is, if we say submission is just a slavish obedience to the husband as opposed to a voluntary submission, then if that’s what’s happening in the home, you’re not correctly ordered and you’re not going to be as effective for victory in the context of the culture wars or whatever else we’re involved with. You understand?

So to bring in foreign concepts, and particularly ones where the husband is ruling over wives dictatorily, not only is it really a shame because it’s just wrong, but it hurts the Christian cause as we press forward the gospel of Christ. It’s a real problem in reformed churches, particularly newly reformed churches. You know, in evangelical world there, the order has been lost of the home, and so everybody’s equal. And you know, and then guys become reformed, they become Calvinists, reformed Baptists or five-point Calvinists, and man, now they’re going to make that wife submit. Now they’re going to rule the home. “This is it. I’m going to, you know, bring down the law. Now that I see the Bible says I’m supposed to rule in my home.” Well, you know, you got half of it right. You’re supposed to lead in your home, but if you’re leading that way, that’s the fallen way of doing it.

God says the way to lead is to encourage voluntary submission on the part of your wife. Okay. So, and that makes that, gives us power and effectiveness for victory in battle.

So the context of this, as I said, is the mutual submission of verse 21. The mutual submission follows, and this is why I read just before that. It follows the discussion of the Spirit-filled life. You can’t do this apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. That’s one way to say it. The other way to say it is that if the Spirit is at work in your life, you’re going to be mutually submissive to other members of the body of Christ, including your wife, husbands, including your kids. If they bring knowledge to you of the Word of God, if they bring a little, you know, “Dad, what about this?”—line up under their, you know, correctness. At times there’s a mutual submission.

Homes are to be places where lots of discussion and agreement are made about decisions. It’s not supposed to be a place where husband makes a decision and all his wife is supposed to do is salute. That’s the wrong image. That’s not the way we do battle. That’s the way the world does battle. Husband makes a decision after consultation with wife, and then the decision goes forward for the two of them, and the wife does what she can to support the husband’s decision.

So this is mutual submission, and verse 21 is the immediate context. As one commentator says, “We must be of a yielding and submissive spirit and ready to all the duties of the respective places and stations that God has allotted to us in the world.” A yielding and submissive spirit. In other words, it’s the opposite of demanding what you want in a relationship. It’s a yielding submission. Particularly when times are difficult, we don’t understand—well, if there’s a sweet reasonableness of our attitudes one to the other, this is the proper ordering up of the army of the Lord Jesus Christ. This is proper submission that gives us in the church. You see, it’s the same thing. If we don’t have mutual submission in the church, the church is not as effective a fighting force for the Lord Jesus Christ if there’s not that going on.

And as I said, part of this mutual submission—let’s put it this way: the immediate context for the wife to understand the husband’s or the husband to understand the wife’s obligation of submission is mutual submission. In the same way, when Paul commands husbands and wives in 1 Peter, he—well, let me just read it. 1 Peter 3, verse—chapter 3:1. “Wives likewise be submissive to your own husbands that even if some do not obey the word, they without a word may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear.”

So there it is again: submission and fear. It’s not respect or admiration for the pagan husband. It’s a fear of God working through, if you know, a desire to please the authority structure, the rightly ordering of things that God has placed in the context of the home. And he puts it in the worst case scenario: an unbelieving husband. Okay? She’s supposed to properly order herself under that.

God says we’re supposed to properly order ourselves in the context of the civil state. And he says that in the context of a Roman government that was evil, mean, wicked, nasty, and terrible. But to rebel, to be anarchic, to be revolutionaries against that is wrong. God wants a properly ordered state. And you go about trying to achieve change, but you do it through properly staying in the right relationship to the ordered structure you’re in, whether it’s the home or the state. And you do that because you have a proper reverence and fear of God. This is His power. This is how power is unleashed. This is how the curse is reversed. This is what the gospel is all about: maintaining those right relationships in the context of the home.

