Reflecting Christ in Marriage: Love, Submission, and Spiritual Wisdom

In this sermon, D. A. Carson discusses Christian teachings on family, marriage, and relationships. He delves into the concepts of love, submission, and respect within the context of marriage, drawing parallels between the relationship of husbands and wives to that of Christ and the Church. Carson emphasizes the importance of living wisely and in the Spirit, using the example of Christ’s love for the Church to guide marital relationships.

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“Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

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 to 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, no one ever hated his own body, but they feed and care for their body, 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, and the wife must respect her husband.”

This is the Word of the Lord.

I said we really had to begin at verse 15. The reason, as I’m sure most of you know, is that although most of our English Bibles begin a new paragraph or a new heading at verse 21, in fact the Greek structure runs back a little farther, picking up at verse 18. “Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit …”

That’s the command, and that is then fleshed out by a string of participles. “… speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” That’s all one long sentence, and all of it fleshes out what it means to be filled with the Spirit and not being drunk on wine.

Then in particular, it works out in the following verses, wives to husbands, children to fathers, slaves to masters. There are one or two important observations to make about that. This is what spiritual existence looks like. This is as mandated (whatever it means … we’ll come to that) as giving thanks, because after all, in Scripture, giving thanks is part of worship. Not giving thanks is part of idolatry.

In Scripture, not to be thankful is really to deny the existence of God or deny his goodness or to deny his sovereignty. Thanklessness, ingratitude, is the sin of idolatry. That’s three-quarters of the history of Israel in the wilderness wanderings. Likewise, making music and singing to the Lord, speaking to one another, and giving thanks in the name of the Father … all of this is part and parcel of fleshing out what it means to be filled with the Spirit. Part of that is submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Note the pairings that come immediately after that. Wives … husbands. Children … fathers. Slaves … masters. There are three pairs, and in each case, the perceived weaker of each pair comes first. The perceived weaker. Slaves … masters. Children … fathers. Wives … husbands. Note too that the stronger one is not then told to exercise clout. In each case, it’s not, “Slaves, submit. Masters, exercise clout. Children, obey. Fathers, command.”

See, in each case, there is a challenging of both sides of the equation. The same is true, as we’ll see in due course, with wives and husbands. Gordon Fee sees all of this in one of his articles but argues that cultural norms in Paul’s day were so authority-driven that this sort of balancing of things out was a spectacularly healthy amelioration, but it would have been beyond the bounds of anyone’s thinking that you could have had (as we have today, he says) genuine egalitarian marriages steeped in a lot of love. It would’ve been outside the bounds of their thinking.

Well, with the best will in the world, I want to say, “Give me a break.” Although you can talk about cultural trends, there was as much diversity in marriage in the first century, as there is today. Besides, you discover Paul and, earlier, Jesus to be spectacularly capable of being anti-cultural when they want to be.

So one must not try to domesticate this passage by saying, “This is about as far as Paul could go, because apart from that, he couldn’t have imagined genuine egalitarianism” and therefore say this is irrelevant to us now that we have egalitarian marriages. That is just bad exegesis. We should be very careful of arguments that depend too strongly on what the New Testament writers could or could not have imagined.

Now let’s take this section step by exegetical step. First, verse 21. “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” The verb “to submit” (hypotassomai) invariably in the New Testament suggests submission in some ordered array. It’s in a military hierarchy, or it’s in a master/servant relationship, or something of that sort of thing. It always suggests ordered array. Take out the disputed passages. It’s simply not used in a context where everybody is sort of submitting to everybody. That doesn’t make any sense in an ordered array.

More important is the precise force of the word allelous (“one another” in our language). “Submit to one another …” What is often presupposed in contemporary debates is that word must always be reciprocal. That is, if three people submit to one another, then each one is submitting to the other two. Or if two are submitting, then each is submitting to the other. That is, there has to be reciprocity, or you cannot make sense of the pronoun.

But in reality, whether or not allelous is reciprocal depends on the context. For example, once or twice in the book of Revelation (and similar things elsewhere), when you get one of these massacres where they killed one another, the mind boggles if you’re going to make that one perfectly reciprocal.

You know, there were 184 people. They all shot each other at exactly the same time. It just becomes a joke. In other words, whether or not it’s reciprocal depends on context. That’s the way we use “one another” today too. In some contexts, “Love one another.” Yeah, it’s a mandate. It’s pretty reciprocal. “They shot one another” also makes sense even when you have a large crowd, or, “They killed one another.” It depends on the context.

In this context, you run immediately to three pairs: wives … husbands, children … fathers, slaves … masters, so that unless you are prepared to say that the perfect reciprocity then extends to children and parents perfectly mutually submissive, which is against the meaning of an ordered array like hypotassomai, in any case, so the same as Paul’s response to the slavery issue, Paul’s response to the slavery issue in fact over the whole Canon is remarkably subtle.

I wish I had time to go through Philemon with you. Yet at the same time, it is not an issue of perfect reciprocity and mutual submission. In other words, what it sounds much more like is that being filled with the Spirit means, amongst other things, that kind of mutual submission that works out in these ordered arrays, and then you’re given the three.

Now that’s a minor exegetical point, but the reason it becomes important is in passage after passage in the New Testament where you have what are called “house tables,” haustafeln, these tables of household duties, tables of household rules, then the ordered array is always in the New Testament, without exception, “Wives submit to their husbands.” It’s never, “Husbands submit to their wives.”

But every time you point out that this is a repeated pattern, not only in Paul but it shows up in the Pastorals as part of Paul and in Peter (a very different author), the house haustafeln extend beyond the Pauline corpus. It’s not just a Pauline idiosyncrasy. Whenever you point that out, then the answer automatically is, “Yes, yes, yes. But Ephesians 5:21 says submit to one another,” as if that then is the cleansing argument that means all of these submission passages are all bound up with mutual reciprocity.

Well, if our exegesis of the Old Testament is right, it’s not very likely in the first place, but I’m saying it’s not even very likely here. This is the only text where you can get this sort of perfect mutual reciprocity out, and it doesn’t work here. It doesn’t work because of the force of hypotassomai. It doesn’t work because of the contextual features connected with allelous.

