Rehoboam, too "manly" by half

 ⁶ Then King Rehoboam consulted the elders who stood before his father Solomon while he still lived, saying, “How do you advise me to answer these people?”

⁷ And they spoke to him, saying, “If you are kind to these people, and please them, and speak good words to them, they will be your servants forever.”

⁸ But he rejected the advice which the elders had given him, and consulted the young men who had grown up with him, who stood before him.

The advice of the young men, of course, was as follows:

¹⁰ ... “Thus you should speak to the people who have spoken to you, saying, ‘Your father made our yoke heavy, but you make it lighter on us’—thus you shall say to them: ‘My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s waist! ¹¹ And now, whereas my father put a heavy yoke on you, I will add to your yoke; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scourges!’ ” 

And as we know, this turned out poorly for Rehoboam, because whilst making big boasts about what he would do, he lacked any actual capacity to enforce it.  Oops!

What, though, in the advice of the young men appealed to them, and appealed to Rehoboam? Why did it seem like a good idea? After all, Rehoboam had just inherited the kingdom from his father at its peak of prosperity. The good times had arrived: peace, and abundance. This was hardly the time for the sort of tough, no-nonsense measures which might sometimes be needed to get through a crisis. Nothing that was going on called for an authoritarian crack-down, and the results demonstrated how stupid it was to say that he would bring one. The advice was pure folly, as the outcome showed. But again we ask: why did it appeal to him?

What appealed was not related to the outcome of the policy, which Rehoboam took for granted in the wrong way - he assumed he'd be able to carry it out. What appealed was simply the policy itself, and the act of declaring such a policy. Rehoboam was a tough guy, and took tough measures. He was a real man. No softies here! He talked tough, and would act tough, and all would admire his masculinity. All hail the big man, Rehoboam!

And so, to our day..... this is all rather familiar to Internet users in 2026, is it not? There are plenty of kings (unlike Rehoboam, self-crowned), who speak as if masculinity is on a simple sliding scale, and that sliding scale is marked "talk a big game". The bigger game you talk, the more you ignore any attempts at correction, the more you double-down and go further to the extremes in whatever way, the more masculine you are.

If you are drawn to those sorts of people - and it seems plenty are - then please, instead, consider Jesus Christ. He was nothing like this! He was the servant of all his people, and gave up all his rights when he took on the form of a servant and gave himself for us. That was the most manly thing ever done. Unlike Adam, he did not abdicate and disappear, hovering somewhere on the periphery. And unlike Rehoboam, he did not brag about what he was going to inflict on those under him. He took the whole load upon himself, voluntarily, and was crucified for us. This he did, with conviction, firmness of purpose, and refusal to compromise on God's will for him.

There was nothing manly about Rehoboam threatening to tyrannise the people who had been put under his care. That idea was the foolishness of the ungodly, who think that the great men of the world manifest their greatness by lording it over others. Of course, if you merely have a podcast or whatever, then you're not even doing any actual lording, you're just talking - which makes it all a bit pathetic. Yes, a father-figure (such as a king) must sometimes be firm, using his God-given authority to suppress evil and folly. But this has nothing to do with using it arbitrarily to commit evil and folly. There is nothing manly about force for the sake of force, or dominion for the sake of dominion. 

Ultimately, Rehoboam aped Pharaoh and other tyrants, aping Satan, who wanted authority so that he could exercise authority. Jesus, the true man, laid aside his rights and shed his blood, so that he could redeem the lost. That sort of man is worthy to rule, and that sort of man - only - shall have authority in the world which is to come. To be much more like a real man, have no compromise with Satan's idol of pseudo-manliness, and instead use your position to serve, by word and self-giving deed. Lead others into the way of giving your life away so that others can live.

Jesus gave himself for people

Matthew 9: ¹⁸ While He spoke these things to them, behold, a ruler came and worshipped Him, saying, “My daughter has just died, but come and lay Your hand on her and she will live.” ¹⁹ So Jesus arose and followed him, and so did His disciples.

This sort of thing is, in the gospels, so natural and so frequent, that we easily miss it.

In the modern world we have time for programs and schedules; for projects, for jobs, for careers, for our homes, for entertainment. We have time for ourselves and the things we want to achieve, and our days are divided up even perhaps into 5-minute segments, to make sure we can achieve these things.

Jesus, though, had time for people. He is dealing with the questions of one group (in this case, John's disciples); and then another person comes, and asks for his aid. So, therefore, hence, he arose and followed him. Someone came and interrupted, urgently seeking Jesus; Jesus embraced this new development in the plan of the day, and embraced the new person and new opportunity to serve in front of him.

As modern Westerners we tend to put programmes, action plans and schedules first, and people as individuals often sit a level behind in the structure of our thinking. What would our lives look like if people were first and primary, always, and the rest merely flexible means towards the end of giving ourselves to the image-bearers that God has placed around us? Certainly, Jesus had a programme. But it was all driven by his love for people, and the God who made them. Needy people could never get in the way of his programme, because people were his programme.

Well, that's weird

Having been a missionary, the following experience is familiar to me. You take part in a meeting. You sit, you watch, you observe. You try to understand what's going on. You try to understand what's really going on. What does the way this meeting is organised mean? Why is this being done, and what is the significance of that? Everything seems to flow naturally, as something entirely normal and well-understood by everyone present (except you). You, unfortunately, don't get it. Don't worry: you can try again the next time.

