Throughout our lifetime, we’ve pretty much ignored Jesus as an example of masculinity.
Part of this has to do with the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’
perception that still dominates the church. In other words, by assuming Jesus
isn’t really all that masculine, we don’t bother to look to Him as a model for
manhood.
Also, there remains a particular fear that keeps some from
giving Jesus much attention regarding masculinity. And that’s the fear that
following Jesus as a model will somehow overshadow the necessity of His
atonement, and we’ll begin to trust in ourselves rather than Him.
But the failure to look to Jesus regarding masculinity has
been to our detriment. And it’s left many Christian men turning to secular
gurus to try and discover what it means to live as a man in our day.
This is so unfortunate and unnecessary because as the second
Adam, Jesus is the ultimate dominion man and the ideal one to turn to when it
comes to recovering masculinity – in any generation.
So what can Jesus teach us about being a man? Particularly in
today’s scenario?
In his study The Person of Jesus , Paul Miller does a fantastic job bringing to life a full and balanced view of the humanity of our Lord. In so doing, he reveals many traits of Jesus that instruct us about godly masculinity.
Let’s consider three which I believe men need to recover
today.
Masculinity Looks and Takes Action
Throughout His ministry, Jesus was alert to what was going on
around Him.
He didn’t sleepwalk His way through life. Instead, he paid
attention to the people, situations, and needs before Him and then engaged them
accordingly to bring hope.
One of the best examples of this involves the widow of Nain
(Lk.7:11-17).
When Jesus, with His disciples, encountered a funeral, He
didn’t just wait for it to pass by. Instead, he observed what was taking place
and took special note of the widow who had lost her son. ‘His heart went out to
her,’ the text says, and this led Him to take action that changed the woman’s
life.
In a day when so many men have become passive, are conflicted
about their duties, and have opted to just check out, this simple account gives
a wake-up call.
It says…
Men, pay attention to what’s happening around you! Open up
your heart. Consider how you might meet a need and bring hope. And move forward
and engage.
The path of the righteous is like the light of dawn, which shines brighter and brighter until full day. The way of the wicked is like deep darkness; they do not know over what they stumble. ~Proverbs 4.18-19
Solomon incentivizes his son to accept his words and walk in
the path of wisdom with the promise of ever-growing light. Light is a great
blessing in everyday life, but why would ever-growing light be an incentive to
walk in the path of wisdom? Solomon’s promise is rooted in deep themes of
Scripture that begin with the story of light and darkness in the opening scenes
of history.
There was a time when there was nothing outside of God
himself. You and I can’t imagine “nothing,” for when we try to imagine “nothing”
we are imagining something. Nothing means that there wasn’t even darkness. On
the opening day of history, God created heaven and earth and, with it, darkness
(cf. Isa 45.7). Darkness was not evil in the broad sense of affliction or
trouble or in the narrow sense of being sinful. In fact, God judges all of his
creation “good” at the end of the week. Darkness was a part of each day and
was, therefore, good with the rest of creation.
In the beginning, God gave a mission to the man: he was to
take dominion over the earth. This was his mission, but it was revealed he
could not do it alone. So, God created the woman to be his helper, one who
would come alongside him, who would be oriented to him and his God-given
mission. The mission of the dominion of the world, bringing order and glory to
a disordered and immature world, was beyond the capabilities of two
individuals. God blessed them, giving them the ability to be fruitful and
multiply. As children grew and eventually left their original household,
cleaving to a spouse and creating a new household, a division of labor emerged
that moved the mission forward. Each household, led by the husband who was
helped by his wife, would develop its own mission that would contribute to the
larger mission of the dominion of the world.
The grand mission continues and, therefore, the division of
labor continues. Each household or family is responsible for an aspect of the
mission. Within each household, the man is responsible to determine the mission
of the household. That is the duty of headship. What this means is that must
determine how the family fits in and
works toward the advancement of Christ’s kingdom. You are not responsible
for the entirety of the mission. But you and your family are responsible to
pull part of the load.
