[AI translation] Above the longer Bible passage just read, in our Bible it is written: house rules. And it is also clear from the context that it is not just any kind of home rule, but a distinctively Christian home rule. It is not an order for unbelievers. For people who are not believers, it may simply be good advice, which they can argue about whether it is right or wrong to try or not to try, but nothing more: it is not really for them. To the unbeliever there is only one message, and that is to accept in faith the saving grace of the Lord Jesus. This is the life of a man who has already received from God the grace offered in Christ and now wants to arrange his whole life accordingly. So, "As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him" (Col 2,6). As the saying goes, "There are many houses, there are many customs. Every house has its own house rules. Well, the family of God has its own house rules. So it only applies to those who are already part of the Father's family, acquired through the blood of Christ!It could be said to be the order of life of the Christian man. Order of life! For there is a certain order to the Christian life. God wants there to be order in the life of the Christian man. And if we observe this list carefully, we see that this divine order does not only affect a certain part of human life, but the whole of it. There are four great areas of the Christian man's life. These are: the family, the workplace, the church and the world. You cannot be a Christian in just one part of life! I cannot, for example, live my life in the family under the Lordship of Christ, but not in the world. Or: in the church I follow Christ, I walk according to Christ, but at work I hide that I belong to him. Either the faith in Christ and the behaviour that flows from it permeates the whole of my life, every area of it, or if not, then following Him in the areas that remain becomes hypocrisy. That is why the order of family life, of employer-employee relations, of life in the Church and of conduct towards the world is listed here in almost a breath as the order of the Christian man's life in its unity, coherence and indivisibility.
There is order in the life of the Christian man when obedience to the Lord is equally prevailing in all its aspects. Each is related to the other like the lights on a Christmas tree in a row: if a bulb burns out somewhere, the power goes out, the whole tree is disordered, the other lights do not light up. You can't say, for example, that someone has problems only in his family life, but everything else is fine; because if there are problems in his family life, there are also a lot of messes in other areas of his life - just perhaps not yet so much as in the most restricted area: at home. "As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in him." To walk in Him, to walk in His ways, to walk according to His guidance. Either one walks this way - but then one walks this way in every area of one's life, in the family as well as in the world, in the workplace as well as in the church - or one walks the wrong way, because one walks two ways at once. There are two ways. You can do that, too, walking two paths at the same time, but do you know what the Bible says about it? (Pro 28:18) Isn't that why we have so many stumbles in our lives, because we walk - or want to walk - in different ways in different areas of our lives, but we fail? Well, this is why God's Word warns that for those who have accepted Christ, there is only one way for them everywhere: at home, in the church, in the world. Only the one for which Jesus said, "I am the way" (John 14:6). We will now deal only with the first, the home order of life, and the others, with God's help, at another time.
When the apostle begins to detail the Christian home order, the great thing about it is that he does not get lost in the minutiae, but shows us the main guidelines. He doesn't explain much of God's Word, but he gets right to the weak point in our lives, the very place where trouble tends to come from. In his description of the order of family life, he begins with the relationship of the spouses to each other, and begins with the wife. He could say many things about how a wife should behave towards her husband, but it is very typical that he says only one thing: the wife should obey her husband. Obviously because this is the woman's weak point. This is something she must be particularly careful of, and must be specifically drawn to her attention. It is not a social rule in the Bible that a wife should obey her husband, but a divine order. The woman who takes Christ seriously should also take seriously the order of God: that the husband is head over his wife. (It is surely no accident that this is the second time this week that a number of women in this church have been warned about this in the Word.) It is a question of submitting to God's order, or of rebelling against God's ordinance. So, "Wives, obey your husbands, as is right in the Lord." (Col 3:18) It may be otherwise according to the world's taste, and it very likely is, but it is so in the Lord.
(Col 3,19) These two verses are like the arch of one arch and the arch of the other in a Gothic church: they lean towards each other, they hold each other, they complement each other. One cannot exist without the other. Only where the husband loves, truly loves his wife and vice versa, can obedience be demanded of the wife. The trouble tends to be in the absence of one, for example, obedience, but demanding the other, love; or in the absence of tender love in the one, but expecting obedience from the other. Well: the two together are complete, together are possible, they hold each other. If the Word of God sees a special need to admonish men to love their wives, it is surely because we men either do not love our wives enough, or do not really love them. The word the Word of God uses here to express love is the same word used in the New Testament to indicate the love of God: agape. The word that is used in 1 Corinthians 13. That is, the love which covers all things, hopes for all things, endures all things, which does not seek its own gain, does not provoke to anger, does not act impiously, does not reproach evil, does not envy, does not boast, never wastes away. With that love of which God is the source, which man draws again and again from God, which he receives from God!
