Men of the Beach, Talk #1: Laying the Foundation

I am posting my notes from a four-part series we are doing on Biblical Manhood. Please excuse grammar mistakes/poor writing. This was just a skeleton that I spoke from.

I. Introduction

What is a man?

Let’s start with a quote from Elisabeth Eliot: Men are men. They are not women. Women are women. They are not men.

This simple-sounding quote is quite profound. Men are men. What this means is that they have certain innate characteristics that cannot be changed or altered no matter what culture they live in, no matter what environment they were raised in, no matter what education was given them. You are all men, a simple fact of creation. When God made you, he made you as a man and not as a woman. This fact has real meaning.

However, just because we were made in a certain way does not mean that we understand ourselves. John Calvin says that there are two types of knowledge: knowledge of self and knowledge of God. It is important to remember that both types of knowledge are revealed knowledge, given to us in Scripture. Just as there are certain types of things that we can know about God from observing the creation (Romans 1:19-23), there are certain types of things that we can know about ourselves from self-observation. But even these things can be denied or suppressed, perverted or misused.

We also live in unique times. Now is one of the great times of gender confusion, self-misunderstanding, and the widespread suppression of the innate differences between the sexes. In academia, you can be fired for even suggesting that there might be differences between the sexes beyond the physical plumbing. This message has trickled into every area of thinking, from the church outward.

In the church, the 20th century was a great time of retreat from the uniqueness of each gender. The charismatic movement, with its emphasis on personal experience of the Holy Spirit, led the way with many charismatic women ministers leading large ministries and congregations. Add into this mix, widespread acceptability of homosexuality, a powerful unifiying popular culture, and you have a potent brew of confusion.

It is important to note that the things that are happening in our culture are not new. Homosexuality was common and unremarkable in Ancient Greece. The denial of gender differences has happened many times before. But the rise of science has diminished the effect of the natural greater strength of men. Few men in the west labor in a field in which women are physically incapable of performing. The effect of this has been to call into question whether the differences between men and women does go beyond the merely physical. The feminist movement of the 20th century argued that the physical superiority of men had for centuries kept women in a subordinate position so that men could exploit them. There is a great deal of truth to this.

At any rate, in order to understand man, we must return to the revealed truth of Scripture to guide us. It is God who made man, and therefore he alone is to be trusted to instruct us on what a man is.

You have to understand a few things:

1. Your view of man has been perverted by the culture. This has strongly affected, and will continue to affect the way you view yourself, the way you interact with other men, and the way you interact with women. KNOW THIS!!!!

2. The church has been remiss in addressing this deeply. In this, they have been complicit in the acculturation of our understanding of men. The result is the absence of strong male leaders in the church.

3. You need to filter not only your thinking, but also your emotions through the Scriptures, testing them and discarding what does not align.

4. The thing that lies in back of all this is our sin, our deliberate rebellion against God.


What is the purpose of Men of the Beach?

1. To give a compelling vision of Biblical Manhood.

2. To encourage the repentance and faith that allows us to restore ourselves to this vision.

3. To give you the tools you need to grow in manhood throughout the rest of your life.

Men of the Beach is a beginning. The restoration of your manhood will continue for the rest of your life and remain incomplete until the day when your flesh is remade, unstained by sin. Remember this: When you are remade, when you are raised from the dead and appear before God, it will be as a man, not as a woman!

Appropriate attitude for entering into these things:

1. Self-doubt

You are much more wicked and rebellious than you can yet imagine. Your heart, your emotions, your patterns of thinking, all are stained by sin and will lead you astray if you trust them.

2. Humility

We must come into the word to be instructed, to be taught. Our cry to the Word of God must be “Change me! Transform me! Teach me!”

3. Hunger for God

At the bottom of all this is the desire to know God. And to come before him, we must come as we were created. We must come as men.


The Biblical foundation:

Genesis 2, Obs.

1. Man is made first, from the dust of the ground.

2. God breathes into man.

3. Man is given a task to do. This is what man was made for. He is not made to simply relax in the garden, but for a specific task. God gives him work to do.

4. God commits a command to man. This shows that man was made to live in submission and obedience to God. He works before God as his image in the world. As his image in the world, he rules over all creation.

5. Woman is made from man because man alone is an incomplete image of God. Alone, he does not reflect the fullness of God. Women completes man because their relationship is a mirror of the Trinitarian relationship.

6. Man looks at woman and names her. He identifies in her a complement.
--J.I. Packer: “Two sexes perceiving the other as having in it that which completes what each individual, male or female, is at present.
-Sexuality—men and women are different and complementary and thus desire each other.

