dungeon lord

While weak husbands can become Dungeon Lord of their home, wives damage their marriage by becoming the Rebel Queen. Some women seek to subvert their husband’s home from day one.
They run an ongoing insurgency in the home, either to resist the husband’s leadership or subvert his world under her own control.

Queen

Pride in Heart

Some wives live in the delusion that they are morally superior to their husbands. Their sensibilities to domestic order, cleanliness, social propriety and the like testify to them that they are the morally superior being and the husband in the oaf or ogre who must be tamed.

Such thoughts spring from pride and self exaltation. From that position the wife can justify her efforts to enslave the husband and make him serve her leadership. She can equally justify her resistance and insurrection.

If the wife cannot win the husband she may at least enlist the children to her cause, values and domestic wisdom. The “don’t be like your father” message may be played repeatedly by the wife to push her rebel cause.

Enslaving the Husband

Because most men want their wife to be happy it is possible for women to enslave the husband, making him servant to her standards and ideals. The wife may restrict the man in his own home (“Don’t sit in THAT chair!”), dictate what he eats and drinks (“Don’t eat before dinner!”), control his money (“Don’t come to me for more!”), set the family goals and plans (“These kids are going to go to Uni!”), and so on.
Some men happily comply with this rebel cause, to keep the peace and in gratitude for having a woman in their life.

Other men are more stubborn and set on their own will. The wife may then end up in a long-term cold war of passive resistance, contention, manipulation and the like. While she may not enslave her husband, she can be a constant resistance against all the things he wants to do that don’t fit her will.

Abducting His Life

I have seen wives who simply abduct their husband’s life. Instead of being his helper, as per God’s design for the woman in Genesis 2, she sees the husband as the means to fulfilment of her dreams.
Her aspirations of wealth, home, lifestyle, etc, are forced on the husband. She sees it as her role in life to tame his wishes, and make them subservient to her own.

Many men happily comply with this abduction, not seeing how completely the family values, direction, achievements and aspirations are being set by the wife. The wife’s values and goals may be fine. But when she asserts them, in place of submission to the husband as head, she abducts the home. She is acting in rebellion against God.

A True Wife

God created the role of ‘wife’, and He made the woman to be the man’s helper. The man who finds a ‘wife’ finds a good thing (Proverbs 18:22). The man with a rebel queen has not found a good thing. A woman doesn’t become a godly wife, as a gift to her husband, just by saying “I do”. She must fulfil her unique part as ‘wife’ in her husband’s life.

The true wife is instructed to submit to her husband. He is her head and she is his helper, assisting him to fulfil God’s call on his life. She is not lord of her husband. She is not queen of the home. She is not the focus on the husband’s life. She is not there to be served.

A true wife does not manipulate, undermine, compete, resist or frustrate her husband. She empowers him by being wind in his sails, as he seeks to be the man God calls him to be.

The Rebel

When a woman rules her own home she is in rebellion against God. As a rebel queen she not only stands against her husband’s authority, but against God’s authority too.

The reason many woman engage in subversion of the home is insecurity. She fears that the husband’s ego-driven decisions will be unwise, self-serving and damaging to future security. In her insecurity she rises up and take control.

She needs to put her trust in the Lord and find security in Him. She needs to worship God, by being what He made her to be, not what her self-interest prompts her to be.

Another reason women rebel is their pride. Many have a deluded sense of moral superiority as if that gives them a different place to the one God gave them. Pride exalts, and when women exalt themselves over the husband, pride is at play. But pride leads to destruction, so it must never be pandered to.

True Beauty

The Bible teaches that a woman’s true, inner beauty comes from a submissive spirit. When a woman submits to her husband, not because she fully trusts his wisdom, but because she is determined to glorify God, a new radiance glows from within her (see 1Peter 3:3-6).

The rebel queen will never fulfil her natural beauty. She will become hardened and her efforts will be unfruitful. Her pride will lead to destruction. Going her own way will lead to death and failure. Her fears will enslave her. She will pluck down her home with her own hands (Proverbs 14:1).

A Life of Trust

Women were designed to help their husband. They are designed to be under instruction, not taking lordship. This requires trust. Her trust is not in her husband and his wisdom. Her trust is to be securely placed in the Lord, as her source of supply and defence from harm.

A life of trust in God is the highest life a wife can live. Becoming a rebel queen is the total opposite to that high calling.