“Honor Yahweh with your wealth and with the firstfruits of all your produce; then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will be bursting with wine.” (Proverbs 3.9-10)
“Do you want your needs met? Do you want to be wealthy? God
is calling you to plant a seed of faith of one hundred, two hundred, or one
thousand dollars in this ministry. The return you receive depends on how many
seeds you plant.” If we haven’t heard it directly, many of us are familiar with
the message of the prosperity gospel hucksters who siphon off money from the
desperate and gullible. We dismiss these charlatans with disdainful laughter because
we know that God and his world are not a divinely rigged slot machine that
produces a fortune every time the handle is pulled or the button pushed.
(Sorry, I’m a little unfamiliar with slot machines.)
Jezebel. Adolf Hitler. Paul. Mao Zedong. Augustine. Fidel
Castro. Martin Luther. Joseph Stalin. John Calvin. Donald Trump. Joe Biden.
Names provoke various reactions, from respect to revulsion. They have this
effect because they are not benign tags to distinguish one person from another
but carry with them the revealed character of the person.
Should we care about our name? Should we be concerned about
what people think when they hear our name? Joan Jett says she doesn’t care
about her bad reputation, but Solomon says that we should care about ours. “A
name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor (that is, a good
reputation) is better than silver or gold” (Pr 22.1). There is something else
in Proverbs that is worth more than silver, gold, and precious jewels: Wisdom
(cf. Pr 3.14-15; 8.10, 11, 19; 16.16). Solomon is making a connection. Your
name ought to be “Wisdom.” When people speak your name, the speaker and those
listening ought to think, “well-ordered life, integrity, faithful, diligent
worker, a reflection of God’s character, fears God.”
Instruction, education, or discipleship can sometimes be
reduced to the transference of ideas from one brain to another. The young
person who needs to learn needs to read a book, listen to a lecture, and follow
commands, we think. Teaching of this sort is indispensable to learning wisdom.
God, after all, gave us a book of books that we are to hear and read to know
him, to understand his works and his will.
If left to mere talk, the communication of information, our
teaching is truncated and insufficient. The goal of education in wisdom is
about formation not merely information. Teachers are looking to
capture the disciple’s heart, shaping his desires as well as his ideas, forming
habits as well as inculcating facts.
Desire is key. What you desire you will pursue, love, and
cherish.
What do we desire? We desire that which we believe is
beautiful. What is beautiful is the highest good. What we consider beautiful
draws us to itself promising us, with and without words, the good life.
Solomon wants his son to desire wisdom’s beauty. So, in
Proverbs 3.13-18 he paints a portrait of wisdom’s beauty for his son. This
little section might even be considered a hymn of praise of Wisdom. There are
no commands in the section. There is only the portrait of the beauty of Wisdom
with the promise of the blessedness for those who lay hold on her. There are
commands, exhortations, and admonitions elsewhere in Proverbs. All of those are
needed, but they need to be conjoined with why we are doing all of these
things: the pursuit of the beautiful.
Because of the foolishness that is bound up in our hearts
from conception (Pr 22.15), our visions of beauty are distorted. We will tend
toward the superficial, vaporous beauty of Harlot Folly. We need our vision
reordered to see the beauty of Wisdom; the beauty of a well-ordered life that
lives at peace with God, others, and the non-human world around us.
Instruction in wisdom, therefore, is not merely explicated
but demonstrated. For our children to learn wisdom, wisdom needs to be exemplified
in our well-ordered lives as parents. It is not enough to have strict rules,
stridently catechizing children, and rigidly doing all the right things. Rules
are needed. The discipline of catechesis and doing the right thing even when
you don’t feel like it are needed. There will be times you will need to fight
the distorted visions of beauty that come from the heart of foolishness in a
child. But there must be more. Wisdom’s beauty must be exemplified in the home
in affection between husband and wife, parents and children. There should be
hefty bouts of laughter as well as non-anxious quiet that comes when people are
at ease with and around one another.
I’m not talking about putting on sappy, superficial,
over-the-top, fake acts, but training your own hearts to love wisdom’s beauty
so that the genuineness of your love so pervades your life that your children
want to grow up and be like you. As your children grow, they can see the
contrast between the life that they see in you and what is going on in people
who give themselves over to sin. As you have instructed them along the way
about why you are the way that you are, they know how to lead the life that
will direct them to be like you.
