Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

So our new sermon series is called “It’s Good To Be A Man”—there’s a book by the same name (that undergirds much of these messages) by Michael Foster and Dominic Bnon Tennant; I commend it to you as we go through these sermons.

Last week we started by observing that it is good to be a man because God created men to be ruling fathers—patriarchy is inevitable, but good patriarchy is not.

But today I want to start off by stating another reason that it’s good to be a man—because men don’t have to read instruction manuals!

(Amen, brothers?)

We can lay out all the pieces of our new five-piece patio furniture set (or smoker grill or bassinet) and just intuitively understand how it all fits together.

The only thing we can’t understand is why there are always so many spare parts left over after we’re finished—manufacturers are apparently throwing in a lot of extra parts with their kits these days!

In all seriousness, I think that a man’s tendency not to “need” instructions and directions comes from something very good in his masculinity.

But in the world we live in today, there are a lot of men who are looking at their own lives as if they were examining an odd remaining piece after they’ve finished assembling a swingset: “Where did this come from, and what is it for??”

In our society today there are countless men who are looking at their masculinity and saying, “What is it for??

Why am I made this way??” What is masculinity—with all of its strength, aggressiveness, independence, restlessness, energy, ambition and curiosity—what is it for?

The common answer in our day and age is that all of those masculine traits that I just named are detriments to the world; that those attributes are what is broken in men.

But, just like any bewildering doohickey laying on the shop bench at the end of an assembly project, the question of what God made men and their masculine nature for is found in the Instruction Manual.

Right at the beginning of every instruction manual is a list of the parts and what they are for—and the Bible is no different.

Like every other question about our world and the way it works, the question of why God made men masculine is answered in Genesis.

(And somewhere in northern Kentucky, Ken Ham just smiled quietly to himself!)

So once again, Bethel Baptist Church family, turn with me to Genesis 1.

Here is the answer to why God made men:

Genesis 1:26 (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.”

Two things to notice here—God created man in His image.

And He created man to exercise dominion over the creation.

The verses leading up to verse 26 describes how God formed and filled all of creation.

And here in verse 26 he creates man in His image to exercise His rulership over that creation.

In the passage we read earlier in our worship, this is described as a glorious position:

Psalm 8:5–8 (ESV)

5 Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

6 You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

This is why I think we need to speak of masculinity in terms of glory—because the Scripture itself describes it that way.

Masculine glory is tied up with the notion (here in Genesis 1 as well as in Psalm 8) of dominion.

God made man to have dominion over the creation.

And as we make our way through these verses today we will see that “taking dominion” means

DOMINION: To FRUITFULLY ORDER the world in God’s STEAD

Masculine glory flows from God’s design in which men were created to be His representative ruler on earth.

To be a flesh-and-blood stand-in for His presence, working in submission to God to continue the work that God began in the first six days.

And so the way I want to say it this morning from Genesis 1 is that

Masculine glory is the living IMAGE of God that brings HEAVEN to EARTH

This, then, is what you were made for, brother—this is why God wired you the way that He did, this is why your masculinity was given to you.

God has made you to be His viceroy, His stand-in, in order to “establish His own presence and rule in the physical realm” (Foster, M., & Tennant, D. B. (2022).

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

Canon Press., p. 19)

Masculine glory comes, first of all, from the fact that

I. Men are made to EXTEND the REIGN that God STARTED

Genesis 1:28 says

Genesis 1:28 (ESV)

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.”

As we noted a moment ago, these verses come at the end of the chapter’s description of God’s creation of the grand structures of the Creation—the heavens and the earth and the sea and everything that fills them (stars, planets, sun, moon, animals, birds, trees, fish).

But then at the end of this process he creates man, and gives him the responsibility to continue what He started—fruitfully ordering the world as His representative.

Notice the way God instructs Adam in verse 28—he was to be fruitful.

God commanded Adam to exercise dominion

By being wisely PRODUCTIVE (v.

28; cp.

Gen 2:8)

In Genesis 2:8 we read

Genesis 2:8 (ESV)

8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.

Notice that the Scripture says God planted the garden—but He gave it to Adam to cultivate.

