“An excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels.” (Proverbs 31:10)

I recently finished reading the brilliant novel East of Eden by John Steinbeck. There are a number of moral lessons and philosophical insights that could be discussed from this masterpiece, and this isn’t even a main element that I think Steinbeck was shooting for, but as I sat here thinking of Lee I couldn’t help but think of both the wisdom and the foolishness people portray when choosing a spouse. 

Lee is unquestionably the beautiful soul of the story. Sam Hamilton is arguably a runner up. Readers adore both, but Lee’s wisdom, servanthood, humility, friendship, selflessness, and consistent faithfulness make us love him deeply. Sadly he is never married, though he undoubtedly would make a wonderful husband. The one who does marry in the story, Adam Trask—as kindhearted as he is—marries a wretch (Cathy Ames) who ruins his life. Blindsided by her physical beauty, Adam is oblivious to not only the multiple more-than-subtle red flags she waves, but to the fact that she is representative of the devil himself.

As fictional as the novel is, who of us have not seen this played out in real life? Not that any woman is representative of the devil—I’m not taking it that far. But I can’t count how many times I’ve witnessed a good man fall head over heels for a woman who he swore was an angel, but it turned out it was only her physical form that was angelic, while her character was far from it. Love is blind, they say. But isn’t it really that lust is blind? My advice to men is this—make sure her inward beauty surpasses her outward beauty. Make sure her character is a delight, and that she will be a blessing to you in your aspirations, in your calling from God, and through difficult times. Will she walk with you through fire? Is her desire to support you and help you in your calling? Is her heart and will set on glorifying God and serving Him with her days? Is she patient, long-suffering, joyful, others-oriented? Does she love children? Does she treasure Christ in her heart? Does she desire to submit to God’s Word in all it says? Does she trust and love God’s roles for men and women? Is she going to make serving God easier or harder for you? 

What I’ve seen time and time again is a wonderful God-fearing man fall in love with a physically attractive woman, believing she is everything he has made her up to be in his mind (just like Adam Trask), all to find out with time that she is actually very manipulative, self-centered, and is going to make life pretty difficult if he doesn’t bend to her will.

Beware of mere physical beauty that isn’t accompanied by a soul that reflects that beauty. Outward beauty is good, I’m not denying that. Men are crazy visual, and as women we should be doing what we can to be physically attractive and as healthy as possible. But beware of being so blinded by physical beauty that you don’t see the red flags of selfish character.

Husbands and wives are meant to glorify God together, serving the Lord with all their heart, and embracing the complementary roles God has designed for them. Wives are to respect and submit to their husband’s authority. We are to be helpers to our husbands, not nags or burdens. Our society has so influenced women to believe they should dominate their husbands—embracing rather than fighting against the curse. But matriarchy is not God’s will. He has laid out an order for the household, and I’ve seen too many times men whose souls are crushed by the very person who is suppose to be cheering him on and assisting him, but is instead insisting he follow her lead, her desires, her self-serving pursuits. 

Be wise, my brothers. “Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised,” (Proverbs 31:30). Seek a good wife who longs to support you in your God-given calling, who wants to give you children and raise them up in the Lord, who isn’t asking “What’s in it for me?” but rather “What’s in it for the Kingdom?”, and who will follow you wherever the Lord leads with a joyful heart. Seek a Lee, but in female form. Cathy will destroy you.

And what is the beauty of Lee? Who does he remind us of? Lee is the foundation of the Trask family—the surrogate parent who takes on the role of raising the twins who were abandoned by their mother. He is the sage, the moral intellect, and the philosophical heart filled with love and stability. Vocationally he is a servant who delights to spend his days humbly keeping house, cooking, cleaning, and caring for all in the home. All in the home look to him for insight, warmth, and truth. He is the voice of reason, he is trusted and stable when everyone else falls apart. He is humble, un-entitled, and selfless. Much of who Lee is reflects what I see when I read Proverbs 31–a beautiful portrait of a hard-working, purpose-filled woman. He is a quintessential homemaker in every sense. Though Lee in no way is meant to represent a woman, I can’t help but compare roles and wonder why, when Lee takes on the Proverbs 31 portrayal he is admired and applauded, but when a woman in contemporary society does, she is called oppressed and a victim of the misogynistic patriarchy. Selflessness and servanthood is admirable as long as it doesn’t come from a wife and mother serving her family. 

