as Christ loved the church

I’m married to a firefighter who is the son of a retired sheriff’s deputy. A couple of his cousins were/are in the U.S. military. Maybe it’s a trait of most men, or maybe their occupations give them a unique perspective, but one thing I’ve noticed that all of these guys have in common is a rather lighthearted way of talking about their own deaths.

My husband, for example, periodically remarks that I’ll be a rich widow if he dies on the job. He recalls how his dad used to joke that if he were to die unexpectedly at home, the family should put on his uniform and stage him in his patrol car to make it look like an on-duty death. His cousins would talk among themselves about the “cool” ways they hoped to die, if they must die in the course of their service.

I’m not surprised, then, that Christian men seem to like Ephesians 5 a lot more than Christian women do. Not only do Paul’s words make it easy to preach a divine calling for wives to be doormats, but they also give ample opportunity to paint men as spectacular heroes, knights in shining armor, Prince Charmings who get the glamorous mission of loving their wives “just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25).

Dying a “cool” death—a hero’s death—for your family? It’s right there in the Bible. What wife wouldn’t naturally want to defer to the lordship of such a man? What husband doesn’t deserve unconditional reverence, if this is his divine calling?

I’m no great music buff, but I can almost always clear a space in my brain for the music of alternative rock duo Twenty One Pilots. To my taste, they hit the sweet spot of catchiness, poetry, and depth. I find that there’s an apt Twenty One Pilots lyric for most occasions (along with a Jane Austen or Downton Abbey quote—what can I say, I contain multitudes).

Ephesians 5:25 and our glorification of sacrificial love to mean a hero’s death is, it turns out, one such occasion.

“I’d die for you” that’s easy to say
We have a list of people that we would take
A bullet for them, a bullet for you
A bullet for everybody in this room
But I don’t seem to see many bullets coming through
See many bullets coming through
Metaphorically, I’m the man
But literally, I don’t know what I’d do

- Twenty One Pilots, “Ride”

These few lines of rap are not about Ephesians 5 (well, I guess I’d have to ask Tyler to know for sure, but I rather doubt it). But they capture the dissonance between how Paul chose his words and how the Church often chooses to teach them.

Let’s review:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her. . . . So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Ephesians 5:25, 28-31

There is only one imperative in this section: “Husbands, love your wives.” The rest of the passage, including verses 26-27 which I’ve intentionally excluded*, is descriptive of Christ’s role in the Church and God’s good design for the sexes as outlined in Genesis 2:23-24.

*I have excluded verses 26-27 because, while they do go into greater detail on what Christ did for the church, they don’t add directly to what the husband is commanded to do for his wife. It’s as if Paul started talking about Jesus and got so excited by it that he had to expound on Christ’s work further—even though the contents of these verses are not part of his command to husbands. Christ alone sanctifies and cleanses the church, the whole church, including its women. Husbands are not told to do that work.

Paul included both of these examples for the singular purpose of arguing for the importance of his basic command. Contrary to how this passage is sometimes presented in our culture, “Husbands, love your wives” was an earth-shattering countercultural message for Ephesus, not a given or an afterthought. To convince the Ephesian Christian men that it was actually important to treat their wives as if they have value, Paul had to support his argument, and he used the example of Christ and the example of Creation to that end. These together make up the answer to the question:

How are husbands called to love their wives?

1. Following the example of Christ

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.

This is where that glorious hero’s death image usually shows up. Instead of seeing Christ in the Garden, humbly healing the soldier after Peter impetuously cut off his ear, willingly giving Himself into the custody of the Romans; instead of watching Him silently stand an unjust trial, turn His cheek to His abusers, and carry His own method of execution to the site of His own brutal death—all of which Paul is referencing when he says “gave Himself up”—we insert a different set of images pulled from our own cultural zeitgeist: Harry Potter absorbing Voldemort’s Killing Curse; Gandalf the Grey fighting the Balrog to protect the Fellowship of the Ring; Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor enveloped by the brilliant white heat of the Death Star’s attack on Scarif just after transmitting the space station’s all-important plans to the Rebel fleet. These heart-wrenching moments of sacrifice play out over an epic musical score and make the whole idea of giving oneself up look truly glorious—even, almost, appealing.

It’s not that hard to think of people we’d take a bullet for. It might even be fun to imagine playing that kind of hero in our story, and using this trope can make the loving and peaceful values of the Kingdom of Heaven seem a lot more interesting. But as the Twenty One Pilots lyric goes: “I don’t seem to see many bullets coming through.”

