The Trinity has always fascinated me, especially the relationship of Christ to the Father. Christ yields His will to the Father. Then the Father glorifies the Son. And the Holy Spirit glorifies the other two. It’s like “You take the last chocolate.” “No, You…” And all of them are selfless, even though they are God and created the universe, and if anyone deserves to be prideful it’s God.
But going back to God the Son, who by the way is not inferior to God the Father, but chooses to submit willingly so that there is only one will… The reason two different people can be one is due to the submission of the one, and the selflessness of the other. The reason women find it usually impossible to submit is because of the selfishness of their husbands. But let’s just say that you submitted anyway, and then suddenly your husband realized that you were following him. And that somehow starts to make him a better man, because he doesn’t want to lead you to the wrong place.
One time while taking a theology class at church, we were talking about the Trinity, and I had an epiphany, you know, an “Aha!” moment. I realized that God had to be three and no other number because of the crucifixion. God the Son had to have the sin of the world put onto Him. God the Father couldn’t look at sin and had to turn His back. So there had to be God taking sin into Himself, but God can’t take sin into Himself. Divine irony. Then you have to have the Holy Spirit to raise Jesus from the dead, because Jesus was dead. He had to have a human body to actually die. Hence the Trinity has to be three and no other number.
Well, a marriage is two, and to actually be one, one will has to go under the other. It’s just the way it has to be. The sad reality is that both people have to be selfless for it to work. But you are both still on this earth trapped in your flesh, which has as its default option “serve myself.” Hence the problems in marriage.
In that same theology class, I came to the conclusion that Jesus actually had separate thoughts and a will that was different than the Father during the Garden of Gethsemane the night before His crucifixion. He felt a high level of anxiety about taking on the sin of the world. He didn’t want to do it. The will of Jesus had to die so that the will of the Father could be accomplished.
As a wife, my will must die. (Believe it or not, my husband’s will has also died, which makes our marriage beautiful, because he doesn’t look out just for his own interests, but for mine. He truly cherishes me as his own body.) But my point to wives is that your will must die. Your will has to die for God to rule you anyway.
So when my husband walks into the room, I want to know what his will is, because that’s my will. Any man will tell you that’s the perfect wife. And the funny thing is that when I don’t assert my will is when God fills my needs anyway. Because God knows what I need, and in my rebellion of asserting my will, I am grabbing the reins of my own life. Selfishness will never lead me anywhere that is good. It will only make me miserable.
For more information about how to submit, listen to “My Submission Story.”
“I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.” (Galatians 2:20)
