closer than a brother

chapter one

the thing we have lost

Here is the plain and sobering fact, and I will not dress it up, because a man would rather have the truth straight. Men today are lonelier than men have perhaps ever been. Ask them and most will tell you they have no close friends at all, not one man they could call at two in the morning, not one man who truly knows them. They have coworkers and acquaintances and the other fathers at the ballfield, and under all of it a deep and aching isolation they would never confess to another soul.

It was not always so, and it does not have to be so, and part of the reason it has become so is worth naming right at the start. The culture has poisoned the well. It has taken the natural closeness of men and taught us to be suspicious of it, so that a man now keeps every other man at arm’s length by instinct, afraid that if he gets too close, if he shows too much, if he says out loud that he loves his friend, it will be read as something it is not. So he holds back. He keeps it shallow. He jokes and talks about the game and never once lets another man all the way in, and he calls this being a man, when in truth it is being a wounded and lonely one.

A man keeps every other man at arm’s length, and calls it being a man, when in truth it is being a wounded and lonely one.

And it is killing us, quietly. A man was not built to carry his life alone. We will come to it, but the God who made the man said, before sin ever entered the world, that it was not good for him to be alone, and He did not mean only that a man needs a wife. A man needs brothers. He needs other men who know him and stand with him and will tell him the truth. And the great tragedy of our age is that men are dying of thirst a few feet from a well they have been taught not to drink from. This booklet is here to send you back to that well, to show you from the Book that the deep friendship of men is good and godly and yours to have, and to press you to go get it honestly, and to stop pretending you are fine alone, because you were never made to be.

chapter two

knit to his soul

Go now to the great picture of it in all the Scripture, the friendship of David and Jonathan. A king’s son and a shepherd boy, and the moment they meet, something is forged between them that the Bible describes in language it does not use lightly.

Knit together. The soul of the one bound to the soul of the other. The word for soul is nephesh, the whole inner life, the very self of a man, and the two of them are described as bound, tied, woven together at that depth. And then it says Jonathan loved him, and the word is ’ahav, which is the ordinary strong word for love in the Hebrew Bible, the very same word used when a man is commanded to love the LORD his God with all his heart, and the same word used of a man loving his wife. It is not a lesser word. It is the full word for love, and the Spirit of God chose it, without embarrassment, for the love of one man for another.¹

And that love did a concrete thing, at once, because real love among men always shows itself in deeds and not only in words. Watch what Jonathan does.

Understand what you are seeing. Jonathan is the crown prince, the heir to the throne of Israel, and he takes off his own royal robe and his armor and his sword and hands them to David, a shepherd with no rank at all. In that world this was an act of staggering weight; he was, in effect, laying down his own claim and binding himself to David as to his own life. And they cut a covenant, a berith, the same solemn, binding word used of the covenants God Himself makes; a sworn bond, unto death, between two men. This was not a casual friendship. It was a vow.²

The heir to the throne took off his own robe and sword and handed them to a shepherd. This was not a casual friendship. It was a vow.

So mark what the Bible is holding up here, plainly and with no discomfort at all: two men, bound soul to soul, loving one another with the full word for love, sworn to each other in covenant unto death. That is the pattern. That is the thing our age has lost the very category for. And it is not a strange or shameful thing; it is a glorious one, and the Word of God puts it on display for every man to see and to want.

chapter three

passing the love of women

Now we come to the verse that the modern man cannot read without flinching, and we are going to read it without flinching, because the flinching is exactly the thing we have to cure. Jonathan is killed in battle, and David, hearing of it, breaks into one of the great laments of the Bible, and at its height he says this.

Passing the love of women. And there it is, the phrase that our sick age immediately reaches to sexualize, because it has lost every other category into which such words might fall. So let us be men about it and think clearly. This is David speaking, and if there was ever a man in the Bible whose love of women was not in question, it was David; his appetite for women was so strong it became the great sin and sorrow of his life. This is not a man confessing a hidden thing. This is a man standing over the body of his brother, torn open with grief, saying that the loyal, covenant love of this man had been to him a deeper and steadier and more faithful thing than the romantic love he had known with women.

It is not that his brother’s love was more than a wife’s. It is that it was a different thing, and a rarer one, and it was gone.

For these are two different kinds of love, and David is not ranking them on one scale so much as naming that they are not the same thing at all. The love of a man and a woman is its own glory and I will say nothing against it. But the covenant loyalty of a brother-in-arms, a man who stood with you in the field and covered your back and kept faith with you when it cost him, is another kind of love entirely, and there is a steadiness and a faithfulness in it that David, of all people, had found more wonderful than anything else he had known. It was not more than a wife’s love. It was different from it, and rarer, and now it was lying dead on Mount Gilboa, and David was howling.

