325 Mark,

You said:

A while ago you stated that i did not have authority over my wife because i did not ‘take’ it. Now you have just said regarding Christ…

” He never took an authority to demand love but as the perfect example of husbandly love, He initiated the sacrifice, initiated the cherishing and initiated the clinging to or joining Himself with her.”

So according to your train of thought, Christ did not ‘take’ authority. Does he therefore also NOT HAVE ANY AUTHORITY? This appears like a fallacy in your critiques…inconsistencies. Again…

No, it isn’t an inconsistency. We all know that Christ as ALL authority, so He can choose to take authority or not to take authority as God. But also as a human, He takes a human bride and this has been the issue that we have been talking about. As far as a husband’s authority, it is not given. Christ’s is given. Think about that. Christ is God, yet as a human He had to be given all authority. He didn’t assume authority. He waited until it was given to Him. But husbands cannot say that like God, they have authority. They are human just as Christ is human and they cannot take an authority that has not been given to them.

Since power over their wives is not in their hands from God, it can only belong to them if their wives turn over this power over them to their husbands. This is why not taking authority over their wives is just another proof that they do not have authority that resides within them. If their wives do not turn over authority over their person, husbands have no authority whatsoever to take from her what she has not freely given to him. If he does take it, it isn’t an authority that he has. It is a nasty four letter word that can result in a jail sentence in our country.

Think also about this. The Bible says in 1 Cor. 7:4 that the husband has authority over his wife’s body and she has authority over his. Does this mean that they can take authority over the other person’s body? No. It means that the wife cannot rightfully give her sexuality to another man because only her husband has that authority or right to her body. And he cannot give himself to another woman because she has authority over his sexuality. But in the marriage, authority doesn’t mean taking that authority when the spouse is unwilling to freely give.

Does this make sense?