But Peter goes on to tell husbands, “Likewise, dwell with your wives with understanding.” I don’t think that means understanding your wife means understanding your responsibilities. What’s your responsibility? What are you supposed to understand? “Giving honor to the wife as to the weaker vessel and as being heirs together of the grace of God.” He says that the context—not just for the submission of the wife but for the way the husband interacts with the wife—is a mutuality, and in this case the mutuality of glory. You see this idea again? This idea that, well, husbands are supposed to love, wives are supposed to respect their husbands—respect is giving glory to them. Well, the idea that Peter says your driving motivation, one of the key tools you’ve got in reference to your wife, is to give her glory, give her respect. And so there’s this mutuality there as well.

So there’s a mutualness to submission and also a mutuality of fear of God working through these relationships and a mutuality of respect and giving each other glory. And as I said, Ephesians 4 sets up Ephesians 5. He says, “With all lowliness and gentleness, longsuffering, bearing up with one another in love.” What is biblical submission? That’s what it is. To have lowliness, gentleness, longsuffering, bearing up with each other in love, not getting ticked off at something. “Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” Working hard at trying to, you know, be properly ordered in the context of your relationships one with the other. “Don’t grieve the Holy Spirit of God. The Spirit comes to bring about this mutual submission. And how would we grieve it?” He says, “Don’t grieve it. Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking be put away from you with all malice.”

So the mutual submission is not giving way to anger, malice, wrath, not getting ticked off, being longsuffering, kind, having a sweet reasonableness in the relations that we have within the body of Christ in the local church with the extended body of Christ. And this is the same thing that goes on in the context of the home.

In 1 Peter 5, he tells elders to serve as overseers not by compulsion but willingly. So they’re supposed to engage the office not by way of compulsion but voluntarily. This is God’s way. It’s not compulsion. It’s willingly. And then he says in verse 5, “Likewise you younger people, submit yourselves to your elders.” So in the context of the church, there’s a proper ordering of submission to the elders. But then he immediately says, “All of you be submissive one to another and be clothed with humility. For God resists the proud.”

Mutual submission has a humility aspect to it. God is arrayed against you. He’s properly ordered against you if you’re prideful and in that pride break up the mutual submission that God says is supposed to characterize the body of Christ. So whether it’s the church, whether it’s the family, there’s a mutual submission. That’s the context for this. Husband and wife are supposed to be submitting to each other. Parishioner and pastor are supposed to be submitting to each other.

Now there’s an order to that. And the guys in the church, the men and women of the church have to see that there’s an order, that the elders of the church have authority. There is a structure to all of that they have to be careful of. But the pastors have to remember that they’re not going to rule. They don’t take the office, nor do they rule the office with compulsion.

When I talk with people, it’s my job to remember that what I’m trying to do with people, if I’m addressing an area of sin in their life, is to get them to voluntarily submit to the teaching of the Word of God and to voluntarily submit to the counsel I’m giving to them. That’s my job. Husbands, if that’s your job relative to your wives, if you think they’re doing something improper, wives, that’s your job relative to your husbands, if you think they’re doing something improper: to get them to voluntarily submit to what the Word of God says.

Remember that the general rubric is we’re all being submissive to the law of God. It’s not submission. It’s not properly yielding order to the husband for the wife to obey, or the citizen to obey an illegal command, right? Peter says we got to obey God rather than men. Because the whole idea is not just saluting somebody. It’s obeying the law of God that sets up the ordered relationship.

So this truth is far broader than what wives do to husbands. It’s about husbands and wives. It’s about the whole of the Christian life. It’s about how we gain dominion and power and strength in the battle: a proper ordering of all things. It’s what Jesus is in the context of doing: bringing all things in submission to himself. And then finally—

So we’ve said that, you know, it’s a reversal of the curse. It’s an emblem of the gospel. We see that it’s power for victory. And we see there’s a mutuality of submission from, you know, every time it’s practically referred to, the context shows a mutuality of submission. And finally, it’s voluntary.

And here, you know, it’s a little—I need to again, this is revolutionary because in the context in which it’s written, wives wouldn’t have been addressed individually, or certainly not first, and they wouldn’t have been told to do something voluntarily. So it’s revolutionary.

