The Household Belongs to the Lord

When I tell wives to "submit" (Colossians 3:18), the word I use is one of ordering oneself under, taking one's place willingly — not the cowering of the crushed, but the free arranging of the strong. And when I tell husbands to love and not be "harsh" (Colossians 3:19), the word carries bitterness, the vinegar that sours a man toward the one nearest him. Notice too that little phrase repeated like a drumbeat — "in the Lord," "pleasing to the Lord," "fearing the Lord" (Colossians 3:20, 22). Every relation here is set inside a greater one; no one in this house answers only to the person across from them.

I take up this same household thread more fully to the Ephesians, and there I root the whole of it in Christ and his church (Ephesians 5:22–6:9). I press the masters especially when I send Onesimus home to Philemon — no longer a slave, but a beloved brother (Philemon 15–16). And I remind Timothy that if anyone does not care for his own household, he has denied the faith (1 Timothy 5:8).

These were real houses in Colossae — wives, husbands, children, fathers, slaves, masters, all under one roof, many of them newly washed in Christ and unsure what the gospel now asked of them at their own hearth. The danger was to think that being raised with Christ (Colossians 3:1) meant the daily bonds no longer mattered. I write to show them the opposite: the new life is lived out precisely there, in the ordinary obedience of a household. And I write it in chains myself, in a rented house in Rome, where I have learned that Christ is served in the place he has set you, not the place you would choose.

The honest difficulty is the word to slaves, and it stings: why does he not simply tear the whole cruel thing down? Do not look away from it. But look closely at what I actually wrote — I gave the slave a dignity his master's world never gave him, an inheritance from the Lord (Colossians 3:24), and I turned and warned the master that he too has a Master in heaven, that with God there is no partiality (Colossians 4:1). I planted a seed there that no chain can hold: two men, master and slave, standing as equals before one Judge. Read it beside my letter to Philemon and see where that seed was already breaking the ground.