A friend of mine today raised a question mark over how biblically focussed this book is. On the surface it seems aimed at Christians - but is it actually just a thinly veiled moral self-help read...? There's lots of twaddle out there on High Street shelves about what kind of people we should be and how we should interact with each other - but there's also a lot of good stuff too... Some of it we like, some we dont. Stuff we like finds a place in our heart because we like it and can justify it as not too harmful or contrary to our Christian beliefs, for example guilty pleasures like Harry Potter, Sex And The City or Clive Cussler books - even our love of football on TV or F1 racing in my case...!
What I find so often happens is that we end up with a compartmentalised head - things we just enjoy and benefit from in one compartment - God and what we feel he is interested in - in another seperate compartment. Oddly that means that sometimes if things are offered as Biblical when they aren't really we will write them off but if something says something similar from a completely secular point of view we might have time to at least listen...
For me everything is spiritual. I don't always live that out, but that's my conviction. There's no word for 'spiritual' in Hebrew (apparently) as everything was understood in the light of God's law... I aim at least for everything in my life to reflect my passion for him and his ways, which I believe are best - but rather than restrict me to Rob Bell and The Chronicles of Narnia - this allows me to enjoy the wealth of the world in a way that is fundamentally reconciled with my faith...
The way I see it, God's big picture is to redeem the whole earth - everything, not just our souls. The Greek word for salvation is "sozo" which means not just from hell, but salvation physically, spiritually, AND emotionally. I see him working towards a world without disease, suffering, emotional captivity - indeed any symptom of the fall...
Take as a random example, art; we celebrate art as a good thing though it could by some be argued as superfluous to the Christian faith. I think we would all agree art is clearly biblical, God instituted and so on - crafts and all kinds of 'doing things well' crop up in the bible as pleasing to God. So the tension for us all is to how to balance the tension between doing the typical things we believe Christianity is about - discipleship, worship, prayer, evangelism... and all the other stuff that can also be a way of learning/engaging with God and being part of the world becoming a literally perfect and amazing place.
The point of all of this is - does knowing who we are as men and our masculinity also fall into this bracket - or does it fall the other side of the line into stuff that doesn't warrant our time in the wake of our number one priority of chasing God himself...?
We are "co-workers" with Christ - we are not physically in the image of God (he's invisible and omnipresent) so I think it's to do with our creativity - he doesn't want robots - I think actually God makes himself vulnerable to our desires - the Temple was not God's idea - it was David's - but God went along with it as a good idea. We get to have relationship with God meaning we can explore the possibilities of who we are and what we can do as 'surprising' and pleasing thing to him...?!
Reasons to explore masculinity?
a) helps us to know our father better - although it's true introspection doesn't tend to get us very far - but God himself shows us things about ourselves in order that we can know him and serve him better...
b) men being men and women being women the way he intended celebrates his majesty - anything that is contrary to the way he planned things I guess is commonly known as 'sin' and falling short of his glory - that would be one reason I might pursue the meaning of masculininty
c) another reason i might is because if everyone gets to know their identity as created by and in Christ, then the world and the church works better and more christlike as a whole - everyone's a winner :-)
I do wonder if this is a big distraction - if we just dedicate oursleves to chasing Christlikeness perhaps we will all end up with a good masculinity and a good femininity... but that seems a little naive to me - I explore Jesus' humility almost on a weekly basis it seems! as that is one of the things the church likes to celebrate - but masculine aspects of Jesus character are not explored as much which has the effect that we know less well how to do it - we have less of a grip on that side of his example... A perfect world is not 6 billion Jesus'es - its 6 billion people who are very different but are all pure, Jesus-like and madly passionate about the presence of God and serving each other...
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