Marriage 19
How do you boil a frog? Put him in a
pan of water and slowly bring it up to temp. If you had dropped American
Christians from 1924 into our society today, they would be horrified by a host
of things we have long since begun to accept, including many of the tenets of
feminism. The proof is how my title and essential point today will cause even
good people to recoil immediately. Yet this is precisely part of God's plan for
a wife in relation to her husband. A virtuous woman is a crown to her
husband: but she that maketh ashamed is as rottenness in his bones. (Proverbs
12.4)
What does a crown do? Depending on the
context in which it is worn, several things come to mind. Primarily, it sends
the message that the wearer is a person of authority. Along the same lines, a
crown causes an ordinary man or woman to look positively royal. In other words,
a crown is a visible extension of the elevated position and authority of the
one who wears it.
A man looks like a better man when he
has a capable, beautiful wife gazing up at him adoringly. And men, while they
do not generally care how they physically look, care greatly about how they
look to other people and what others think of them. I have often enough
adjusted my own estimation of a man by the way his wife acts, for good or for
ill. Occasionally, that mental adjustment on my part is rather drastic.
Nor am I the only one who does so.
Earlier today, I was reading William Taubman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography
of Mikhail Gorbachev. As a student at Moscow University, he was somewhat
overlooked, being of poor peasant stock from a distant province. But when he
won the hand of Raisa, in his words, he obtained instant prestige. How could he
not? She was beautiful, cultured, intelligent, educated, and poised.
Here is a man I become acquainted with. I
place his leadership ability and potential about the middle of the scale so to
speak. Then I meet his wife. Suddenly, I realize I have enormously
underestimated him. Consequently, I will act toward him differently going
forward than I would have otherwise for the sole reason that his wife has made
him look good. She is her husband's crown, revealing his otherwise unseen
authority and high position.
There are practical and philosophical
ramifications to this, or perhaps I should say more noticeable and less
noticeable applications of this. On the easily noticed negative side of the
ledger, we see a wife who publicly interrupts her husband, disrespects his
friends, dresses inappropriately, shares her disappointments and frustrations
with him, nags him, compares him unfavorably to some other man, makes jokes at
his expense, mocks him, or defies him, for example. Maketh ashamed, indeed.
On the positive side, we see a wife who handles negative things in private,
publicly speaks well of him, sees that he presents well in the sense of clothes
and carriage, minds the children when he is otherwise occupied, encourages
others to turn to him for advice or help, and affirms that she feels loved,
satisfied, and content in her marriage. A crown, indeed.
But I also think there is a deeper
layer to this. Proverbs 31 famously shows us what is, in some real
sense, the ideal wife. There we find the following: Her husband is known in
the gates, when he sitteth among the elders of the land. (Proverbs 31.23) The
implication here is that she has something to do with this. In other words, she
does not just happen to be married to a publicly successful and accomplished
husband. Rather, he is publicly successful and accomplished, at least in part
because she married him.
Many years ago, I heard a
thought-provoking message entitled "Woman the Assembler." When she
married her man, he had all or mostly all of the parts necessary to be a
success, but it took a woman's deft touch and patient skill to assemble those into
the man that everyone admired so much twenty years down the road.
I feel this at the twenty-five-year
mark in my marriage. My wife avoids/fulfills all or most of the surface
illustrations I mentioned above. More importantly, living with her has changed
me. It has grown me, molded me, shaping me into a better man. I am less
sentimental and more sensible. I am more compassionate and less rattled. I am
more groomed and less wild, and I am talking about the inside, not the outside.
I am deeper, more wise, less angry, and less naïve than I was when I married
her. And my ministry is more extensive. And the fact that this coincided with
twenty-five years of living with her is not mere happenstance. She has (and is
still) assembled me. If I am a king, she placed the crown on my head.
The details of your marriage do not
need to match my own, naturally, but your marriage arc should. God did not
design the man and wife to share one address while building independent lives.
He created the man to do a task and the woman to do all she could to help him
do his task. And make him look good while he is doing it.
If your husband is not a king, do not
blame him. Look in the mirror. Repent. And go to work putting a crown on his
head.