The Covenant Household

by Douglas Wilson

But Jesus is the dragonslayer. Jesus is the one who came into this world to secure the salvation of His bride. When He went to the cross, He did not try to save anybody. When Jesus died on the cross, He was settling your salvation. You were bought and purchased when He died on the cross, and He is taking you home. If He died for you, there is no way you are not going to Heaven. This is the kind of efficacious love that husbands are called to imitate.

So when husbands get a glimpse of what it means to be a head, it ought to scare them sideways. Headship does not mean that the husband gets his way in all the petty things. It does means that the husband cannot blame his wife for the state of their marriage. Just as Christ assumed responsibility for things He did not do, in the same way husbands should be willing to take responsibility for things their wives do.

But the first and most fundamental sin that a man commits is forgetting that he is responsible for all of them. If we are talking about Bob and Suzie Smith, Bob is responsible for Bob’s sins, Suzy is responsible for Suzy’s sins, and Bob is responsible for all the Smiths’ sins. The man is the head, whether he wants to be or not, and the only choice is whether he will be a good head or a bad head. He cannot not be a head. Even if the man abandons his family and flies to the other end of the country, his empty chair still dominates the table. He is still teaching about what headship is, but his abdication means he is teaching a lie about it. A husband does not have the option of being silent about Christ and the Church. All day, every day, in every word, a husband is teaching about Jesus. What he is living out is either true or false, but he is always teaching—when a father chooses to be absent, distant, grasping, or selfish, he is teaching his family lies.

In particular, single ladies should not even dream of marrying a man they do not respect, because once they are married, it is their obligation to respect him—whether or not he is respectable. Your husband probably does fall short in many places that you are correct in noticing, but you must respect him anyway. Our generation talks a lot about unconditional love for wives, but almost no one talks about unconditional respect for husbands.

When a man loves Christ more than anything else and his wife is number two, she receives far more attention and love as number two than if she were number one. Because he is an idolater, a man who worships his wife has cut himself off from the source of all love. He is going to run out of strength very quickly, but if he loves Christ the way the Bible says to, then he will have the strength to love her as Christ loved the Church. If your one central goal in life is to keep your wife happy, then the one thing I can guarantee is that you are not going to make her happy.

C.S. Lewis’s line on this topic: “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”

A covenant is a solemn bond, sovereignly administered, with attendant blessings and curses. Covenants are built into the world, and they cannot be established or disestablished by legislation or social customs. Marriage covenants are rooted in the fact that God has made us male and female, and the two sexes were designed by Him to produce children together. It is not subject to the courts or public opinion.

We think that responsibility is something that is split between people, but in the world of covenants, responsibility is not something that can be divided up 50/50, or even 70/30—taking responsibility is not a zero-sum game. It is something that multiplies and increases as one party takes responsibility. If a father takes responsibility for how his son is doing spiritually, that does not leave less responsibility for his son to take. It leaves more.

Imagine four lanes, two going one way and two going the other—two lanes going to Heaven and two going to Hell. On the road to Heaven there is a Ford and a Chevy, and on the road to Hell there is a Ford and a Chevy. Often when the Chevys pass each other, the owners wave and beep at each other because of all they share in common. But while they may share the same make of car, they are going in opposite directions. The issue is not homeschooling or classroom schooling. You have wise and foolish people using both methods. Godly homeschooling parents and godly parents who have their children enrolled in a good school are using different methods to drive in the same direction.

One time, Charles Spurgeon was talking to a man, and the man said, “When I got saved, God did His part, and I did mine.” Spurgeon’s internal alarm bells went off, and he asked the man what he meant. The man answered, quite correctly, “God saved me, and I got in the way.”

Now, there is a difference between things that are worldly and things that are earthly. God made us material creatures. God could have made food as just a way of refueling, and it could have all been cold porridgy mush with no taste. But God has put us into a world with physical, material pleasures. That is not worldliness, and it is not worldly to be thankful for such material goods; worldliness has to do with the world’s system of polishing these things up in such a way that you want to disobey God’s law and to pursue His good gifts in all the wrong ways.