Be Strong
As we saw on Sunday, for all they got wrong, the Philistines got a few things right—specifically, relating to the nature of manhood.
“Take courage, and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the Hebrews as they have been to you; be men and fight.” (1 Samuel 4:9)
The Philistines understood that being a man isn’t just a matter of biology; it’s also a matter of behaviour. There are certain ways of acting that are appropriate for men. In this passage, that specifically includes courage and the ability to fight.
As Christians, we’re very prone to spiritualize these characteristics. 1 Corinthians 16:13 says, “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.” I wonder how many of us assume that, because that’s in the New Testament, it means we should be spiritually strong.
No doubt it does. But is that all it means? I’m not so sure.
Most men discover at some point that it’s impossible for them to be spiritually strong without some attention to their bodies. Even Charles Spurgeon, not exactly the picture of physical health, recognized that he couldn’t be happy in the Lord without getting out and walking in a stiff breeze every once in a while. “A day’s breathing of fresh air upon the hills, or a few hours ramble in the beech woods’ umbrageous calm, would sweep the cobwebs out of the brain of scores of our toiling ministers who are now but half alive,” he once wrote.
God gave us bodies which work best when they are used, and much of the time that means using them to do hard things. “Bodily training is of some value,” Paul said 1 Timothy 4:8, a statement that establishes rather than downplays the value of physical training. Commenting on this passage, Douglas Moo writes,
We should not underestimate the physical toughness of someone like Paul, who walked thousands of miles/kilometers on his journeys and endured extreme physical deprivation over decades (2 Cor 11:23–27). Timothy would have trekked his share of miles/kilometers alongside Paul. The point is not to denigrate fitness but to contrast its (temporal) utility with the eternal worth of “godliness.”1Douglas J. Moo, “The Letters and Revelation,” in NIV Biblical Theology Study Bible, ed. D. A. Carson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2018), 2173.)
Let’s go even a step further. Men, as men, have a God-given responsibility to provide and protect. When bad people want to hurt vulnerable people, godly men step in between. A generation of us have been raised on John Piper’s illustration of a young guy on a first date with a girl who, he just found out, has a black belt in a martial art. But then…
…two men accost them with ominous expressions and say, “Pretty girl you’ve got there, fellow. We’d like her purse and your wallet.” And then they say, “In fact, she’s really pretty. We’d like her.”
Now, the thought goes through his head, “She’s got a black belt in martial arts,” but instead of stepping behind her, he takes her elbow with a firm grip and just eases her back and says, “You touch her, it will be over my dead body.” And he tackles them both. And while he tackles them, he says, “Run.” They knock him out cold, and the next thing they know, they’re both on their back with their teeth bashed in.
…and as she’s riding to the hospital with this man, she looks down at him and says to herself, “This is the kind of man I want to marry.”2https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/god-created-man-male-and-female/excerpts/what-makes-a-real-man
I’ve shared versions of this story throughout the years, and I love watching how the guys sit up a little straighter and the girls get that far-away look in their eyes. We all know, deep down inside, that this is what real men do. This is good.
But 1 Samuel 4:9 has got me thinking: what’s the value of getting in between your girl and the bad guys if you can’t actually do anything to protect her? Most of the women in our lives don’t have black belts. For a lot of men, this story would end very differently: “They knock him out cold, and then they grabbed the girl and did what they wanted with her.”
Did the man in that version of the story act like a man? He had the courage to try to protect her. But what good is intention without ability? If God has given him the responsibility to protect, but he can’t actually fulfill that responsibility when the situation calls for it, is he actually being a man?
Increasingly, I’m beginning to suspect that physical strength has at least something to do with God’s call for Christian men to “be strong.” Those who know me well understand how ironic this might sound. I’ve been hopelessly ectomorphic my entire life; my body really doesn’t like building muscle. I’m not a particularly strong man, if strength is defined physically. But, at 40 years of age, I’m feeling less and less okay with that. And I have a fresh bag of protein powder on my kitchen counter to prove it.
If it sounds strange to hear a pastor talking about the the importance of physical strength on his church’s website, maybe that’s because I’m getting sidetracked on some weird tangent. Or, maybe that’s because us western Christians have a long history of separating physical realities from spiritual realities in ways that the Bible doesn’t.
There’s a whole post’s worth of caveats and qualifications I could add here. If you’re thinking “but what about…?”, there’s a good chance I’d agree with you. Yes, there’s different kinds of strength and different ways of being strong. Yes, feminine strength has physical manifestations, too: lots of women throughout history and around the world today have had to work really, really hard with their bodies. No, I’m not advocating for some macho, chest-thumping version of Christianity. And no, I certainly haven’t been “red-pilled” by the “manosphere.”
But I do want to call men to be men in every way that God intended them to be. Paul meant something when he said “act like men, be strong.” And I’m wondering if just maybe the Philistines were on to something after all.
