Love your wife = love yourself
I feel like there is so much action packed into these few verses. So many things to delve into and think about. So many things to be grateful for.
First of all, lets look at this analogy that has been set up. "He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body." Something I once read and learned was that God loves Himself above anything else. When I first heard that, I was shocked. Surely God was self-infatuated right? But once it was broken down, it started to make more sense. God could ONLY love Himself the most because if He were to love something lesser than the best in the universe, then He would no longer be truly God. He would no longer be all powerful. So He loves Himself the most because He is (the I am). But returning to this verse...isn't it amazing that knowing He would choose to love us? He chooses us and makes us members of His body. By saving us, He allows us to glorify Him. SO, point 1: He, being the all-powerful being, chose to make us part of His body...isn't that great?? Point 2: It doesn't make sense to me how loving a lesser being would bring glory to the greater being if the lesser being was just a screw up. If I were God, I would just create a new world or do something else..move on. And yet, He is God and He says that by loving us, He loves Himself.
And now to the husbands. The passage draws this analogy of Christ and the church and husbands and their wives. We are taught that by loving our wives, we love ourself. Again, sometimes that just doesn't make sense. But don't stop believing in God and loving your wife. If you believe God is God, and He made the right choice by choosing us (as humans)[this is going back to point 2 above]...then you know that you can trust His wisdom in saying to love your wife because then you will be loving yourself. I can probably expound with details and experiences, but ultimately at the end of the day, the most profound and useful experience is self-experience. So just love! Also another thing I love (pardon the pun) about this passage is that is teaches us that love is an ongoing event and it is not purely based on emotion, but rather also on action. Christ made the church one in flesh with Him..and therefore, He has in many senses committed to us (love is ongoing, not an instance in time). However, even awesomer is that God loves us, as humans, and chooses us, even though we are sinful beings and sin is nothing but pure distaste to Him. As husbands, we must learn to love even though we can be disappointed or frustrated at times, we must love.
Lastly, if you are a woman reading this, you might read my point 2 and say, "Is he calling women lesser beings?" No, by no means at all..but that was just for the God part of the analogy. In fact, this passage I believe should not be hard on women at all, but rather, men, wake up and see how hard this passage is on us. This is a very high order..to learn to love as Christ loved us. That's a high order that we too often fail. Let's love.
This was post was kind of disorganized and kind of jumped from thought to thought. Not as beautiful as I thought it worked out in my mind, but I still think there is much beauty to be found in this passage.
Created 7 months ago