When we make Ephesians 5 into a call for wives to become smaller and weaker while husbands become bigger and stronger, several sad things happen. Abusive dynamics increase. Avenues to safely and appropriately deal with such abuses decrease. Women are taught that their part of the bargain is an all-day-every-day command they must obey, while men are allowed many liberties as long as they’re prepared to take a bullet (literally or metaphorically) when the need arises—even if that never happens.

It’s easy to forget that when Paul said “Husbands, love your wives,” he was telling husbands to become like Christ, not to become like Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame.

In the Greek, “gave Himself up” does not mean “died.” Paul was not referencing Christ’s sacrificial death alone (although that’s undoubtedly part of the picture). The word means to hand over or to betray oneself. In essence, it means to give up one’s power. To humble oneself as Christ did: the Creator and King of the universe became a human “nobody.” He lived as a vagrant; He was eventually abandoned by nearly all of His friends and family; He was unjustly accused, arrested, and tried. He died the lonely death of a criminal.

He gave up His power and His rights. That’s how He loved the church.

Can you imagine what Paul would say if he knew his words were being used for the exact opposite purpose—to set husbands in a position of superiority and entitlement over their wives?

2. Following the example of Creation

So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Ephesians 5:28-31

The final sentence in this passage, verse 31, is a direct quote from Genesis 2:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

Genesis 2:24

This is important. If you’ve spent much time in churches that place a high value on the study of the Scriptures, you may have heard it said, “Whenever you see a ‘therefore’ you need to figure out what it’s there for.” The “therefore” in this version is translated “for this reason,” but the principle holds. For what reason?

We can’t find the answer in Ephesians 5. We must follow Paul where he’s taking us—back to the beginning, back to God’s original design, back to Genesis 2.

Then the Lord God said, “It’s not good that the human is alone. I will make him a helper that is perfect for him.” . . . So the Lord God put the human into a deep and heavy sleep, and took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh over it. With the rib taken from the human, the Lord God fashioned a woman and brought her to the human being. The human said, “This one finally is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh. She will be called a woman because from a man she was taken.” This is the reason that a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife, and they become one flesh.

Genesis 2:18, 21-24 CEB

The reason a man leaves his parents and is joined to a wife as one flesh? “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

In other words, when the first man sees the first woman, he recognizes her as a piece of himself. She is him—she came straight out of him. She is identical to him in nature and identity and role and value—in everything, except in her sex. She is his exact counterpart, his perfect partner, and—both literally and figuratively—his other half.

So it makes perfect sense for Paul to command husbands to love their wives as their own bodies. After all, “He who loves his own wife loves himself”—not in the shallow, self-centered sense of the old cliche, “Happy wife = happy life,” but in the profound Creation truth that God’s design for marriage was for two equal image-bearers to join together as one, together more perfectly reflecting the male and female attributes of God than either could do alone.

In the Greco-Roman culture of Paul’s day, it was common for women’s bodies to be seen as a flawed and deformed version of the male body, which was considered the ideal. Paul was, again, teaching the church something that would have blown their minds (and unfortunately, might still blow some minds in our churches today): Husbands, your wife is your equal, a perfectly designed and pricelessly valued human being created by God Himself to reflect His image.

Treat her like one.

The next line in the song goes like this:

“I’d live for you” and that’s hard to do
Even harder to say when you know it’s not true

In my thirty-ish years of observation in the various churches and communities I’ve been part of, I’ve known a lot of men who were probably ready to take a bullet. But the ones actually giving themselves up? That was usually the women—especially the wives and mothers.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be doing it. Paul is clear that the command to subject ourselves to one another is mutual (Ephesians 5:21), and the entirety of Scripture is clear that the command to love one another is not limited to either sex. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that we often see the sacrificial love of a man as something completely different from the sacrificial love of a woman. We allow his version to be aspirations for a “cool” death, or maybe the exchange of 60+ hours of his week for pay, if we’re being generous.

But hers? Hers is expected to include the day-by-day, minute-by-minute offering up of her time, her career, her sleep, her physical body, her brain space, her dreams, her desires, her mental health, her interests, and even the food on her plate (if you have a toddler, you know what I’m talking about). On top of all this, she’s reminded with wearying regularity that it’s very important to her heroic husband that she stay young, pretty, thin, and sexually available. She might get a potted plant and an allusion to Proverbs 31 by way of a thank you at church on Mother’s Day, if she’s lucky.

This is so distant from what Paul envisioned when he was writing the New Testament—not to mention what Jesus envisioned when He came bringing the Good News of the Kingdom, or what the Creator envisioned when He formed humans in the Garden—that I want to weep on his behalf.

