The Measure of A Man (Part 2)

Part one was about the reed, the man who will not stand. This part is about the other man, the one who saw the reed and ran the other way. He looked at all those soft, passive men and swore he would never be one of them. Good so far. But running from one ditch is not the same as finding the road. He ran so hard he fell into the ditch on the other side. Call him the brute, the man who cannot yield.

The Man Who Cannot Yield

You can spot the brute pretty easily. Strength mixed with anger. He works at looking tough, or being tough, as he calls it. A mouth let loose to insult people, and his excuse is that it is the courage of the prophets. He does not want to be a man without a chest, so he beats his chest like a brute to prove he has one.

So where does he get his idea of a man? Not from the Bible, though he will quote it. He gets it by looking at feminism and running the other way. Some of these men come right out and say so. One of them put it plainly, that carefully preaching through the Bible will not protect your church, that you have to go after feminism head on. Read that again. The thing telling him what a man is supposed to be is feminism. He just does the opposite of whatever it says. Which means feminism is still holding the measuring stick. He has not escaped it. He has only turned it upside down.

He is proud of being hard. He thinks a real man does not cry, that tears are for the weak. But the Christ of the Gospels cried at a grave (John 11:35). And the same Christ was furious in the temple and drove men out with a whip (John 2:15). Both were true of Him, and a man does not get to keep the whip and throw away the tears. If crying makes a man weak, then the Man of Sorrows was weak (Isaiah 53:3), and Jeremiah, who cried until his eyes gave out, was weak (Lamentations 2:11), and David, who soaked his bed with tears, was weak (Psalm 6:6). Calvin said the cold, iron way of the Stoics was put to shame by our Lord, Who answered it not with words but with His own tears (Institutes 3.8.9). A manhood that is all hardness and no tears is closer to the old pagans than to Christ.

None of this means strength is bad. Just the opposite. God tells men to be strong (Ephesians 6:10). He calls a young man's strength his glory (Proverbs 20:29). But God will not let a man lean on that strength to save him. A king is not saved by his big army, and a strong man is not saved by his own muscle (Psalm 33:16). God is not impressed by the strength of a man. He delights in the man who fears Him (Psalm 147:10-11). Ecclesiastes says it another way. Strength and work and pleasure are all good gifts from God's hand (Ecclesiastes 5:18-19). But the moment a man grabs one of them to fill the hole in his heart, it turns to smoke. Strength is a gift. It is meant to be spent on other people. Lean your whole weight on it, and it will drop you every time.

Then there is his mouth. Yes, the Bible has a sharp edge in places. Elijah made fun of the priests of Baal (1 Kings 18:27). Paul wrote a line or two that cut deep (Galatians 5:12). One of the leaders in this movement even wrote a whole book praising what he called the serrated edge, a biting, mocking way of talking, and he treats it like a Christian duty. But that is not how the New Testament tells men to talk. It says speak with grace. Be kind. Be gentle, even with people who hate you. Answer with respect (Colossians 4:6; 1 Peter 3:15). A man who makes a hobby out of mocking his brothers is not carrying the sword of the prophets. He is just carrying out the works of the flesh, dressed up in a prophet's coat.

This is where it gets dangerous. Once a man reads everything through his anger, he starts finding that anger in verses that never had it. The favorite is one little phrase at the end of Paul's first letter to Corinth. The old Bibles translate them "act like men" (1 Corinthians 16:13), and this crowd has built a whole gospel of aggression on top of them. Now, there is something true here, and we should believe it without shame. The word does mean courage, and courage really is part of being a man. A coward is failing at something real, and the old translators were right to hear it. It is even the first in line of those cast into the Lake of Fire (Revelation 21:8). The phrase means “be courageous.” Everywhere this word shows up, it means to be brave. Notice it in the Greek Old Testament. It is the word Moses uses when he tells Israel to be strong and take heart (Deuteronomy 31:6), the word God uses with Joshua (Joshua 1:6-9), the word David uses with Solomon about building the temple (1 Chronicles 28:20). Every time, it means have courage when things are hard. So when a man takes that one little word and hangs a whole system of aggression on it, he is guessing, and worse, he is teaching people wrong.

You can see the difference a few chapters earlier in 1 Corinthians. When Paul actually wants to teach that men and women are different, he does not just drop a phrase and walk away. He builds a case. He goes back to creation, to the man made first and the woman made from him and for him (1 Corinthians 11:8-9). He talks about the man as the head. And then he adds that in the Lord the man and the woman need each other, because every man since Adam was born of a woman, and all of it comes from God (1 Corinthians 11:11-12). That is what Paul does when he means to teach something. So when he just says "act like men" and moves on, we can tell he is not laying down a whole doctrine of manhood.

And when the Bible does speak straight to men, look at what it actually says. Older men, be steady, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith and love (Titus 2:2). Younger men, control yourselves (Titus 2:6). When Paul lists what a man has to be to lead the church, almost the whole list is character. Above reproach. Gentle. Not violent. Not a fighter. Not quick-tempered (1 Timothy 3:2-3; Titus 1:7). Not aggression. Not dominance. Not big muscles. Self-control and steadiness, nearly the same things God asks of godly women and of every believer.

