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You advise women to stand up to jealous husbands, but The Bible says submit….
06 Dec 2007 by Rod Smith in Anger, Attraction, Love, Manipulation, Marriage, Trust, Victims, Violence, Voice / 15 Comments
You advise women to stand up to their jealous or controlling husbands. Don’t you know the Bible says wives must submit to husbands?
I do. Paul says, “wives submit to your husbands,” and one can safely assume Paul is addressing all of his writings to both men and women. A husband who loves according to Paul’s descriptions of love is both safe and worthy of submission! Such a man will indeed not be going out of his way to secure the obedience of others. Beware of any man whose knowledge of Scripture begins, and ends, with “wives submit to your husbands.” Loving men (leaders, bosses, teachers) have no desire (or craving) for the submission (obedience) of others. “Love seeks no power, and therefore has it,” says Alan Paton.
Please write, I'm reading...
Submitting (“giving in”) to jealousy or controlling or abusive behavior is certainly not very helpful to the marriage, the husband or wife. The Bible doesn’t require anyone to submit (accept, obey) anyone’s pathological behavior, whether it is from a spouse, pastor, or any leader. To resist (stand up to) pathological behavior, however (wherever, whenever) it rears its ugly head, is to do the perpetrator (spouse, pastor, leader) a loving service.Submitting to damaging behavior can hardly result in helpful long-term outcomes.
Sadly, I have seen many a woman hang onto the hope that the husband will eventually change (stop drinking, beating, swearing, and go to church!) if she could just learn to really “submit.” I know women who believe their husband’s abuse is deserved – a “reward” for the failure to really submit. If abusive men (yes jealousy and control are forms of abuse) were as interested in Paul’s injunction to men: “love your wife as Christ loved the Church,” we’d be pleasantly engaged in a completely different discussion.
No. The monster (jealousy) will not go away if continually fed. It only gets more controlling, more demanding, and more viscous when it is not appeased.
About the Author: Rod Smith
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Verbal log-jam
When I was a boy I’d endlessly practice the fluent delivery of my name but it seldom flowed easily from my lips. As if it was new news to me, adults pointed out my stutter. Perhaps they thought I was beginning, at that precise moment, for the first time in my life to spit from the mouth, twist at the neck, jig my head back and forth trying to expel some inane statement log-jammed between my gut and my throat.
Idiots – always adults, children were surprisingly patient, – would make me repeat sentences as if a repeat performance of the humiliating uncoordinated gesticulations, my arms and legs flying in all directions, would make for an easier delivery the second time. That I’d just spent every ounce of energy trying to cough it up was lost on them. That I was already thoroughly humiliated was something to which they were blind.“Practice, practice,” they’d say as if stutterers simply didn’t speak enough. “Think before you speak. Now – try that again,” they would declare slowly and loudly as if I was stupid and deaf. These thoughtless people were ignorant of just how much stutterers do think. Too much – which is central to the issue!
If I’d known at twelve or thirteen that the day would come when I’d make a career of public speaking I might have strolled off a high-rise building.
Now it is quite easy to hide. I am very comfortable with crowds.
It’s asking driving directions or ordering food at a drive through where it gets tricky. Sitting in a cozy circle waiting for my turn to introduce myself sends my blood-pressure through the roof. The ticket attendant on the London underground can render me dumb after I’ve just spent days addressing a room full of graduate level adults about Family Systems Theory. I know. It sounds ridiculous.
I was almost immobilized the first time I saw Thulani put himself “on duty” in the event he needed to be my mouthpiece. He did it. No one asked him or appointed him. He just did it.
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Life in our beloved 122
If the inside of a house (outside, too, I suppose) is a metaphor of the lives of the people who live in it – which is something I once read somewhere – gosh, are we in trouble. Our house is a mess.
I consistently clean it room by room, thinking often of the legend that the Golden Gate Bridge that says there’s some guy constantly painting it. I feel for him. While I am sure the view is wonderful I must believe that the poor guy whose doing it daily from one end to the other must find the wind and the weather quite a challenge.