This wisdom must also be portrayed in the church for the sake
of the world. The church is, after all, Lady Wisdom, the helper of the eternal
Son in ordering the world under his lordship. Because we are Lady Wisdom as the
church, we are to be the embodiment of beauty. The church is to be living a
well-ordered life with proper relationships in authority, serving one another
in love, maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, exuberantly
worshiping our God.
As we adorn the gospel in wisdom, with our well-ordered
lives, in union with Christ we become “the Desire of all nations” (Hag 2.7),
the beautiful bride of Christ to whom the nations come for healing and to bring
their gifts (Rev 21.9—22.5).
The incarnate beauty of Wisdom is key to discipling the
nations.
Our speaker this Sunday at Providence Church (CREC), Dr. Ben Merkle, recently opined that you may not be postmil and paedobaptist, but the leftists are and they are actively seeking to implement their agenda. The left has a developed view of the future and they are eagerly seeking to catechize our children with their optimistic eschatology. They also have a covenantal view that sees generational faithfulness to their cause at the very heart of all they do.
Many Christians, on the other hand, live as if the future is determined for failure and that children are future disciples; little vipers in diapers waiting to be evangelized for a proper time of discernment–paedos and credos act like this at times. We treat the entire project with triviality and give over the reign of ideological terror to the enemy and let them set the agenda while we sit back with our Veggie Tales catechism.
Take the San Francisco Gay Men’s Choir who has become a national topic these days. Now, they argue that the entire endeavor was tongue-in-cheek humor and that conservatives don’t have a sense of humor. But let’s consider for a moment the heart of their anthem:
“We’ll convert your children. Someone’s gotta teach them not to hate. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children.”
Now, this kind of indoctrination is rather the explicit variety; the stout version. But any sober Christian knows that there are no neutral actions and certainly no neutral lifestyles. The national pushback is not so much pushback to the agenda–for conservatives have been too hesitant to speak out against homosexual activists– but the pushback is a reaction to the overt language. We are generally fine when the argumentation happens at a subtle level because we don’t care much about grasping logical subtleties are arguments. Nevertheless, the best agendas are comedic agendas. That’s how God created us and God has a pattern of haha-ing his way through history, especially when songs like these make the round (Psalm 2).
Of course, we are not naive. These gay men may attempt to apologize for their song, but we know that their song is their anthem and agenda. Their boldness is coming to new levels of obscenity and their postmil and paedo-agenda cards are out in the open now. That’s a good thing for us. We need more testing as Christians to sharpen our discernment skills.
Now, if Christians act as if this is some SNL skit and move on from this without learning any lessons, we are fools for it.
What we do need to see is that unnatural acts and actors of unnatural lifestyles (Rom. 1) would love acceptance and acceptance comes in the form of enculturation to norms. These norms are actualized in the songs of a culture. Even the humor attempts are forms of indoctrination. We should not panic, but we should form even greater circles of postmil and paedo-life disciples who see that Christians are deeply committed to an agenda, a form of godly conspiracy against the prideful schemes of gay men. We don’t narrow our focus on gay men only, but gay men and various other alphabet letters are seeking to build a kingdom, and if we walk around as if this warfare is only left to the halls of public schools in California, we are going to lose the near battles.
This all means that our language to our boys needs to be conspicuously robust; the kind that shows them that sweat is good and that gets them out of the house often to tackle thorns and thistles. They cannot grow up with a diet of praise choruses. They need the “Son of God Goes Forth to War” and “Lion-Hearted” theology that acknowledges that the future belongs to the Lord and our sons and daughters are marked by a divine Catechizer in baptism.
One way in which the father teaches his son wisdom in Proverbs is through observation of what others are doing and the outcomes of their ways of life. He calls upon his son to look at the skillful man (Pr 22.29) as well as the ways the father himself (Pr 23.26.28). The son is not only to learn from wise examples but also the unwise. The father tells his son of a young man who puts himself in a bad place and is seduced by Harlot Folly. He watched the whole incident, and it didn’t end well for the young man (Pr 7.6-27). He also passed by the field of a sluggard and noticed that his vineyard was in complete disrepair and overgrown with thorns. He looked and considered, “How did it come to this?”
