Our Head makes provision and supply for the growth of his wife. As Head, he not only loved her at the cross with covenant-making allegiance, and loves her daily with ongoing concern, but he even loves her enough to take action for her growth, her improvement, her advance. Now we add a fresh kind of encouragement to Christlike headship. Such heads not only keep covenant promises and show affection, but they find the right balance and proportions for challenging their bride to grow in holiness, to become more free from the miseries of sin.
We’ve now heard plenty about bad heads. In a world of depravity, where even churches are led by recovering sinners, humans have long circulated reports of poor leaders, and some terrible ones. Now we can amplify the stories with our new technologies.
Power can indeed corrupt, but not because power itself is poison. Rather, the poison is in us already. We are sinners to the core and across all our faculties. Christians have long called this “total depravity.” Leadership is not the problem; sin is.
In fact, good leadership, and healthy headship, is part of the solution to what ails us today. Many don’t even know to ask and pray for such leadership because they haven’t experienced it. But for Christians, even if we haven’t personally enjoyed healthy headship, we have a clear Good Head to look to — one we confess as Lord. We have Jesus.
Our great need is for more heads like him, leaders who are not just kinder, gentler, and more patient, but men who actually lead — in taking godly initiative, in opening God’s word and explaining it, in prayer, in envisioning good deeds, in shaping the moral vision of our families and churches. We need heads who don’t melt into a puddle of self-pity when they don’t get the strokes they’d like, but who are ready, like Jesus, to endure personal discomforts for the good of their household, and the joy set before them.
Head of All Heads
This month at Desiring God, as we take up a focus on the “marks of healthy headship,” we begin with the one who is Head of all heads. One of the first truths to rehearse about mere human heads is that they all have a Head. Before the apostle writes, “The head of a wife is her husband,” he says, “I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:3). Before reflecting long on headship in our marriages and homes, and other spheres, we first take our bearings from the divine-human Head over all human heads.
Those with an aversion to all human headship might consider the chastening and comforting effects of grasping that “the head of every man is Christ.” On the one hand, every human head is a man under authority. None is autonomous. No husband or father or leader is unaccountable to his Maker. All will stand before the judgment seat of their Head (2 Corinthians 5:10). To have Christ as Head will be terrifying to self-serving men. On the other hand, this truth is precious and strengthening for heads who know themselves weak and in need of his help.
For Christians, healthy headship takes its cues from Christ himself. He is Head of his bride (Ephesians 5:23), Head of his church (Colossians 2:19), and Head of every head (1 Corinthians 11:3). Learning from him, then, what might it mean for us mere human heads to rule like Jesus does? What imitable forms does his headship take?
1. Covenant Fidelity
First, Christian headship is covenantal. It’s not random, free-floating, and simply spontaneous but operates in specific, given terms. Jesus is Head of his church, his bride, in a different way from how he is Head over all as sovereign. He has covenanted himself to his bride in a way that he has not to all people. So too with Christian husbands.
The husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. . . . Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. (Ephesians 5:23, 25)
Christ has pledged his special allegiance to his church, and he is a man of his word who fulfills it. He makes solemn promises to his bride that he will keep her, love her, and be faithful to her, come what may. Amazingly, Jesus “hold[s] fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). And so his church responds in reciprocal fidelity, “holding fast to the Head” (Colossians 2:19).