#Marriage - Women and Marriage

It has taken me nearly two weeks to write this post, half out of procrastination and half out of pure fear. The modern world’s view on women within the context of Christian marriage, as we all know isn’t the greatest. Many times people outside and even sometimes inside the Church will take ideas on what is a woman’s role in marriage and pull what the Bible says out of context, twist it, distort it and even sometimes completely demonize it.

That all being said I am not here to debunk every myth presented about Christian women by culture and lies. I simply am here to communicate a little on practically what it looks like to follow Christ as a married woman. 

Whenever the idea of a woman’s role is presented at church, small group, Bible study or even amongst fellow female believers Ephesians 5 is usually brought up.

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her... This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:22-25, 32).

SUBMIT. As modern women, living in a free world we look at that word and immediately stop there. That word. That little word makes us want to be defiant; it makes us want to not believe that Paul was speaking the true words of our God and purely just speaking out of his own cultural accord. I’m here to stay its okay to read on, we have to. Like most other things in the Bible we must understand the whole redemptive story to understand God’s beautiful and majestic plan.

We are called to submission as this passage states; this passage says to submit to our husbands as the church submits to Christ. That is some beautiful imagery. We as women represent the church, God’s true bride. As the church submits to the leadership of Christ we too are supposed to submit to our husbands as they represent Christ in this metaphor. We are the beautiful and chosen beloved of not only our husbands but also the Creator of the universe. The institution of marriage should make us overjoyed in that fact.

So, practically what does submission look like? Submission within the context of a Christian marriage should be something done out of respect, trust and reverence for our husbands. Just as we trust that God has a plan for our lives we should trust that God has a plan for our husbands as he humbly leads the family. Submission a lot of the time is trusting that your husband is following Christ and that Christ is orchestrating something fantastic for you and your family through him (your husband). When we are submitting to our husbands we love them in the best way we can. We need to trust that they love us enough to consider us and put our needs as a family above their own.

Does this mean that we lack responsibility for decisions, our spiritual well-being and the state of our family? Absolutely not. While the husband carries a majority of the responsibility for the family, we were created for a specific purpose and a specific role that we are responsible to fulfill with the help of Christ.

Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” 

In Genesis 2: 18 we see that it was not good for men to be alone and while we can offer a lot of practical, comical reasons why this is true for our husbands, we need to recognize that we as women were needed for God’s divine plan. It was not good for men to be alone; women were created in order to fix this problem, the first problem. Wives: masterfully and uniquely created to help, to serve, to be served and to be a part of God’s wonderful design for creation.

We are the helpers discussed in this passage, and in that we need to know in our fallen states we are not very helpful most of the time. We do not act as God designed us to: we are not always the fantastic helpers to our husbands as we should be. We demean our husbands, we disrespect them, we make jokes about them to our friends, we tear them down, and we don’t trust them. I am so guilty of all these things. I am not the helper I want to be and that I have been designed to be.

However, with the help of Christ, his redeeming power on the cross and his gift of the Holy Spirit we, as wives, can grow to be wondrous helpers. We can help our husbands so that together we can glorify God more. We can help our husbands by encouraging them, and in marriage we can have more effective and healthy teams. Teams that work together follow Christ, glorify his name, and feel a joy unmatched by any worldly pleasure.

So women, what is your role in marriage? Your role is to follow Christ, hold fast to the Bible, and trust that your husband does the same. Marriage is a beautiful thing; it is the Bible’s primary imagery for describing how Christ loves and serves us. It is a fantastic thing, we should not grumble about the role we feel like we have been burdened within marriage. We should rejoice that God designed a role perfectly for us, and as hard as it may be to be in that role at times, Christ is there, alongside us and making us all into something truly amazing.

God is good and gracious.

Ali Nichole Gonzales