Quote Of The Day

It is not enough to say, 'Serve one another.' That is true of Christ and his church - they serve each other.  But they do not serve each other in all the same ways.  Christ is Christ.  We are the church.  To confuse the distinctions would be doctrinally and spiritually devastating.  So also the man is the Christ-portraying husband, and the woman is the church portraying wife.  And to confuse these God-intended distinctions, or to abandon them, results in more disillusionment and more divorce and more devastation.  

One of the things that is crystal-clear in Ephesians 5 is that the roles of husband and wife in marriage are not arbitrarily assigned, and they are not reversible any more than the role of Christ and the church are reversible.  The roles of husband and wife are rooted in the distinctive roles of Christ and his church.  The revelation of this mystery is the recovery of the original intention of covenant marriage in the Garden of Eden. 

You can see this more clearly when you ponder what sin did to headship and submission and how Paul's teaching here in Ephesians 5 is so perfectly suited to remedy that corruption.  When sin entered the world, it ruined the harmony of marriage not because it brought headship and submission into existence, but because it twisted man's humble loving headship toward hostile domination in some men and lazy indifference in others.  And it twisted woman's intelligent, willing, happy, creative, articulate submission toward manipulative obsequiousness in some women and brazen insubordination in others.  Sin didn't create headship and submission; it ruined them and distorted them and made them ugly and destructive.

Now if this is true, then the redemption we anticipate with the coming of Christ is not the dismantling of the original, created order of loving headship and willing submission, but a recovery of it from the ravages of sin.  And that's exactly what we find in Ephesians 5:21-33, Wives, let your fallen submission be redeemed by modeling it after God's intention for the church!  Husbands, let your fallen headship be redeemed by modeling it after God's intention for Christ!

John Piper