The father calls his son to watch and learn, to judge the way of wisdom from positive and negative examples so that he himself will not fall into judgment. As Christians, we don’t mind looking at the positive examples and noticing for ourselves or pointing out to our children these examples to follow. But we wince when we think about using the bad examples of others to teach others. We don’t want to be “judgy.” The limit of the explanation to our children, for instance, might be “There but for the grace of God go I.” We say that almost as if God’s grace is a magic spell that kept me from being there, but God didn’t perform the same magic on the other person. We want to avoid pride (a good impulse, to be sure), but in order to do so, we practically deny all the choices that were made that put that person in the position in which he now lives.
Friendship is vital to our humanity. We desire friendship
because we are created in the image of the Triune God who is eternally in
friendship as Father, Son, and Spirt, and, like him, our mission can only be
completed in a community of friendships. The mission God gave us in the
beginning cannot be completed by an individual. We need friendships; from the
friendship of marriage (cf. Song 5.16) to same-sex friendships to broader
societal connections, we need friendships at various levels to complete what God
has given us to do. It is not good for man to be alone. Friendships, therefore,
are not an optional accoutrement to our humanity.
The drive to have friends is innate in everyone. We want
connections, people with whom we can share life. We are broadly connected to
all humans so that every person we meet is a friend. The command to “love
your neighbor as yourself” in Leviticus 19.18 can rightly be translated,
“love your friend as yourself.” There is a sense in which everyone is
a friend with whom we are connected and to whom we owe our love. The Bible not
only speaks of friends in this broad sense but also speaks of friendships of
various degrees of intimacy. Friends of the king (for example, Job or Jesus in
John 15) are his trusted advisors. A husband is the wife’s friend (Song 5.16).
There are friends and there are friends.
While we owe a friendly duty to all those with whom we come
in contact, we don’t share the same intimacy with all. Indeed, we must take
care with whom we become close friends because of the way deep friendships
shape us. Friendships involve an “entangling of souls.” The soul is our whole
person animated before God and the world. Our lives get wrapped up with someone
so that our emotions, will, mind, and heart are connected with the other.
Jonathan’s soul was knit to David’s so that he loved him as his own soul (1Sm
18.1). That is a close friendship. In these types of friendships as we “share
souls” with one another, we take on the characteristics of the other so that
our mannerisms, speech patterns, desires, and the direction of our lives blend
with the other person.
The entangling of souls can be good for us or bad for us.
Paul proverbially tells the Corinthians, “Bad company corrupts good morals”
(1Cor 15.33), recognizing this general principle. This is why Solomon and his
wife direct their son to be careful about friendships from the start of his
instruction (Pr 1.8-19). His son is to avoid the gang of young men who are
unhinged from God’s wisdom. He is not to walk in the way with the wicked; he is
to “avoid it; do not go on it; turn away from it and pass on” (Pr 4.14-15). He
is to recognize Harlot Folly by the way she speaks and dresses and avoid her as
well (Pr 7). Wisdom is to be called his “sister” and insight his close friend
(Pr 7.4). He is to seek out Lady Wisdom for his intimate companion. He is to
walk with wise men (Pr 13.20).
Some Christians out of misguided love and distortion of
mercy might believe that the avoidance of entangling ourselves with the unwise,
the rebellious, is selfish. However, Proverbs is quite clear in its directives,
and its wisdom is embodied in Jesus himself. Jesus walked the way of wisdom and
called others to join him. If they were willing to follow him, to join him in
the way of wisdom, he was willing to be patient with them and help them along
the way. However, he was willing to cut off relationships with those who did
not want to walk or continue to walk with him. The rich young man who appeared
to be a hot prospect for the kingdom turned away from Jesus’ call to walk in
the way. Jesus didn’t run after him. At one time, after Jesus spoke about being
the bread that came down from heaven, many quit following him. He turned to the
Twelve and asked them if they would leave him as well. He was not deviating. He
was willing to let them go if they didn’t want to continue in the way of
wisdom.
