Ephesians Devotionals
Bob Morris
Husbands, Live for and Love Your Wives (Ephesians 5:25-33a) Part 1:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, people have never hated their own bodies, but they feed and care for them, just as Christ does the church – for we are members of his body. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery – but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself…
Let’s begin by focusing on what this passage says about husband-wife relationships. Next week we will examine the implications for Christ and the church.
Last week we suggested that Paul addresses specific weaknesses of wives and husbands in their relationship to each other. If psychiatrist Louanne Brizendine (The Female Brain) is correct, female and male brains are different and have different strengths and weaknesses. The hippocampus, the part of the brain dealing with memory and emotion is larger in women than in men.
On the other hand, men have two and a half times as much brain capacity as women devoted to sexual drive. We said women’s temptation is to manipulate men, which is so easy to do. The corresponding weakness for men is their temptation to bully their wives to get their own way.
Paul says that not greater physical strength, singleness of purpose, or sexual drive should determine husbands’ treatment of their wives, but rather self-sacrificing love. This is just the opposite of the self-preservation that comes naturally to most men. Men feed and care for their bodies, a fact universal enough to prompt the adage “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach”. In fact, this argument underlines men’s natural tendency to love themselves first. Paul turns the argument around and says “He who loves his wife loves himself”.
If we take Christ’s relationship to the church and apply it to husband-wife relationships, the wife’s godliness is at least partially the responsibility of the husband. She is not his property, as was the case in the Roman Empire at the time of Paul’s writing, nor was she totally independent of her husband as the followers of Diana of the Ephesians argued. Rather, the wife is the husband’s complement in a one-flesh image of God. For this reason, men leave their father and mother and establish a new basic relationship of husband-wife, the most fundamental building block of all societies. Husbands who love their wives as their own bodies (not “themselves”) recognize that they are one flesh, one body; to love their wives is to love themselves.
Even before marriage, as we relate to potential marriage partners, we will do well to pattern our behaviour after the Biblical model, which gives the husband a measure of responsibility for the spiritual well-being of the wife.
Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you who created us in your image male and female, help us to live out your love in our male-female relationships, both in dating and in marriage.
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