To my mind, I would like to see Ephesians 5:21 forever banished from the arsenal of arguments that try to knock down what the house tables of the New Testament actually say. Listen to them! Listen to them! They’re repeated again and again and again. They’re for our good.

Now then, the second thing. Clearly in the following verses, there is a massive comparison going on between, on the one hand, Christ and the church and the husband and the wife. On the one hand, there is something relatively brief said to the wife, something much longer said to the husband. It’s worth pointing out on the fly that what is said to the wife is not said to the husband about the wife. That’s important to recognize. It’s not said to the husband about the wife as if she is second-class and can’t be spoken to by God herself.

That is to say, she is addressed as a morally responsible agent, and this is what’s required of her. Then he is addressed as a morally responsible agent, and this is what is required of him. Now the notion of Christ as head of the church in one fashion or another, that theme occurs and occurs sometimes with the specific word head and sometimes in some other locution.

In Ephesians alone (Ephesians 1:22), “And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” That simply has nothing to do with origins. It has to do with authority. Again, in chapter 4, verse 15, “Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.”

That is, the head of the body in maturity. He might be doing some nurturing there, but it is certainly in the context of authority. “From him the whole body, joined and held together … grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” But how does the church submit to Christ? That’s the question. For in the same way, we’re told, the church submits to Christ, the wife is to submit to her husband.

How then does the church submit to Christ? Not in wrestling misery. After all, people use the term submission in a variety of different contexts even in our culture. If you have a son or a daughter who is involved in team wrestling or the other.… Once you realize you’ve had it on this round, then you hit the floor twice or whatever sign you signal to say, “I submit.” You say, “I submit” to say basically, “You’ve won, and I want to stop any further humiliation and pain.”

Does the church submit to Christ as a wrestler submits to a better wrestler? What is the mental image that is brought up when we start speaking of submission? Is it just, “Be under and don’t ask nasty questions”? Rather, if you listen to the whole voice of Scripture on this regard, the submission of the church to Christ is joyful, whole-hearted, grateful, willing, voluntary. Doubtless because of grace, but still, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

It is the totality. There is supposed to be at least no grudging. “Okay, I’ll let you have this part of my life but not that part of my life.” The old slogan, “Christ is either Lord of all, or he is not Lord at all” has a certain kind of power to it beyond the mere poetry of it. It should not be too surprising then that we read passages like this.

Ephesians 5:10: “… and find out what pleases the Lord.” Well, that’s what you want to do when you want to submit to this Lord. Verse 17 of chapter 5: “Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is.” Now we’ve too easily disconnected such passages from the submission passage, but of course they’re tied up together. It’s not just that they’re in the same chapter, but to submit to the Lord presupposes finding out what the Lord’s will is, because precisely, you want to do it.

On the other side, Christ loves the church. Here too Ephesians has already been rich in texts. After all, God’s people (Ephesians 2:20) are “… built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.”

Chapter 3: “And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”

The measure of all the fullness of God is a Pauline locution for spiritual maturity. That’s what it means. In order for you to be spiritually mature, “I pray,” Paul says, “that you may probe the limitless dimensions of the love of Christ.” You cannot be strong unless you know more of these limitless dimensions of Christ’s love.

Chapter 5, verse 2: “… and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” A little earlier in Ephesians 4:11, “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God …” and so forth.

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there.… Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”

You see, there is a relationship of love that finds its maturity as it basks in increasing self-consciousness of Christ’s love. That’s the picture long before you get to chapter 5 reiterated again and again and again in the earlier chapters of Ephesians. Now we’re told Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

This is such a truism for us that sometimes we fail to be moved by it unless we stop and think it through again so clearly. Costing him not less than everything.… This because not that we are lovely but that he is love. When I say, “I love you” to my wife, in part I mean I find her lovely. When Christ dies for miserable sinners, he does not say, “I love you, rotten world, because you’re so lovely.” He is that way because he is love.

He makes the unlovable lovely. That’s the point. “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 to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.” His matchless sacrifice was precisely for her good to build this perfect unity of Christ and the church.

Now we apply this to wives and husbands. The wives are mentioned first, as I’ve said, with a shorter exhortation. It presupposes that they are morally responsible agents themselves. Why then is she supposed to submit to her husband? What’s the reason given? Simply because he is her head, as Christ is the church’s head. That’s the only reason given.

When we are told, “… so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything,” don’t misconstrue this. This does not mean every decision a husband makes is always good and wise and godly and just, and therefore, right across the board without exception she must submit in everything. I don’t think that’s quite the point. We’ll come to abusive husbands in due course. That’s not the point either.

The point is there’s no no-go area. That is to say, just as the church in submitting to Christ is supposed to submit to Christ right across the board, there’s no no-go area. There’s no place where you say no to Jesus. “You can be Lord everywhere else but not here.” There’s no no-go area here either, but in everything, that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

I suspect we find this difficult not because the text is so difficult but because we don’t like it. Before we come to the husbands, we still have to acknowledge this is an argument by analogy. Whenever you have an analogy, you don’t have an identity. After all, the parallel between Christ and the church on the one hand and husbands and wives on the other, is not perfect in every respect. It is an analogical argument.

There are a lot of differences too. After all, Christ is perfect. Husbands are not. If you start arguing from this passage to all the hard cases, it’s pretty easy to infer back that, therefore, this passage can’t say what transparently it does seem to be saying. Just as the lawyers say, “Hard cases make bad law,” so also in the Bible, hard cases make bad theology.

There are all kinds of things that are spoken of the Bible in generic principled terms where you make a mistake if you say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but what happens supposing your husband is a wife-beater? Supposing he gets drunk and comes back and beats her up? What should she do?” I’ll tell you what she should do. She should call the police. She should press charges.

The Bible is not eager to justify injustice. Do you see? It may be that he will respond to treatment and counseling and maybe even get converted. It may be, but on the other hand, he is actually engaging in criminal acts. The text is not advocating that women should submit to their husbands in order to get beaten to death.

