sons of adam

chapter one

the junk pictures

Every man is walking around with a picture in his head of what a man is supposed to be. You did not sit down and choose it. You absorbed it, from your father, or from the hole where your father should have been; from the movies and the screens; from the locker room; from the men you admired and the men you swore you would never become. It got into you young, and it has been running quietly in the background ever since, grading you against itself every single day. And most of those pictures are junk. Let us drag a few of them out and look at them in the light, because you cannot throw out what you will not name.

There is the lone wolf, the man who needs no one, asks for nothing, answers to nobody. It sounds strong, and it is a lie. God Himself said it was not good for the man to be alone, and He said it before sin ever entered the world, when everything else in creation had just been pronounced good. A man was never built to be an island, and the one who prides himself on needing nobody is not strong. He is isolated, and calling it strength.

There is the stoic, the man who feels nothing, or at least shows nothing, because real men supposedly do not. That one is not even true to history, let alone to Scripture. David was the mightiest warrior in Israel, and he wept, and he danced, and he wrote the rawest poems of grief and longing in the entire Bible. The flat, feelingless man is a modern costume, not the genuine article, and a great many men are suffocating quietly inside it.

There is the wallet with legs, the man told his entire worth is the money he brings home, so that if the income goes, the man goes with it. There is the culture’s favorite, the toxic male, guilty until proven harmless, taught from boyhood that the thing he is made of is poison. And then there is the church’s contribution, which is gentler and almost sadder: the tamed man, the nice fellow who shows up, does not cuss, stacks the chairs, and never does anything so dangerous as to lead, or risk, or fight for anything.

Some were lies the world told you to weaken you. Some were lies the church told you to tame you.

Some of these were lies the world told you to weaken you. Some were lies the church told you to tame you. And you have likely been trying to live up to two or three of them at once, which is part of why you are tired and cannot say why. So we are going to throw the whole stack out, every one of them, and start over at the only place a reliable picture has ever come from: the One who invented the man in the first place.

chapter two

made on purpose, for a purpose

Go back to the beginning, because that is where the design is, and design tells you intent.

God formed the man. Deliberately, with His own hands, out of the dust of the ground, and there is a thing worth knowing buried right in the words. The name Adam comes from the Hebrew adamah, the ground, the soil, the tilled earth. He was taken from the very stuff he would be sent to work. That is not an accident of language. That is the Lord telling you, in the man’s own name, what he is here to do.²

And notice the order of the week, because the order is the argument. The man was made first. The garden was planted, and the man was put into it, and given his work and his charge, all of it before the woman was ever formed. This is not about the woman being lesser; she is not, and any man who reads it that way has missed it badly. It is about the man being made with a job already waiting on him, a charge laid on him from the first breath. He did not drift into purpose. He was handed it the moment he opened his eyes.

You are not an accident. You are not a leftover. You were made on purpose, by a God who had a job in mind before you drew breath.

So get this settled before we go one step further, because everything else is built on it. You are not an accident. You are not a leftover. You are not, whatever the culture has hissed at you, a problem the world is trying to solve. You were made on purpose, by a God who formed you with His own hands and had a job in mind before you drew breath. Manhood is not a social construct that the modern world is free to redefine on a whim. It is a design. And the One who designed it is the only One with standing to tell you what it is for.

chapter three

work it and guard it

Here is the original job description. Before there was a wife, before there were children, before there was a single one of the responsibilities you measure yourself by now, God put the man in the garden and told him to do two things.

To dress it and to keep it. The old words are richer than they sound in English. To dress it is to till it, work it, cultivate it, make it produce and grow and flourish. To keep it is shamar, to guard, to watch over, to protect from harm, the same word used of a man keeping watch over a flock or a city keeping watch on its walls. There it is, the whole spine of manhood in two verbs, and nobody has improved on the job description since. Work it. Guard it. Cultivate and protect. Build and defend.³

Look at how much of what you have always admired in a man traces straight back to those two roots. The man who builds something, a business, a barn, a family, a field, a future, who makes something grow that would not have grown without him: that is dressing the garden. And the man who stands watch, who guards his home and his wife and his children, who keeps out what should not get in and is willing to put himself between the danger and the people he loves: that is keeping it. Every counterfeit of manhood is one of those two gone wrong. The man who will not build, who drifts and consumes and produces nothing and leaves no mark but a dent in the couch. Or the man who will not guard, who lets the wolves walk in the front door because a confrontation might be unpleasant.

And here is where I have to correct something the world did to that job, because it shrank the whole magnificent thing down to almost nothing. The culture took work it and guard it and reduced it to earn a paycheck. That is all. Bring home a number and you have supposedly done your duty as a man. Now hear me: providing money is a real and good way to work and to guard, and Paul says flatly that a man who will not provide for his own has denied the faith and is worse than an infidel, and he is not joking.

But the paycheck was never the whole job. It was one tool for the job. The trouble is the man who believes the paycheck is the entire job. He brings home the money and figures he is covered, and meanwhile nothing is growing in his home because he never cultivates it, and his household stands unguarded because he was never actually watching, only earning. His wife is carrying burdens he does not see. His children are being discipled by screens and by whoever else is willing to do it, because he outsourced the keeping of the garden and called it provision.

