Excuse Me, are you a Block Head?

²³For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.²⁴Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Eph 5:23-24

Following on from my earlier post on the headship of man, I want to focus on what the shape of headship look like.

If you are one of those who think that being the head naturally confer on you the rights to come home to your family slouched in front of the goggle box justifying that it is a hard day’s work without lifting a hand to help your equally weary wife who is busy minding the noisy kids, I am afraid you are in the same category as those who are described by the title of this post. If you are those who thinks that it is the head’s immutable perogative to keep your date with your computer game while your poor wife is slogging away in the kitchen or laundry room, it just shows how little you understand biblical headship.

Among the many things regarding this headship, I would like to focus on 2.

1)  Biblical headship is authoritative.

What kind of authority is it? It is that kind with the word ‘Loving Sacrifice’ written boldly across it. And authority always assumes responsibility.  And that means that every husband is responsible for his household before God. He is responsible for his family’s provision, he is responsible for his family’s spiritual state, whether his wife is progressing in her holiness, whether the children are growing up in the training and admonistion of the Lord. In other words, on judgment day, every husband can rest assured that God will ask him, the same way He looked for Adam after their fall, how he has been leading the family that was entrusted to him by God, whether leading them towards God or away from Him. What a sheer responsibilty and weight upon our shoulder! And God, knowing that we are not able to perform all this by ourselves,  in his mercy has provided a help-meet to assist us. And she is no other than flesh of our flesh and bone of our bones.

2) Biblical headship is sacrificial

Husband headship over his wife ought to be patterned after Christ headship over the church. And what kind of Head is Christ? He is known as the Saviour of the church  in the text above. In other words, He gives himself for her. In the same way, husband is to give himself for their wife. Husband, do we give ourselves for our wife or do we give material substitutes (whatever it may be) to her in place of us? Is our love, prayer, time, resources, strength, etc spent for the benefit of her physically and spiritually? And how does that translate into every day application?I leave that for us to ponder and perhaps to share.