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Don and Wendy Francisco
This is a destructive and cultish concept. JESUS is the leader of both man and wife directly, and the two have equal partnership in marriage and ministry.
The myth that the husband must lead the wife goes against greater New Covenant principles. Jesus said not to name a human spiritual leader. All believers are The Bride, adult sons, priests, and kings. Scripture tells us that we can have unbroken fellowship with God without any middlemen.
The Bible does not say that men are to be the heads of wives. The sentence doesn't stop there. The Bible says that men, who were already heads of wives in secular culture, were to express their secular headship AS Christ is head of the Church, WHO died for her and gave her His own position of sinlessness before God! He is not saying the man is to wash his wife. Christ has already washed the entire Body from all sin, both men and women. Paul is saying that men are to remove the cultural shame of womenhood from their wives and treat them as equals, as Christ did on a much larger scale for His Bride.
Christianity is NEVER about the assumption of power over people, even by God. Christianity is ALWAYS about the relinquishing of power from stronger to weaker, the equality of all believers in Christ, and mutual servanthood. This is what God Himself modeled to us when He walked the shores of our planet in human form.
No human can assume the spiritual responsibility of another. To attempt this breaks a person down by placing him on an impossible pedestal whether it is a husband or minister. Likewise, no person can bury the voice of God within and everything they were made to be and follow a human without being shipwrecked.
This myth causes men to become shallow, macho, driven, and arrogant. It causes women to become mousey, retiring, and manipulative. The men bark that the women don't submit, and the women whine that the men aren't strong enough leaders. This myth eats Christian marriages up from the inside out by the millions. Relationships that are unequally yoked will suffer. If the God of the universe can say that He came to call us friends, not slaves, then obviously, He would not place some as rulers and some as slaves within the Body.
The Bible tells us not to live by the flesh. Patterning life according to imagined gender roles is a deeply entrenched form of living by the flesh.
The myth, based on errant translation and misunderstanding of Scripture, feeds two aspects of fallen human nature - the desire to control other humans, and the desire to abdicate responsibility for our choices. This is precisely what God told Eve after the fall - that women would reach toward their husbands instead of God, and their husbands would rule them instead of loving them. Both responses are unhealthy. This is what happens when humans live without God as number one. But we have now been freed from every aspect of the curse and offered unbroken friendship with our Creator and Parent. When our relationship to Him is restored, our relationships with each other become healthy. We reach for Him and are satisfied as only He can satisfy. Then, from our rich resources, we love and serve each other.
Paul the apostle told us all to stand fast in the freedom which we were given. No marriage is richer than one where both people are adults, whole, functioning uniquely as they were created to be, with each one hearing and responding to God. Many churches attempt to homogonize all marriages with gender roles, yet God makes every snowflake different. Every marriage is a new combination, and every couple has the freedom to express their union in a unique way as God leads.