Ephesians 5:22-24 - Wives submit to your husbands as in the Lord

5:22

We now get to the thorny issues of the practical application of the general principle given in 5:21, and the one that causes the most objections. “Wives submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” Should wives still do this in this modern age? Absolutely yes! So why so many objections? There are three prime reasons. The first is sin and the associated rebellious heart, referred to in comments on the previous verse. The second is a misunderstanding of what submission means. Above all else, being in submission does not mean being inferior. The Son is not inferior to the Father. Thirdly, we see and experience numerous bad examples. Some husbands are terrible examples of being “head of the household”. And all of us get it wrong some of the time. We will see what a good husband is to be like in the next verse or two, and it is very different picture than the one that is in our minds a lot of the time.

5:23,24

“For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of church, His body and is Himself its Saviour.” The key phrase here is “as Christ is the head of the church” Everything in this whole section is “in Christ”. We are not to be heads or in submission as “in the world”. The world has a totally distorted and corrupted image of submission and headship, which essentially means superiority and getting your own way. This has nothing to do with the Biblical picture. The Trinity is the perfect example of submission. The Son submits to the Father, but the Father glorifies the Son, and the Son glorifies the Father.