1 Peter 3:1-6 – Wives, be subject to your own husbands, by Rev. Colin Pretorius.
“All marriages are happy,” someone once said, “but it’s the living together afterwards that causes all the trouble!”[1] Friends, those of us who have been married for some time know that the bonds that hold a lasting marriage together are not like those pretty pink ribbons that you find tied around your wedding gifts. No, a lasting marriage is more like ancient Japanese samurai swords forged in the heat – in the case of marriage, not only forged in the heat of tussles and disagreements but also strengthened into a firm bond that cannot be shaken or broken.
Part of that forging process has to do with what our text speaks into today as well… the different roles of men and women in marriage. And in particular, in the first 6 verses of chapter 3, Peter gives us the biblical understanding of what that role looks like for a wife. He’ll look at the man’s role too in verse 7, but in the first 6 verses of chapter 3 the focus is on the role of the wife in marriage. As we take a look at this passage, we’ll be looking at the what, how and why of the often controversial subject of a wife’s submission to her husband. We’ll see that the text doesn’t just give us the command (the what), it also gives us the why and the how. Or to put it this way, this passage gives us:
- The command to submit;
- The reason for submission; and
- Examples of submission
[1] Paul Lee Tan, Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations: Signs of the Times (Garland, TX: Bible Communications, Inc., 1996), 575