Chesterton wrote “feminism is that muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands,” and what a prophecy of the modern female mind. Anyone with a phone has probably heard that obnoxious song “LABOUR” by Paris Paloma—a feminist chant in honor of Lindsay Clansey to ridicule the lives of homemakers and present the very basic duties of womanhood as something to lament. 

This is what has become normal—to cry victim at the privileges of motherhood and womanhood, rather than seeing them for the remarkable blessings that they are. And this is what I am warning against. Men, if you come upon a woman who gives the slightest hints that she views motherhood and wifehood as oppressive, belittling, or beneath her…run. Women have spent the last century fighting for the right to run away from their God-given calling in the home, and it has left husbands without a helpmeet, children without a mother, and the repercussions in society are disastrous.

God has designed marriage as an avenue to bring Him glory through a united mission to spread the Good News and reflect the relationship between Christ and the church. I love the story of Jim and Elisabeth Elliot—the missionaries to Ecuador in the mid-1900s. Jim had his mind so set on Christ that he didn’t want to get married, lest a wife hold him back from serving God with all his heart. The empowered woman mindset was heavily on the rise, and he must’ve seen warnings in other couples. However, he saw something different in Elisabeth. In a letter to a friend, Jim wrote that he did not find Elisabeth very attractive, but her soul was set on Christ, and he knew she would go wherever he went and would only be a blessing to his missional calling. And that she was. Elisabeth had a deep sense of gospel-centered servanthood, and this drove her to live sacrificially, serving her husband with the end of serving Christ and spreading the Good News. Jim and Elisabeth both were gospel-driven far above seeking romantic fulfillment, and this led to the gospel reaching and transforming the hearts of an unreached people group through the martyrdom of Jim and the ongoing missionary service of Elisabeth after he died. 

How beautiful is their story! Who lives this way anymore, with such single-minded purpose to glorify God no matter the cost? We have forgotten how short our lives on this earth are, and what we are here for. We have forgotten the reminder of C.T. Studd: “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.” We have swapped a mission-driven life for one of comfort and pleasure, and this is highly prevalent among modern women. This is what is often overlooked when men seek a wife, often because men are so hormone-driven that they settle, for they are so eager to have a wife for physical satisfaction (this sounds shallow but who can deny this very real need?). But also because an excellent wife such as Elisabeth Elliot seems entirely impossible to find in today’s modern world. But take heart; they still exist. 

Women might argue that the example of Elisabeth Elliot provides nothing of a reflection of biblical gender roles: i.e. a Titus 2 homemaker who raises her children and submits to her husband. But it is precisely that she was such a woman that she was so willing and able to go to the depths that she did with her husband. Elisabeth wrote fiercely on this subject in her book Let Me Be a Woman, in which she gave warnings and exhortations to her daughter to resist feminism and to embrace God’s explicit design of gender roles. In this vital book of letters she writes, “You can’t make proper use of a thing unless you know what it is made for. The New Testament points back clearly and strongly to what a woman was made for: ‘Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.’ I can’t for the life of me see any ambiguities in this.” She further expanded on her belief that what “makes a marriage work is the acceptance of the divine order. Either there is an order or there is not. I believe there is an order, established in the creation of the world, and I believe that much of the confusion that characterizes our society is the result of the violation of God’s design.” No one can argue that complementarianism holds the gospel back, for the woman who promoted gender roles more than anyone I’ve seen is the very woman who went to the ends of the earth to share the gospel, lost her husband to martyrdom, and continued giving herself away for the Kingdom. This type of humble submission to God’s Word is what will make a marriage thrive. Men, this is what you should be looking for. Physical beauty is fleeting, but a woman who wants to serve you, raise your children, and live for Christ according to His Word will be a blessing to you far above what you can imagine.

