Fight Like Men (Part 5 of Biblical Manhood Series)
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When I began this series on the fall and recovery of Biblical masculinity several weeks ago, little did I know that we were all about to witness a powerful and yet pitiful example of what fallen and impotent manhood looks like. Just as the brave Marines, holding the American flag atop a mound of rubble, on the war torn island of Iwo Jima, became a symbol for that entire era, so too will the slap heard round the world become a symbol of the weak and sickly manhood that is available today. Like the majority of the world, I had no idea that another award show filled full of opining elites had come and gone; that is until social media became a flurry with rumors that the fresh prince of Bel Aire slapped the Zebra from Madagascar.
Mildly intrigued, I went to youtube and saw the pitiful display.
And before we continue, let me begin with a few disclaimers. I detest celebrity culture. I despise award shows. I loath tabloid style gossip that thrives on who's sleeping with who. And I have found that my life will be so much more productive, peaceful, and rewarding if I worry about what God has called me to do, rather than worrying about which celebrity is in rehab for shipwrecking their life. That may sound insensitive, but I have more than enough to fill my schedule with growing in the love God, fighting to prioritize my family, loving neighbor, serving the church, and being faithful to do the things God has entrusted to me to do with the precious seconds He has given me. Celebrity culture does not even crack the top billion on my list.
Yet, I am interested in what happened, if for no other reason than I think it poignantly and perfectly encapsulates the downfall of our society. But, being two weeks removed, I am not contributing to the cacophony of opinions on the matter, because Will and Jada Smith are not my point. I only bring Will Smith up as a microcosm for failed masculinity. Let me explain.
First, I am no expert on the comings and goings of the Smith’s, but you would have needed to live under a rock much larger than a comedian named Chris to think things were hunky dory in the Smith home. And while it is not my goal to air all of their soiled linens on this episode, I do want to point out that smacking Chris Rock for a joke was not at all a masculine act.
Masculinity would have been faithfulness to his own marriage vows over the years. Masculinity would not have stood idly by while his wife was sleeping with one of her son’s friends. Masculinity would have provided a home where his children did not grow up entitled and thoroughly perverted by his debauchery. In fact, after years of abdicating his responsibility as a man, his family has become the joke… The humor of Chris Rock was just the final straw atop an overly burdened ego.
This was not masculinity. This was not defending the honor of his wife. This was the petulant temper tantrum of a guilt ridden man, who knows what it is like to play a strong and successful male on television, but behind the mask, is a weak and pitiful example in real life.
This is why I say that this moment was the perfect encapsulation of modern culture and manhood. Mr Smith represents a generation of spoiled, entitled, emasculated boys, who would rather shift blame onto other people for their failures instead of facing the consequences of their decisions.
Mr. Smith showcased one way to fight, but it certainly was not how to fight like a Christian man, which is the topic of our present episode. Unlike Will Smith, or whatever societal image we may have seen of late, we need to know what it means to fight like a Christian man. We need to know how we are called to fight? Where are we called to fight? What we are fighting for? And who we are fighting for! That is what we will be answering today, and we will begin with understanding the battle.
UNDERSTANDING THE BATTLE
I hope it goes without saying that we are not called to fight with literal weapons. This is not a battle for geography, per se, this is a battle for the spiritual life and well-being of the world. We are called to make war with sin, make war against the kingdom of darkness, heralding Christ to all the nations, extending His Kingdom so that He may become greater as everything else becomes less. This war is a spiritual war, advanced in the souls of men, spreading out to the ends of the earth, putting everything under the feet of Jesus. But, before we can engage in that battle, we must first understand our enemy.
UNDERSTANDING OUR ENEMIES
When the Bible speaks about our enemy, we often get the picture of a serpentine dragon that is roaring about seeking whomever he may devour and that is certainly part of the story. We really do live in a world where the devil prowls about like a lion seeking whomever he may destroy (1 Peter 5:8). We know that Scripture tells us that this beastly fiend is the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4) and that the world, in some ways, is still under his dominion and authority (1 John 5:18-19). But we also live in a world where Christ has triumphed over and disarmed the devil (Colossians 2:15), bound him in order to plunder his kingdom (Mark 3:27), and has given us the ability to resist him (James 4:7) and to see Jesus’ Kingdom triumph over his (Mt. 16:17-19).