Our house is the same, but instead of painting from end to end and back again, I am the guy constantly cleaning, – and, it’s hard to tell.
Where I cleaned and swept and dusted and vacuumed and sponged and sterilized yesterday there are scooters and bicycles (boys), mail in piles (me), books (boys and me), newspapers (me), magazines (me), and socks (boys and Max, the Chihuahua).
Turn my back and the boys and Max are at it again – enjoying life as boys (and a dog) while I find being a cleaning lady quite an exhausting challenge.
There is a point of no return, I’ve noticed, or at least a point of the chaos where I feel compelled to let it all go for a while and I throw up my hands and join in the fun of trashing the place.
But when I clean I like to think I’m just like the guy painting the Bridge, which I can only imagine must be a slow and methodical task.
I do it room by room, starting at one end, the front, in the event that I soon lose interest – then, at least, the front room is somewhat in order. I push it (trash, magazines, books, socks, clothes) all back from the living room, through the piano room, then into the TV room until everything lands up in the kitchen.
Once it hits the kitchen I separate out what’s Max’s – he’s has his own set of toys with which he ruins the house – what’s Nate’s, what’s Thulani’s, and what can be recycled, dumped, restacked on bookshelves, placed in drawers, hung on a hanger, or filed in the “important documents” file I keep losing.
We moved into “122” (creatively named for its street number and which has had very few updates since it was built in 1886) when Thulani was about two – and I have been getting it in order ever since. Nate joined us in 2002. Max, in 2009. The house- attachment, at least for the boys and Max, is strong. When I talk of selling Thulani reminds me that Rhino, the husky that was on the run for nine months and returned to die within a few weeks after we reconnected, is buried in an Air France first class cabin blanket just outside of the kitchen door. Nate reminds me of where the fat goldfish is buried and Thulani ends the litany with his inability to think of living in a house without the large tree in the front yard where he has his brother (and Max) have “peed like boys” (and a dog) for the past several years.
So. I’ll go on painting and, before you send me letters about giving the boys chores and responsibilities and assigning daily tasks and getting on top of it before it gets on top of me let me advise that you are barking up the wrong tree (sorry, Max for the dog metaphor) because we do have all that in place and it does work here and there and off and on.
I know, I know. Consistency is the name of the game for parenting and let me tell you, the ONLY thing that is consistent here is the need to keep going room by room with or without the boys (and Max) to get this little bridge painted one stretch at a time so the world can see just how organized and decent our lives are here at our beloved “122.”
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Being a white South African can come with complications
Being a white South African reared under Apartheid is no simple matter. It permeated everything for me. While I do not pretend to have been a political activist, I was always cognizant that my privileges, simply a result of being born white, were unmerited, and most unfair especially when enjoyed at the expense of others who were not. I think this unsettling truth (for I took advantage of my station in life) was somewhat of a companion to me from the age of about six or seven.
I am regularly aware that:- I was discouraged from playing soccer in the “front” yard (in view of the neighbors) with the servant’s children. While this may seem insignificant in the light of other much more severe problems rising from racism, it was huge for me as a child on several fronts. I loved the children and I loved soccer even more. They were excellent soccer players.
- I did attend a segregated school as did almost all white South Africans while there did exist some church schools that were integrated even under Apartheid. I vividly recall my school principal scolding the entire student body (over a thousand white boys) because a domestic worker (a black adult man) was seen walking in the neighborhood wearing a school blazer.
- Although, by no means wealthy, I was waited on hand and foot by a full-time servant.
- In the late 80s I was warned not to pray publicly for Prisoner “Nelson” Mandela from my church pulpit.
- A member of my family did balk at my request that I bring black children to his home-swimming pool to swim.
- Even as late as 1987 I was embarrassed that a young black boy whom I’d “helped” in his squatter camp had shown up at my door unannounced. I recall wondering what the neighbors would think seeing a child arriving at the home for a social visit and not to work in the yard.While I am aware that these are piddly problems in the light of what millions faced under the Apartheid regime, I am also aware that these factors in my immediate environment “shaped” me into believing perverse things (like in my own superiority and in “their” inferiority) about persons of other race groups. More significantly, I am frequently reminded that my children and I could not have shared life as we now do if we were still living in the era of Apartheid.
