So ought men also to love their own wives as their own bodies he that loves his own wife loves himself.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
For no one has ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, even as also the Christ the assembly
The verse rests on something no one has to be taught: we feed and protect our own bodies. Paul makes that instinct the standard for how a husband loves his wife, and then says it is the way Christ treats the church.
The verse does not appeal to duty first. It appeals to something already at work in every person, and God puts His approval on it.
The Spirit of God here assumes a necessary way of nature, and assumes it with approval. That regard for one's self which each of us is ready enough to give has God's own approval. And then, on this very principle of nature, the apostle goes on to set out the Lord's nourishing care of the Church... So if I can understand my love for myself, I may understand Christ's love to me. My Lord owns the duty I owe myself as a duty He owes to me. He can only nourish and cherish me, as I would nourish and cherish myself.
Applied to marriage, this reshapes how a man sees his wife — and how he sees any injury done to her.
He is now taking up the common instinct that men naturally avoid pain and take care of themselves. He is speaking only of the fact. He says: look upon your wife as a part of yourself. Anything that would wrong her is that much wrong done to your own body.
The two words are not repetition. Each means something different, and each reaches us in its own way.
And what are nourishing and cherishing? Nourishing is food, and cherishing is warmth of affection. You have the truth ministered by the gifts the Lord gives — that is the nourishment, and saints need nourishment... not just the ministry of all that He is to our souls to form us like Himself; He also leaves out no detail of tender care for His own.
Christ's aim is heaven. But this verse is about now — what His love is doing for the church here, and what draws it out.
Not only has Christ a heavenly aim, but His love performs the work which, so to speak, is natural to it. He cares tenderly for the church here below; He nourishes it, He cherishes it. The church's needs, weaknesses, difficulties and anxieties are only openings for Christ to show His love... If the end is heaven, He does not leave the church abandoned here. She learns His love where her heart needs it.
That has a steadying effect on anyone discouraged by the state of Christians around them.
It is a great comfort to know this is true of the Church as it is now, when we think of the ruin all around. Does Christ ever cease to nourish what belongs to Him? Impossible. In spite of all the ruin, He has the same care for His people.
Some older translations end the verse with "even as the Lord the church." One commentator shows why the better reading, "Christ," matters.
Scripture never speaks of Him as Lord in relation to the Church. That clause in Ephesians 5:29, when read rightly, stands: "even as the Christ the Church." To the Church, whether seen as His body or His bride, He is head, not Lord. Lord of course He is; God made Him such... Headship and Lordship both belong to Him, but they are not interchangeable terms. As Lord, He stands apart from all others; as head, He is in close association with what He is joined to.
Care that flows from union rather than rank changes the character of the love itself:
Christ's care of the church does not flow from prerogative only, but His care and tenderness are exercised over it... The love we have to learn is not supremacy in love, but caring, as it were, for Himself.
A husband is not asked to copy everything Christ does. The call is narrower, and more searching.
Christ's love in cleansing the Church is set here before the Christian husband. That is not so that he should set to work and do the same with his wife. It is so that he may, in a general way, learn from our loving Head in glory to show his love to his wife in tender concern for everything that touches her welfare... There are not a few who show great willingness (I do not say skill) for washing their wives' feet, but let them starve at the same time. If you do not know how to nourish and cherish your wife, as your own body, you are not fit to wash her feet.
Measured against Christ, the standard is one a husband never finishes meeting.
What heights and depths this comparison holds! It shows that the debt of love is never paid, but always owed. And yet that love delights to own the debt, and to keep paying it, lavishing care and tenderness on her who has become one with him in God's view.
- Instinct — No one needs convincing to care for himself. God approves that love and makes it the measure for all that follows.
- Measure — Take that instinct as your gauge of Christ's love for you: what you owe yourself, He owns as owed by Him to you.
- Method — Nourishing is food; cherishing is warmth of affection. Christ gives both: truth ministered to us, and tender care that never fails.
- Moment — This is His love now, not only at the cross or at the end. The church's weaknesses and worries are openings for it.
- Mirror — A husband is not asked to cleanse his wife but to feed and warm her; the debt is never paid off, and love is glad it isn't.