Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

We have officially entered the world that the 19th Century British author and apologist G. K. Chesterton once predicted:

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.

(That was in 1926!)

I read that quote as we begin this morning to brace you for something that I am about to say that is being howled down today, something that is raising furious cries of opposition, something that is persecuted as a heresy and even now brings on the online lynch-mobs:

IT IS GOOD TO BE A MAN.

Sure enough, we live in a world gone mad—to the point that even in this room when I said that, you flinched a little bit, didn’t you?

We live in the midst of a people and a nation gone mad, a people that cannot bear to say anything positive about masculinity, a world where even the concept of male and female is under assault.

But, mad as it may be, our world needs to hear this message—men need to hear this message, because men in our culture are being decimated.

As one author puts it:

Technological and environmental shifts have resulted in men having such low testosterone levels that their grip strength is weaker than that of women from a generation ago.

The ubiquity of porn has led to erectile dysfunction in men not even out of their twenties… Masculinity is shamed.

Strong men are vilified as “toxic”... Fathers are portrayed in mass media as unnecessary buffoons--little better than one of the kids.

Anyone esteeming motherhood as foundational to femininity is cancelled.

Domestic violence is regarded as an exclusively male sin.

No-fault divorce, welfare, and wickedly prejudicial custody laws incentivize women to leave their husbands and take everything they have--and they do, initiating nearly 80 percent of all divorces.

Male suicide rates are heading for the skies.

No one cares.

(Foster, M., & Tennant, D. B. (2022).

It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity.

Canon Press.

pp.

11-12)

And so we will spend the next several weeks together saying what God’s Word says about masculinity: it is good to be a man.

Men need to hear this message, to know what God says about manhood.

But this is not just a “men’s” sermon series.

Men need to know what Biblical masculinity is—but so do women.

If you are an unmarried woman who expects to be married someday, you need to understand what is happening to the men of your generation and how to recognize the kind of godly masculinity that your Father in Heaven commands you to seek.

If you are a mother, you want to be able to raise your sons to be what the Scripture says a man should be, and you want to train your daughters to look for and prepare themselves to marry this kind of man.

If you are a grandmother, you want to know how to pray for your grandsons as they navigate this world gone mad in its hatred for them as men.

The Church needs to declare this message of Biblical masculinity—that it is good to be a man because men know that they are in trouble, and they are looking anywhere they can for help.

And there are a lot of voices out there like Absalom’s.

Absalom usurped his father’s kingdom by listening to the people’s complaints, offering a sympathetic ear, taking their problems seriously, offering himself as their solution.

And there are many “Absaloms” in our culture today who do the same thing—secular men’s rights advocates, YouTube personalities, podcasters and speakers who are massively popular because they listen to men, they understand men, they speak up for them and defend them—and they all lead men away from God.

We cannot be silent, we who have the authoritative Word of God with its message of the goodness and holiness and glory of masculinity rightly ordered in obedience to its Creator.

And so this morning we will see what God’s Word declares about the goodness of being a man.

And this morning I want us to look at the Scriptures to see what God says about manhood—and the starting place for us in the first book of the Bible tells us that it is good to be a man because

God MADE men to be RULING FATHERS

Once again, all the tripwires subtly installed in your head by this fallen world start to go off when you hear that men were made to rule, to take ownership, to subdue and then reign over their realm.

The common word used to describe what I’m getting at is the much-hated, continuously maligned word “patriarchy”—

PATRIARCHY: From the Greek words patros (FATHER) and archos (RULE)

According to our day and age, “patriarchy” is the most vile monster of our time—the patriarchy is evil, the patriarchy is unjust, the patriarchy is the root of all of the violence and injustice and bigotry and ruination of the world.

But the problem for all those enemies of patriarchy out there is that

I. Patriarchy is INEVITABLE (Genesis 1:26-28)

Look at Genesis 1—verses 26-28.

It’s a familiar story, and one that we have been dwelling on for quite some time in our Sunday School curriculum—because Genesis 1 explains how the world works.

Genesis describes for us what our world is like and why our world is the way it is.

And so listen to what God says about why He created man:

Genesis 1:26–28 (ESV)

26 Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

28 And God blessed them.

And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

You see it here clearly stated:

Men were CREATED to exercise DOMINION (Genesis 1:26-28; 9:1, 7)

Men were created to exercise dominion because they were created in the image of God.

God is the ruler of all creation; He has the ultimate dominion and authority and rulership of all things.

And the fact that you bear His image, brother, means that you are meant to rule as well.

Look around the world we live in and you will see even today that men overwhelmingly occupy positions of authority and rulership and government.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature.

This is the way God (in Whose image men are created) made the world to work.

Water runs downhill because God made it that way; Cows have horns because God made them that way.

The sun rises in the east because God created it to do so.

And men will inevitably rule because God made them to rule.

Adam was placed into the Garden and told that his job was to transform the entire planet Earth into that same kind of garden—he was to exercise dominion by making the whole world into one gigantic garden, subdued and transformed and ruled over by him and his wife.

(Of course dominion involves men and women both—Lord willing we will unpack this command to exercise dominion further in coming weeks and how God calls both men and women to exercise it, but for now it is enough for us to see that the responsibility for exercising dominion was given to men.)

But as we continue the story of Creation in Genesis we see that Adam’s ability to exercise godly dominion was destroyed by his sin.

Because Adam did not exercise his rulership when Eve disobeyed God, and instead allowed her to exercise dominion over him by joining her in her disobedience, the earth would no longer cooperate with his attempts to subdue it:

Genesis 3:17 (ESV)

17 And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

But it is vital for us to note that, though Adam’s ability to subdue the earth was lost, his nature as a ruler was not.

Ever since Adam, men have always sought to subdue and rule and hold dominion.

We cannot do otherwise—but we have lost the relationship with God that makes our dominion good.

Because of Adam’s fall and the sin that he brought into the world,

A man’s DOMINION will either BLESS or CURSE

Patriarchy is inevitable—it is not a matter of whether men will dominate.

Every man dominates.

The only question is whether they will dominate in a constructive way or a destructive way.

Just because patriarchy is inevitable does not mean that dominion is inevitably good.

A man may exercise righteous dominion in his household, blessing his wife and children and protecting them with sacrificial strength and joyful manhood, or he may nuke his dominion and curse his family by his sin or abdication or violence or depravity—but either way, he rules that household.

He rules by his presence, he rules by his absence.

He rules by his responsibility, he rules by his dissipation.

He rules by his kindness, he rules by his cruelty.

A man will always exercise dominion—and that dominion will either bless or curse.

Patriarchy—father rule—is inevitable.

It may be a righteous patriarchy or a wicked patriarchy, but it will be a “father rule”, because God made men to rule.

It may have been inevitable that the Pharaohs of Egypt were men, but it was not inevitable that they were good men.

The Pharaoh who blessed Joseph and his family at the end of Genesis was not the same kind of man as the Pharaoh who we find at the beginning of the Book of Exodus:

Exodus 1:8–10 (ESV)

8 Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.

9 And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us. 10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”

This is the next thing that we learn from God’s Word about manhood—since God made men to be ruling fathers, wicked rulers will always see men as a threat to their rule!

And so we see in the Scriptures that

II.

Wicked patriarchs WAGE WAR on men (Exodus 1:8-11)

Pharoah knew that if the Hebrews were allowed to continue growing and multiplying that they would eventually become an unstoppable threat to his rule.

And so who did he target?

The boys:

Exodus 1:15–16 (ESV)

15 Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, 16 “When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women and see them on the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him, but if it is a daughter, she shall live.”