You could find, of course, a lot of instances and problems that are not quite as over the top as that one, but you need to see an over-the-top one to understand what the text is not really focusing on. It’s talking about how marriage ought to work. What is mandated for Christian marriages when you’re filled with the Spirit? This too in a context where, likewise, the husband in this passage is also a Christian. In 1 Peter 3, we’ll see we have a context of a mixed marriage. We’ll come to that in a moment.

Meanwhile, the husbands for their part are to love their wives as Christ loved the church. Oh my. That’s a pretty miserably high standard, speaking as a husband. What does that mean? It’s not just sloganeering. What does it mean? Just as it’s possible out of the sweep of the Bible to talk about what it means for the woman to submit to her husband if she is to submit as the church submits to Christ. Joyfully. Completely. Over the whole range of things. In everything. Without begrudging things. Without scoring points. Thankfully. Respectfully.

Yeah, you can put words to all of these things from the whole sweep of the way the church is supposed to submit to Christ. How does it work the other way? Christ loved the church with utmost self-sacrifice for her good, and that’s how husbands are to love their wives (with utmost self-sacrifice for their good).

This passage is no more in favor of some sort of generic putdown of women than it is of a sort of generic putdown of Christ’s love. “Lord, you keep her humble and obedient, and I’ll keep her pregnant.” There’s no flavor of that here. “… as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her …” which means if I’m talking to a Christian man, I want to know what he is voluntarily, cheerfully, happily sacrificing for his wife’s good. Otherwise, I don’t know what self-sacrifice means.

Now the text does not get fleshed out then in a whole lot of rules about what needs to be done. That could mean very different things in different cultures, even in different families with different personalities. It might mean staying home two nights a week to make sure you look after the kids and change the nappies while your wife is finishing her master’s degree. I mean, it could mean a lot of things, but it’s going to be self-sacrificial for her good out of love for her sanctification.

Does she get to a Bible study, or are you so busy ministering that she is just left at home doing all the chores? It may even be a good thing that we’re not fleshed out with a whole lot of dos and don’ts here, because it’s the principle of the thing that is really crucial. Having said that, I don’t think you have the right anymore to reduce the sweep of the command to the wives to submit to their husbands than you have the right to reduce the sweep of the command to the husbands to love their wives. I don’t think you do.

All the arguments that are brought up in favor of such reduction strike me as spurious and answering much more to the spirit of the age than to the exegesis of the text. At least as I look around at marriages, my perception is when both parties are doing what is expected of them as Christians and they are filled with the Spirit, it turns out to be a pretty happy marriage. Certainly it’s a lot easier for the wife to submit if he is loving her that way. Certainly it’s a lot easier for him to love her if she is cheerfully taking his lead.

On the other hand, it does not say, “Husbands, love your wife provided she is decently submissive,” nor does it say, “Wives, submit to your husband provided he loves you as Christ loves the church. Otherwise, you don’t have to.” He just doesn’t think in those terms. That is looking for a tit-for-tat relationship. It so mistakes what the gospel is about … full of grace, full of the very structure of headship under the triune God in the pattern of creation now renewed by re-creation and the power of the Spirit. Now we’ll move on to 1 Peter, chapter 3, verses 1–7.

“Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.

For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear. Husbands, in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect as the weaker partner and as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”

Well, this is somewhat like Ephesians 5 and like Colossians 3 and Titus 2 where there are other house tables. Again, you’re in the same sort of domain of family existence and husband/wife relationships. On the other hand, it’s by another author, which shows this sort of pattern is not restricted to Paul.

Here, however, it is focused on a special case, namely with the husband as an unbeliever and the wife as a Christian. What does submission look like in that case? The closest parallel in some ways is 1 Corinthians 7 where Paul can deal with questions of divorce and the like when you have a mixed marriage.

Here because it’s the wife who is the Christian and the husband who is not, wives are more in the frame than the husbands are. In Ephesians 5, there was much more said to charge up the husband than the wife. Here it’s the reverse for this reason. Moreover, here there is mention of different kinds of beauty that don’t surface in Ephesians 5, and there is no appeal to Genesis 1 to 3 by allusion or any other way. So there are some differences, clearly. Now let’s come to some exegetical details.

Both verse 1 and verse 7 begin with the word in Greek homoios, which is rendered in our versions most commonly by “likewise” or “in the same way” or something like that, although the word can mean in certain contexts merely “also.” It may simply mean “also” here. It would merely be additive. If that’s the case here, there’s no difficulty that arises.

If, on the other hand, it means “likewise” or “in the same way” as most of our translations have, then you have to ask yourself, “What exactly is the nature of the comparison?” That’s not an easy question to answer. Some people want this to mean something like, “In the same way, wives, submit to your own husbands. Husbands, in the same way, you do the same sort of submitting.”

The problem is, of course, when you take a look at what follows for husbands and wives, the actual commands are quite different. In other words, if you try to make this too much “likewise” or “in the same way,” then it’s difficult to see exactly how the comparison is being drawn, because the text does not say, for example, “Husbands, submit to your wives,” nor does the text say, “Wives, make sure you respect your husband as the weaker vessel.”

In other words, the language is so different in the two cases that to say the “likewise” really means the two patterns must be exactly identical just doesn’t fit the diversity of the descriptions. There’s another possibility. In my view, it’s more credible, although it’s not a very popular one. So I warn you.

I think the “likewise” is going back to the cross of Christ, the cross of Christ that is brought up in particular with respect to slaves and before that submitting to the Lord’s sake. Yes, yes, yes. But then live as free people. Don’t use your freedom as a cover-up for evil. Live as God’s slaves. Show proper respect to everyone. Then as Christ dies uniquely for us, he nevertheless also dies as a model.

In other words, this Jesus (verse 24 of chapter 2) “… ‘bore our sins’ in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; ‘by his wounds you have been healed.’ ” But it is also said of him (verse 21), “To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ ”

In other words, there’s a modular emphasis in the cross that applies to all Christians. You know that, for example, when Jesus can introduce the cross in Matthew 16 and parallels Mark 8 and so forth and then immediately say after that, “Unless you take up your cross and follow me, you can’t be my disciple either.”