As you choose friends, take care. They need to be on the
same path of maturing in wisdom. You cannot save the undisciplined, slothful,
angry, drunk and glutton, so don’t mix with them (Pr 22.24-25; 23.19-21). The
sin magnet that is in you will be drawn toward the atrophy and disorder that
characterizes them, and then you will be able to help no one. You will need
someone to help you. Find friends who are walking in the way of wisdom and join
them, encouraging one another, and so be saved from destruction and be
productive in our common mission.
Last week, our church hosted a Vacation Bible School that included the story of “David and Goliath” as one of the Bible stories. I was responsible for the “Bible story station” that introduced the characters, the meaning behind the story, and its application. Groups would spend twenty minutes with me and then return later in the day for ten minutes of reflection and prayer.
Our VBS theme’s package included scripted lessons that a leader could simply read with sample questions and ideas for applications for various age groups. Our materials were produced by the Methodist publisher Cokesbury and generally faithful to the Biblical story. They were also insightful about how to manage the attention of younger students, but like all modern children’s curricula – do not expect much from the child.
On Bite-Sized Lessons
Exercises like this always cause me to question how much of Sunday’s sermon is actually understood by my youngest congregants. The VBS curriculums seem to assume that children need everything delivered in such easily digested, bite-sized pieces. Perhaps this level of VBS is meant for children who may have never been to a church. But not even two minutes into my introduction of David and Goliath it was obvious that my group of eight and nine-year-olds were already very familiar with the details of the story—down to the number of stones that David collects. The study guide wanted me to focus on “facing bullies” and “overcoming adversity” but the kids had heard it all before.
Caught off guard, I went into “Rev. Clowney Mode” and thought I would pivot into teaching how Goliath’s downfall points to Christ. Now completely off script, I asked the students, “So what happened to Goliath next?” A few hands went up. One young man was so excited to share that I decided to ignore his impatient “I know! I know!” and call on him anyway. “David cut his head off!” For some strange reason, this scene wasn’t included in the coloring sheets and didn’t make it into any of the suggested drama skits for the day. Go figure.
And, “and then what happened?” I asked. The students looked at each other, shrugged, and back to me. Here I explained that King David eventually took the giant’s skull to Jerusalem, to be buried just outside of the Holy City of Jerusalem.
I asked them to consider Goliath a type of serpent, reminding them that “coat of mail” that we see described as his armor in 1 Samuel 17 is more akin to a breastplate of snake scales. I then asked them to remember the Garden of Eden and to consider the promises made to Adam and Eve after their expulsion, chiefly that a descendent of theirs was to crush the head of the serpent. I pointed out that in our Scripture reading, David’s stone “sunk” into Goliath’s head. David was Adam’s great-great (times thirty-five generations) grandson and he was well aware of the promises to his family’s line. He and all future generations would remember David as the son of Adam who had crushed the serpent with a stone to the head.
Yet David was only fulfilling part of that promise. David’s battle with Goliath was looking forward to when the Messiah would destroy the true serpent and undo mankind’s death curse. David anticipated this when he brought Goliath’s skull back to Jerusalem as a covenant sign of God’s future faithfulness. For the very place that David buries Goliath’s skull is to become the very same spot that Jesus is to be crucified: Golgotha.
David with the Head of Goliath, circa 1635, by Andrea Vaccaro
As James B. Jordan points out:
“Golgotha is just a contraction of Goliath of Gath (Hebrew: Goliath-Gath). 1 Samuel 17:54 says that David took the head of Goliath to Jerusalem, but since Jerusalem was to be a holy city, this dead corpse would not have been set up inside the city, but someplace outside. The Mount of Olives was right in front of the city (1 Kings 11:7; 2 Kings 23:13), and a place of ready access. Jesus was crucified at the place where Goliath’s head had been exhibited. Even as His foot was bruised, He was crushing the giant’s head!”