And surely the man must be warned of this because he is not willing to love his wife with such love, but passionately, erotically, only in a human way, according to his mood, that is: not in the Lord! So everyone can love! It is not love, but instinct, which is also in the animal in some way. It is the love of the blood first of all. It means I love you because it is good to love you, my life will be more through you, more beautiful, richer, happier. I love you passionately because you are beautiful, you are young. In fact, this love, this passion, can be cultivated a little, and then it becomes: I love you and I ask you to love me, let us join together, let us put our lives together, let us make each other's lives more beautiful by putting our potential at each other's disposal for each other's pleasure and benefit.
But that is still not what our Word is about. Here it is about loving you because you need my love, because you are orphaned, unhappy, poor without it, because you need someone to love you! This is the meaning of the word the apostle uses here when he says: "Husbands, love your wives." This love is not in us, we cannot produce it in ourselves. This love is only in God, in fact, God is love. He does not command love, but pours it out. So love can only be found in God. He who has come within the life of God can only love in this way! Surely it is no coincidence that this is also the second time this week that many of us have been warned of this in the Word of God. You men! Your wives will know if you love them like this!
He adds to this admonition to love, "Do not be bitter towards them." I have tried to understand the meaning of the original word, and I could render it something like this: you men, do not let your wife become habitual, boring to you! Ageing spouses can sit or walk side by side with such a monotone, bored look that you can almost tell from a distance how little these two people care for each other. Well: where the spouses are in the Lord, where there is such love between them as is here spoken of, the joy and happiness found in each other remains fresh and does not fade. As an old man, celebrating his golden wedding anniversary and living very seriously in the Lord, once said: 'Even now my heart leaps - just as it did when I was young - when I see my wife come through the door! Yes: "Do not be bitter towards her!"
After the order of spouses comes the order of parents and children. Again, the Word touches on the weakest point: "Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is pleasing to the Lord." (Col 3,20) Again, this is not just a piece of advice, an ethical command, but it is valid only in its full context, that is, that parents who obey the word of the Lord should enforce the divine order that their children should obey his word. It is not, therefore, that a parent may command his child as he pleases, because he is the elder, but that to be a parent in God's order is to represent God's paternal care, wisdom and love to the little ones entrusted to him, to transmit God's paternalism through my own parenthood!
This explanatory remark means a lot here: "it is pleasing to the Lord!" Not all parenting is pleasing to the Lord, of course. It may be pleasing to the parents, because the child does everything for them, like a well-trained puppy - dancing and jumping as the owner whistles. The Word does not mean here to be at the mercy of the parents - for there is such obedience, but it is not pleasing to the Lord! Parents, when you demand obedience from your child, consider whether the word you are demanding the child to obey is pleasing to the Lord? That is why there is an immediate continuation of the previous warning: 'Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, lest they despair' (v. 21). The word which our Hungarian Bible translates as annoyance also has this meaning: to excite, to excite, to irritate. Let us think of the nervousness of parents, which also permeates the child, or the secret sins of parents, which the child either knows because he sees and hears everything very clearly, or unconsciously senses, and these parental sins, faults, miseries excite and irritate the child.
"Lest they despair," says the apostle. Despair means that there is some kind of split in the soul, some kind of dichotomy, a loss of will, a loss of courage for life, for the problems of life. The soul is crushed. Many of these oppressed souls, lives with inferiority complexes, come from the very error against which the Word warns in this way: "Fathers, do not provoke (provoke) your children, lest they despair." This Word warns us against the burden of the crushing responsibility for our children's souls and the development of their whole spirituality!
Christian Rules of the House! And is this really the order of your house?! "As ye have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him." Do we walk?! Are we not so that when the guidance of the Word becomes so concrete, as it is here, there is nothing left but to begin to beg, humbled by the many omissions:
Lord God, make haste
Help us,
In our great need,
For Christ Jesus,
Our Lord
and our Saviour!
(Canto 151)
Amen
Date: 25 November 1951.
Lesson
Kol 3,18-4,6