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Location, location – remembering winter in August
We live very close to our school and church, so close we can hear the school bell from our kitchen and the church bells in my bedroom.
Sometimes we walk to both and we don’t see the car for days.
I like it. I like not having to get in and out of the car. I like not having to negotiate traffic, something as synonymous with life in the USA as Disney, Fast Food, and the Fourth of July.
That’s the upside.
We are a 10-hour-drive to the nearest coast – and, most of the east coast beaches are not worth the drive. The west coast, which has many wonderful beaches comparable to where I was reared, takes three full days of driving to reach.
Being landlocked is one thing but another is the weather. Indiana weather is erratic, neurotic, and downright psychotic.
Days ago I could’ve (but I didn’t) ice-skated across the street. Now, as I write, there’s a small lake in the street next to the sidewalk from last night’s rain. The weather is so brutal and extreme (it is as hot as blazes in the summers) that when we do drive anywhere (there are no grocery stores in walking distance) the streets are often full of potholes making some of America’s finest suburban streets resemble stretches of road you’d find in a rural stretch of South Africa’s Wild Coast. So, I am exaggerating but really not too much. Washington Boulevard is a challenge to drive right now, you have got to dodge potholes and loose pavement or, unless you drive a tank, you stand to severely damage your suspension.
But I do love living here. My neighbors are some of my best friends. My children are free and safe in the neighborhood and everyone knows everyone’s children. Even as I write Joseph (born a week or so before Thulani) from down the street has wondered into the house and it is quite likely he will eat with us, stay the night, and then wander down back down the street to his home sometime in the morning. His mom and I will talk sometime between now and nightfall unless he of course chooses to wonder off home and be gone just as quickly as he showed up.
Potholes and crazy weather won’t send us running, although we will drive to church in the morning – even though it is really close. I’m not sure I want to brave the elements which could be a snow-storm, an ice storm, the threat of a tornado – or a little or a lot of each. What else could you expect during March in Indiana?
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Ready to adopt?
If you wait until you are ready to adopt a child you never will because you will never be ready. The baby, and only the baby, will make you ready. Reading the right books will be helpful, but “ready” magically comes upon you when a real baby is sleeping in your arms or crying in the middle of the night. If you are not ready to change diapers – and I always am amused at the big deal about this non-issue – being unprepared will last only as long as a clean diaper. Of course you can go baby-stuff-shopping, get a room painted, stencil yellow ducks on the wall – if you know long enough in advance your child is coming. But painting a bedroom with ducks and rainbows and a pot of gold, and getting a truck load of stuff from your local one-stop baby emporium will only fill your home with a lot of weird and wonderful, and mostly unnecessary, equipment.
Children interrupt everything. It is the child who is really ready to teach you, whether you are or not. Once he arrives he will become the hub of all your scheduling. You will be fine with this because the child is not an interruption to your life but rather, from this point on, central to it.
The baby will make you ready and you can’t really prepare for the baby until he is breathing in the crib right next to your bed.
Life inside the Smith household
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15 Comments
Stef
My ex husband used to throw the Biblical meaning of “submit” at me all the time, along with other Bible verses that supported his views. I was almost relieved when he asked me for a divorce. He finally got it that I wasn’t going to “conform” to the way he thought a wife should be. He seemed to have forgotten that I was a human being, and not a pile of clay he could mold to his liking. No matter how hard he tried, I was never going to be that naive 18 year old again.
And you are right that no one has to take abuse from anyone, no matter what their beliefs are. After all, I don’t believe that there’s anything in the Bible that says “Submit even to cruel, harmful and demeaning behavior”.
08 Dec 2007 10:12 pm
A-mW
My husband kept badgering me with the 'submit to your husband' scripture, but I kept reming him of the following scripture, and he has since stopped using it as a weapon of control -
Ephesians 5:25
For husbands, this means love your wives, just as Christ loved the church. He gave up his life for her.