For all that the cross is unique and sin bearing and substitutionary and all the rest, it also has a moral modular function. So as Christ did not retaliate, as Christ bore abuse, as Christ loved even to the death on the cross, so you die to yourself. That’s the commonality between the two, men and women. You have to die to self to love your wife as Christ loved the church. You have to die to yourself to submit to your husband too.

Likewise, follow Christ. It’s part of the entailment of living under the shadow of the cross. I’m inclined to think that’s what it means. I won’t insist on it, but it seems to me it makes most sense of the flow of the passage. The first exegetical detail, in the same way, what do we do with that? Then in this context, secondly, what does submission look like?

Well, in the book itself, there has already been talk of submission. “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors …” and so on, so on, so on. Notice again this submission is an ordered array. You don’t submit yourself to the dustbin man, the garbage collector, or whatever. You submit yourself to the emperor, to the governors. There’s an ordered array. That’s where you submit yourselves.

Nevertheless, this is for the Lord’s sake. Now that’s interesting. You don’t do it simply because you have fear of punishment, although nevertheless Romans 13 tells us the powers that be wield a sword in part to engender fear of punishment. Nevertheless, if you’re a Christian, it’s not primarily to avoid getting tossed into jail. It’s primarily for the Lord’s sake.

Within that frame of reference then you have the same flavor here in the ordered array where she submits herself to her husband. Clearly if it’s for the Lord’s sake and unto the Lord, then if the husband is wanting her to do something that is transparently against the Lord, she must not do it. That’s not just a theoretical pattern.

You find that, of course, for all Christians in one fashion or another. On the one hand, the powers that be are ordained of God, and you’re supposed to submit to the authority of the state and all the rest. On the other hand, if the powers that be start commanding you to do something that’s against the truth or the like, then you start saying with Peter, “We must obey God rather than human beings.”

I mean, that’s also the case. That’s why, on the one hand, the New Testament can talk about God giving the state in order to preserve order in the land but also talk about the state on occasion as in Revelation 13 as a beast with horrendous torture capacity.

I know a situation in another state a few years ago in a Free Church where one of the evangelistic Bible studies that had formed amongst some of the gifted women evangelists in the church drew in a young woman into this Bible study, and she was quite spectacularly converted. She was just wonderfully converted.

She and her husband (they had been married two or three years) had what they themselves called an open marriage. They not only gave each other permission to sleep with other people, but they actually sometimes went to wife-swapping parties and things like that. It was an open marriage. Then she got converted. She actually said to him, “I’m not going to say anything if you want to continue that lifestyle, but I can’t. I’m a Christian. I can’t do that anymore.”

So he divorced her. “This is not the woman I married.” I tell you, she acted honorably. This passage is certainly not saying, “No matter what he tells you to do, do it. He might be schizophrenic and tell you to do something really ridiculous, but nevertheless, do it.” It’s not saying things like that. It’s laying out what a marriage is supposed to be. In this framework, just because he is a non-Christian does not give you the right to change how marriage is supposed to work.

Granted, it should be in all the footnotes for all the questions of abuse and all the perversions and things that come along. There might be some reason to draw the line somewhere or other because at some junction or other, you might be fighting against God himself. None of this suggests she has to be stupid or ignorant or can’t voice an opinion or help to steer him or anything of that order. It’s simply not what the text is focusing on. No, no, no, no.

Submit yourselves to your own husbands, because you have an additional motive. It doesn’t show up in Ephesians 5. This is a mixed marriage. You have an additional motive. You do it “… so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives.” There’s an evangelistic purpose here, a winsomeness in all of this.

Then it’s teased out a little farther. The ultimate beauty comes not with outward adornment. This is not saying you should aim to be as plain and ugly as possible. That’s not the point. The point is if your self-identity is bound up with the clothes you wear, if your self-identity is bound up with your jewels, if your self-identity is bound up with how pretty you can make yourself, then you’re missing something at the heart of the gospel.

The greatest beauty is in the transformation of character, and you don’t have to be a Christian to see that. Any decent guy can see it. After all, the “… inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit … is of great worth in God’s sight.” This does not sound like somebody who is first and foremost standing on their rights but someone who wants God’s approval for a gentle and quiet spirit, nor is this trying to say you have to be a certain personality type. “Extrovert women are not allowed here.” That’s not the point either!

Don’t make the text say things it’s not interested in saying. You can be a wonderful extrovert with a spectacular sense of humor and still have what God would call a gentle and quiet spirit. In this case too, there is an Old Testament parallel brought to the surface. “For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord. You are her daughters if you do what is right and do not give way to fear.”

Just as the person who has Abraham’s faith is Abraham’s son, so the person who has Sarah’s reverence for her husband, that person, that woman, turns out to be Sarah’s daughter. It’s the same sort of analogy. But there are a lot of commentators at this point who make the text incomprehensible. I don’t know what else to call it. They argue, first of all, that in the narratives of Genesis, Abraham submits to her (Sarah) as often as Sarah submits to Abraham.

There are two explicit passages, it is argued, where Sarah tells Abraham that she’d like him to do something, and he does it. He submits to her wish. First, Genesis 16:2. She wants him to sleep with Hagar so that a child would be raised up who would be legally hers (that is, Sarah’s) under the laws of the day.

Well, if that’s what an instance of obeying your wife looks like, I’m not too impressed. It sounds a bit like the way Adam obeyed his wife too and got them both into a lot of trouble. In other words, this is flat-out disobedience to God, and it is flat-out distrust in the promises of God to bring about what he himself said would take place.

The second instance that is adduced is Genesis 21:10–12. Ishmael is now growing up, and Hagar is becoming a thorn in the side of Sarah. Sarah wants Hagar and her son thrown out. But if you read the account carefully, Abraham does not want to do this and goes to God and asks God what he should do.

