Ephesians 5:22 Commentary and Bible Study

‘Wives, submit yourselves’ – and the word is submit, not obey. As a matter of fact, nowhere in the Bible are wives told to obey their husbands. Of course, to submit to your husband clearly implies obedience, but the ‘obey’ word is not itself ever used in a command to a wife. If you look at chapter 6:1, you will see places where it is used rather significantly: ‘Children, obey your parents’, and in chapter 6:5: ‘Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters.’ But strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, it is never actually used of wives to their husbands. A different term is used – and in many ways a much more important term – and that is ‘rank yourself under’. It is important to emphasise that, because although it implies obedience – and we have obedience in the wedding service, and quite rightly – this helps us to understand a little more about the nature of the wife placing herself under her husband. It is done by God, in accordance with his distribution of gifts between men and women, and his distribution of roles, and it does not imply a superiority-inferiority relationship.In a business it may be that the chief executive officer – though he is paid the most and he is the supreme authority in that business – may be the intellectual inferior of many other people in that enterprise. You may say, these other people are in their particular spheres infinitely better trained, better qualified and very brilliant people. But of course, everybody accepts that that is not the issue. The chief executive officer is not suggesting he is a superior being by any means, but that is his role. The same is true in the Army. The Chief of the General staff is probably not by any means the most brainy or smart person in the Armed Forces. There will be others, maybe in the Intelligence Corps; maybe in today's very technically advanced military services, people who set up and use complex weaponry are far more qualified and cleverer in their way. It is not a matter of inferior-superior. It is a matter of the ordering of roles and responsibilities. So, ‘to place yourself in rank under’ is a very helpful way of looking at it actually, because it does not suggest any kind of superiority of one sex over another. It is a voluntary obedience, and it is made, because the Lord requires it: this is his order. It is not made as some people suggest – and this is an outrageous suggestion – because the husband is Christ's representative to the woman, so that whatever the husband says is God’s authoritative will for his wife. No, the husband is not – as the Church of Rome says of the pope – Christ's vicar on earth to his wife. He is a mortal man, he is fallible, he gets things wrong. He needs her input, and sometimes he would do well to be guided by her.‘Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands’. Some of the modern translations leave out the word ‘own’, and regard it as superfluous but the term used for husbands is possessive and should be there. This is not about any kind of general gender superiority. ‘Obey your own husbands’: you are not obliged to obey anybody else's husband, unless you work for them, or unless there is some reason why you should. This is not a matter of generalised gender submission. Some people, very foolishly, read into this: superior-inferior, general subordination of one sex to another.