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.

Inescapable Headship

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. Eph 5:23-24

I now come to a topic that may ruffle a few feministic feathers and may seem to be pandering to MCPism (Male Chauvinistic  Pig).

But our doctrine should not originate from man but from God’s words.

And what does it say?

Our text above says that man is the head in the marriage. Note that it does not say that man ought to be the head. In other words, every man is the head of his wife (as Christ is the head of the church) regardless he is behaving like one. Obedience or disobedience on the part of the husband does not make him a head or not a head. He is one regardless- he is either an obedient head or a disobedient head. He can be an obedient head who tells the truth about Chirst in His sacrificial love or he can be a head that lies about Him through selfishness but silence is not an option.

And since he is the head of his wife the same way Christ is the head of the Church, we can learn about our marriage by looking to the marriage between Christ and the Church.

More on this…..

Marriage – The Great Mystery

³¹“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”^{[c] 32}This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.³³However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. Eph 5:31-33

The bible describes the union of a man and a woman as a great, profound mystery. In what sense is it a great mystery? In the sense that every marriage is imaging the relationship between Christ and the Church.

What am I saying?

In Scritpture, Christ is known as the Groom and the Church the Bride. The great marriage feast shall be on the day when Christ will return for His Bride. The relationship between this Groom and Bride is one of love and respect. (Eph 5:22-29)

Since our marriage is a tiny picture of that great Relationship, the thing to ask of us is what kind of message is it conveying? Depending on how we treat our wive and how our wive respond to us;

1) It can proclaim the truth about Christ and the Church rightly as stated above if there is love and submission

or

2) It can speak the lies  of that Relationship if we treat each other shabbily

The only option our marriage does not have is to maintain silence.

Leave and Cleave Principle

Genesis 2:24:  “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

The closest relationship between two humans must certainly be that between husband and wife as imaged by the ‘one flesh’ reality. Mature Christian parents should be training their sons and daughters up for it and not to ‘take ransom’ of their children’s emotion as some parents tend to behave. Parents should be training up their son to leave them and set up his own family under God and if the child is a daughter, to train her to be given away to be cleaved to her husband.

Immature parents tend to behave otherwise. They insist on emphasizing on the relationship of parent/child over that of the husband/wife. Especially when the age old conflicts arise between the mother–in-law (MIL) and daughter-in-law (DIL), who does the poor husband side with? The issue is not less helped when the husband is the elder son or the only son.

One scriptural way in looking at this is not to confuse honour for our parent with love for our spouse. Some parents insist that their married child love them and honour their spouse. But this is not the biblical mandate. Having state this, it does not give passport for the married children to ignore everything their parent says from now and listen only to the spouse. But what it does is to change the direction of the child’s orientation. Before marriage, the child orientation is to the parents. After marriage, his/her orientation must be to the spouse. Married couple first priority must be to each other followed by other duties such as filial, sibling or parental duty, etc. Children added to the married couples later can often blur that distinction. Nevertheless, this principle must be ever held up before both husband and wife.

Does this mean that we can’t stay over with our parents after marriage? What if we have yet to save enough for that new house? What if our parents are medically unfit and require constant care and therefore would like to move in with us? What if no one looks after our children while we work? And the permutation can go on and on.

The issue at stake is not so much with sharing the same roof. The real issue is whose headship is reigning. Before marriage, we are under our father’s headship and therefore submission is appropriately rendered. But if the newly wed is to move in with the guy’s parents, this creates 2 issues, 1) the husband is not exercising his headship as he is not the head of the household, 2) which headship should the wife submit to now, her father-in-law or her husband?

The situation is different if the married couple were to invite their parent to stay with them for all the valid reasons. In this case, the husband is the head of the family and the parents understand that they are under the son’s headship. What is the difference then, you may ask, are they not all living together in either of the above cases?

The difference is in the word ‘maturity’. The husband needs to grow up to maturity. Part of that involves exercising his headship in his new family. That means instituting new and godly culture and habits in his family under God. All members within the household should submit to the culture and elderly parents who live with them ought to recognize and respect it. When that happens, there will be a lot less problems with important issues like MIL/ DIL relationship, grandchildren discipline and so on.

Marriage – A Mansion with no exits!

“You have heard the law that says, ‘A man can divorce his wife by merely giving her a written notice of divorce.’^[a] 32 But I say that a man who divorces his wife, unless she has been unfaithful, causes her to commit adultery. And anyone who marries a divorced woman also commits adultery. ” Matt 5:31-32

“The Lord God of Israel says that He hates divorce, for it covers one’s garment with violence.” Mal. 2:16

Someone once describes wedding as a wonderful doorway to a grand mansion which we call marriage. Some couples spent so much money creating the most grandeur doorway but ended up with a really dilapidated mansion. On the other end, some couples have a less than decent doorway but the mansion in which the doorway lead to is strong and beautiful.