We’ve only been studying the portion of the passage that deals with husbands, but Paul’s message begins all the way back in Ephesians 5:18, with the initial command to “Be filled with the Spirit.” When the Holy Spirit of God fills two people who are in a marriage, there is mutual submission, respect, and sacrificial love. The wife lays down her own interests for her husband the same way she would expect to do for her God; the husband gives up his rights for his wife the same way he would expect to do for his Savior.

The husband treats his wife as his equal image-bearer and co-worker in the Kingdom. The wife treats her husband the same way.

They live out the Genesis design by recognizing that they are not opposites, but counterparts. Their union is not a hierarchy, but a team: the head needs the lifeblood supplied by the body and the body needs the animation made possible by the head. Their clearest testimony to the Good News of the Kingdom is to refuse to imitate any version of the Genesis 3:16 distortion of God’s plan—even one taught inside a church.

Jesus already died the hero’s death for us. Sure, there have been martyrs since, and will be martyrs to come—but the ultimate life-saving sacrifice has already been made. Our job now as husbands and wives, as men and women, as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, is not necessarily to lay down our physical lives, but to do the thing that is sometimes harder: to give up our very selves.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.”

Matthew 16:24

the story of the Bible

Once upon timelessness, there was a mutiny.

A beautiful creature called Lucifer, right-hand to the King of the Universe who had created him, rose up with a third of the kingdom in a wild attempt to thrust their Sovereign off His throne and take the highest place for themselves. But they had grossly overestimated their own strength, and in response to their treason, the King justly expelled them from the kingdom.

The remaining two-thirds of the King’s angelic subjects watched anxiously to see what would happen next. Would the King end them all, His created beings, and choose to exist alone in His splendor? Would His beautiful character - the goodness and justice and mercy they all revered - shatter in the wake of this betrayal? Would He grieve and mourn and lament, or would He vengefully call up His armies to chase down Lucifer and destroy him utterly?

But He did none of those things. To His kingdom’s surprise, He instead selected a dark and unformed corner of His universe, and began to create again.

They watched while He divided the light from the darkness, the waters from the atmosphere, the land from the oceans, the day from the night. Then they saw Him place living creatures on the land, in the oceans, and in the air, painstakingly divided into hundreds of kinds and categories. Finally, hushed with anticipation, they watched Him plant a beautiful garden and create a magnificent being that was almost like them - but his name wasn’t Angel, it was Man.

Then they drew in a collective gasp: Instead of protecting this pristine new world at all costs, as the angels had expected, the King opened up His brand new creation to the access of His enemy, Lucifer.

In no time at all, Lucifer sowed death and destruction into all that was good and perfect in what the King had made. Man betrayed his Creator faster than even the Enemy had before him, and the whole new world was stolen by the darkness. The angels held their breaths once again, waiting to see what the King would do.

And again - He didn’t attack. He didn’t defend. He didn’t conquer. Instead, He chose from the multiplying nations of mankind one - named Israel - to be His bride. And He spoke to her something profound that puzzled them all: “Through you, all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”

The King loved Israel - how He loved her! The angels watched while He wrote love letters and spoke poetry over His wife, inviting her ever deeper into intimacy with Himself, inviting her to choose faithfulness to Him over every other temptation in the dark, stolen world.

The Story of the Bible

But her heart was fickle, and the angels watched in horror while she dared to cheat on their King - and then cheat again - and again. She made a humiliation of herself with countless suitors, all of them mere pawns of Lucifer, who delighted in the King’s heartbreak.

The King wept. He pleaded. He sent messengers to call Israel back to her home, back to her place by His side. Defiant, she refused, and at last the King divorced her for her infidelity - released her into the harsh, dark world she seemed to long for, so that perhaps she might realize the truth out there, and come home.

The angels waited. Hope seemed lost; Lucifer had corrupted all of the King’s beautiful work, and had even stolen His beloved wife. Maybe it was over; maybe the Enemy had won.

But they didn’t know that the estranged bride of their King was with child.

Israel labored alone in the dark on a cold night. She had no idea that the King had sent a throng of His angels to guard her and her child from Lucifer’s grasp. That night, she gave birth to a Son - a Son of her own nation, but also of the King’s royal, heavenly blood. This Son grew up to love His mother and grieve over her separation from His Father. He knew that the price for her treason could justly be her life.

But the King had a plan.

He told the Prince to take a wife for Himself - not of a nation, as His Father had done, but of a people. This people, called the Church, would be defined solely by her love and devotion to Him, and not by her ethnicity. By their example, the King hoped that the heart of His own beloved Israel would sear with the reality of her loneliness, and she would desire to return to His arms.

