What Does Ephesians 5:25 Mean?

(25) **Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church.**—The love of Christ for His Church is such that He counts Himself incomplete without her (Ephesians 1:23), and raises her to be one with Himself; that He bears with her weakness and frailty; that He draws her on by the cords of love; and that He gives up Himself for her. Only so far as the husband shows the like love in perfect sympathy, in chivalrous forbearance, in abhorrence of tyranny, in willingness to self-sacrifice, has he any right to claim lordship. **And gave himself for it.**—Here, as before, the antitype transcends the type. In the character of our Lord’s sacrifice, as an atonement offered “for” the Church, and in the regenerating and cleansing effect of that sacrifice (see next verse), none can approach Him. The husband may be said to give himself for his wife, but it cannot be in any higher sense than as taking the chief share of the burden, and if possible the pain, of life for her. He may follow Christ in love, and in that alone. Compare St. Paul’s words in Colossians 1:24, “I fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ for His body’s sake, which is the Church” (where see Note). (25-27) In these verses we trace, under the nuptial metaphor, a clear description of the three great stages in salvation—justification in His “giving Himself for us, sanctification in the “cleansing by water in the Word,” glorification in the final “presentation” to Christ in glory. The metaphor is certainly preserved in the last two clauses, which correspond to the bath of purification of the bride, and the festal presentation of her (usually by the friend of the bridegroom, John 3:29), in all her beauty and adornment, to her husband at his own home; perhaps even in the first also, for the husband used to give a dowry, which was held in the rude simplicity of ancient times to purchase his wife, and here that which Christ gives is the unspeakable price of His own Self. Throughout, in accordance with the whole tenor of the Epistle, it is the Church as a whole, not the individual soul, which is “the Spouse of Christ.”