Wifely Submission

Here's a letter I wrote to my sister a while ago.

Dear Jewel,

Greetings in the name of our Lord and Savior! I got your letter in the mail yesterday, and now while the house is quiet (2:30 AMJ) I’ll take the opportunity to begin my reply. I’m glad if our talk on the phone has made you think more about submitting to your husband. It’s very important – so important that it’s commanded in at least 6 books of the N. T. My husband isn’t a domineering dictator either, and most of the time it’s not hard to submit. But the Lord has been faithful in showing me subtle areas where I was not being submissive, and I encourage you to keep asking the Lord to show you how to submit to and reverence your husband. As wives, that is our responsibility in serving the Lord. And yes, as you said, we wives will need to give account to God – have we obeyed God by obeying our husbands?

You mentioned Acts 5:29. Notice that it was Peter and the other apostles who said, “We ought to obey God rather than men.” They were men who were directly accountable to God (Jesus Christ is their Head). It was not women who said this.

Another Scripture account you used was of Ananias and Sapphira. Well, notice that in Acts 5:9, Peter asked Sapphira, “How is it that ye have agreed together to tempt the Spirit of the Lord?” Obviously she was not a lover of the truth, but was in agreement with her husband. It may easily have been her idea in the first place. The Amplified Bible says (Acts 5:2) “And with his wife’s knowledge and connivance he kept back and wrongfully appropriated some of the proceeds, bringing only a part and putting it at the feet of the apostles.” If she had been a godly woman, she probably would have made an appeal to him, explaining from the Word of God why it is wrong for him to do such a thing. And then if he insisted that she keep it a secret, she could commit it all to the Lord and obey her husband, knowing that thereby she was obeying God. Eph. 5:24 The same Peter who rebuked Ananias & Sapphira, wrote 1 Peter 3.

You mentioned about Sarah being from the OT, and God winking at things done in the OT. But Jewel, using that logic, you can’t turn around and use two other women from the OT as examples of “standing for what’s right”. (Abigail and the Shunammite) Abigail called her husband “this man of Belial.” Sarah called her husband “my lord”. Regardless of whether how Abigail acted was right or wrong, God chose Sarah for the example for you and me.

You want to show me “that God expects us as women to take a stand and do what is right, even if our husbands wouldn’t approve.” Well, according to Titus 2:5, if we are not obedient to our own husbands, we are causing the Word of God to be blasphemed. In 1 Peter 3, wives are commanded to be in subjection even to an unbelieving husband, making him their “lord” – the one who commands. Eph. 5:24 – “As the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be unto their own husbands in every thing.” We believe that God said exactly what He meant in His Word, and when He said “be subject in every thing” – that’s what He meant!

“Subject” – owing obedience or allegiance to the power or dominion of another.

“Submit” – to yield oneself to the authority or will of another; to commit to the discretion or judgment of another.

If we “submit” to our husband only when it seems right to us, we actually are not submitting at all. Note again the second definition of submit, above.

Just lately I was also impressed that the Word stresses that we must submit unto our own husband – not to someone else’s! Eph. 5:22, 24; Col. 3:18; Titus 2:5; I Peter 3: 1,5

You wrote that the wife is not “responsible to her husband only, but also to God and the church.” In 1 Cor. 11, God tells us His order of headship – God, Christ, man, woman. The “church” is not sandwiched in there between Christ and man. The true church is made up of men and women who are subject to their heads – the men all subject to Christ, and the women subject to their husbands.

A woman who refuses to obey her husband because what he wants her to do is not right in her opinion, is usurping authority over the man. 1Tim. 2:12 – “But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”

You wonder how we can turn away from the church group that we grew up with. Well, someday soon we will be judged by the Word of God (John 12: 48), whether we have obeyed it or not – and not whether we obeyed the church group that we grew up with. We want to build our lives on the Lord Jesus Christ, the living Word. Matt. 7: 24 -27

- Monica, with Marcus’ help