Also, in the context of this passage, to say that submission means to yield one's rights to another also means that the church possesses certain rights against Christ himself, that even he must honor, only that we are admonished to surrender these rights to him. Very few blasphemies can rise above this level.

We must have more sense and reverence when reading Scripture. The two relationships are so tied to each other in this passage that it prevents all equivocation. Submission cannot mean one thing when it comes to husbands and wives, and then mean something altogether different when it comes to Christ and the church – all within the same passage, or even the same sentence!

Besides its blasphemous implications, it also begs the question to impose "to yield one's own rights" as the definition for submission on this passage. That is, if the church must obey Christ – to actually do what he commands – then it really possesses no rights against him that it could yield in the first place.

We know that the church must obey Christ, and Paul says that, likewise, "wives should submit to their husbands in everything." Therefore, the wives have no rights against the husbands in the first place, so what is there for them to yield? They never had the right to oppose or disobey their husbands to begin with, so it is not something that is up to them to give up.^* If anything, because of the analogy to Christ and the church in this passage, the submission of the wives is asserted in much stronger terms than the obedience of children and slaves, whose relationships with their superiors are not compared to Christ and the church.

In fact, in Ephesians 5, the only ones who are told to yield their rights are the husbands. Paul instructs them, "love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her" (v. 25). The church never gave up anything for the benefit of Christ, but Christ sacrificed himself to save the church. Likewise, the husbands are the ones told to make the sacrifice. They are the ones who possess the rights that they may surrender for the benefit of their wives, but it is said that the wives must submit to them in everything, just as the church submits to Christ. Now if anyone says that the wives do not need to obey in everything, he must also say that the church does not have to obey Christ in everything. No one should call a Christian anyone who asserts something like this.

*Women indeed have certain rights in the marriage relationship. For example, she possesses conjugal rights (1 Corinthians 7:3-5), and the right to expect her husband to remain faithful. However, these are not really rights that she can surrender. It is not as if she can allow her husband to commit adultery! These rights do not apply to our context, which refers to the general headship of husbands over their wives, and the broad authority that this gives to the husbands. Also, the point is that they have no right to disobey in the first place, and therefore they have no rights to surrender in this context where we are referring to obedience to the husbands.

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