When a Man Loves a Woman
Douglas Wilson
The apostle Paul reminds husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church. He tells wives in their turn to reverence their husbands, to respect them. When men get this garbled and backwards, one of the results is that they spend their time
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wondering
why their wives don’t respect and honor them. And so they start to demand
it, making it even less likely that it will ever happen. Few forms of
behavior are less respectable than that of demanding to be respected.
When a husband does what he is told to do, the result is that
his wife is washed with the water of the Word. He loves her, as Christ
loved the church, and one of the blessings that flows from this is the
fact that his wife finds herself naturally respecting him. He who loves
his wife, Paul says, loves himself. A man who gives love receives
respect. But
marriage is not a vending machine, and love is not two quarters to put
into it. This is a manner of life, not an exchange of commodities. So
what does this kind of life look like? What does it look like when a
man loves a woman? First, the love that Christ modeled for Christian men was a particular love. Another way of putting this is that Christ is monogamous. He gave Himself for His bride, the Church. He has one Church, one bride, one wife. Other worldviews, other religions, other patterns of philosophy, are not loved by Him redemptively. Christian men are therefore to be dedicated |
 Douglas Wilson |
to
one particular woman. Temptations to look aside, to the right or to
the left, are temptations to represent Christ and the Church sinfully. Husbands
are a walking typology of the Gospel, and when they waver in their sexual
dedication to their wives, they have begun to model a religious relativism.
Lusting after another woman is like saying that Buddhism or Islam have their
good points. The particularity of the atonement is very important, but we
should never trust a man who affirms this without being equally devoted to
his wife. He should treat her like the elect -- because typologically that
is what she is.
Second,
Christ loved His bride sacrificially to the point of death. More than
this, His perfect, sinless life up to the point of death was an expression of
His love for His wife as well. When a man has to lay down his life for his
wife, it should not be a spasmodic final event inconsistent with what has gone
before. In other words, if a man has to die for his wife, it ought to be the
next logical step, the most obvious thing. A sacrificial death is unlikely
outside the context of a sacrificial life. We do not become suddenly,
miraculously obedient at the last minute. So, when Christ gave Himself up for
His wife, this sacrifice was characteristic of His entire life. It began in
history with the Incarnation, continued through to His baptism, and culminated
in His death and resurrection. Too many husbands want the perks of headship in
the home (“with dominion, glory and a kingdom, that the wife, sons and
daughters, dog and cat, and TV remote should serve him”) without understanding
that biblical authority in the home is based on sacrifice. The universal
dominion of Christ is based squarely on the fact that He died in obedience to
the Father. All men who want to be the boss in their home without an ethos of
self-sacrifice driving their daily decisions are men who secretly want to be
Muslims. But Christian men show honor to their wives by imitating the kind of
authority that Jesus modeled, which is the authority of the servant’s heart.
Third,
a man loves a woman sacramentally. She is bone of his bone, flesh of his
flesh. This happens when the marriage is consummated on their wedding night,
but it is constantly renewed in their sexual life together. This is not a mere
physical action, a biological phenomenon. Most contemporary Christians
unwittingly set the stage for marital infidelity by how they view the
sacraments of the Church. If the Lord’s Supper is a mere memorial, then eating at the table of devils is merely something else. If lovemaking is
merely physical, then what does it matter what other physical bodies might get
involved? At the other extreme is the mistake that mirrors the Roman Catholic
error of the
And
last, when a man loves a woman, he does so in a story. Paul says that men are
to treat their wives with a certain end in view. In this passage, men are commanded
to nourish, cherish, sanctify, cleanse, and present their wives. Nothing about
marriage is static -- a marriage travels through time. It has characters,
development, a plot, and so on. This means that men are responsible to see
themselves accurately. Men can do this by asking the right question. If this
household of his were a story (the kind you get from a book), what kind of
character would he be in it? The question can bring remarkable and unsettling
perspective. Is he the antagonist? The protagonist? The villain? The buffoon?
The sidekick? And is this story going to end the way Paul describes in the
fifth chapter of Ephesians? Without
spot or wrinkle, or any other blemish? And which character is preventing this?
The above article is reprinted by permission from Vol. 15, Issue 4 of Credenda
Agenda magazine. Douglas Wilson serves as
pastor of Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho and is a popular speaker at
conferences on history, education, theology, and family issues. He has authored
a number of books on education and family life including Reforming Marriage, The Federal Husband and Future Men and is the editor of Credenda Agenda magazine as well as a regular
contributor to Table Talk magazine. He and his wife Nancy will be among the
featured speakers at a seminar entitled Reforming Marriage to be held at