Regardless of the price tag of the doorway, once you enter this mansion, you find that there are virtually no exits!

So we would do well if we bear the following words,” Before marriage, we need to keep our eyes open. After marriage, we need to keep them shut.”

As one puritan says,” First we choose our love, then we love our choice.”

Body, Sex and Marriage

How serious is the sin of sexual immorality? The key to understand this is the single word known as covenant.

And to further expound on this word, we must apprehend the relationship between marriage, sex and our body.

 

 

Marriage is not a piece of paper as the moderns would have us believed. The foundation of marriage as God would have intended is covenantal. (Prov 2:17, Mal 2:14) What does that mean?

 

A marital covenant is a solemn bond between a man and a woman sealed by marital oath and consummated by sexual union. It is first and foremost an act of God. “What God has joined together, let no man put asunder”(Matt 19:6) God is the One who marry the first woman to the first man. From then on, it is to be a pattern to come.

 

Not only is marriage a covenant, it is also meant to image the great covenant between Christ and His Church transacted in the new covenant of Jeremiah 31:31.. This Paul revealed to us in Eph 5:32 and it is said to be a great mystery. By that, we understand that every marriage is a dim picture of the gospel, the relationship between Christ and His church. Depending on the marriage, every couple is either proclaiming it truthfully or falsely, nevertheless the proclamation is always made.

 

Husband, do you love your wife sacrificially and as your own body as Christ loves the church? Wife, do you submit to your husband and respect Him as the Head? God in His dispensation has ordained that how well we understand this New Covenant doctrine by how we treat our spouse! If a Christian man thinks that he has fulfill his husband duty by putting bread on the table and driving the kids to church on Sunday, he has yet to understand this doctrine.

 

As much as modern man may protest otherwise, every marriage is an act of God. But modern man continue to extinguish every creation of God by thinking that another piece of paper can easily replace the one the newly married have just signed. But the judgment of the scripture is that death and sexual immorality have the power to absolve this covenantal bond. (Matt 19 and Roman 7:2)

 

But why does sexual immorality have this absolving power? The key to understanding this is to understand the place of sex in God’s economy. Sex is not as many moderns would like to imagine, after a night of physical passion, the willing engaging parties departed in the same way they came with no ramification whatsoever. The bible declares that the one flesh union consummates our marital covenant. A covenant is not normally enacted unless the one flesh union has taken place together with the marriage oath. The two shall become one. And when a man has engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman, the two have become one body and a covenant has been enacted. (1 Cor 6: 16) This principle remains the same regardless if the man pays the woman or otherwise.

 

Looking from this light, when the married man join his body to another woman in extra marital infidelity, he is in fact covenanting with her and his original marital covenant will be broken. The marriage is therefore judged to have no covenanting bond. That is how powerful sexual immorality can be, even put asunder what God has joined together.

 

This also throws up some light regarding why sexual immorality is categorized under idolatry in Col 3:5. Idolatry is the sin of breaking the covenant of God by following after other idols. In similar way, sexual immorality has this capacity to break the marital covenant.

 

In view of all these, our unredeemed body does matter and this is in opposite to Gnostic doctrines. The fact is we are all going to dwell in bodies forever. We are going to live in flesh and bones forever!

 

Now this body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and it has been joined to the Lord in one spirit. Therefore the scripture exhorted us that the body is meant for the lord and the Lord for the body. We joined with the Lord’s Body, the church in baptism. That is why the Lord’s body, the church must give us the blessings before we can join to another body in holy matrimony.

There is a very clear connection that is made in Titus between sexual purity and the blessed hope: “teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Tit. 2:12-13). The glory of the resurrection body is a great inducement to moral purity now.

 

The scripture says when we commit sexual sins, we sin against our bodies. Sexual sin is not the worst of the sins but it is certainly the most complicated. Some people understand this verse as contracting sexually transmitted diseases after a few rounds of reckless fling. It may very well includes that but considering what we have been talking about our bodies, sex and marriage, the impact of sexual sins is much broad based. This body which is given by God and indwelt by the Holy Ghost and ultimately to be joined to Jesus should not be thoughtlessly bonded to other illegitimate bodies covenantally through sexual immorality. We are really doing this body the utmost injury and risk falling short of the standards for the warning is clear and unmistakable (1 Cor 6:9)

 

What does this mean for us, husband? It means that we should keep our eyes on our wives, leave our heart at the altar of God and when we smell the slightest temptation, we should run a million miles away.