(4 a.) In Ephesians 5:22-33. St. Paul passes from warning against special sins to consider the three great relations of life, first considered as “subjections,” and so illustrating the general precept of submission in Ephesians 5:21, but ultimately viewed in their reciprocity of mutual obligations and rights. First, accordingly, he dwells on the relation of marriage, declaring it to be hallowed as a type of the unity of Christ with His Church, and hence drawing the inference of the duty of free obedience in the wife, and of self-sacrificing love in the husband. This passage may be held to contain the complete and normal doctrine of the New Testament on this great question, written at a time when Christianity had already begun to exalt and purify the nuptial tie; and it is instructive to compare it with 1 Corinthians 7, written for “the present distress,” glancing not obscurely at marriage with unbelievers, and adapted to the condition of a proverbially profligate society, as yet scarcely raised above the low heathen ideas of marriage.
(22) Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands. — The same exhortation is found in Colossians 3:18; Titus 2:5; 1 Peter 3:1-6; and besides these formal exhortations there is distinct and emphatic declaration of the “subjection of women” in 1 Corinthians 11:3; 1 Corinthians 11:7-9; 1 Corinthians 14:34-35; 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Probably the sense of that fundamental equality in Christ, in which (see Galatians 3:28) “there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female,” while it was rightly accepted as showing that there is no spiritual inferiority in woman — such as Oriental theory asserted, and even Greek and corrupt Roman practice implied — was perverted to the denial of the greater natural weakness of woman, from which subordination comes, and to the foolish and reckless disregard of all social conventions. St. Paul, as usual, brings out the simple truth of principle, sanctioning whatever is fundamental and natural in woman’s subordination, and leaving the artificial enactments of law or custom to grow by degrees into accordance with it. The principle of subordination is permanent; the special regulations of it in the world or in the Church must vary as circumstances change.
As unto the Lord. — These words are explained by the next verse. In Colossians 3:18 we have the less emphatic phrase, “as it is fitting in the Lord.”