Working it and guarding it means building and defending with everything you have, in every room of your life: your money, yes, and also your time, your attention, your leadership, your presence, your prayers. The check is a tool. The job is bigger than the check, and it always was. And here is the good word in that, because it cuts both ways: if the job is bigger than the paycheck, then a man who loses the paycheck has not lost the job. He still has a garden to work and a household to guard, and he can get up tomorrow and do both.

chapter four

strength under control

Men were made strong. Not only in muscle, though usually that too, but strong in drive, in aggression, in the will to push and build and conquer and win. The culture now treats that strength itself as the disease, something to be apologized for and bred out. That is a lie, and a destructive one. Your strength is not a defect. It is a gift, handed to you by God on purpose.

But a gift can be misused, and here is the truth the world cannot hold and the church often will not say: the answer to misused strength was never no strength. It was strength under control. A bulldozer with no driver flattens the house. The same machine, governed by a skilled hand, builds the city. The power was never the problem. The question was always whether anybody was steering.

The Bible has a word for this, and it is one of the fruits of the Spirit. The King James calls it temperance, at the end of that famous list in Galatians; the Greek is enkrateia, and it means self-mastery, strength brought under control, power with a hand on the reins. It is not the absence of force. It is force with a governor on it.⁴

Meekness is not weakness. It is the war horse trained to stand still under its rider.

Notice that meekness sits right there in the same list, and notice that meekness does not mean weakness, which is one of the most expensive misreadings in the whole language. Meekness is strength under control. It is the war horse trained to stand still under its rider. It is power that has learned to obey. The meek man is not the weak man; he is the strong man whose strength answers to something higher than his own appetite. And that is exactly the man you want guarding your home, and exactly the man the world is no longer producing, because it tried to solve the problem of unruly strength by shaming strength itself, and got a generation of men who are either still bulldozing or have parked the machine entirely and gone soft.⁵

There are two ditches here, and most men fall into one. On one side is the domineering man, strength with no control, the bully, the tyrant in his own house, the man who mistakes making people afraid for being respected. On the other side is the passive man, strength surrendered, the engine switched off, the man who will not exert himself for anything and calls his cowardice being easygoing. Both are cowardice wearing different clothes.

God’s man is in neither ditch. He has real strength and he keeps a real hand on it: powerful and governed, forceful and self-controlled, a man with teeth who has decided before God exactly what he will and will not use them on. That is not a smaller man than the bulldozer. It is a far larger one, and it is what you are aiming at, and the Spirit of God produces it in men who ask.

chapter five

you are not your function

Now I have to take something away from you, because it is killing men by the thousands and most of them never see it coming. Here it is: you are not what you do.

Ask a man who he is and he will tell you what he does. I am an electrician. I run the company. I play ball. I provide for my family. Every one of those is a function, a thing he does, a role he fills, an output he produces, and the modern man has been trained to build his entire identity out of them. The culture does it, defining a man by his job and his performance and his usefulness. And the church often does its own version, prizing a man for what he contributes and how he serves and what he produces for the body. Both have taught you to stand your whole sense of self on the ground of function.

And here is why that will destroy you: functions fail. The job is lost. The body breaks down. The business folds. The performance, one day, is no longer there. A man who built his identity on what he does has built his house on sand, and when the function goes, and it will go, sooner or later, for every man alive, the man collapses with it. This is why a laid-off man so often falls apart in a way that frightens his family; he did not merely lose an income, he lost the thing he had quietly made himself out of. He was the function, and when the function was cut away there was nothing underneath holding him up. You have seen it. You may have feared it. You may be living it right now.

The Word says your identity has to be anchored somewhere it cannot be taken. Not in your work, but in your God. Before you are an electrician or a father or a provider or anything else you do, you are a man made in the image of God, and if you are in Christ, a son of God, bought with a price, held by a love that did not depend on your performance to begin with and therefore cannot be cancelled by your failure at it.

Get the order right and everything stands. Identity first, in the Lord, settled and unshakable, and then function flows out of it. You provide because you are a man secure in God, not in order to become one. You lead because of who you already are, not to earn the right to exist. The man who has that order right can lose the job and grieve it like the hard blow it is and still be standing, because the thing holding him up was never the job. Get the foundation under the function, and then go do the work like a free man instead of a frightened one.

chapter six

the sin of standing there

We have to talk about the oldest failure in the book, because it is the one men are most prone to and least likely to notice, since it does not look like a sin at all. It looks like nothing. That is exactly the problem. It is the sin of doing nothing.

Go back to the garden, to the moment it all came apart, and read it more carefully than you ever have.