When God gives the sanction, Abraham obeys God. In other words, it’s not a question of saying, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but okay, Sarah, I’ll obey you.” It’s really quite the reverse. He doesn’t want to until, in fact, God tells him that’s what he must do, and he does it because he is obeying God.

No, no. I suspect Sarah’s big submission in the narrative is in going out with Abraham in the first place to a land she doesn’t know of away from her father’s house, crossing several cultures, taking a long time to get there, stopping for a while in Haran and all the rest. That’s what I suspect is the biggest submission (leaving Ur of the Chaldees). In any case, Peter encourages Christian women to submit like Sarah.

Now husbands. They are given two commands. “Husbands, in the same way …” I take it then under the cross of Christ, death to self. “… in the same way be considerate as you live with your wives, and treat them with respect …” Give them honor you might render it. It’s difficult and can be rendered both ways. Be considerate. That is, be kind. Be thoughtful. Be gentle. Let your love be manifest in doing good for them to them. Give her respect. Give her honor. Lift her up.

You can watch homes where this is done by examining the children. I shudder in homes where children sass the mother and the father does nothing. The best way to get a rapid clout on the ear and maybe banished from meals for a couple of days and so on in the home I grew up in was saying anything that even bordered on sass to my mother. That would bring down the wrath of God faster than any other thing.

Well, that’s good. That’s honorable! My kids, I confess, soon learned the same lesson. You could do a lot of naughty things and maybe slip by, but sassing Mum wasn’t one of them. That’s treating her with honor. You hold her in respect. That means if you have responsibility in the home, then you impose that on the family.

It also means you don’t tell sly jokes about how your wife is stupid or ignorant or did some dumb thing. Oh, it might be part of kidding around on all sides where you give and take. That’s just humor. But anything that is actually slicing people up, diminishing them, putting yourself up while you’re putting somebody else down is an abomination. It’s not loving your neighbor as yourself. It’s not treating your wife with respect. It’s not being considerate. It’s not living under the cross!

Now two reasons are given for husbands to say this. Now obviously at this point in the narrative, in the exposition, Peter has moved from a mixed marriage to a Christian marriage because, you see, in the first part (verses 1 to 6), he really is talking to the Christian woman whose husband is an unbeliever. Now suddenly he is talking to the husband as if he is a believer. Obviously you’re now moving into Christian marriages again or conceivably even a mixed marriage where he is the believer and she is not, although the text doesn’t get explicit enough to say that.

Two reasons are adduced. First, she is the weaker partner. Second, “… as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life …” She must be treated this way “… so that nothing will hinder your prayers.” Let’s take the second one first. “… live with your wives, and treat them with respect … as heirs with you of the gracious gift of life, so that nothing will hinder your prayers.”

Just as in creation you are both made in the image of God, so in new creation, you are equally made as heirs of this common hope. Unless you see that, you’ll be inclined (especially if you’re a leader in the church) to think of yourself as somehow a cut up. “Oh, I know we’re all Christians. We all know that. But, you know, I’m a more important Christian.”

As soon as you start to think that in any way, shape, or form, you’ve already lost the line somewhere. I mean, Christians who know their Christians best know they’re debtors to grace. There’s something really wrong, foul, wrong-headed in all of this. What you discover is if you begin to think like that, one of the things that gets abandoned pretty soon is your prayer life, whether your own individual prayer life or your prayer life with your wife.

I won’t ask for a show of hands, but I’d love to know.… I really would love to know … how many of you actually spend time praying with your spouse. Oh, I mean more than meals. How do you pray for your spouse on your own if deep down in your heart you’re resenting her or you don’t treat her with respect? It’s easy to pray for people you love. You tend to ignore in your prayers people you can’t stand unless you pray to the Lord, “Bring down judgment upon their heads.”

Then what shall we do with this other bit? “… treat them with respect as the weaker partner …” Well, again, over the years all kinds of suggestions have been made that have no exegetical warrant in the text whatsoever but reflected some of the stances of the day: Women are dumber. They’re not as astute. They’re not as clever thinkers. They’re not as logical. They’re slower. They’re too much bound up with bearing children, so they don’t have enough energy going to their brains.

After awhile, you’ve read them all, but there’s no exegetical warrant for any of them as far as I can see. So often people have suggested it’s something else. That is, on average, they’re physically weaker. There’s nothing wrong with saying that. I mean, after all, on average, women are physically a little bit shorter than men for any particular culture. Mind you, I know a lot of Swedish women who are a lot taller than most Chinese men are. You know? The analogies get difficult pretty fast.

I go to some parts of the world, and I tower over them. If I speak anywhere in China, my translators almost always have a little box they are standing on so they can get up to reach up to my shoulder. Then I go to Norway or Sweden, and I’m the runt. I mean, it’s remarkable how tall all those blondes are.

You’re not talking about all women being shorter than all men or something, but granted, race by race, culture by culture, on average women are a little shorter, a little weaker. They don’t have quite so much body muscle. Oh, I know there are some women who can do some remarkable things, but …

We had a guy in my spiritual formation group.… We’ve had more odd ducks in my spiritual formation group over the last few years. I mean, really an interesting collection. We had a guy who had been world champion for his weight class for bench pressing. He could bench press almost 800 pounds.

Once in one of the times when we had all of our students back in our home, as we regularly do, he was sort of argued into this, but he finally said, “Oh, okay. Okay, I’ll do it.” He went down on his stomach. Another student sat on his back, and he did one-handed pushups with the student on his back. You realize, “Whoa! Talk about strength!” I’m not in that class.

By and large, men do have a little more muscle than women do. Is that what’s at stake here? Well, it’s possible, but physical strength does not really seem to be at the heart of the burning issue in this context. Over the years, I’ve gradually come to another suggestion. I’m not sure it’s right, but I think it is.

You see, precisely when you set up this sort of polarity, the person who is in the submissive part of the pattern is in a more vulnerable place and thus a weaker place. It doesn’t mean she is morally weaker. No, no. She might have to have far more guts, to be quite frank. It doesn’t mean she is intellectually inferior. It doesn’t mean any of those things.

