Submitting One to Another

The Vine

This verse sits directly before Paul’s more specific instructions to wives and husbands, and it is worth noticing it applies mutually, one to another, before any of the specific roles that follow are addressed. Whatever else this passage goes on to say, it begins with mutual submission, not a one-directional demand placed on only one spouse.

Notice the phrase in the fear of God. This submission is not primarily submission to the spouse’s own preferences or authority for its own sake, but submission offered as an act of reverence toward God himself, who has called both partners into this kind of mutual yielding as part of what marriage, rightly understood, actually requires.

This corrects a common misreading of the passage that follows, treating submission as belonging entirely to one party while the other is exempt. The mutual framing here insists both spouses are called to genuinely yield to one another, in different ways their specific roles will describe, but starting from this same shared foundation of mutual submission.

Consider today one specific way you could yield to your spouse, not from weakness or from losing an argument, but as an act of reverence toward God, who has called you both into this kind of mutual submission as the actual shape of Christian marriage.