So hear this and let it correct you: the fact that you cannot read that verse without your mind darting to a sexual explanation is not a mark of your sophistication. It is a mark of how badly the category has collapsed in you, how thoroughly the age has trained you to believe that deep love between men must be one thing or it is nothing. The Bible knows better. David knew better. There is a love between men that is fierce and deep and loyal and wholly good, and it has nothing to do with the bedroom, and a man who cannot see it anymore has been robbed, and does not even know what was taken.

chapter four

they were soldiers

I will nail this down hard against anyone who would wave it off as soft sentiment, some poetic exception, two unusually tender men. Because David and Jonathan were nothing of the kind. They were killers. They were the hardest fighting men of a hard and violent age, and the bond between them was forged in blood and danger, the way the deepest bonds between men have always been forged.

Consider who these men actually were. David killed a giant as a boy, and then killed his tens of thousands, until the women sang of it in the streets. He was a warrior, an outlaw, a commander of desperate men, a man whose hands were so bloodied with war that God would not let him build the temple. And Jonathan was every bit his equal in courage; there is a scene where Jonathan, with a single armor-bearer beside him, climbs up on his hands and knees to attack an entire garrison of the enemy, and routs them, because he believed the LORD could save by many or by few. These were not delicate men. These were lions.³

They were not delicate men. They were lions. And lions, it turns out, are exactly the men who forge the deepest bonds.

And that is the whole point, and it is the thing the modern man most needs to hear, so I will say it plainly. The deep love of these two men was not the opposite of their hardness; it grew straight up out of it. Men who face death together are bound in a way that soft and comfortable men can scarcely understand. Ask any soldier who has been in the real thing, and he will tell you that he came to love the men beside him with a love he cannot explain to civilians, a love he would give his life for and nearly did, and that has nothing whatever to do with anything sexual and everything to do with shared danger and covered backs and trusting your very life to the man next to you. That is the band of brothers, and it is one of the most masculine things there is. David and Jonathan were that. The love between them was a warrior’s love, and there is no manlier thing in all the Book.

chapter five

how men used to be

Widen your eyes a little now, because you have been handed a picture of the past that is simply false, and it is keeping you from seeing what men are and always were. You have been taught, without anyone ever saying it outright, that men were always as guarded and closed and untouching as they are now, and that the reserve you feel is just how men are. It is not. For nearly the whole of human history, right up until very recently, men were far more openly affectionate with one another than a modern man would believe.

Go and look, for it is all still there in the record. Men of old wept in each other’s presence and were not ashamed of it. They embraced, and kissed one another in greeting as a matter of course, as men in much of the world still do. And they wrote each other letters we would scarcely believe today. Abraham Lincoln, no soft man, shared a bed for years with his close friend Joshua Speed as a young man in Springfield, and wrote him letters of deep and open affection, and no one in that hard frontier world thought a thing of it. The English soldier-poets of the Great War wrote of loving the men they fought beside with a plainness that would embarrass a modern man; Wilfred Owen and the men in the trenches spoke of their fellows the way men once freely did. Montaigne wrote of his friend Étienne de La Boétie that their souls had mingled and blended so completely he could not find the seam where he ended and his friend began, and when La Boétie died Montaigne wrote that he only went on as half a man. When they traveled they shared beds without a second thought, because a bed was a place to sleep and there was nothing in it, and only a mind as sexualized as the modern one would assume otherwise. Soldiers who fell together were buried together. None of this was thought odd, or soft, or suspect. It was simply how men were, and many of them were hard men, fighting men, men who plainly and famously loved women, and none of it was ever in question.⁴

They shared beds, embraced, wrote each other letters of open love, and were buried side by side. It was simply how men were.

And I want you to sit with how recent the change is, because it matters. The guardedness you feel, the reflex to keep every man at a distance, the inability to say to another man that you love him, this is not ancient and it is not natural and it is not manly. It is a modern injury, a wound only a few generations deep, and it has been sold to you as though it were strength. It is not strength. Something was taken from men, quietly, within living memory, and most men do not even know they were robbed, because they never knew the thing they lost. You are meant to know it. You are meant to have it. And the first step to getting it back is simply seeing that the emptiness you were told is normal is in fact a very new and a very unnatural thing.

chapter six

who poisoned the well

So what happened? How did men go from that open, easy, deep affection to the locked-down isolation of today? I am not going to pretend I can trace every cause, and I am not going to spend this booklet blaming, because the point is not to find a villain but to see clearly what was done, so that you can undo it in your own life. But the shape of it is plain enough.