But if you set up one of these patterns in a fallen and broken world, she is in the more vulnerable place, and you, husband, must therefore treat her with respect and be considerate of her all the more because she is in that vulnerable place. She is the weaker vessel. In other words, the fact that she is in this place does not give you any excuse whatsoever to put her down or diminish her or destroy her or the rest. You are to love her and build her up as Christ loved the church. I suspect that’s what is meant by the weaker vessel here.

If you try to flesh this out in terms of all that it might mean in particular cultures, times, places, the patterns are extraordinarily diverse. Again, I reiterate, as at the end of Ephesians 5, I think it’s a good thing God does not follow this up with a whole lot of rules. If the pattern itself is truly understood and absorbed, it will work out in our lives.

The danger with rules is you think by obeying the rules, you have become holy, but you can obey rules and still not live under the cross. But if you live under the cross and follow this pattern, it will transform everything. This we must keep insisting in our own lives, in our own homes, in our own marriages, and in our churches is non-negotiable. This is for our good. It’s not because God is mean or has it wrong or the poor chap never really did understand twenty-first century culture. This is the Word of God, and it is for our good. Let us pray.

Help us, Lord God, to understand our times. Forbid that our solutions to the problems of our age should be dictated by our times but rather that we would turn again and again to your most Holy Word and live our lives here with reverent fear and holy joy, seeking to be conformed to the likeness of Christ Jesus whose very death is our model.

Death to self, taking up our cross daily, rising again to newness of life, and with holy joy, following him who goes before us, the firstfruit of the resurrection on the last day. Grant that this may work out in our homes, in our marriages, and across the sweep of our congregations. For Jesus’ sake, amen.

I think we have at least a few minutes for questions and answers.

Male: Dr. Carson, in the Ephesians text beginning at verse 15 as you worked us through that and the participles (speaking, giving thanks), in verse 19, “… speaking to one another …” I don’t have the Greek text. Is “one another” there thus the same as verse 21, “Submit to one another …”?

Don Carson: I can’t remember, but I think so.

Male: So could not verse 21 bump up instead of bump down in terms of within the church frame of speaking and giving thanks and being submissive to one another? Then I know verse 22, the word submit is not even there in that first text. It’s just, “Wives … to your own husbands …” So it’s pulling it from verse 21.

Don: That’s true.

Male: So they’re truly interconnected, but that first one is tied in with what he is just doing, which then bleeds out into husbands … wives, wives … husbands, children … dads, and slaves … masters.

Don: Well, even when you’re speaking to one another in the congregation, it’s certainly not always the case in a church like the church in Ephesians that you have the whole church there every time and everybody is talking to everybody. Even there it might not be perfectly reciprocal. Beyond that, whenever you argue from context, then there are circles of context.

That is, the immediate context becomes most important. Then the larger context and the larger context. Eventually you have the canonical context, and eventually if you’re doing word studies, the whole cultural context. How were words used at the time? In this particular case, then the most immediate way to ask questions of what is meant by one another in that context is in that immediate sentence.

By the time you get down to the next one, it’s immediately before the house table. What do you do with that? Moreover, that “one another” is in the context of hypotassomai, which is an ordered array, which already presupposes that it cannot be perfectly reciprocal. It’s the wrong category. I don’t think it really makes any difference.

Male: With all these passages about husbands and wives and marriage, I think it can become viewed by singles as complementarian roles don’t exist until you’re married. Can you speak some to what these marriage roles say about single relationships?

Don: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a very important question today when so much of the population is single. It’s not a question that’s easy to answer quickly. I think it’s worth saying, however, in the first place that we tend to bring a whole lot of individualistic biases to the table in such discussion so that we might accidentally start thinking, “Oh, I’m free and can do anything I want. Then I get married. Then I’m tied down.” The ol’ ball-and-chain routine.

I mean, that’s pretty ugly from the Bible’s point of view where, “Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled.…” It’s ordained by God, not good for man to live alone. I mean, there are so many texts that exalt marriage.

Moreover, in the ancient world, most people were tied to families in various ways so that sons were regularly under the shadow of the patriarchal home and so were daughters under an older brother’s home so that you actually came (if you were a woman) to your greatest liberty precisely once you did marry, which is just the opposite of the way we’re thinking today. It’s partly because our culture is so infatuated with youth and partly because there’s such a high degree of individualism.

A few years ago, I was in China for something or other, and I was introduced by the chair in Mandarin (which I don’t speak … somebody translated it for me or else I wouldn’t have gotten it) as, “Dr. Carson from so-and-so who had done this-and-that.” I had been to this group before. He said, “I would like to tell you that he has just turned 60 this week.” I cannot imagine anywhere in the Western world where I’d get introduced like that. Do you know what they were saying? They were saying (politely), “He is finally worth listening to.”

I can hardly wait to go back when I’m 70! I’m really looking forward to 80. There’s this kind of respect for age and so on. Because of that, then you get a father who is the patriarch over the whole clan. The 30-year-old who is still single is still a junior compared with him. You’re never quite free of the entanglement of familial relationships.

Today part of our problem is we have so many singles living alone, going to another city, getting another job and so on. I’m not even saying that’s all bad or wicked, but it means the whole dynamics look very, very different. I think in the context of the local church, we have to do more to enmesh our singles into the life of the church, not just singles’ groups.

I have a daughter who is almost 30, and she is single. What I’ve perceived there is (I’m not saying anything now that we haven’t talked over face-to-face) singles in our culture, Christian or otherwise, tend to group together with other singles and end up living remarkably selfish lives, because they’re all the same. They’re all in their little corner.

They’re like university students. You know, university students are all 18 to 22 or 23. They’re all a similar age. They’re all a similar level of development. They’re all a similar level of education. They’re boringly the same. They think they’re so with it, and then when they get out of university and get into a church, they can’t stand the church because it has old people and babies and nappies and people who aren’t very bright and manual workers. But that’s what the church is!

There’s a sense in which our very multiplication of singleness in our communities, especially if we respond to it by just having another singles’ group.… I mean, they’re all clustering around doing this little group activity and that little group.… They’re not learning to think others. If you’re going to have a singles’ group, you want to start doing things with it in which they think out in terms of mission or helping some of the elders in the church or providing a babysitting service or getting enmeshed in families and so on so there’s much more give-and-take.

