June is the most romantic month, the month rhyming with moon and the bride’s choice for many weddings. And as it happens our church just finished a four-week sermon series “From This Day Forward,” focusing on marriage. The Scriptural bases were primarily Genesis 1-3 and Ephesians 2, 4, and especially 5. Here are a few notes I took:
- Does the complementarity of men and women make each more likely to become godly/be saved than had this complementarity been lacking? For example, might it be that — because we cannot deny that men need women and that women need men, that men have obvious lacunae and so do women — we are more likely to accept that men and women even together need Something outside ourselves? Or this: Men obviously need help in perceiving and appreciating the emotions of others, and women obviously need protection and stability, and so men can then see that they also need God’s help in loving others and women that they need God’s help and guidance in a cruel world?
- Alternative translations to “submit” in Ephesians 5:22-24 — Paul’s injunction that wives submit to their husbands (not to all men, mind you, but to their husbands) — are “be under the authority of” and “be subject to ” and “follow the lead of.” My sense is that, at the time, the relevant Greek word — hypotasso — may have been (most) commonly used in a military context, to suggest being “outranked.”
- Amusingly, our church pastors’ original schedule had the “submit” sermon aimed at wives falling on Mother’s Day; instead, it was rescheduled to the following week, and our pastor announced that on Mother’s Day the women could sit back, relax, and listen to him “give it to the husbands.” Note, by the way, that men have many more demands placed on them in Paul’s list (5:22-24 versus 5:25-33).
- After the unfortunate apple-eating incident in the Garden of Eden, God went looking for Adam: not Eve, even though she was the worse miscreant. That suggests that the male-female hierarchy that Paul gives us — and that is, let’s face it, nearly omnipresent in human history — was expected and endorsed by God Himself. And note that this authority that men have is then coupled by God with responsibility and accountability.
- Our pastor said that, in years of marriage counseling, he’s found that by far his single most effective suggestion is for husband and wife regularly to hold hands and pray together.