Somewhere in the last century, the culture began to sexualize everything, and once everything is seen through that one lens, the natural closeness of men becomes suspect. You can actually watch it happen in the record. Go back and look at the ordinary photographs of men from a hundred and fifty years ago, the tintypes and cabinet cards, and you will find men, ordinary men, soldiers and farmers and friends, sitting with an arm around each other, holding hands, leaning close, perfectly at ease, in a way almost no two men would pose today. Nobody thought a thing of it then. It was simply friendship, plainly shown. And then, over a few generations, it became unthinkable. A hand on a shoulder, an embrace, a man saying he loves his friend, two men close and devoted, all of it got quietly reclassified, and men, sensing the new suspicion in the air, began to pull back from one another to protect themselves from the accusation. And once men started pulling back, it fed on itself, one guarded generation raising the next to be guarded, until we arrived where we are now, at a place where a man will let another man see almost nothing of his heart, and calls the hiding manhood.⁵

Men pulled back to protect themselves from a suspicion that never should have existed, and taught the next generation to pull back too.

And I will tell you the bitter fruit of it without softening it, because you are living in the middle of the harvest. We have a generation of men with no true friends. Men who have never once told another man that they love him. Men who carry every burden alone because there is no one to share it with, who face their fears and their failures and their sorrows in total isolation, who are, many of them, quietly drowning, and who would sooner die than admit it to another man. The well was poisoned, and men walked away from it thirsty, and a great many of them are perishing of a loneliness that never had to be. That is what was done. And it can be undone, because it can, and the Book has been showing us how the whole time.

chapter seven

other brothers in the book

For David and Jonathan are the brightest example, but they are not the only one; the love and the closeness of men runs all through the Scripture once you have eyes to see it, and I want you to see that this is not one strange story but a pattern woven through the whole Book.

Look at Paul and Timothy. The old apostle calls the young man his own son in the faith, his dearly beloved son, and writes to him with a tenderness that aches off the page, longing to see him, remembering his tears, wanting him near at the end. Look at Paul and the elders of Ephesus, at the moment he tells them they will not see his face again.⁶

Grown men, hardened by persecution, weeping openly and falling on the apostle’s neck and kissing him goodbye, and Luke records it without a flicker of embarrassment, because there was nothing in it to be embarrassed about. Look at Elijah and Elisha, the younger man refusing to leave the elder, following him to the very end, crying out my father, my father when he was taken. Look at the Lord Jesus Himself, who drew twelve men close and shared His life with them for three years, and who had among them one disciple spoken of again and again as the one whom Jesus loved, who leaned back on His breast at the last supper, near to Him, at rest against Him.⁷

The love and closeness of men runs all through the Book. David and Jonathan are only the brightest example, not the only one.

Do you see it now? It is everywhere. Men loving men, weeping with them, embracing them, drawing them close, speaking their love out loud, binding their lives together, and the Holy Spirit records all of it as good, and holds it up for us to see. This is not a footnote in the Scripture; it is a thread running clean through it, from Jonathan’s covenant to John leaning on the Lord’s breast. Male friendship, deep and open and unashamed, is a biblical thing, a godly thing, and a thing God plainly means for His men to have. The pattern is right there in the Book. The only question left is whether you will go and live it.

chapter eight

go and get a brother

So we bring this home and put a charge in your hands, brother, because I did not write this only that you would understand the thing but that you would go and get it. Here is the verse the whole booklet has been walking toward.

A friend that sticketh closer than a brother. The word for sticketh is dabaq, to cling, to cleave, to be joined fast, and here is a thing worth knowing: it is the very same word used in Genesis when it says a man shall cleave unto his wife. The Scripture uses the one strong cleaving-word for both bonds, not because they are the same, they are not, but because both are real, deep, God-made joinings of one life to another. A man is made to cleave to his wife, yes. And a man is also made to have a friend who cleaves to him closer than his own blood. Both are good. Both are gifts. And most men today have the one and are starving for the other.⁸

And notice the first half of that proverb, because it is the part with your marching orders in it: a man that hath friends must shew himself friendly. The friendship you want will not fall on you out of the sky while you stand there guarded and closed. You have to go and be the thing you are looking for. You have to open the door you have kept locked, take the risk you have been afraid to take, be the man who reaches out first, who says the true word, who steps toward another man instead of keeping him at the safe and lonely distance. It will feel like a risk, because it is one. Do it anyway. That is what a man does.

For behind every earthly brotherhood stands the truest Friend of all, the One who called us friends and then proved it the only way it can finally be proved, by laying down His life for us. He is the friend that sticketh closer than a brother, closer than any man ever could, and He is the pattern and the source of every good brotherhood beneath Him. A man anchored in that friendship has the strength to risk all the others.⁹

Go and get a brother. Two or three men who will tell you the truth and stand with you and carry your burdens when they are too heavy for one man’s back.

So go and do it. Go and get a brother, or two, or three. Real ones. Men who will tell you the truth when you do not want to hear it, who will stand with you when everything is falling, who will carry the burden with you when it is too heavy for one man’s back. Stop keeping every man at arm’s length. Stop drowning alone and calling it strength. Reach out, open up, show yourself friendly, and be for another man the brother you are looking for. It is good. It is one of the best things God made for a man, and He made it for you. Go and get it.