Husbands, love your wives, and don’t be bitter against them.
Parallel translations
- KJV Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.
- BSB Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.
- NKJV Husbands, love your wives and do not be bitter toward them.
- NASB Husbands, love your wives and do not become bitter against them.
- NLT Husbands, love your wives and never treat them harshly.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
Husbands are to love their wives actively and refuse to let resentment or harshness take root. It matters because Christian marriage is meant to display self-giving, Christlike love.
Overview
In his household instructions, Paul addresses husbands directly, balancing the wife's submission (v. 18) with a sacrificial command to love. The warning against bitterness guards against the daily hardness and coldness that can replace love over time. Ephesians 5 makes explicit what is implied here: this love is patterned on Christ's love for the church, who gave himself for her.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 14
- 1 Pet 3:7You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor to the woman, as to the weaker vessel, as being also joint heirs of the grace of life; that your prayers may not be hindered.
- Gen 2:23–24The man said, “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She will be called ‘woman,’ because she was taken out of Man.”
- Col 3:21Fathers, don’t provoke your children, so that they won’t be discouraged.
- Eph 5:25Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the assembly, and gave himself up for it;
- Eph 5:28–29Even so husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself.
- Eph 4:31Let all bitterness, wrath, anger, outcry, and slander, be put away from you, with all malice.
- Eph 5:33Nevertheless each of you must also love his own wife even as himself; and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
- Prov 5:18–19Let your spring be blessed. Rejoice in the wife of your youth.
- Eccl 9:9Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your life of vanity, which he has given you under the sun, all your days of vanity: for that is your portion in life, and in your labor in which you labor under the sun.
- Mal 2:14–16Yet you say, ‘Why?’ Because Yahweh has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion, and the wife of your covenant.
- Jas 3:14But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your heart, don’t boast and don’t lie against the truth.
- Luke 14:26“If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t disregard his own father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be my disciple.
- Gen 24:67Isaac brought her into his mother Sarah’s tent, and took Rebekah, and she became his wife. He loved her. Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.
- Rom 3:14“whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness.”
Themes, concepts, people & topics
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Christ at the center
The image of the invisible God, firstborn over creation, in whom all things hold together and all the fullness of God dwells bodily — supreme over every power.
How Colossians 3:19 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
Each word below is tagged with its Strong’s number — tap one to see the underlying Greek word, its meaning, and every verse that uses it.