And while an exhaustive study on the devil would be helpful, the central point I want us to understand is that we are in a war and that Satan is one of our great enemies. He is a liar, a deceiver, and wants nothing more than to blind eyes and deceive the nations. As Christian men, we fight him by clinging to the truth, employing the means of grace, participating in the church and sacraments, by contending for the Gospel once for all delivered to the saints, and by seeking to see Jesus’ Kingdom extended to all the nations. Satan is our real enemy and as Christian men we are not called to tremble over him, but to wage war against him in Jesus’ name!
But, he is not our only enemy. The Bible tells us that we actually have three enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil.
The world, according to Scripture, is the realm of sinful humanity who live by lies, hate the church, and are opposed to the Lordship of Christ. Think about it this way, Jesus is the King over His people, the elect, and we have become citizens of His glorious Kingdom to do His bidding. Well, in the same way, the serpent is the prince and power over his tyrannical kingdom, the world, and the reprobate are both pleased and equipped to do his bidding as well. The world, our second great enemy, consists of reprobate people, who are trying to advance a reprobate agenda and vision. Like Christ, Satan is attempting to gain ground in every generation. But unlike Christ, Satan will fail. His Church will advance and his shabby gates will keep falling down. That is the fate of his kingdom.
As Men, we engage in this fight against the world by attending church and participating in Christ’s movement of resistance (Hebrews 10:24-25). We publicly and joyfully herald Christ as Lord instead of caesar (Philippians 2:9-11). We do not participate in the world (1 John 2:15-18). We fight by not being conformed to the world’s patterns of thinking (Romans 12:2). We resist pagan ideologies, philosophies, lies about gender, sexuality, and any standard that does not conform to Scripture (Colossians 2:8). We fight by engaging the world with the Gospel but never becoming friends with the world (James 4:4).
And, as men, we fight the world by rejecting ungodly depictions of manhood and we uphold a godly vision of Biblical masculinity. These are just a sample of ways that we can fight.
The final enemy that we are called to fight is the most personal of all, that old man that you and I carry around with us every day, that which the Bible calls the flesh. I won’t spend much time on this point, because I think Romans 8:13 says it so clearly. Paul says:
for if you are living according to the flesh, you must die; but if by the Spirit you are putting to death the deeds of the flesh, you will live.
We have a triad of enemies that we are called to fight. Our war is waged alongside the church, with spiritual weapons (See Ephesians 6), with Scriptural fidelity, employing the Word, the Sacraments, and Prayer, to the ends of the earth for the glory of Christ. Godly men do not sit on the sidelines of this battle, they stand up, act like men, and engage with all their hearts in the church, like good soldiers of Christ to see His Kingdom come!
Paul says it like this in 1 Timothy 6
But flee from these things, you man of God, and pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, perseverance and gentleness. 12 Fight the good fight of faith; take hold of the eternal life to which you were called, and you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.13 I charge you in the presence of God, who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus, who testified the good confession before Pontius Pilate, 14 that you keep the commandment without stain or reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 15 which He will bring about at the proper time—He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, 16 who alone possesses immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has seen or can see. To Him be honor and eternal dominion! Amen.
Our battle is fought by simply being a faithful Christian and doing that until Jesus returns. It is time for the men of God to stand up, stop being passive in our faith, weak in our leadership, boys in our maturity, and to lead the charge in this great battle. Future generations will suffer or be blessed by what we do here. Let us live like Jesus until He returns.
BEING DRESSED FOR THE BATTLE
In closing, I also want to address an adjacent issue that is certainly relevant to the fight that men are called to. So far, we have spoken about what the war is, who the enemies are, and how we are called upon to fight. But we should not conclude without talking about the necessity and the importance of men being dressed for the battle.
In the Bible, there are physical and spiritual ways that the man of God ought to be dressed that cannot and must not be ignored. Spiritually speaking, we are to put on the strength of Christ (Ephesians 6:10), by putting on the full armor of God (Ephesians 6:11). That armor is spiritual in nature and includes things like putting on the breastplate of righteousness and girding up our loins - a symbol of our God-given masculinity - with truth (Ephesians 6:14). We are to shod our feet with intensive preparation for the work of the Gospel of peace (Ephesians 6:15), which means that we must be prepared to do work in His Kingdom in ways outlined in Scripture. We are to take up the shield of faith during unfaithful times (Ephesians 6:16). We are to gladly and unashamedly wear our helmet of salvation, while wielding the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God (Ephesians 6:17).
