A Conversation About Submission in Marriage

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today we have a special treat for you. I have as my guest, Mrs. Foskey, my wife, Jennifer. Hi, how are you?

Hi, good to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad you're here. And Jennifer's been wanting to do this with me for quite a while. And we've been looking forward to putting together an episode and we thought what better way and day to do it than when we looked at Ephesians chapter five.

Submission in Marriage from Ephesians 5

So if you have your Bibles open, please turn with me to Ephesians chapter five and we're gonna look at verses 22 down to verse 33. This is the conversation of husbands and wives. So we're gonna read this to the audience and then we're gonna discuss the concept of submission in marriage.

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It says, wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is head of the church, his body and is himself its savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he might present the church to himself in splendor without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.

In the same way, husbands should love their 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 Christ does the church because we are members of his body.

Therefore, man shall leave his father and mother and shall hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

The Changing View of Marriage in the Church and Culture

All right, well, Jennifer,.

We have been married for how many years?

Almost 22 come August the 1st.

Well, I want to begin by congratulating you on being able to put up with me for over two decades. So I wanna say praise the Lord and I'm very thankful that God gave you to me so many years ago. And I know that in our lifetime, we have seen a lot of changes in regard to the way people treat marriage.

In the last 40 years, there has been a big change in how people understand even the concept of marriage. We've seen people go from relatively normal situations where you have father, mother, children, to now a lot of situations is the man and woman maybe live together but aren't married, or maybe there is a single parent home situation.

And that has steadily grown. And so we've seen a major dynamic shift in the family. But one of the shifts that we've seen, and I would say this is very common, even within the church, is a shift to understanding the marriage as an equal partnership between the husband and the wife.

Would you describe marriage between a husband and a wife, from a biblical perspective, would you describe it as an equal partnership?

No, not at all. Now, okay, in one sense, it is a partnership because the two of us together seek to live under Christ, live by what the Bible says. We raise our children and train them up, we want them to love the Lord and we point them to the Lord.

So in that way, yes, but the way that the world means and the world twists that, no, we are not. Keith has roles, the role that is given to him from God, he is the provider of our house, he protects our house.

His role is different than my role. My role is to raise the children and to manage and care for the home. Titus chapter two, as well as first Peter chapter three, details some responsibilities for the woman.

And I am to submit to him as I am to submit to Christ. It's a very unpopular message, but it's a biblical message.

And would you say that the average person hearing you say that would be very off-put by how you just described what marriage is supposed to be like?

Yes, yes, I believe if they had some tomatoes, good thing this is online, I would probably be shielding myself or ducking from them right about now. But yes, that's not a message that's popular outside of the church, but even within the church, those influences from the world have crept in and that message is not popular.

I think Francis Schaeffer said, and I may be misquoting him, but I know that this was said, he said, if you look at where the world is now, that's where the church is gonna be in 20 years. And I think in regard to the family, there's probably no better prophetic word or professorial word than that.

When he said that if you look at where the world is, that's where the church is gonna be in 20 years. And so when we look at our lives, you probably, when we first became Christians, we both became Christians around our 20, in our early 20s, late teens, early 20s, right around the same time we got married.

The church had a very different view on things that we see today as being widely accepted. And a lot of this has to do with the destruction of the family. But way before that, there was already a push within broader Christianity to sort of do away with the concept of structure in marriage as husband and wife.

And we see, again, patterns developing where the women were taking control, not only in the home, but also in the church. And you grew up in a situation where you were a sports person, you were a athlete, that would be the better word to use.

Athlete is the proper word there. My wife was a college scholarship winning athlete. She was a pitcher, a softball pitcher. And when you were pitching, you were playing ball. I would used to go and watch you when we were teenagers, go watch your games.

You were dominating in what would previously been maybe referred to as a male category, sports in particular. And a lot of people still consider sports a male category. So were you brought up in a situation where you were taught that if you did not do the things that a man did, that you were somehow lesser?

Submission, Authority, and Biblical Roles

Yeah, I believe so. Even if it wasn't really stated that way, it was always, I mean, just for example, growing up, I wanted to be a mom. I always, from the earliest age, I wanted to be a mom. But teachers at school or friends would say, what do you wanna be when you grow up?

I wanna be a mom. Well, what else do you want to be? Like, that wasn't good enough, and it's not good enough now. Even 30 years ago, that wasn't good enough. So, and it's okay to just wanna be, desire that, but it's always more.

You know, you should work the same number of hours as a man, or you should be equal in all ways, the equal partnership that we were talking about.

