Biblical Masculinity is Toxic Masculinity
Has there been a culture as confused as ours?
Clarity
It’s a shame, but I’ve got to stipulate.
As much as I cling to truth and the language of truth, our culture demands clarification.
For example, I simply cannot speak of marriage lest you be confused. I must stipulate…biblical marriage between a man and a woman. Even the word “biblical” does not delineate decisively. Now, you and I know that the word “marriage” carries a biblical connotation—God ordained marriage after all—and excludes all but those between a man and a woman. Unfortunately, society no longer honors such clarity.
The concept of masculinity demands a similar stipulation.
We must delineate between masculinity and biblical masculinity though again, you and I know that apart from Christ, masculinity is meaningless. It rings hollow. It doesn’t exist. Christless masculinity is as meaningful as heteronormative or cisgender or pregnant persons or any of the litany of doublespeak that proliferates and masquerades as reality today.
So, for the sake of clarity, we must agree…
…biblical masculinity is toxic masculinity.
Godless Masculinity
Allow me to establish a term. Let us address godless masculinity.
In Christ, we find the ultimate exhibition of masculinity. Masculinity—biblical masculinity—demands Christ. He must exist for masculinity to even be a thing.
God in the flesh, Jesus is a man.
Let’s start there. Again, the present devolution necessitates that we affirm so simple an idea. In the common contemporary vernacular, He is a cisgender, biological male, one who gender identifies with the sex assigned at birth. He would be totally comfortable with He pronouns.
And in His humanity, His masculinity resonates. It affirms the goodness of masculinity, the rightness of masculinity, the necessity of masculinity.
The masculinity of Jesus resonates with tension, with contrast.
He is BOTH the glorified Christ of Revelation 1, the mere sight of whom drove John to fall to his face as if dead, AND the gentle rabbi to whom children were given. He is BOTH the awe-inducing Christ of Revelation 19, the King of kings and Lord or lords who will judge and make war as He treads the winepress of the wrath of a holy God upon His return, AND the compassionate healer who has mercy upon the masses, who weeps at their lostness.
He is gentle.
He will rule the nations with a rod of iron.
He is kind.
He will strike down His enemies.
He is love. He is mercy.
He demands obedience.
And He calls His sons to account, to be strong, to be courageous. He requires His sons to emulate Him, to love their wives as Christ loves the Church, to make disciples of their children, to demand justice, and pursue purity. He moves them to humility and mercy, to serve and to love, to love selflessly.
He calls them to act like men, to embrace their God-given masculinity and when they fail, which they will, to look to Him, to always look to Christ. This is just what men of God do.
Godless masculinity knows nothing of this.
It knows neither strength nor weakness. Godless masculinity is BOTH the cat-calling chauvinist AND the limp-wristed coward who concedes his role as the spiritual leader of the home and the church.
Godless masculinity is Matt Lauer AND Bradley Manning, a caricature of the humble servant, Jesus. Godless masculinity can never reconcile the overt and sinful bravado of faux masculinity with the effectively-neutered males of this present day. In response, culture necessarily and deliberately confuses biblical displays with gross perversions, labeling them both toxic in rejection of the perceived patriarchy.
Godless masculinity recoils at the real thing.
A godly man looking to Jesus, leading his wife and family in the way of the Lord is anathema, toxic rather, to that which is perishing.
Toxic to Godlessness
Men lead the general rebellion against God.
The most influential person in the life of a child is the father. A child’s future and his faith, or lack thereof, is largely attributable to what the father does or does not do, his presence or absence.
In our nation, fathers long ago walked from the church and failed to raise their sons in the way of the Lord. Predictably, when we became older, we departed from those ways. Each subsequent generation is more unchurched, more godless, drifting further from truth.
Ours is a rebellion of apathy, of passivity. It is a rebellion of abdication. We long ago ceded our God-given role as spiritual leaders of the home and the church. The resultant feminization of both, the home and the church, spelled doom for both institutions.
Masculinity spells death for godlessness.
By God’s design, legions of committed men, disciples themselves, make disciples of the nations, starting in their own homes.
Godly men love their wives as Christ loves the church, consuming them with the fire of their selfless and unconditional love. (Ephesians 5:25) Godly men wash their wives in the water of the Word, coming alongside them in pursuit of the Lord. (Ephesians 5:26) The resultant union testifies loud and clear to the Gospel of the risen Lord Jesus.
Godly men pour into their children, rearing them as disciples from their youngest days. Godly men discipline their sons and teach them to cherish women, to esteem them as the fairer sex. Godly men instill into their daughters a sense of worth independent of their looks or what they could offer a man. Godly men model what their daughters ought to look for in a future husband and how their sons ought to think, act, and speak.
Godly men look to Christ first and always.
Godly men lead their families.
Godly men lead the church.
Godly men stand firm against the flaming darts of the enemy, holding steadfast to the truth of Scripture, demanding righteousness from themselves and other men.
Godly men subordinate themselves to all of these pursuits and there is no greater threat to the world and its associated godlessness than masculinity…which is why Satan has labored so diligently in confusing the world as to what masculinity actually is.
This leads to an unnecessarily comfortable truth. Our nation and the church will only go as far as masculinity will carry them.
Toxic to Evil
The proliferation of evil speaks to a general emasculation.
Godly men do not stand idle as men harass women, as bullies do their thing, as people treat one another with hatred and disrespect. Replace the word “godly” with “good” and almost everyone would agree with this sentiment, even recent progressive movements that reject traditional notions of masculinity.
God forces us to expand the provision to a basis that would merit subsequent rejection by those same secular forces.
Godly men would never have required the overt sexualization forced upon our young women in the first place. We would’ve never convinced legions of women to find value from their looks, pressure them into premarital sex, and abandon them once they become pregnant. The widespread proliferation of single mothers and all of the affiliated affliction testifies to emasculation.
Abortion is a by-product of this emasculation, as is the destruction of gender norms in our society, even men standing flaccid as perverted men wearing dresses frolic with our children, or destroy our daughters in competitive sports.
Only good men, who by definition must be of Christ, can readily stand against the proliferation of such wickedness.
Symptoms no More
Apart from Christ, society may only treat symptoms, the proverbial band-aid on a sucking chest wound.
Meanwhile, women will continue to be abused and debased, babies will be murdered in the womb, more of our sons will walk from the faith, and our nation will continue its descent into the abyss.
My prayer is simple, for the men of this nation to turn to Christ, that God would grant us repentance. I pray that the LORD would raise up a generation of men who would claim all that He has set aside for them, that they would waive aside the clouds of confusion in repentance and boldly stand in allegiance with true righteousness, the righteousness found in Christ. This is the only way.
What are you afraid of?