Similarly, we read that God created the animals, but He gave them to Adam to name (Genesis 2:18-19).

So you see here that Adam was given the task of extending the reign that God started—he was to fruitfully order the world in God’s stead.

The garden was planted, but it was up to Adam to take what God planted and make it more fruitful—cross-pollinating, hybridizing, grafting, innovating.

God equipped Adam with the drive to order and harness and cultivate the Garden, to strive to accomplish grand plans and establish impressive results.

Masculinity equips men with the drive to create and build and innovate and invent and and be productive because men are created in the image of the wise and creative and innovative and inventive and productive Creator God who tasks them with bearing that image to bring heaven to earth.

We often think of this in terms of “stewardship”—that we have been given the Creation to care for in God’s place.

And that is true, as far as it goes.

But there really is more to masculine glory than merely being a “manager”—read carefully what God commanded Adam in verse 28:

Genesis 1:28 (ESV)

28 ...And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it...

As helpful as it is to see men as stewards of God’s creation, there is an unmistakable element of subduing—of conquering, of bending the creation to our will, of striving with and taming the creation.

God commanded Adam to exercise dominion by being wisely productive, and

By being constructively AGGRESSIVE (v.

28; cp.

3:23; 2 Chr.

28:10)

The same word for “subdue” is found in other places in Scripture that give us a fuller picture of what God was commanding Adam to do.

In 2 Chronicles 28:10, for instance, we read

2 Chronicles 28:10 (ESV)

10 And now you intend to subjugate [same word] the people of Judah and Jerusalem, male and female, as your slaves...

The same word is used to describe the conquering of the Canaanites in Joshua 18:

Joshua 18:1 (ESV)

1 Then the whole congregation of the people of Israel assembled at Shiloh and set up the tent of meeting there.

The land lay subdued before them.

The need to subjugate or tame or conquer the creation comes into a bit more focus when we consider that the Garden of Eden was not representative of the whole earth at this time.

God planted the Garden in a particular place, and (as we see in Genesis 3 when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden) it had borders.

Think of it this way: A number of years ago I was talking with a lumber company owner who told me a story of a landowner who had contracted with them to harvest the timber off of his property.

He brought the owner to a patch of ground in the woodlot that was perfectly cleared and raked, all the stumps removed and all the tire tracks smoothed out.

The owner said, “Now when you’re done, I expect my entire woodlot to look just like this!” (Needless to say, the lumber company told him that’s not the way logging worked!)

In much the same way, God placed Adam in the Garden so that he would have an idea of what his task would be—to make the rest of planet Earth look like that.

And in order to do that, he had to strive and subdue and conquer and impose his will on a wild, untamed, trackless wilderness.

Not in the sense that Adam was violently attacking or destroying the creation, but aggressively subduing it to harness it, tame it, make it productive.

Like a cowboy bronc-riding an unbroken horse, Adam was to use his God-given aggression to bend the Creation to his will as God’s representative.

The world around us is of the opinion that the aggressive nature of masculinity is one of the great evils to be eradicated.

But as Foster and Tennant write in their book, “There is no hint in the Bible that your aggressive instincts are a result of the fall.

You are not, in other words, a defective woman...” (ibid., p. 25).

Moms, your little boys’ natural aggressiveness and energy, their drive to conquer and explore and subdue and tame, their habit of leaping off of the couch with a full-throated battle cry is not something to condition out of them—it is their glory!

Brothers, your desire to conquer and subdue is not the problem--the problem is that you are following in your father Adam’s footsteps all too well.

Because Adam was created to bend the world to his will on God’s behalf; instead, he rebelled and decided to bend the world to his own will.

And instead of man’s natural aggressiveness being turned to subduing the Creation on God’s behalf, instead of masculine drive and ambition and creativity and energy being directed to bringing heaven to earth as God’s image bearer, we have created Hell on earth by our sin-twisted image.

We sons of Adam have failed to carry out the work God entrusted to us, and all of the masculine glory we were made for has been tarnished and smothered and twisted and made ugly by our sin.

We were made to extend the reign that God started, but since all of us have followed our father Adam into rebellion we are no longer capable of bringing Heaven to earth.