Re-Shaping the Culture

Taught by Catherine Anderson
Series: Ephesians
8.29.21


Ephesians 5: 18–6: 9


Imagine these verses read aloud to a house church composed of men, women, children, slaves, people of different ethnicities, of different religious backgrounds, of different socio-economic levels.


Chapter 5

18…but be filled by the Spirit, 19 speaking to each other in psalms, hymns, and spiritual poems, creating poems and singing in your hearts to the Lord, 20 giving thanks always to God the Father for all things in the name of the Lord Jesus Messiah, 21 submitting to one another in reverence to the Messiah, 22 wives to their own husbands as to the Lord 23 because the husband is the head of the wife as the Messiah is the head of the church, he is the deliverer of the body. 24 But as the church submits to the Messiah, so also wives to their husbands in every way.

25 Husbands be loving to your wives, as the Messiah loves the church and gave himself on her behalf, 26 so that he could set her apart having purified her by washing of water with a word, 27 so he could present the church to himself glorious, having no stain or wrinkle or any such thing but that she should be set apart and blameless. 28 In this way, the husbands are obligated to love their own wives as their own bodies; the one who loves his own wife, loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but he raises it and nurses it, just as the Messiah does for the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “For this reason, a man will leave the father and mother and he will be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” 32 This open-secret is great, but I am speaking about the Messiah and the church. 33 Nevertheless, each of you should love his own wife, and the wife should respect the husband.


Chapter 6

1 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother” which is the first commandment with a promise 3 “so that it may go well for you and you will be in the land a long time.”

4 And fathers, do not provoke your children, but raise them in the training and instruction of the Lord.

5 Slaves, obey your masters according to the flesh, with serious reverence, in sincerity of your heart, as to the Messiah, 6 not as a human-pleaser doing ‘eye-service” but as slaves of the Messiah, doing the will of God with your very being, 7 with goodwill, serving as to the Lord, not humans, 8 knowing that each person, whatever good he might do, that one will receive from the Lord, whether a slave or a freeman. 9 And masters, do the same things to them, giving up threats, knowing their Lord and your own is in the heavenlies, and there is no favoritism with him.


Aristotle, Politics, 1:3: “Seeing then that the state is made up of households… we must speak of the management of the household…. [A] complete household consists of slaves and freemen. We begin by examining everything in its fewest possible elements; and the first and fewest possible parts of a family are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children.”


Aristotle, Politics, 1:12: “Of household management we have seen that there are three parts: one is the rule of a master over slaves…another of a father, and the third of a husband. A husband and father rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs; the rule over his children being royal, and the rule over his wife is based on natural constitution. For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown is superior to the younger and more immature.”


• Josephus, Against Apion 2:24: “The woman… is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be obedient, not for her humiliation, but that she may be directed; for God has given authority to the man.”