Biblical Horizons Newsletter No. 84: Christ in the Holy of Holies The Meaning of the Mount of Olives by James B. Jordan (April, 1996)
I had gone way off course from the VBS script. I was talking about burying a giant’s skull and Christ crucified, where the script had this as its closing reflection: “If you wonder how you can face challenges that might seem bigger than you, remember that with God you can find what you need to help you meet your challenges.”
At reflection time they returned eager for more juicy details about David’s bloodlust, only for me to remind them of Christ’s present promises to conquer sin and that perhaps us miserable sinners are more like Goliath than David in the story. We deserve a stone to the head for our life of war against God. And like Goliath’s lifeless skull outside of Jerusalem, our only hope was the blood dripping down from the saviour on the cross.
On Practical, Relevant Preaching
The need for a “practical application” and the lure of relevance or accessibility has detached the Christian meaning of David versus Goliath from its place in the story of the Gospel. King David as a historical figure with a natural and spiritual lineage leading to Jesus is of no real consequence in the VBS version. While I have no doubt that this story also presents a great opportunity for character building in giving us examples of overcoming adversity, let’s not limit David to the realm of mere fable.
After all, popular authors have done much better than pastors with this self-help approach. For example, Malcom Gladwell parlayed the underdog notion of David and Goliath into a New York Times Bestseller back in 2015 when he connected this story to all sorts of character applications. Everything from the religious sacrifices of the French Huguenots to the jumbled but noble struggle of dyslexics. In Gladwell’s applications, the whole idea of the story was simple: what we saw as disadvantages in the small-statured shepherd boy, were actually his secret weapons against the Philistine giant. David had it in him the whole time, everyone else just couldn’t see it. Is this the message of Christ?
We must contend that the Holy Spirit did not include the battle with Goliath to add a Hebrew hero to the Aesopica. David’s battle must be more than a story for inspiring courage and spurring on self-development. We have not faithfully taught any passage of Scripture without connecting it to the story of Christ’s redemption. Or as Rev. Edmund Clowney put it, “Preachers who ignore the history of redemption in the preaching are ignoring the witness of the Holy Spirit to Jesus in all the Scriptures.”
Rev. Clowney was Professor Emeritus of Practical Theology at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he served for over thirty years, sixteen of those as president. He authored several books, including The Unfolding Mystery: Discovering Christ in the Old Testament.
Esoteric Speculations
Grounding our teaching in the story of Christ also prevents the fetishizing of obscure details in the Hebrew text. I was recently asked to lead a book study through Michael S. Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm. While leading the study, I quickly learned that the generation of men taught under “relevant preaching” styles had missed out on the necessary theological framework to hang the Old Testament narratives. They craved the order and structure The Unseen Realm offers. Unfortunately, Heiser’s book reads like he has just recently unlocked a secret code to understand the Bible through special ancient symbols and obscure language clues.
Speculations about Nephilim, angels, and giants creep in and have the power to wedge an artificial gap between our historical theology and our new pet passages. Men like Othmar Keel, Meredith Kline, and Gregory Beale have been offering us similar approaches to Biblical symbolism while staying within Nicene orthodoxy and the historic church. And of course, James Jordan offered a very accessible compendium of Biblical symbolism in his book Through New Eyes.
How much did Goliath’s armor weigh? Were his ancestors fallen angels? Did the giants survive the flood? Does new Philistine DNA evidence prove the existence of bronze-age giants? The depths of the Biblical text are inexhaustible, or as D.A. Carson put it in his book The Gospel as Center, “The Bible is an ever-flowing fountain…” but wild speculations detached from the story of salvation are not equal to seeing Christ in every passage of Scripture. To see Christ in every God-breathed passage is to drink from the living stream, while a desire for obscurity inevitably leads to the brackish waters of pseudo-scholarship based in the mysteries of pseudepigraphon and cliches of post-modern religious studies.
Teach Christ
There’s nothing foolish, redundant, or mediocre about Christ-centered preaching. Those who love the Lord will never tire of hearing how Christ is present on every page. Those who are far from him desperately need to hear him speak to every area of life. Let us never grow weary in taking captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. (2 Corinthians 10:5)
There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’Abraham Kuyper
