Better Homes & Families Pt 3: The Submission Revolution

Well, I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because there's nothing that causes more controversy in the modern world than how men and women are supposed to live together and then how families are supposed to live together as well.

The thing is about this Better Homes and Families stuff that we're marinating over over the next few weeks is it is really not just about marriages and just about parenting and just about kids.

Like it's sort of about what about our private world, which is why we did use the analogy of a garden.

Because I go to school, that's a garden.

I go to work, that's a garden.

I go to uni, that's a garden.

I have a dorm room, that's a garden.

A home, a house, any private context is a garden.

And Ephesians chapter 5, flowing over to Ephesians chapter 6, it offers us this thing called a household code, which by now anyone who's listening to the podcast a lot probably would have heard the discussion with the Reverend Dr. John Griffiths.

And we talked about sort of if you listen to that in the first century world, how that code really would have struck you.

And there's a couple of interesting things.

And one is really when we read that household code, we should understand that we're actually being educated.

How do Christians behave in certain contexts? And the code chooses three sets of relationships.

Wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters.

So for starters, those are not the only relationships in a household in the first century world.

There's all sorts of, what about mother-in-laws? It doesn't say what you do with your mother-in-law, you know, and that's for good reason.

No one knows what to do with them.

It doesn't say what you do with sister-in-laws or if you adopt someone, you know, it doesn't say what you do with the people who visit the home to transact business, which they were considered part of your household in the first century world.

Yeah.

So therefore, firstly, we should recognize the household code in Ephesians 5 is not exhaustive.

It's not saying this is the only thing you need to know about a household.

But then secondly, if we know that, what it's saying is let's choose a sample space of common relationships and explain how those relationships are transformed in the Christian household or how the gospel transforms the way we relate to each other.

And then secondly, then we could extrapolate, well, how are we supposed to treat other people? And so it sort of becomes this whole concept of what we do with others in our lives.

So therefore, really, the household code is an exhibit A of if you chose three sets of relationships and you explain this is how we live together, you can extrapolate those values outside to all the other relationships.

So therefore, if you're not married, you still learn something from what it says about being married.