When the Bible mentions the word submit, it says, wives, submit unto your husbands. Do you think the Bible is being misogynistic?

Not at all, no. Because we are to submit to Christ. We are to submit to the church, to the elders. We should submit. Unless the government tells us something to do that is not what Christ wants us to do, we are to submit to our authorities.

Submission is not only in marriage. I mean, Christians should submit, and those that don't have husbands have authority to submit to. So we are called to submission.

When it comes to the subject of submission, we look at this, we look at this list. It says, wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. You've already mentioned the fact that that's not absolute submission, because if I were to tell you to do something that was unbiblical, you would have to follow God rather than men.

That applies to our relationship as well as our relationship to the government. If the government tells us to do something that the Bible says is wrong, then we don't have to do it. Because the Bible is the ultimate authority.

God's word is our ultimate authority. And in our relationship, God's word is still our ultimate authority. So let's say that there was a situation, let's just kind of throw this out there. Let's say there was a woman who said, you know what?

I'm a Christian, but I don't want to submit to my husband, because even though he's a Christian, even though he's a biblical man, even though he provides, I just feel like I should be equal with him, and there isn't in me any desire to submit to him.

He should have no authority over me at all. How would you respond to somebody who said that to you? Because I certainly have heard that.

I've heard that too.

I've heard that before. I mean, I remember years ago, the woman who, I married a couple, and this was very early in my ministry. And she said, take that submission stuff out of the vows, you know, says the wife to submit it to her husband.

And she said, I don't want to hear that. We're going to have absolute equal partnership. If somebody said that to you, and they said, I'm a Christian, and I believe the Bible, but I'm not going to submit to my husband, how would you counsel somebody like that?

I would take them to the scripture. If they're a Christian, I mean, they're saying that they, as a Christian, that they believe what the Bible says, but in their statement, they're saying they're not believing what the Bible says.

I mean, in theory, I mean, maybe they give, they're giving lip service maybe to what the Bible says, but do they really understand what that means? And I would take them to the chapter that you ran and try to reason with them, or try to explain what the scriptures say in other passages too, that speak on submission.

What if they said, but Jennifer, the problem is this passage was written 2000 years ago. We live in a post enlightenment era. We live in modern times. And this was during the time when men treated women like property.

And so this is wrong. How would you respond to that?

I would say the word of God is active. It's sharper than a two-edged sword. It is our authority then, as it is today. It's a living book. What parts, you can't just cut out the parts that you don't like or that don't go along with the, that you think that don't go along with the culture.

I mean, the Bible, it cannot be divided in that way.

I would agree with that. But you understand that that is something that we deal with.

Yeah, absolutely.

In the church, we see that a lot. There are often opportunities and desires among people to usurp authority, especially in marriages. And you and I both, we've been in counseling sessions where the wife obviously has no desire to submit to the husband.

But also, I wanna put this back on the men for a moment because we are not without guilt as well. A lot of men see this wife submit to your husband and they see that as a carte blanche that allows them to behave in all kinds of awful ways.

Christlike Love and the Call to Respect

Can I say something, and I'm not asking you to compliment me, you already do that, and I appreciate the compliments that you give me, but I wanna ask you something. Does the way that I treat you as a husband make it easier for you to submit to me as your authority in the home?

Yes, absolutely.

In what ways?

Just like in that passage, it talks about how Christ loves the church is the way that you're supposed to submit. I mean, you're supposed to show love to your wife. And I believe you do that very well.

Like, I know my importance to you and I know that I am appreciated for the things that I do in our home and with our children, which makes me want, even desire that even more to submit to you and to please you as I'm pleasing Christ.

See, that's the thing. Years ago, I developed sort of this saying, you remember the saying, the number one. I developed this sort of saying that I used in counseling sessions and premarital things when I talked to people.

And it was a concept of the number one. I said, everybody needs to be someone else's number one. And especially in a marriage, it's very important that your spouse knows that they are the number one person in your life.

I mean, outside of Christ, outside of God, in a marriage, there can only be one number one. And that number one can't be the children. We've talked about that. Can't be the parents, can't be the best friend, can't be anyone else.

The number one person in the relationship must be the spouse, that person that they are. The covenant that's made with them, it supersedes every other relationship.

We leave our families to become one flesh, united together.

That's right.

I left my father and mother, I cleaved unto my wife, and the two of us became one flesh. I'm gonna be preaching about this in a few weeks when we get there in Genesis 2. Our relationship is the primary relationship that both of us have in life.

