Being the "Head" of Your Wife

I recently ended up embroiled in an angry discussion of what Paul meant when he said, "the man is the head of the woman". I mostly had to endure an angry tirade about what that must mean. After all, where is the head? It's on top, above the rest of the body. And what does it do? All the speaking, the seeing, the hearing, the thinking. So of course, in a Christian marriage, the man does all that and the little woman keeps quiet and submissive. What else can it mean?

Well, finally we get to the right question. If you accept the authority of the Scriptures, which I do, then you can't get away with simply deciding what various phrases mean. You need to see what the Scriptures themselves say about each other. God has been very free over the years with his poetic metaphors, and the world is quick enough to hijack them for its own justification. Unlike politicians, God doesn't seem very worried about being misquoted. He seems to be more concerned with filling his words with as much life as possible.

So, and I wish I'd said this at the time, let's look at that verse. That phrase is actually one of three parts and the full sentence goes like this:

But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.

 Now let me engage in a little literary logic. Since the expression is repeated three times in the one sentence, doesn't it make sense to assume that it means the same thing in each case? They all inform each other. So, if you want to know what it means for the man to be the head of the woman (and make no mistake here: we are talking about a husband and a wife, not any man relating to any woman), take a look at what it might mean for Christ to be the head of "every man", and take a look at what it might mean for God to be the head of Christ.

Notice that he did not say Jesus is the head of every man, nor did he say the Messiah, or the Son of God, but he said "Christ". Jesus is all of these things, but what does it mean particularly for him to be the Christ? It means the annointed one, the lamb of God, who took away the sins of the world. As the Christ, he came to us be a servant and a sacrifice because he loves us. And as he himself said, "If any of you would be great, let him humble himself and become a servant." So ya wanna be the head? Ya wanna exercise godly authority? Then, as Paul says elsewhere, love your wife as Christ loved the church, and gave himself for her.

And God is the head of Christ. I take "God" here to mean the Father, the Holy One of Israel. How does he relate to Christ? He has greatly exalted him, placing him above everything else. This is a hint about the intimate relationship within the Godhead, and a man who hopes to fulfil his role as the head in a godly way will want to look at that. For a husband and wife, as I have written elsewhere, are a metaphor for the loving intimacy of Elohim, the Mighty Ones, creator of heaven and earth.

So I hope that I have clarified two things here. One is that I do not accept the age-old idea that men have any license to dominate their wives. What they have is an opportunity for love and sacrifice that they won't find anywhere else. And two, something I remember Kenneth Hagin saying forty years ago: make sure you get all the Scriptures in before you decide what they mean.