The angels watched while the Son wooed His chosen bride and offered her the bread and the cup of engagement. Perhaps it really could end happily, somehow - at least for the Prince and His bride.

Israel’s heart grew cold and bitter toward her Son, in whom she saw only reminders of her own humiliation and disgrace, shame and despair. His obedience to the King’s work enraged her, and the Church’s wide-eyed wonder and innocence disgusted her. The angels exclaimed in horror: In a single stroke, Israel thrust the blade of all her hatred and shame into her own Son’s side, and slew Him.

The Church struggled to support the weight of His slumped body. His precious blood spilled out onto her garments and splattered Israel’s tainted robes. In the distance, Lucifer gloried in this, the ultimate victory. Surely, this couldn’t be part of the plan.

The King cried out in agony while He watched His Son die: “It is finished.”

Darkness fell like a curtain across the stage of a tragedy.

The angels didn’t dare to breathe.

Silence - deafening silence.

Until the King spoke again.

And in an instant, with the thundering of His voice, light like the dawn cut across the black, and against that brilliant and blinding light stood the silhouette of the Son Himself - alive.

Celebration erupted among the angels above, and between the Son and His Fiancee below. The Church exulted over her restored Beloved, and when that powerful resurrection light hit the scarlet bloodstains on her robes, her garments became white as snow - the regalia of a bride.

Israel backed away from the scene in shame.

Lucifer cowered away from the light.

At last the King’s plan was fulfilled, His victory sealed. His Son’s blood had purchased costly robes of purity for Israel so that when she finally returned to the Kingdom, it would be as one of the royal family, not as a traitor.

“I must go to my Father’s house and prepare a place for us,” the Prince murmured to The Church. “Wait for me - be ready for my return. I’ll leave you my own Guardian from the palace to guide you and encourage you until then. And go to my mother,” he added in a tone of urgency. “Be kind to her, tell her that my Father longs for her return, and that she has been acquitted of her treason. I paid the debt myself.”

He kissed her and turned away. “I’ll be back for you.”

As the angels watched the Son journey back toward His heavenly Kingdom, they couldn’t help but notice that the dead and broken world was not quite so dark anymore. In fact, small, flickering, resurrection lights seemed to multiply wherever The Church went.

Maybe Lucifer had not quite won after all.

The Story of the Bible

•••

The angels still wait for the completion of the story, when all of the King’s family is reunited - including a forgiven and reborn Israel, and a newly-wed Church - and all of Creation is made new, untouchable by Lucifer’s treachery. But in watching this incredible drama unfold, the King’s loyal angels have learned one thing for certain: This is who He is.

Good. Patient. Faithful. Loving. Holy. Just. Selfless. Eternal. Victorious. Compassionate. Gracious.

King.

And one day, we will all live joyfully forever and ever after in His presence.


Note

This is the dramatized version of a story that my Bible professor told on the very first day of class, before we had even cracked open Genesis. It is, in a sweepingly general sense and with immense liberties taken, the story of the Bible. This is the narrative arc that undergirds and sews together all sixty-six books in the canon we call Scripture. At its core, the Word of God not a handbook on how to please Him; it’s a revelation of His love for His people, and the relationship He desires to have with us.

Below, I’ve included a list of Scripture references that informed this rendition of the story, although since every single verse of the Bible contributes its piece to the narrative, this list is by no means exhaustive. It simply contains some of the passages that most closely correlate. If you were to read just one, I would suggest the book of Hosea, which is really the original edition of this tragic and yet victorious romance.

Or, if you would like to join us in reading through the Bible in 180 days in 2020, you can get the full picture of God’s incredible story for yourself. To learn more, sign up, and get your own Bible180 Challenge Journal, click here.

For further reading, in approximate order:

  • Isaiah 14

  • Ezekiel 28

  • Genesis 1-3

  • Genesis 12:1-3

  • Deuteronomy 6

  • Song of Songs

  • Hosea

  • Ezekiel 16

  • Jeremiah 30-33

  • Revelation 12

  • John 13-21

  • Acts 1-2

  • Acts 10:34-48

  • Romans 11

  • Isaiah 61-62

  • Daniel 12

  • Revelation 19-22

Merry Christmas, and a happy new year.

the story of the Bible (2).png

biblical vocabulary: unity

It’s been a little while since our last installment in the Biblical Vocabulary series, but there has been a word on my mind recently that I think deserves a closer look, especially because it’s so easily misunderstood. The word is unity.