And it is a partnership, but it's a partnership among differing responsibilities. I have the responsibility to lead, to exercise authority, to protect, provide, to pastor, and you have the responsibility to submit to that and to do the job that God has called you to do.

You have a wonderful picture, and I'll have an opportunity to put this up maybe in post-production, I can put a picture up. But it's a picture of an umbrella, and the first umbrella, there's three umbrellas, one bigger than the next.

The biggest one on top is God, and he protects the whole family. And underneath that umbrella is the umbrella of the husband, and underneath the umbrella of the husband is the wife, and underneath the umbrella of the wife is the children.

And it's a picture of, you know, it's a picture of that sort of staged relationship, the relationship of the husband should be the protector, provider, pastor of his home, and the wife submits to that.

And as much as the world hates that, that is the pattern that God has provided. Years ago, I remember saying in a sermon, to do life the way God intended life to be done is the best way to do life, because God's the author of life.

To do life the way the author intended is obviously the best way to do life.

That's right.

And I would say Ephesians 5 is God's expression of how we're supposed to be doing life together. Now, would you, if you had a person who told you, I can't submit to my husband because he's an unbeliever, how would you respond to that?

Submission to an Unbelieving Husband and the Limits of Authority

You submit to him as to the Lord. Unless he is asking you to do something against what the Lord has called us to do, you know, in his word. I mean, if he's telling you, you know, something against what the Bible commanded you.

To sin, you know?

If he commanded you to deny Christ or to sin, sure.

Yeah, but I mean, I think outside of that, I think, and there's a passage that talks about the unbelieving spouse that can see your conduct before the Lord. So I think if you're listening to this and your spouse, your husband is not a believer, I think your submission to him, I think that could, I mean, he would be able to see that.

You know?

And that's an example.

It would honor him.

It's an example of Christ to him, an example of love to him. So what you're saying, and what I hear you saying, and I agree, is that a husband, even though he's an unbeliever, doesn't mean he's not an authority in the home.

That's right.

That's right.

And so we still, as wives, we, I say we, as wives, there's still a responsibility, because the home structure is still designed by God. And as long as he's not calling you to do things that are sinful, then there should not be a battle within the home.

That's right.

And so I think that's an important encouragement. And I wanna say this. If you're a wife of an unbelieving husband, pray for your husband, love your husband. You know, ask others to pray for your husband.

Ask us, send us a message. We'll be happy to pray for you and for your family, because we know you're in a difficult situation. And I would also, I wanna say this, because I'm not sure if I said it yet or not, but if you are being abused, you are, you need to get yourself to a safe situation, whatever that takes, because abuse is certainly not sanctioned by God in any way in the scriptures.

And I will say this. If you are a man watching this and you use this passage as an excuse to abuse your wife, shame on you. Shame on you. And I will tell you this, there is no quarter for that. There is no exception for that.

A man who uses this passage to mistreat his wife is no man of God. This passage says two things, and this is how we're gonna draw to a close. This passage says two things that you need to remember. Number one, husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church.

Christ doesn't abuse the church. Christ doesn't mistreat the church. The church submits to Christ because Christ loved him, loved her and gave himself for her. You love your wife, you give yourself for her, and she'll submit to you.

Now, on the other hand, wives, your command is not to love. If you read the passage, your command is to respect. Respect your husband.

Why?

Why is the command different for the husband and the wife? I think it's this. I think this is a reasonable explanation. Men are called to love their wives because it's hard for men to love their wives.

Thus, they're given a command to do it.

It's hard.

Men have a hard time showing love, showing affection. It's harder for a man to do that than a woman. Likewise with respect. Women are called to respect their husbands.

Why?

Because the submission in the relationship does require an act of obedience. It requires an act of submission that is difficult for anyone. So, we are called to love one another. We are called, I'm called to love you, you're called to respect me.

And I wanna tell you something. In 20 years, I think you're doing a fantastic job. I love you. I'm thankful for you. I thank you for allowing me to take time out of every day to come and be on this program.

And I'm thankful that you came today to be a part of the program as well. So, as we draw to a close on this episode of Coffee with a Calvinist, I thank my wife for being with us. Hopefully, she'll be with us again soon.

Maybe we'll come back and talk about a different subject. But I'm gonna let her close. You can close our episode by saying our regular final words.

Go ahead.

Okay.

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Thank you for

Thank you for joining us today. And this is, my name is Jennifer Foskey and I am your Calvinist.