Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to Himself as a glorious church, without stain or wrinkle or any such blemish, but holy and blameless.
In the same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. Indeed, no one ever hated his own body, but he nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body.
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” This mystery is profound—but I am speaking about Christ and the church.
However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
Notes
This section offers one of the most exalted revelations in all of Scripture: marriage is not merely a social institution—it is a living picture of Christ’s union with the Church. Paul opens with a call for wives to submit to their husbands, but immediately roots it in a grander truth: as the church submits to Christ. This is not slavish subordination but gospel-patterned alignment. Just as the Church yields to her Savior, so the wife walks in reverent love toward her husband.
But the weight of the passage falls on the husband. He is not called to lead with dominance, but to love as Christ loved—with sacrificial, sanctifying, life-laying-down love. This is the New Covenant love, the love that gives all to make the bride holy, cleansed, and radiant
(cf. John 13:34; 1 John 4:10–11).
Christ does not love in abstraction—He loves a specific people, His body, the Church. And He gave Himself not just to justify them but to sanctify and glorify them. Husbands are called to mirror that—to love their wives not as accessories to their lives, but as part of their very being. He who loves his wife loves himself, Paul says, because they are one flesh.
And here Paul reveals the depth: “This mystery is profound, and I am speaking about Christ and the church.” Marriage is a gospel display. From Genesis onward, the one-flesh union pointed forward to the union of Christ and His bride. This is the mystery once hidden and now revealed: that in Christ, God has united heaven and earth, Jew and Gentile, and now Christ and His Church in covenant love
(cf. Genesis 2:24; Ephesians 3:6).
New Covenant marriage is not built on control, but on Christ—on sacrificial love, joyful submission, and mutual holiness. It is shaped not by culture but by the cross. The husband images Christ’s self-giving; the wife images the Church’s joyful devotion. Together, their union testifies to the redeeming, transforming, enduring love of Jesus.
This is more than instruction—it is revelation. Marriage is a stage on which the drama of redemption plays out, and every New Covenant home becomes a living parable of grace.
Moe Bergeron 
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