On Masculinity
Cultivator
God decided to bless His beautiful, lush, sunlit and animal-filled world with a gift: On the sixth day, he made a man. This man had God’s very breath in his lungs and God’s very call on his life: He was to, in obedience to and worship of his Maker, work and subdue the earth God had authored. In a world already good, God artfully and with great intent crafted a man in His own image to be prince of His beautiful world. Each human man, knit together in the womb of his mother, has been stitched with that strain of constructing, cultivating vocation in his very nature. He is a man. He is a son of Adam, the son of God, made from the dust with a purpose too noble for trees and bears and dinosaurs and supernovae. When he looks out at a world wild with life and breathing under God’s good sky, he can know he is standing on that soil as one of the most profoundly powerful and consequential pieces of creation: A man. There is no animal that can be what he is for the world, no plant or natural phenomenon or disembodied idea, not even any woman can be what he himself has been conceived by God to be. The Creator authored a sub-creator. The Maker made a builder. By God’s design, where there was a new world there would be a garden, tilled and watered and tended and populated with animals named by a man. This was not an accident of history, and Genesis chapters 1-3 is no sweet allegory by ignorant nomads. The Lord and King Jesus Christ taught the Pharisees of His day what marriage is from the first chapters of Genesis. Jesus Christ did not treat Genesis as mere poetry or metaphor. Men can know who they are and why they were made and who made them and what kind of heart that Maker has from those same chapters.
When a man leaves his home of birth and takes a wife, he is tending the beginnings of a world God ordains men to tend. A family, a man leading and loving his bride and building a home for her and their children to grow and worship under, is a new world within the world. New souls are birthed in it, new names are given in it, work is begun and continued in it, and a marriage is at the center of it, all just like at the beginning of our big world. And just like when that one was sparked, God has called the man, the husband and father, to have the hands and the mind and the will and the faith and the fellowship with God that are necessary to good building. A man’s wife will flower as he builds a good home for her. A man’s children will grow up in Godliness as he constructs a home they can learn true things in. The activity and productivity and good, righteous works of the home will be ripe, beautiful fruit as he waters the home with prayer, daily trust in Jesus the Christ, and his own consistent, loving sweat from his brow. Good men build good homes, and they do so only because they have a good Father who made them that way and gives them the grace without which they would be unable to do anything. That is how Abba Father has made the world. And He makes wisely and wonderfully.
Without men, the world would be a wild and desolate and nameless place. Without Adam, God’s world would have been untended and His creatures unnamed. And while sin has scarred the strength and intelligence God gives men to be His builders, they are still the creators and cultivators of the world that holds life.
Leader
Adam was the head of his wife. Jesus Christ is the head of His Bride. God has kneaded into the very meal of this world the headship of husbands and fathers, all of that reality finding its fountainhead in God’s Fatherhood and headship. Authority is good. Headship is good. Leadership is good. Our sin-stained world can bludgeon countless souls with them just as it can with any good thing, but that does not change the reality of their goodness, the taste with which they were originally imparted to creation by Abba Father. Adam leading the woman taken from his side and naming her and cherishing her as his helper was not an accommodation God made to a bad situation. It was a perfect gift to a perfect planet. And sin can no more undo the inherent goodness of Godly authority than it can to the inherent goodness of parenting children or tasting good food.
The world is blessed by men who lead their wives in a Godly way. Streets are better when fathers who live on them are leading their children in a Godly way. Neighborhoods, cities, societies, and nations will inevitably be made more productive, safe, and righteous when most husbands and fathers among them are leading their wives towards God and His Christ, are leading their families in worship at home and to the gathered church, and are leading in the wider world through taking responsibility where they work and where they pay taxes and where they shop and where they vote. Men who lead with the ultimate, eternal good of those for whom they are responsible in mind and heart bring forth the best of fruit in this world.
The male hands that God made, the eyes, the nose and chest and feet that He moved into being, those are a leader’s parts. He gives men the muscles and the minds and natures of a man, and He then places them in a day and place when and where they are called to go and subdue, even as the first man He ever fashioned was. Every man is an under-shepherd. Where Jesus Christ reigns and rules and governs this whole cosmos, from Greenland to Chile to the asteroid belt to the outer arms of the Milky Way, He has ordained the authority of husbands and fathers to steward and justly govern the souls of their wives and children. Because God the Son is a perfect shepherd, God has made lesser shepherds of his adopted sons. They have both the calling and the equipment, by His good hand and choice. God made Adam, gave Eve to him, and dealt directly with him when Eve sinned. Adam was responsible for his wife, and Adam was called to lead and shepherd her and her children. These are God’s chosen stones in the temple He is building called the world. These realities are hand-carved by the Good Maker.
Father and Son
God the Father made the world through His Son, Jesus Christ. And on the sixth day of that glittering new world, He fashioned a new son from the soil, thoroughly different in that he was no god, but deeply alike in that he was a son. This son Adam was created, unlike God the Son, and he would be a creaturely father, unlike God the Father. He was a worshiper, not to be worshiped. Those distinctions in place and unbreakable and as wide as the sky, nonetheless the reality of fatherhood and sonhood, of all the wondrous energies and creative love of the masculine nature, are pictured in Adam, and in all men since him. Men carry that picture within their own fleshly frames, and God’s world is called to be subdued by its best and most gracious bearers.