7. When they are placed in relationship, a certain pattern of interaction comes inevitably from this. Woman is the helper, men takes her on as his responsibility to protect and care for her—this is what happens when he says “she is flesh of my flesh.” Paul refers to this in Eph. “love your wives as yourselves.”

Let’s sketch out the full picture:

A man is a creature designed for work in the context of submission/obedience to God. When he works in submission to God, he is fully satisfied.

He is presented with a perfect complement in which his role in the interaction is to lead and protect.

Here we bring out the full picture of what it means to be a man:

Obedience/Submission to God
Responsibility in work and towards woman
Initiation

This is what a man is designed for. To be the initiator towards woman. To be responsible for work and woman. To submit to God and obey him in all things. This is a man.


How have we fallen away from this?

Genesis 3, Obs.

1. Adam is present but silent. His inaction is his sin. Rather than initiate, rather than take responsibility for the garden and his wife, he chooses passivity. In this, he rejects what he is made for. He suppresses his design.

2. This culminates in his disobedience. When he eats the fruit, he rejects the commands of God, but the process is begun when he rejects the responsibilities he has been given.

3. His passivity is rebellion. He rebels against what God has created him for.

4. The promised result of this is death. God had said if they ate from the tree they would die.

The curse, obs

1. The decay and eventual destruction of our bodies. “to the dust you will return.”

2. The task given to Adam had been to tend for the garden and care for it. This task is cursed. Only with painful toil will he bring fruit from the earth, and he will not be able to sustain himself in it. It will not bring life or satisfaction.

3. Death and the lack of satisfaction in the work we were made for. This is a curse on our design itself.

4. Note the pattern here: We are created with a certain design. We sin against that design. Our design is itself cursed.

Conclusions:

1. Man sins by rejecting his design, through refusing to take responsibility towards the woman and towards the garden.

2. His design does not therefore change, but it is cursed. This cursing makes him unable to find life and satisfaction in doing what he was designed to do.


Applying this to ourselves:

1. Know that Adam’s story is your own story. You were designed for these things. You have chosen to suppress this in passivity and sin. You have rebelled against God, choosing your own way rather than the way he made.

2. No matter what we say or do, we cannot change our design. There is a reason that men and women are drawn to each other. There is a reason why work and destiny speak to the soul of men. There is a reason men long for the experience of grand things. The draw on your soul for adventure, for experience, for completion, for self-testing, for endurance, etc. These are part of your design, and in themselves, good things. It is proper for a man to desire a woman. It is proper for a man to hunger for the achievement of work, success, victory. These things are in a man, and will emerge, despite all the work of suppression we do.

3. But we desire our own way. In our sin, men hate God. Listen to that and know the truth of it from Scripture. Psalm 10:

He boasts about the cravings of his heart,
He blesses the greedy and reviles God.

Therefore, we tend towards two extremes, each one a rebellion against God:

A) We deny and suppress our design.
B) We embrace a parody version of our design outside of the authority of God

Note: Most men do both, at different times, but incline towards one or the other.

Examples:

Parody manhood is easier to see and understand, because it is more common across history. This man attempts to find life in his work. The most classic example of this is Alexander the Great, the man driven by his overweening ambition to conquer the whole known world, only to weep when he discovered that it would not bring him satisfaction and life.

This is a common vision in pop culture. This is James Bond, who is powerful over women, who completes his job with effortless competence. This man finds satisfaction in his work, gets what we wants from women. But it is a fantasy because this parody version of man cannot bring life.

Men seek this life from their work, seek to find in women the satisfaction of their desires. But it does not work because only God could bring life.

Parody man is haunted by a simple question: Am I enough?

No matter his competence or achievement in work, no matter his success with women, he had not found the completion he desires, and he does not know why.

The suppression of these things does not work either. This is man who refuses to take on a task (this does not mean he does not work, ex. Jim Halpert), who denies the ambition, the work-orientedness of man. He denies the complementary relationship between men and women, failing to understand himself as a man and therefore refusing his desire for women.

(This of course leads to homosexuality. It is important to note here that this is not always a conscious decision. Often, a man fails to understand himself as a man, and denies them because he does not see them as a part of himself. We will talk about homosexuality more next week.)


Surveying the Wreckage:

Man is defined by several things:

1. Responsibility in task
2. Initiation in relationship to women
3. Submission/Obedience to God

All three have been fatally weakened by sin. They are either suppressed, or we seek a parody version outside of the authority of God.

At this point, we are in need of honesty and humility to move forward. We are in need of deep repentance. We are in need of each other.