I don’t want these passages to become a discouragement to the singles, nor do I want them to be ignored in the total ministry and outreach of the church. If I focused on them here, it’s not because I don’t think there are any single issues that need to be addressed in the church. It’s because I was given the topic.

Male: Paul simply said the husband is the head of the wife. It seems in our Christian culture that we’ve added many phrases like “head of the home,” “head of the household,” or “spiritual leader.” Are those kinds of phrases wrong and misleading or just unhelpful?

Don: Why don’t we just go for “household pope” and be done with it?

Male: Yeah, that’s right.

Don: Sorry! They’re not so much wrong or wicked as at least potentially misleading. If there is going to be this sort of relationship and you have a strong Christian daughter, you want her ideally to marry somebody who is going to be at least her strength in character and in spiritual wisdom and maturity. You do want that! Otherwise, you’re probably going to be pulling in very different directions.

On the other hand, it is true sometimes that our locutions actually change our theology. I’m teaching Acts and Paul and General Epistles at the moment, and one of the things I always get my students to do is to make a list of every instance in Acts where conversions are described to find out what sort of expressions are used. There’s not one instance of, “Accept Jesus as my personal Savior.” That’s not a biblical locution.

Now I don’t object to it, but on the other hand, if that’s the only way you refer to conversion, then it’s probably going to reshape your theology in some ways that are pretty subtle and you might not even see. If you’re going to be really biblical, you need to be talking about conversions in all the ways the Bible talks about conversions. There are a lot of them just in Acts!

How about coming to the end of an evangelistic campaign and then use the language of Acts 12 and say, “Oh, it was wonderful! As many as were ordained to eternal life believed”? Why not? It’s biblical language! We ought to be incorporating into our discussion of these things as many of the biblical locutions as possible and not be hardnosed or rigid about using other locutions but be careful. Be careful. They begin to transform our theology if we use too many locutions that are not biblical and that begin to take over.

Male: Dr. Carson, I very much enjoyed your walk through 1 Peter. Maybe I wasn’t listening closely, but you talked about how “in the same way as Christ on the cross” in that sacrificial way. I’m just wondering, as I look at it from context, I see the phrases “chosen race” and “a royal priesthood,” and then they move toward being aliens and strangers and our behavior being excellent before the Gentiles.

I guess when I read it before, I’ve seen it as it moves from the general (the citizens, slaves, husbands, wives), and it seemed to me it was tying it back to citizens before Gentiles as an apologetic before them (slaves). Would you help me see how we would tie it to Christ in the sacrificial example?

Don: Well, the question is whether or not you are looking at the immediately preceding few lines or the immediately preceding paragraph. What you are suggesting works well for 1 Peter 3:1. I don’t think it works well for 1 Peter 3:7.

If you want it to have something like the same functionality in 1 Peter 3:1 and 1 Peter 3:7, I think it works a little better if it’s flipping back to Christ (the thought of the whole paragraph) rather than just how you live your life as foreigners in an alien world. It’s not a knockdown-dragout argument. I acknowledge that, but that’s how I’d respond.

Male: Hi, Dr. Carson. I’m just finishing William Webb’s book Slaves, Women & Homosexuals. He argues for this redemptive-movement hermeneutic, which I find really helpful as it relates to the slavery issue and I’ve found somewhat helpful as it relates to women in ministry, women in the home, particularly well with respect to some of the Old Testament passages and how we see Jews and Paul advancing beyond the culture of the day and giving more rights to women. Do you find that persuasive with respect to the slavery passages?

Don: No.

Male: No, you don’t?

Don: No.

Male: No. Okay. I guess my question is predicated on that. It seems like the abolitionists and others throughout church history have kind of naturally taken that redemptive-movement hermeneutic with respect to slavery and potentially saw some other issues as well, but especially well with respect to slavery.

It seems like you see that natural movement in the Bible with respect to women. Why does it stop there with women when it doesn’t stop with slavery? If you don’t find it persuasive with respect to slavery, then it may be a moot question.

Don: Well, let me begin through the side door. I mean, incidentally there are some really excellent responses to Webb. If you’re really interested in this question, I can give you some bibliography on the matter that might change your mind again. One of the entailments of that view, of course, is that you get a higher pattern of morality after you’ve left the Word of God behind than when you have it in the Word of God.

Now without commenting on the details of how that’s worded, there’s something that’s wrong there. There’s something flawed there somewhere. It’s the inevitable entailment of his view, and that ought to be troubling, it seems to me, to anybody who has a high view of Scripture. There’s more to it than that. That’s one of the reasons why I said I wish I had time to expound Philemon in particular. There are a lot of interesting things said about slaves in the New Testament, but the most interesting book by far is Philemon.

It’s helpful to remember that slavery in the first century looked rather different from slavery in the American pattern. In the American pattern, after all, all slaves were taken by capture, whether it by whites or by other Africans who then sold them to whites and transported across the Atlantic.

Initially of those transported were 11 million. All blacks and only blacks were slaves. Blackness was associated with slavery not only in the white mind but also in the black mind, and they were all ignorant. They came to a language they didn’t know, a culture they didn’t know. They did the joe-work, and so on.

By contrast, in the ancient Roman world, there was a much higher proportion of the people who were slaves, but you could become slaves not only because of raiding parties of similar sort or because of wars but also because they didn’t have Chapter 11 and Chapter 13. The bankruptcy laws of the time meant, if you borrowed money to start a business and then the business went belly-up, you had no option but to sell yourself and your family into slavery. You had no option!

That meant there could be a lot of slaves from different backgrounds. I mean, there were Italians who were slaves, Italians who were free, and Italians who were noble. There were Jews who were slaves and Jews who were free and Jews who were noble. There were Africans who were slaves, Africans who were noble, and Africans who were free, and so on. It was not associated with race, nor was it associated with one’s socioeconomic class.

