Joshua 1.9.
One of my biggest peeves about the way Christianity is practiced in the United States has to do with the way certain
A lot of these men have taken their cues from the 1990s’ mythopoetic men’s movement, which
So men nowadays, claim Eldredge and the sexists, are too effeminate. Cowardly, wimpy girly-men. Our culture requires men to suppress our manly urges and behave ourselves. But, they insist, our urges are natural and good: Men were meant to be wild, free, and fighting. Not just fighting randomly in bars and sporting events, but fighting for noble causes—for truth and justice, to tame nature, in the defense of loved ones,
Really, any excuse will do. So long as we get to do some fighting.
For fighting, they insist, is the deep down—but suppressed!—desire of a man’s heart. Men fought throughout human history. Men needed to fight, ’cause noble causes. They claim God gave us this desire to fight, smite, scratch, and bite. And God wants to give us the desires of our hearts, right?
This verse is their mantra:
Joshua 1.9 KWL - “Don’t I command you? Be tough! Be strong! Not afraid, not shattered.
- For your L
ORD God is with you everywhere you go.”
In the
I write all the time about how people bring our prejudices with us into Christianity,
So if men are competitive; if they enjoy rough, violent sports and video games; if they love the idea of standing their ground and shooting bad guys in the head, Jesus must approve, right? These violent urges must’ve been put into us by God, right?
Not in the slightest. They come from our selfish, violent,
Jesus taught us to go the extra mile and turn the other cheek.
They approve of hazardous types of fun, and object when saner heads (usually their wives) suggest caution: They don’t need to be cautious. They’re adventurers. They’re pioneers. They’re warriors. Anyone who tries to stop them from living their destiny as adventurers is feminizing them, emasculating them.
Oh, they’re really paranoid about being “feminized” and “emasculated.” ’Cause they’re not all that secure about their masculinity. They have a rather tight definition of it, and care too much what their culture, and fellow sexists, think about it. Not at all what Jesus really thinks, or they’d seek it out and follow him instead of their peer group.
The context of the man Joshua.
The L
Moses had died, and it was time for Joshua to lead the Hebrews into Palestine to forcibly take it from the Amorites who lived there. No, this wasn’t a matter of stealing land from the Amorites, as white settlers had from the Indians in the Americas. This was judgment on the Amorites. God had told Abraham the Amorites’ end was coming,
The book of Joshua is a very hard book for a lot of people. They can’t fathom a good God authorizing death and destruction. He loves people too much to ever do such a thing, right? People can’t be all that bad. Certainly they’d never deserve getting wiped out like that. So they make up various excuses for why God can’t really have authorized Joshua and the Hebrews to level towns and enslave nations; that this was just the Jews inventing religious excuses for their violent ancestors.
But the reason God sometimes judges nations before the End, is because their evil is gonna destroy others. It’s because he loves people so much that he chooses to intervene. Sometimes in deadly ways, but as any cop or soldier will tell you, sometimes it comes to that. Wish it didn’t.
Now. If you’re a peaceful person, the very idea of invading a land and killing people is impossible. Even if you’re not that peaceful, it’s an unenviable, savage, very rough job. Of course there are plenty of gung-ho guys who join the military because they like the idea of killing our nation’s enemies… but once they actually go do it, they can no longer sleep at night. Only madmen, or those who’ve been raised or trained to have no such conscience, consider it an easy task.
Violent men have really romanticized Joshua, and imagine the Hebrews merrily slaughtering Amorites, rejoicing as they went. Some of ’em wouldn’t mind smiting sinners in the present day, in much the same way: Butchering people of other religions, other creeds, other ethnicities, other political views, other preferences.
Well, Joshua realized he had some dirty work ahead of him, and the L
So how do we take this verse out of context? Simple: We ignore how and why God was saying it to Joshua. We don’t realize it was to steel Joshua for a specific, unenviable situation. We act as if God’s saying it to us, as if he needs us to fight new foes—foes we wanna fight. For we’ve chosen them. Not God.
So we tell ourselves we gotta be strong and courageous. At all times. In every circumstance. Regardless of whether it makes any sense to be strong and courageous—whether it might instead be time to be humble, reverent, and compassionate.
The wild desires of our hearts.
Where does evil come from? Jesus said from within.
Mark 7.14-23 KWL - 14 Re-summoning the crowd, Jesus informed them, “Everybody listen to me and get this:
- 15 Things from outside you, which go in, can never make you ‘pagan.’
- Things which come from you, and come out of you—that’s what make you ‘pagan.’ ”
- 17 Going into the house, away from the crowd, Jesus’s students were asking him for the key to this “analogy.”
- 18 Jesus told them, “How dense are you?
- Don’t you realize how anything which enters a person from the outside, can’t contaminate the person?—
- 19 how it doesn’t enter one’s heart, but one’s digestive system,
- and winds up in the toilet, flushing all the food out?”
- 20 Jesus said this: “What makes the person vulgar, comes out of a person.
- 21 For within, out of the human heart, comes these works:
- Twisted reasoning. Promiscuity. Fraud. Murder.
- 22 Adultery. Self-entitlement. Evil habits. Booby traps.
- Lack of ethics. Stinginess. Slander. Conceit. Thoughtlessness.
- 23 All these evil things are within, come out, and make a person vulgar.”
Competitiveness, violence, standing one’s ground, throwing caution to the wind, and other things our culture imagines are “manly,” are found deep within a man’s heart. But they’re not there because God installed them. It’s because we’re fallen, sinful creatures.
These traits are instinctive animal behaviors. They’re meant to be tempered
When sober-minded women and men tell young men to control themselves, or to be more cautious, they’re not emasculating them. They’re civilizing them. They’re reminding people we’re humans, not brutes. God put a rational mind in our heads, and it’s high time we used it. God put his Spirit in our hearts, and we oughta listen to him, and not just run on instinct.
I’m not saying we should ignore our instincts. I’m only saying we shouldn’t be led by them: We gotta be led by God. Follow the Spirit, not the flesh. Those who claim our instincts are God-given, neither understand how sin corrupted us, nor care. They just wanna do as they wanna do, and claim their self-centered hearts must be sign of God’s endorsement of their self-centered behavior.
Thanks to sin, the human heart is deceitful and wicked.