I'm not one for ramming scriptures down people's throats - but there is always a scripture to counteract an abuse of God's words to one's selfish motives within a marriage.
Thank the Lord.
19 Nov 2010 11:11 am
Rod E. Smith, MSMFT
Thanks. I am always sad when people are taught to submit as if it is come kind of key to solving problems not even their own.
Rod Smith
08 Dec 2007 10:12 pm
awakened
Very nice way of handling a very touchy subject. Congratulations!
Cheers,
Albert | UrbanMonk.Net
Modern personal development, entwined with ancient spirituality.
11 Dec 2007 03:12 am
Molly
Dear Rod,
I want to tell you how I appreciate your answer on this subject. Only a year ago I divorced my husband who left me for another woman, which was a relief. I didn’t, or maybe couldn’t, see how abusive my marriage was until after he left the house. In the midst of my 14 year marriage, the advice given me by my pastor was that I must be a better wife, look prettier, keep the house better, work harder, give him more frequent sex (even though he was sexually abusive to me), etc…. and that I was having marriage problems because I was not submissive enough or a good enough wife. I swallowed that philosophy hook, line, and sinker. It nearly destroyed me emotionally… and staying with him nearly killed me. I’m beginning to see that my pastor did not have a full understanding of abuse, or when it is right to stand up to abuse. I always thought it was disrespectful to stand up for myself. But now I’m starting to think a different way. If I hadn’t gotten out at that particular time, I think my husband very possibly could have gone over the edge… leaving my two beautiful children motherless. I’m not sure yet what the Bible says about abuse… but I do see that it says more to husbands about loving and honouring their wives than it does to wives about submitting to thier husbands. There is also a passage that says the two are to submit to each other in love. Well… thank you for helping to confirm what I’ve newly learned. Thank you for this site, as well. It is very helpful.
Yours sincerely,
Molly
08 Jan 2008 01:01 pm
dannimoss
Excellent post! I spent 20 years in an abusive marriage and 13 of those years on my face with God to learn His heart on the subject. The Bible has WAY more to say on the subject than just “wives submit.” For instance, it also says that love does not enable another person to live in sin (paraphrase), and we are supposed to submit to governmental authorities – and in our country most abusive behaviors are illegal. You can’t take one verse out of the context of the whole Book.
The Bible also has a very specific process for church discipline when one believer has been offended by another – and marital abuse would certainly apply. Most churches won’t follow this Scripture, but it’s in the Book. Ultimately, a spouse who has been confronted and refuses to change is to be treated as an unbeliever and the church is supposed to withdraw fellowship. It amazes me that churches like to preach “submission” all day long but I have yet to hear one say they’ll excommunicate an abuser.
My marriage nearly killed me. I ended up with breast cancer at 40. I finally realized my “surprise” new daughter was going to grow up like her brothers had (very bad and no one would ever believe us because my “very good Christian” husband wore such a perfect face) and my example was going to teach her to marry an abuser. And I was not going to be around to raise her very long either because his treatment of me was going to kill me – even if he never laid a hand on me. So I got a divorce in spite of my pastors’ disapproval. It has turned out to be the best thing I ever did. My ex promptly remarried and is adding to his progeny (scary) and my children and I live in a peaceful home.
I’m in school full-time now to get a PsyD in clinical psychology because I want to make a difference. The church appears to be incapable of offering genuine help in this situation (and others) so that desperately needed assistance and guidance is going to have to come through other avenues, and this can be one.
09 Jan 2008 07:01 am
Silent Observer
Did you know that it wasn’t until 454 AD that women were even identified as humans? The vote 32 yay and 31 nay. This vote was taken by clergy men of the time. What does that tell us ladies? The bible is just one persons interpretation, the person who wrote it into English. Just remember that.