Now listen to this for a second. A lot of the loud men leading this movement, some of them in our own good churches, have failed at exactly this. Not small stumbles. Some have failed badly enough that they should have been removed from ministry, and a few of them were. But they are famous now. They have big followings so we look the other way. We tell ourselves the Bible's list can wait, as long as the man has “based tweets.” 

There is a popular book now that teaches the manliness of Jesus wipes out an effeminate Christianity. Stop and notice what that sentence just did. Manliness, not the crucified Christ, becomes the thing that does the saving, and Jesus gets dragged in to approve a picture of manhood that was already drawn up before anyone asked Him. Don’t get me wrong, Christ does wipe out an effeminate man, by making him more in line with what He created (this is called restoration/sanctification), but the same is true of Christ restoring and sanctifying women. As far as what Christ does to “an effeminate Christianity” is the same thing that Christ does to a Brutish Christianity, He casts it into the Lake of Fire. Unfortunately, they get into specifics. These same people go on to say that women cannot be trusted to vote (women’s suffrage can be a point of debate, but the “can’t be trusted part” is the focus here), that marriage between the races is “less than ideal,” and, by dragging up the old curse of Ham false teaching, that God put one race under the others to serve them. That is not a small slip. It is the same error that we are quick to point at prosperity gospel teachers or other false teachers, by holding an idea first and then finding a Bible verse to attach to it to give our idea legitimacy. 

The sad part is, I’ve heard men personally say that we ought to overlook all of that because at least these men are preaching a “masculine Christianity.” If you hear someone say this, you are hearing the whole problem in one sentence. It waves away the very things God says disqualify a man. That is the favoritism James warns about (James 2:1), letting a good cause excuse a rotten man. A movement that set out to save manhood ends up reading the Bible the way he pleases, rather than the way God intended. That is where the road goes when the only move you know is running away from feminism. You end up worse off than where you started.

So, one more time, what is a masculine Christianity? There is no such thing. There is no feminine Christianity either. There is just Biblical Christianity. The real faith makes men more masculine and women more feminine, because it pushes each one toward what God made them to be. But the faith itself is not male, and it is not female. In Christ, when it comes to being saved, there is no male and female (Galatians 3:28). It is not a gender at all. To demand a masculine Christianity is to size up the whole faith by who is stronger, which is the exact thing the feminists do, only flipped around. It is not an escape from their game. It is the same game just inverted team colors. And it ends up doing what feminism did. It shrinks Christ down to fit their picture of a man. Part one said the cure for a soft church is not a hard one. This is the flip side. The cure for a hard, chest-beating church is not a soft one. The cure for both is the real Christ, found in Scripture alone, not a pendulum swing from culture’s definition.

The Man Who Yielded

The brute, like the reed, usually knows deep down that something is off. And like the reed, he grabs the wrong fix. His fix is to get harder. More anger. A sharper tongue. A bigger fight. That is not repentance. You cannot repent of pride by getting prouder. Real repentance does not dig in. It turns around and looks at Christ.

The law does not accept "I was just being bold." It looks at the contempt, the cruel jokes, the strutting pride, the trail of hurt people behind his tongue, and it names it. Sin. The Bible says God stands against the proud (James 4:6), that He hates a lying, scheming, troublemaking heart (Proverbs 6:16-19), that men full of insults and hot tempers and picked fights will not inherit the kingdom (1 Corinthians 6:10; Galatians 5:19-21). The brute thought he was the strong man in the room. The law shows him a man who never once got his own heart under control, a man run by his temper and his pride, a man who swung the Bible around like a club. It breaks him too. Good. A proud man who has never been broken by the law is not ready for the gospel.

Christ is the strong Man the brute is only pretending to be. He held all the power in heaven, and He held it still. He could have called down armies of angels, and He did not (Matthew 26:53). His strength was meekness, power under control, like a warhorse broken to the bridle with every bit of its power still there, now handed over to the rider. He is the Lion, and He won by becoming the Lamb Who was killed (Revelation 5:5-6). He was strong enough to be gentle. He would not snap a bent reed or blow out a smoking wick (Isaiah 42:3). The strongest thing anyone ever did looked like weakness to everyone watching. A body nailed to a beam. Hands that could have flattened the city, held still. He laid down a life no one could take from Him (John 10:18), and He did it for proud, hard men who had it coming.

You do not have to earn God's favor by being the toughest man in the room. Christ was strong in your place, and He was meek in your place, and God counts His record as yours, a free gift, taken by faith and never earned. You can truly be at peace. That peace is the change the gospel works in you once grace takes hold. And grace does not just pour gas on your temper and send you off to fight harder. It takes your strength and breaks it to the bridle. It hands it back to you, turned toward the weak instead of against them, spent on your wife, your children, the brother you used to run over. That is how a brute becomes a real man. Not by going soft, and not by getting harder, but by bowing his hard heart and thick head to the Christ Who bowed His, and being made new.

This is the measure of a man, and there is no other. Not the reed who will not stand, and not the brute who cannot yield, but the Son Who stood where the first man ran, and yielded where proud men will not, Who carried the curse for His bride and rose on the third day to bring her home. A man is not made a man by running from the times he lives in, and he is not made a man by falling in love with his own strength and fighting just to fight. He is made a man as the Spirit shapes him into the likeness of this Christ, the last Adam, in Whom the sons of Adam are made new.