Daily Bible Reading 28th July 2025 // Colossians 3:18-21
18 Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. 19 Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. 20 Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. 21 Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged.
In vv 18-19 Paul bears witness to the divine order laid down for the relationship of mutual care and support between husband and wife. In a day and age when women's issues and women's rights are front page news, both inside and outside the Church, Paul's injunction for the wife to subject herself to her husband is not well received. On the topics of women and marriage Paul is often approached warily, if not dismissed out of hand as bourgeois and middle class. In direct opposition to the apostolic imperative, disparaging and rejecting it as a pandering to the social norms of that day, women are urged rather to assert and to express themselves, to throw off the shackles of male domination. We should not be surprised at this. This is how the flesh has always reacted to the divine Lordship. The flesh, the old man, is always self assertive. Sinful human nature has never liked the biblical 'subordination-ethic'. This is why the flesh must be put to death and why the new man must be put on. This is why we must clothe ourselves with compassion, kindness, lowliness, gentleness and long-suffering patience. A wife submitting herself to her husband is showing forth the grace of her new self (in all lowliness, gentleness and long-suffering patience). In urging submissiveness on the wife's part, this is no craven surrender by Paul to the popular but misguided attitudes of the day. It is exactly the opposite. The new life of Christ challenges the accepted moral and social attitudes. The new man turns the values of the world on their head. This injunction is revolutionary, it flies in the face of our fleshly self-assertion and that is why it is so despised and rejected in our modern world. By urging subjection to the husband, Paul is calling for sacrificial submission to Christ as Lord. It must be admitted that the wife will not always find this sacrificial giving of herself to her husband congenial, but the putting to death of the self is never congenial. This is what it means to be crucified with Christ (Galatians 2:20). This is what it means for the wife to call Jesus Christ, Lord.