07 Feb 2008 05:02 pm
Think about this
The Bible does tell women to submit, or come under, their husbands. If the husband was who the Bible described him as he should be, most of us would take joy in that submission. Husbands are supposed to offer security, affection, honor their wives, and love them as Christ loved the Church. What woman would have a problem submitting to that? It’s when women become used and doormats that submission doesn’t work. There are responsibilities on both sides of a marriage, and when both people are living up to their responsibilities, the marriage works in harmony. So — submission isn’t a bad thing. It’s actually a beautiful design when both husband and wife are being what Christ called them to be.
11 Feb 2008 04:02 pm
Owen
Here here for the last comment. Unfortunately, there are many men who do not understand leadership and service. They do not understand their role very well and pursue unrighteous dominion over their spouse. It was never designed to be that way. Men should rule over the home in “righteous dominion”. Women are to support their husbands in “righteous dominion”. That is the way the Lord has set it up from the beginning of time. Unfortunately, a lost man….leads to confusion all the way down the ranks. To make matters worse….most women come from a long line of mothers and grandmothers who have not trusted the leadership provided. So we see clearly “the sins of the fathers (mothers) passing to the children”. I believe a man should lead his family and wife righteously. And I hope he would find a woman strong enough to follow in righteousness. There is so much confusion in the world today. Men who want to have the womans role. Women who want to have the mans role. Certainly a sign of the last days.
18 Mar 2008 08:03 am
Angry at Bible Bashing..
Only idiots interpret the Bible that way and have no business calling themselves Christians. Submission, give us a break! Educate yourself and read the book “Why Not Women?” Satan hates women…always has.
02 Oct 2008 01:10 am
Wicked Pastors…
Which incude most of them ….. always preach against divorce and tell women to stay with abusive men and be submissive (a pornograhper’s favorite word, by the way). And why? Think about it…they want the tithes money. Sure let the women and children suffer meanwhile the guy molest kids, bring homes STD’s but never enough money….cause they are not men and NEVER WILL BE, or they’d go out in the world and fight for money and good causes. So, no guys, I doubt you’ll make it to heaven, I don’t care what your greedy, perverted, doped up from drugs, so-called pastors say.
02 Oct 2008 01:10 am
Stupid church teachings about Submission…
…has led to a bunch of stupid, ugly people being bred like animals. Kids their education from their mom, not the dad. Learn a few things from science and gentics, people. Therefore, we now have the major problems we have today, dumbasses running the gov’t and everything. It’s a sick, downward spiral. And by the way, there were women disciples and Jesus was not sexist. On the contrary, he liberated women.
02 Oct 2008 01:10 am
Ana
I recently started studying about woman’s rights in the bible. I feel like an infant in my knowledge of the bible. I have been a christian for only about 5 years. I felt God calling me to use my business after hours to hold prayer and worship meetings. Through one of my clients I learned her husband was wanting to preach. She told me he has done it before. I approached him about it and he was willing. Very shortly after we met I realized he has a problem with women. He feels women should be submissive to their husbands. Even though I feel like this is something I was called for. He continues to bypass me and leave all his answers with my husband instead of talking to me directly.
I have been working very hard to have people come and listen to him because he is a good preacher, but I feel offended and have no rights even though I love the Lord because of this. Could you please show me some scriptures about a wife’s rights in reguards to her husband and being obedient. Because I feel I should be my husbands equal and God loves us the same. I have been waiting for the opportunity to witness to others , I always volunteer to be open to help others. I’ve been told I can’t witness to men , only men can witness to other men. Could you please point me in the direction of scriptures pertaining to this.
Thank you so much for your time and effort,
Ana
20 Dec 2008 12:12 pm
thenonconformer
CONTROLLING BEHAVIOR is Public Enemy Number One
http://postedat.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/get-real-now/
01 Sep 2009 05:09 am
Joyce beck
The bible states that women should be slaves to men. To submit means to yield to the will of another. Hence, no free will. And with no free will, there is no freedom. So, freedom is only for men, huh. Women, and the men who respect women, should get out of christianly. The god of the bilble hates you (and wants to make a slave of you). To say otherwise would be an insult to anybody’s intelligence.Not to mention, women are unclean. Oh, and I also don’t kill people who work on
Sunday
06 Jun 2011 09:06 pm
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