Life will not be without challenges. No husband will always delight his wife. We may all have to miss out on some things we desire. But when a wife can lay down her own life, to take on the calling of ‘wife’, she will find a life far richer and more fulfilling than the one she would demand her husband to build for her.

While married life is a wonderful gift to mankind and brings some of the sweetest rewards that people can enjoy, it is also challenged by many things.

If the couple have godly wisdom and live in the fear of God, they can overcome the challenges and enjoy blessing upon blessing. If the couple are selfish, foolish and separated from God’s wisdom and grace, the challenges grow into destructive processes.

There are two positions people can take which pull down their marriage. One is that husbands become ‘Dungeon Lord’ and the other is that wives become ‘Rebel Queen’ in their home.

dungeon-lord

Building a World for the Wife

Back in 1972 I met Dr Jack Hayford on his first visit to Australia. It was my privilege to play chauffeur for him during part of his visit and I was wonderfully blessed by his messages.

Jack’s message to men challenged them that their wife has to live within the bounds of the world the men create for the family.
Small men, he pointed out, create small worlds for their wives. God’s best is that men become great in stature and create vast realms in which their wife can fully express who she is.

Jack told how he let his wife choose what car to buy and what house to buy for the family. When he told his church elders they were shocked, saying that such decisions were for men to make. Jack said he had much bigger things to think about than cars and houses. He was concerned about the whole nation of America.

Small men demand that they make the ‘big’ decisions. But those decisions are not really big. Compared to the realm of truly giant men those ‘big’ decisions are incidental.
Men can build a big world for their wife by becoming bigger in themselves and operating in an expanded realm.

Dungeons

Some men are small on the inside. Trapped in fear, insecurity, shame, loss of meaning and intimidation, they hide in a dark dungeon of isolation, petty values, distrust, confinement and the like.

When those men raise a family they cannot let their wife and children live with greater freedom than they feel within themselves, so they become lord of their own dungeon. They may effectively trap their wife in the home. They may monitor and police all the things their children do, for fear that they go outside the narrow bounds in which the man lives. They will be given to control, confinement, distrust, intense monitoring and so on.

Such dungeon lords create horrible homes in which their families are trapped. Usually the children make a break for it at their earliest opportunity. Wives can be trapped in the man’s private dungeon for their entire married life.

Dungeon Slave

An elderly lady asked me for help many years ago. She had been raised in the church and loved God. The man she married was from a heathen background, but she hoped to soften him in her role as his wife.

Instead of winning him over, this lady spent sixty years under the tyranny of a man who rejected all things Christian. He was given to intense anger, especially when his sporting team lost a match.

When the man was hospitalised, shortly before his death, the wife sought me out and asked if God would forgive her for marrying such a man. She had been trapped away from her faith and was unable to bring any of her children up in the fear of God. They only feared their father’s dominating anger. They became sports fanatics, but had no knowledge of the saviour whom their mother loved in her youth.

Slaves to Fear

Another man I knew a few years ago proved to be a dungeon lord. He demanded that his wife be totally submitted to him. He kept her away from friends, monitored her phone calls, gave her no money, inspected her shopping, dumped anger on her if she did not do exactly what he wanted, and trapped her in the dungeon of his own smallness.

The man was himself a slave to fear. He had no confidence in God, despite his religious connections. He felt compelled to lord it over his wife, out of fear, insecurity and obsession to control. He was first a slave; otherwise he would never have made his wife into one.

Men who become dungeon lords are really inmates of the dungeon themselves. They cannot live in freedom, so they cannot allow others to live in liberty. They fit the description given in Hebrews, “through the fear of death they are slaves for the whole of their lives” (Hebrews 2:15).

The Winning Way

People who are free on the inside do not enslave others. God, who is the ultimate in freedom, gives all His creations free will, even to rebel. Angels were able to rebel and mankind is free to reject God.

Rather than bringing God down and demeaning Him, the actions of others have no power to change Him. Men who fear that rebellion from their wife or family demeans them are not finding their value and wholeness in God.

The winning way is to love those in our care. When a husband loves his wife and places trust in her, he elevates her. When a father loves his children and places trust in them he elevates them. God loves us and trusts us, which elevates us into the potential to receive His forgiveness and become His children.

Women will upset their husbands and children will bring distress to their parents. No amount of slavery can stop that. So the game is not to enslave, but to lovingly nurture and direct.

Another aspect of the winning way is faith. When a man places his faith in God he trusts God to oversee the hearts of his wife and children. He also looks to God for loving wisdom that will enable the man to win his wife and children to the godly values which he embraces.

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