I hear almost on a daily basis laments from men who are mourning that their wife doesn’t want children because she is too caught up in her career, or because she doesn’t want to be bound to the home raising them. I hear complaints from men that they desire to pursue their calling in a given vocation or mission work, but they don’t have their wives’ support, so instead they support their wives in her vocational aspirations. I hear from men who want to provide and have a wife who respects and submits to him, but the mindset of the modern woman is set on equality, entitlement, and empowerment, and these three have come to override any God-given authority or design that Scripture has placed on us. And the family unit is crumbling because of it.

I have no doubt many will read this and hand me the over-played label of “pick-me.” But I’ll hand right back the over-played response of “I’ve already been picked,” because I have been for eleven beautiful years now. And last I checked God’s Word still contains the exhortation for older women to “admonish the younger women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the Word of God may not be blasphemed” (Titus 2:4-5). I rarely if ever hear this encouragement from women anymore, as it seems to be brushed off as something ancient that surely is no longer relevant to today’s women. Or perhaps this part of Scripture is kept quiet because as soon as anyone mentions it they are quickly accused of being a fundamentalist, as if only followers of Doug Wilson are allowed to submit to the full counsel of God. But I’ll take the label of “pick-me” or the false accusation of being a Wilsonite over blaspheming God’s Word any day. The willingness of so many Christians to risk the blaspheming of God’s Word in order to not offend women is alarming.

We need bold men and women who will stand up for the whole counsel of God. We need strong exhortations because even upon striving we will never fulfill them fully, let alone if the exhortation wasn’t there. We are bent toward selfishness and sinfulness, toward doing what we please and making excuses for it. “It is easy to find a logical and virtuous reason for not doing what you don’t want to do,” our narrator rightly quips in Steinbeck’s Eden. How much more when the right thing is said to not even be right anymore. We need to at least call good good, right right, and encourage one another toward the most God-glorifying end, even if we stumble getting there. Honoring, respecting, and submitting to our husbands is right, whether we excuse it away or not. Living to glorify God and not to serve our flesh is what is good and will bring about good, whether the world mocks it or not. Scriptural living does not align with the world’s way of living, and never will. The church has become far too comfortable with accepting the secular and destructive ideology of feminism, and it is ruining marriages, families, children, men, and perhaps most of all the very ones who are promoting it—women. This has made finding an excellent wife incredibly difficult for men who still want to live by God’s Word—to reap the benefits of following God’s design and to keep biblical tradition alive in the upcoming generations. I write this to exhort women to return to God’s design for them, to let go of entitlement and remember that we are the clay, not the Potter. We are here to glorify and serve God in the ways He has ordained. We don’t get to choose how God is glorified, but we humbly submit to God’s perfect, wise, and good craftsmanship and order in the ways He says He is glorified. 

And I write this to encourage men to celebrate God’s perfect design for marriage and the social order, to seek it when choosing a wife, and to uphold it as a husband, father, and Christian. We don’t need any more weak men standing by watching women take over as they abandon their homes and children (or murder them), victimize themselves over God-given blessings, and dominate the workforce as men are left wondering where their purpose went. We need to return to biblical gender roles and put off gender war. And, by God’s grace, we need to fight against the very obvious satanic attack on children that is pervading society and fueled through feminism. Marriage can be a vital avenue through which we can fight against this, but only if both spouses are set on submitting to God’s Word. How can we raise up the next generation to proclaim God’s Word and be godly men and women living for Christ if women are refusing motherhood or neglecting their duties to raise their children in favor of careerism? How can we fight against the victimhood of children and live out our pro-life convictions through adoption and other means, if women aren’t willing to deny themselves and start living for the Kingdom rather than for their own personal pursuits? Choose your spouse wisely, my friends. There is a war out there, the battle is real, and who we marry is critical to our effectiveness in the fight. But by submitting to God’s Word we can live confidently knowing that greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world. 

May children be defended, men be honored, women be loved and cared for, and Christ be glorified in our lives and marriages. Society has played its feminist card, it has celebrated Cathy, and it has failed us all. Scripture points to a better way.