How do we know it’s voluntary? Well, in the Greek, it has these very specific tenses and voices that are used. And there’s a way to say “be in subjection,” to subject somebody to yourself. There’s a way to say that. There’s a way to say just line up, you know, obey, because I’m giving you the command to do it. But this particular way that it’s used in Ephesians, in the mutual submission and submission of wives, is in what’s called the passive tense. And the middle voice or the passive voice with the middle sense is another way that you can say it. And what this clearly tells you—and every commentator will talk about this—that the implication, because it’s in the middle voice, it’s a command, but it’s a command that you’re supposed to voluntarily submit to.

So what he’s telling you is the command is to voluntarily array yourself in the order of the home, in the order of the church, in the order of the civil state, in the order of relationships one-to-one when the authority of God’s laws is being brought to bear. And he’s telling you to do that in a voluntary sense. It’s a trinitarian, not a unitarian model. It’s not coercion. It is rather exhortation to voluntarily submit one to the other.

So in other words, using my old sermon title, if a husband wanted to figure out how to make his wife submit, if he succeeds, he hasn’t succeeded because if he makes her do it, it is not voluntary and it’s not biblical submission. It’s impossible. You can encourage, you can try to, you know, encourage, admonish. Wives can do that to their husbands if they don’t think they’re being mutually submissive. Okay? But you cannot force somebody to biblical submission. That’s not what Jesus is doing. Jesus is getting people to come to voluntary submission just like he did. He submits himself to the authority of his parents when he was 12. That’s what he’s doing with everybody else in the context.

So the passive voice of submit indicates that although this is an urgent command, it is still a voluntary action on our part. God sets himself in array against him. He resists the proud. And what’s required then is humility in order to fulfill this. It’s a command. How we fulfill it is having a humility before God, a proper fear of going outside of what He wants us to do, and faith. The fall was about lack of belief that God had their best interest at heart.

Faith in a sovereign God. How else could you submit to pagan government apart from a sovereign God? You couldn’t. So faith in the sovereign God who is superintending all things, who is indeed bringing about the correct ordering of everything under His law, under the person of His Son, and ultimately the Son submitting voluntarily to the Father. This is what reality is. And our sinful nature tells us it won’t work. Something else has to be done. I got to force that person. I got to just obey and not care why I obey. No. God wants you voluntarily submitting to the different relationships that He’s given you to do. That’s requires faith. That requires faith in the sovereign God of all creation. And that’s what we’re supposed to do, whether it’s in the home, in the church, in the state, in the workplace. All of these places are places of order, places of God’s peace, the orderliness of His creation that He calls us to voluntarily submit to.

So as I say, it’s voluntary. It is mutual. It is based on faith. The only way you can do it is the infilling of the Holy Spirit, right? The Holy Spirit empowers us to do this. When we sin, we’re not going to find it easy to do it because now we’ve grieved the Holy Spirit, and God wants us to have sweet reasonableness one to the other in the context of our various relationships in the world. He wants us to do that.

Submission involves a recognition of an ordered structure. A recognition of an ordered structure. God wants the home to have an ordered structure, the church, the workplace, the culture. We are to recognize that and to move in the context of God’s ordered structure. And when we do that, He says, “Then we’re ready for battle.”

You know, Bob Dylan said, “You got to serve somebody.” Well, I think what we’ve seen today is you got to submit to somebody. Biblical submission. And in fact, you got to submit to a whole bunch of people. There’s all kinds of people in the same relationship that a husband is to a wife: parents, pastors, bosses, customers. And if we involve mutual submission, you got to submit to everybody. You got to live your life in a Spirit-empowered, kind, sweet, reasonable, not getting easily offended, being longsuffering with each other. That’s what God calls us to do. And it’s a small thing. It’s a thing you do every day in your lives, either badly or well. And the end result of that, though, is the actual reversal of the curse. It’s a picture of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. It makes you strong for battle and victory, and it’s the way the kingdom of God goes forward.

Let’s pray. Lord God, I pray for this week that husbands and wives particularly might fulfill not pagan conceptions of husbands and wives but rather the biblical conception. Bless our homes, Lord God, this week. Bring us to Valentine’s Day with joy, and help the people here that are not involved in marriage relationships to see the application of this to their relationships. And may this week be one of experiencing the blessings of the removal of the curse through a proper recognition of Your order and joyful participation in it. In Jesus’s name we ask it. Amen.