Now most slaves were doing the grunt work at the bottom and so on, but many rich people without much education themselves hired accountants and managers and tradespeople and governesses for their children and all the rest. The whole culture worked that way, which is again very, very different from anything in the American set of associations and slaves.

Still the Roman laws were very severe. If a slave ran away, the owner had the right to punish them by death. If you hid a slave or the like who was running away and you knew it, you could be prosecuted and put to death as well. Now within that framework then, what Paul says to Philemon about Onesimus is spectacular. He doesn’t try to change something in the culture at large. If he tried to do that and thunder away, “Slavery is just plain wrong,” then he would’ve been up on a capital charge. That would have been the end of the issue.

What he does say is in the church Philemon was to treat him as a brother. If Onesimus owes anything, Paul will write it off himself. After all, Philemon owes much more to Paul because he has received the gospel from Paul. At the end of the day, we all owe everything to Christ. “I’m sure you’ll do much more than what I’ve said for this brother, and I’m coming to check.”

It’s brilliant! It’s absolutely brilliant! He has undermined the entire slavery thing. If Philemon takes Paul seriously, in the church, slavery is dead, and it’s dead because men and women have been transformed and renewed. Now you’re really into a whole presupposed theology of all of us are in the image of God and all the rest.

What the later antislavery movement did.… It, after all, was the result of the evangelical awakening at the time of Wilberforce and Countess of Huntingdon and people like that. What they were really saying was England was a sufficiently Christian country that the insight for Christians really ought to be imposed on all of society.

In that sense, they were going farther by trying to impose it on the broader state, but they were not saying quite that what the Bible really points to is a state that’s perfect or what the Bible is really commanding the state to do is to follow all Christian ways.

That’s why somebody like Wilberforce, though he was fighting to stop the slave traffic across the Atlantic.… He was having devotions in the morning with his family, devotions in the evening with his family, and evangelizing, doing Sunday school classes on Sunday. He was a classic Christian who was preaching the gospel! He saw that was the transforming medium.

I’m not convinced Webb has the hermeneutic quite right even in terms of understanding the relationship between the New Testament and what happened in the later transformation of society. I could say more, but if you want some bibliography, give me your email address, and I’ll send you some pieces.

Male: I realize divorce and remarriage is not our topic, but if.… Obviously, I guess, many evangelicals see two causes of adultery or desertion (the 1 Corinthians 7 passage). Could you comment on the case of a man who has failed to love his wife to the extent of life-threatening abuse? Is there a place there for a woman having the right of divorce?

Don: Oh, that’s a big question. It sort of does step outside this one. I would say where there is abuse.… I mean, serious abuse. Not just minor inconvenience or something. Where there’s life-threatening abuse or even where there’s life-threatening emotional abuse.… Occasionally you’ll get cases where he is literally driving her mad. I mean, literally! I don’t just mean that in a figure of speech. I had one like that in a church I was pastoring. It was unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything like it. He was one of the most evil men I’ve ever met. He was so smooth.

She had been a missionary. At this time she was driving herself to drink. I mean, it was the only way she could escape him. At some point, I wanted to say, “Give the guy up. You have to abandon him. You can’t prosecute him, but ‘submit to your husband’ is not telling you to drive yourself to drink either.” I mean, it’s just not what’s.… The hard cases are not in the principle, but it’s a bit different to say, therefore, she also has the right to remarriage.

I had another case that was really very interesting. I was a very young pastor at the time, probably too legalistic by half, but nevertheless, it worked out remarkably well so I like to tell the story. It was one of those that worked out well despite me rather than because of me, I assure you.

This was in Canada, and we had a bunch of evangelistic Bible studies running around the church and so on. This woman got involved in one of these Bible studies and was converted. Her husband was a RCMP officer who was a drunk and wouldn’t have anything to do with her really. Even while she was coming to the Bible study, she was in the process of the divorce. She got divorced and got converted very.… I don’t even know which one was first, but it was probably the same week. I mean, it was just bang, bang, bang. It all happened at once.

I went to see him trying to talk to him. He wouldn’t let me in the door. He slammed it in my face, told me to stop harassing. There was just nothing there. Months went by, and he wasn’t sleeping around as far as anybody knew. He was just a self-loathing, self-righteous, half-drunk policeman. What could I say? He wouldn’t have anything to do with her or the kids. He got into endless trouble because he wasn’t giving child support payments and all the rest.

Meanwhile, here was this young wife who was flourishing and growing in the Lord with these two little girls who were 4 and 5 or 5 and 6. They were about that age. After about two years, she came to me, and she said, “Am I permitted to get remarried?” You see, in my take on the desertion clause, it’s not desertion as we think of it. I think there are some caveats in the context.

I said, “I don’t think so.” We went through some of the passages together and so on. Then I kept saying to her (we’ll call her Mary), “Mary, if what I’m saying is true from Scripture.… By all means, talk to others, but if what I’m saying is true, this is going to turn out for your good. I don’t know how, but it’s going to turn out for your good. God is not finished with this. God is not finished with your husband. God is not finished with you. At some point, you just have to trust him.” So she did.

Sometime later I moved on elsewhere. I came back a number of years later on the very Sunday the 18-year-old daughter now was getting baptized. There was this woman, still single, who had brought these kids up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I had asked a couple of Christian families there to keep an eye on them as well so the kids had places to go to and played with other kids. There were a couple of stable families who nurtured her along, brought her along to things and so on. It just worked out really wonderfully well.

At some point, when you do become convinced this is what the Scripture says, you’ve also got to keep teaching it, and it’s good for you. God doesn’t make a whole lot of mistakes. Now there are some things where you have to say, “I’m not sure that’s right.” You know? But you want to keep saying, “Part of faith is trusting him, even in the hard times.”

You don’t want to go into a whole lot of counseling situations saying, “Well, this is what the Bible says, but frankly I don’t like it. I’m not very comfortable with it, but I know it’s what the Bible says. We have to do it.” You want to see and believe with your whole heart that it’s good even if it’s hard sometimes. In this case, in all my stupidity and youth, it did turn out that way.