Colossians 3:19

We have a second verse where the relationship between the husband and wife is addressed.

Let me repeat that it is like plowing on stony ground when we have the two verses in isolation from the whole context of scriptures concerning the new man, which must be first and foremost in our minds.

We have ministries that have developed supposedly to be marriage ministries, which are full of stories, but we have no way of verifying how effective they have been.

If whatever we are saying to the husband and the wife is not under the auspices of the lordship of Christ as clearly enumerated in the preceding verses, what we have is the idolatry of marriage, in which marriage is seen as the be-all and end-all, rather than Christ being all in all. We have the lordship of marriage rather than the lordship of Christ.

We spend so much time chasing marital bliss, and it is like smoke that continues to elude us, why not pursue Christ and his knowledge with the same vigor and seek first the kingdom of God?

We have deified marriage and looked up to marriage to put too much demand on it; no wonder things are only going from bad to worse with regard to so-called Christian marriage because we have put marriage in the place of Christ.

Our fixation on marriage means we have made simple things complicated; all man-made religions have to be complicated; where we have made a religion of marriage, meaning we have rules and rules and rules, whereas Paul has only two.

Before you throw stones at me, try to think deeply about what I have said. Paul did not say more than wives submit to their husbands, and husbands love their wives and not be embittered towards them. And don't you think that is for good reasons?

But what we have in the marriage ministries are merely the wisdom of this world, propped up with various scriptures that are "kidnapped" to support the ideas of this world.

This is not something innocent because when you put the imprimatur of God in an idea, even for the noble motive of having a strong marriage, we have a human tradition that is developed to suppress the truth.

Jesus said it about giving. When the Pharisees said that whatever you should have given to your parents, you can give it to God. Jesus said it was a clever way to skirt obeying the word of God.

Who can argue against giving to God? But Jesus said it was wrong because they had created a way of skirting around the word of God with their tradition.

Paul wanted the elevation of Christ, and he spent verses and verses elaborating on that, and he spent two verses about husband and wife.

To demand a wife not submit to her husband when she is not first submitting to Christ would be like pulling a tooth.

To demand that husbands love their wives without first loving Christ would be like hammering your finger when you want to hammer a nail.

And it depends on which Christ?

• Not a Christ of our imagination

• Not a Christ that wants you fixated on things in this world.

• Not a Christ that is full of love for the world and whose image is defined by social credit and what their worldly friends say or what their family says, fueled by worldly ambition, and an unbending commitment to self-will.

It is not enough to be called a Christian, but what kind of Christian?

• Is it the one that minds earthly things?

• One who snares at scriptures or one that seeks to do the will of God/

• One that tells you you must return fire for fire, rather than one that says vengeance is mine,

• Is it one in which your identity is Christ?

• Or one in which Christianity is about propping up your image and not an inward transformation by Christ.

Because we do not have a foundation of truth as presented in the preceding verses, we have to try to make marriage into more than it is to occupy the space that should occupy our hearts. And it becomes an unending struggle without an ongoing fixation on Christ and the foundation of his truth.

Husbands love your wives

So much has been made of the Greek word translated as love here, which is agape, which people have defined as God's kind of love, which is not true.

We have a wrong model of bible interpretation that depends on importing what the word means in one context to an unrelated context.

In the context of husband love your wive, the emphasis is intimacy, as opposed to the husband sharing that intimacy with multiple people.

The husband is also to love everyone in a general sense, but it is clear that Paul is using love here in a special sense that would only apply to the wife and that it is the love that is about being intimate.

What Paul is communicating here is exclusivity, and not that the wife should not be exclusively, but a rejection of the social norm of the time that gives the man a pass for the wife not being the exclusive person the husband is intimate with.

Have intimacy with only your wife, which goes against the societal norm at the time that gives the man the right to be intimate with as many as possible: concubines, prostitutes, and mistresses.

Paul is putting a clear limit on a man's sharing of his intimacy only with his wife.

Do not be embittered towards them is clearly the number one thing that would scuttle that intimacy between the husband and wife. Being embittered towards them means you want to take your intimacy somewhere else.

Check out these two phrases: He loves beans; she loves her job.

Inherent in he loves beans, it does not mean that is the only food he eats. But inherent in her love for her job is the idea that that is the only job she has.

Husband love your wife comes with the idea of exclusivity when it comes to intimacy, is what I am saying.