Needless to say, men ought to come to this fight equipped by the church, hungry to be discipled, glad to advance His mission, eager in their Biblical studies, and ready to storm the gates of hell to the glory of God! If we had a culture of men like that, the world would be redeemed to Christ. And it is my prayer that the Lord would sovereignly awaken His Church to become this.
But there is also physical clothing that is important for the battle we will fight that has become all the more important in recent days. For instance, in almost every generation of humanity, men have understood the need and the importance to dress like men. To adopt a masculine approach to grooming, dressing, and acting so as to distinguish them from their feminine counterparts. This is good and right.
So, while I wish that this were more obvious, because we live in such a perverted and disgusting culture, we will look at in closing, what the Bible has to say about masculine clothing, grooming, and what it means to be dressed for the battle.
The unified message of Scripture is that a man is supposed to dress like and look like a man. That means, for example, having a short and masculine hairstyle so that no one confuses him as a woman. And before we get antsy and say things like the Bible has nothing to say about men and long hair or that the hairstyle requirements in Scripture are only cultural and that they no longer apply to us today, look at what Paul says… His argument is not a cultural one. He says in 1 Corinthians 11:14:
Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him
He goes beyond the distinctiveness of cultures and makes an argument of nature. He is saying that it should be obvious to us, as gendered beings, that men ought not to have long hair. It is a disgrace to them.
Along with the natural disgrace of it, there is no positive example of a man with long hair anywhere in the Scripture. Think about it, it was long hair that led to Absalom's downfall (2 Samuel 18) and it was long hair on Nebuchadnezzar that was a sign of his insanity (Daniel 4). In both cases, long hair was a part of the curse that these men endured and nothing close to a positive endorsement.
In fact, the only positive cases of a man abandoning a regularly well groomed masculine hairstyle comes on the rarest of occasions when a Nazarite vow is enacted (such as Numbers 6:5) or during other serious vows to the Lord like the one the apostle Paul undertook in Acts 18:18. In both cases, the expectation was that the vow was temporary and a fresh haircut was the first thing one would do when ending the vow.
There is the peculiar case of Samson, who was the only man recorded under a permanent and lifelong Nazarite vow. But, even with him, his hair was the very thing that led to his downfall at the hands of delilah. And while this is a short summary, there just simply is not a positive case to be made for a man having long hair. We are called to be men and adorn our scalp with hair befitting a man.
Now, some may object that Jesus always has long hair in the movies, and who are we to argue with the theological acumen of film directors, right? But, I would challenge you to find a single verse that tells us Jesus had long hair. And I would also challenge you to think about the irony of it all. The Jesus who is portrayed in those movies is an overly stoic metrosexual white effiminate wuss in a bathrobe. Do we really believe our Lord, the lion of Judah, who carried his own cross uphill after receiving the kind of beating most people die under, was no more than the ancient version of a Harry Styles? Let us not place such a disgusting and unworthy image upon our King!
The point we must remember here is that God made men to look like men and that includes the way we wear our hair and in the way we dress.
In Deuteronomy 22:5, the Old Testament is explicit. Moses, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, says:
“A woman shall not wear a man's garment, nor shall a man put on a woman's cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.
There is no lack of clarity here. If you do this, you are an abomination. If you dress in ways that cloud your masculinity, or if a woman dresses in ways that cloak her femininity, if you blur or obfuscate your engenderedness, then you are not only acting in an abominable way but you have also become a stench in the nostrils of God. These are the kinds of sins that pollute the land and caused the great fury of the Lord to be poured out on His people and we will be no different.
And while there are other things we could consider such as earrings, the reasonableness - or even the Biblical expectation of a man having a beard - or how the Bible talks about baldness or shaving, I believe the point at this point is clear. The Bible expects that men will act like men, worship like men, participate in the advance of Jesus’ Kingdom like men, by adopting the weapons of warfare like men, and by showing up looking like men, being groomed like men, and being dressed like a man. These things are a glory to a man, they are most suitable to his frame, and will equip us to fight in a way that glorifies our King.
Until next time brothers, be strong, godly, loving, and courageous soldiers for Christ. Reject the world’s view of you, deny feminism and effiminate behavior, and pattern your life after the Lord Jesus Christ. Until next time, the Lord be with you!