The concept of unity (or the lack thereof) seems to have crept into conversations across a broad range of topics in recent years. We are confronted with division and conflict on every side, and in spite of the fact that so many voices in the public square are denouncing that divisiveness, the splits and chasms only seem to broaden. It matters now more than ever that the Church understands unity - what it is, what it isn’t, and why we so desperately need it.

So, what is unity? How does the Bible define it?

What is unity?

Our dictionary defines unity as “the state of being one; oneness.” I think that’s a good starting point, even though it sounds rather elementary; unity is one of those words that’s pretty easy to throw around without remembering its most basic meaning. The prefix “uni-” means “one” - not “same,” not “compromise,” not “fairness,” not “equality.” One.

That’s the word and meaning Jesus used when He prayed, the night before His death, that His followers and all those who would believe in Him be “perfected in unity.”

“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.”

John 17:20-23

Unity, by Jesus’ description, is the ultimate evangelistic tool the Church possesses. It is the ultimate representation of who God is and what He has done for humanity. It was Christ’s unity with the Father that made Him willing to come to earth as the salvation for humanity, whatever the cost. It is the Church’s unity with God and one another that makes us the guiding light toward Jesus in a dismal, dog-eat-dog world.

But we can’t fulfill that mission if we’re striving after a mistaken understanding of unity.

Jesus was one with the Father without being the same as the Father. He desires us to be one with Him, even though we can’t possibly be equal to Him. He asks us to be one with each other even though we all come from different backgrounds, have different opportunities, and experience different wounds. He envisions unity, oneness, among all of His children - even when some of them have absolutely nothing in common beyond Jesus Christ Himself.

Sometimes, we think we’re fighting for unity when we are really fighting for sameness. Or we think we’re fighting for unity when we are really fighting for fairness. Or equality. Or compromise. We often mistake for unity a room in which everyone acquiesces to the status quo, everyone looks and acts and speaks the same, and no one rocks the boat with a hard question, rebuke, or dissent.

But the real power of real unity is only found in oneness, which defies all our natural prerequisites for camaraderie, community, and teamwork to bring together the unlikeliest of human beings and unite them in Christ, the cornerstone.

biblical vocabulary : What is unity?

Unity is a value statement.

True, Biblical unity is reflected best in Christ’s oneness with the Father. Father and Son had very different roles in the mission to redeem fallen humanity; One remained on the throne, holding the universe in His hands, while the other cast off His holy power and royal rights to become a sacrificial Lamb. To accomplish the greatest rescue of all time, these two Persons of the Godhead became unequal. The demands on one of them became unfair. Their actions and experiences became completely different and separate.

Yet they were still One, because they both gave equal, all-important weight to the ultimate goal: the salvation of the world.

In the Church, we frequently get unity backward. We rally together as groups of people who look and act and think the same, but divide based on how we understand and interpret truth. (If you don’t believe me, consider the sheer number of different denominations that exist, and what “kind” of people stereotypically attend each church in your area.) Biblical unity is the opposite: It’s very different people with very different experiences and perspectives coming together to stand on the same truth and pursue the same goal.

The kind of unity that points the whole world to Jesus can’t be accomplished when we select our churches based on whether they serve our similar demographic or cater to our exact interests, or when churches silence the legitimate questions, ideas, changes, and concerns of individuals in an effort to prevent “division.” We all need to keep our eyes on the big picture, and examine the value statements we are making at individual, local, and denominational levels. Do we balance the weights of different issues in a way that’s consistent with the priorities of God’s Word, our foundation - or are we clinging too hard to certain preferences and petty differences?

Is abiding in life with Christ and the sharing of His abundant love with our brothers and neighbors the foremost concern on our hearts?

If we can all become one behind that cause - even if some of us like to sing hymns and some of us like to worship in dance, or if some of us are decades younger in age and experience than the congregation around us, or if some of us are Calvinists and some of us aren’t - then our testimony to the world will be impossible to snuff out.

There is a reason Paul uses the metaphor of a body to describe the Church. Just as a physical body needs all its different parts in order to stay healthy and accomplish its created purpose, the Church body needs a diversity of people that work together in unity toward its common health and common goals.

For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ. For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free, and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

1 Corinthians 12:12-13

The issues we unite behind are a clear and direct statement to the world about what we believe and value. If we can only unite around our demographics or around secondary theological issues, they’ll notice that in the big picture, we are just as divided as they are. But if we can become one, despite all of our differences, around the ultimate truth of who God is and what He has done? Then, as Jesus said, the world will know exactly who He is, and how He loves.