Warrior-poet

The culture of the Apostle Paul’s day was made up of debaucherous and wicked people, sexually speaking, but there was also rampant violence. From the grand spectacles of the Coliseum to the grime and brutality of life on the streets of ancient Rome, there was no shortage of death and destruction. It is amid this battle-glorifying culture that Paul commands Timothy to find mature men who are not violent. In the world these men inhabited, violence was seen as a part of life because of their belief system. Every culture reflects the god, or gods, they worship. In a culture that worships gods and goddesses of sex and promiscuity, a disregard for the body in the form of child sacrifice and polygamy is present. In a culture that worships gods of war and battle, the people will begin to reflect the characteristics of those violent gods they worship. All culture is downstream from worship. So, for the 1st century man, anger and violence was commonplace. It was someone different that Paul had in mind to lead the church as a man of God.

A mature man of God reflects the God he worships. He is a man who has become shaped by habitually gazing at the Lord Jesus (2 Corinthians 3:18). You become like what you behold, and this is especially true for men. Paul is instructing Timothy to identify the kind of men who don’t have the appearance of the gods of the day, but rather who have the appearance of the one true and loving God. In Paul’s mind, God is not fickle and prone to violent outbursts. Therefore, a man after God’s heart who is being formed into God’s image shouldn’t be fickle and prone to violent outbursts either. There is a serious short in the wiring of a Christian man who is unable to control his emotions and frequently boils over into violence. We know that we shouldn’t be violent men, but does that mean we should be spineless jellyfish who never stand up for our families? Not at all.

“Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle” (Psalm 144:1). There is a difference between not being prone to violence and not being capable of violence. To be a man is to be capable of defending what God has given you. Paul’s admonition to find men who are not violent is not an endorsement of a soft-handed and cowardly version of masculinity. Paul is looking for calm and peaceful men, not pushovers. The verse quoted above is a particularly helpful one in this case. David was considered a “man after God’s heart” (1 Samuel 13:14), wrote beautiful hymns to the Lord that we know as the Psalms, and yet was a powerful and savage warrior-king. In David we see the blending of the lover and the fighter, the warrior-poet. Not a violent man, but a man capable of great violence in defense of the people God had entrusted to him. For us today, we may not be warlords who are leading empires in great military campaigns, but we are men who have been entrusted with families, businesses, and brothers and sisters in Christ who need us to be the kind of men who are willing to lay down our lives in a fight for their sakes. A holy and godly man is not a violent man, but a courageous and brave man who knows when it is time to go to war.