Her husband with her. Now, many good scholars take that phrase to mean Adam was standing right there the whole time, through the serpent’s question, through the lie, through the temptation, through all of it, silent and passive and doing nothing. I should be honest with you, though: the Hebrew is not airtight on the point. The phrase with her can carry the sense of right there at her side in the moment, or it can mean simply that he was with her in the garden, her husband, the man who should have been near. We cannot build a doctrine on the exact distance between them, and I will not pretend the text settles what it does not.⁶

But here is what is not in doubt, whichever way you read it. Adam was the one who had been given the charge. The command not to eat was given to him, before the woman was ever formed. It was his to keep and his to teach and his to guard. So whether he stood beside her in that moment or merely should have been there and was not, the failure is the same in its shape: he did not guard it. He did not step between his wife and the serpent. He did not lead. He did not keep the thing he had been told to keep. And then he ate. The first catastrophe in human history was not only a sin of eating. It was, somewhere in it, the failure of a man to do the one thing he had been put there to do.

And look at what he did the moment God came asking. He blamed his wife, and then he blamed God for giving her to him, the woman whom thou gavest to be with me. Passive when he should have led, and then a coward when he should have owned it. That is the pattern of fallen manhood and it has not changed one inch since Eden. It is the man who checks out, who drifts, who lets his wife carry the weight he was made to carry, who avoids every hard conversation, who lets the children raise themselves, who sees the thing going wrong and says nothing because stepping up would cost him something.

Passivity is the male sin. Not every man’s only sin, but the one we slide into by gravity.

Passivity is the male sin. Not every man’s only sin, but the deep, characteristic, default failure of men, the one we slide into by gravity. And notice it is the exact opposite of the job. He was told to work it and guard it, and in the one moment it counted most he did neither. He cultivated nothing and he guarded no one. He just stood there.

So here is the hard word, because this booklet does not deal in soft ones. The world does not need more men standing there. Your home does not need a man who is merely present, taking up space, technically in the room. It needs a man who steps up, who leads, who speaks, who takes responsibility, who puts himself between his people and the danger, who does the hard thing precisely because it is hard and he is the man.

And now hear the mercy in it, because there is a great deal. The opposite of the sin of Eden is not perfection. It is engagement. God is not standing over you demanding a flawless record; He is calling you to stop standing there. That is a far lower bar to start over and a far higher ceiling to grow into, and it means the man who has been checked out for ten years can be back in the fight by dinner tonight. Not fixed. Not finished. Just in it. Step back in. That is the whole ask, and it is the thing your people have been waiting on.

And do not do it alone, because men were made for brotherhood, for deep and loyal and fierce friendship with other men. Look at David and Jonathan, who made a covenant with each other, and of whom David said, when Jonathan died, that his love had been wonderful, passing the love of women. Our broken age cannot read that without smirking and reaching for a sexual explanation, because it has lost the very category: the deep, non-sexual, covenant brotherhood between men that every great army and every band of brothers has known. It was not romance. It was loyalty unto death between two strong men, and it is one of the things a man is made for, and the modern man is starving without it. Go find one or two men who will tell you the truth and stand with you, and be that for them.⁷

chapter seven

the man christ jesus

We have thrown out the junk pictures. Now the true one, the only flawless man who ever lived, the pattern you were actually made to be conformed to. Because if you want to know what a man is, you do not finally look to your father, or to some hero, or to me. You look at Jesus Christ. And the moment you look at Him honestly, both the world’s caricature and the church’s tame imitation fall to pieces.

He was not soft. This is the Man who took cords and made a whip and drove the money-changers out of the temple with His own hands, who turned over their tables and poured out their coins and called them a den of thieves, a scene with so much force in it that His disciples remembered the words, the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up. This is the Man who looked the religious authorities of His day in the eye and called them whited sepulchres, a generation of vipers, hypocrites, to their faces, with no committee and no apology. There was not a soft bone in Him. The picture of a meek-and-mild Jesus who would not say a hard word is a forgery; the real one was the most fearless man who ever walked.

And He was not domineering either. The same Man took the little children up in His arms when His own disciples tried to shoo them away. He wept at the grave of His friend. He knelt down with a towel and washed the feet of the men who would abandon Him that very night, including the one He knew was about to sell Him. He felt things deeply and was not ashamed of a single one of them. He was tender without being weak and strong without being cruel, and there is no contradiction in that at all. It is simply what a whole man looks like, the thing every junk picture is a broken fragment of.

All power, and all of it under control. That is not a smaller man. That is the only whole one.

And then, hear this, because it is the summit of manhood and not the bottom of it, He laid the whole of that strength down. He had legions of angels at His command and He did not call them. He had every power in the universe and He let them drive the nails in anyway, because there was a garden to guard and a bride to save and a job that only the strongest man who ever lived could finish by appearing, to all the world, to lose. That is strength under perfect control. That is work it and guard it carried all the way to a cross. That is a man laying himself down for those in his care, which is the very thing husbands are told to do in light of it.

So there is your picture. Strong and tender. Fearless and gentle. All power and all of it under control. Working and guarding right to the end, and laying His life down to do it. That is the man you were made to become, not the world’s swaggering caricature and not the church’s harmless imitation, but the Man Christ Jesus, into whose image God means to shape every son He has.