The next time comes, and goes. And the next, and the next; and so on. Unfortunately (for you), though there are some things that you can now explain the inner, local logic of, yet much else passes you by completely and entirely. It's weird. Years pass: it's still weird, really weird. How to relate it to the intended, announced, purported purpose of the meeting? What does it have to do with Christianity? How in any way is it tied to the person, the teachings and the saving work of Jesus Christ, and the Commission that he gave us? Sorry, I don't know. I've tried, but as yet, I'm not sure anyone else really knows either. And yet.... it still makes perfect, effortless sense to the bulk of the people present, such that if you asked them to explain it, well, they couldn't either. Because it just is: this is how things are done, and everybody just knows that. We've always done it this way.

What I am referring to, of course, is that deep, so very deep, thing called culture. Where it all comes from and how it all hangs together is so clear to a cultural native, that not only is it not explained, that some of the time it just can't be explained. If you need it explaining to you, then you'll never get it.

Sometimes, on the other hand (not terribly often!), one of those wonderful moments occurs, when someone says.... "I've been thinking about this, and why do we do it? Is it really in keeping with our purpose and mission, and doesn't it in fact suggest something different to what Jesus taught us, doesn't it clash with it? Shouldn't we change this?" 

When that does happen, it's hard to suppress the urge to jump out of the chair, yell "Yes, yes, yes!", burst into tears, and go and hug the person who said it, and do a few laps of the room in order to work off the adrenaline rush that came from someone saying what you'd been thinking for so long.... but you'd better not do quite this, for it would, in almost any culture, be profoundly weird.

Now, if you live in another culture for enough time, something else begins to happen. Eventually, we hope at least, some of your blinkers begin to come off. It becomes apparent that being weird isn't the exclusive preserve of one or two cultures, much less just the one you happen to be a stranger in. It turns out that in fact your own culture, and your own sub-cultures, are also profoundly weird. There are things that apparently make perfect sense to the people working and acting in them which, if they were gifted with being able to step outside of that for a moment, they'd realise (inside about 10 seconds) are so strange that we can barely begin to describe them. Whether you're British, American, African, Asian; whether you're Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian, Anglican, etcetera, well, frankly, your culture and sub-culture are very likely quite weird, inexplicably odd, with things more or less prominent that just have no real connection to your advertised and professed identity and purpose.

The moral here isn't "and that's OK, let's all be weird in our own ways and accept it and even delight in it". There is no doubt time and place for a good dose of that. God did create, and does love variety, and it's good for us to broaden our narrow, constricted, darkened little minds not just a bit. And whilst in the church of Jesus Christ this variety should be embraced and celebrated, that doesn't mean that there aren't still parts that are not "good weird", but "bad weird". i.e. They are signs that there is something profoundly wrong. Somewhere, at quite an early stage, far back, someone set their compass wrong, and started wandering off the path, and now we're so far lost we don't even realise it. Things are happening that just should not happen, anywhere, at all, whoever we are. It's not just that we lack understanding (which of course, in any particular case we have to allow for, and must be patient as we labour to understand).

This post isn't about any particular person, people, groups or activities. There is no coded message about some specific situation. I am musing on just how common the cognitive disconnect is, once you have been following Jesus a while. So much of the way of the world around us, and of the way of us disciples who still have so much to learn, just makes no real sense given what we profess to believe, that the experience just comes more and more. It's as if, in this world, we're strangers - we don't really belong here; we're exiles and there's some other place that is home and where we fit in and where it'll all be worked out. It's as if we have to live as if this book, which makes more and more sense to me as I study it more, is the real world, and as if the creation I'm actually living in had some major event that caused things to go off-track, quite early.

Having made that explanation, though, here's one from the world of self-described evangelicalism, apparently on the more conservative end, from the few figures in it that I do recognise. I've not heard of this conference and I don't know much about the writer of this piece, but he's on to something: "The Great Evangelical Schism: Prologue". Look at that poster and read the descriptions. It's not so much that there's something obviously wrong, direct-and-up-front, or that they're trying to be weird. Nowhere does it say they're going to torture babies, or have a fancy dress party in which they all decide to impersonate goats, or to hold an evangelistic rally in which they're only allowed to use the word "Wibbly". It's more subtle than that. Somewhere, the wider movement that this is part of took some wrong turns many stages ago, which actually makes this conference look entirely natural. But if, alternatively, you were to read, say, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, or the Westminster Confession of Faith through a few times, and then read the missionary biographies of Hudson Taylor and John Paton (or their like), and then got transported into this conference, you'd surely realise that some very major changes had happened into the intervening years, that were more than simply questions of style and cultural adiaphora. It's not that I particularly know that any of those people purvey heresy. But it's just.... very weird. How did we get from there to here? What have these two reference points got to do with each-other? It's not a sign of health, whatever it is.

In general, trying to encourage people to be bold for Jesus is a good thing, a good use of our time and efforts. Far better than just consuming content from screens. And my purpose here is, as I say, not particularly to criticise the above conference. The poster/conference are the symptoms of something behind that is widespread, and are not the disease itself. As the article above says, "The “Be Bold for Jesus” conference is a touch-point into this mode of religion, where, among other factors, theology and doctrine take a quantifiable back seat to culture."  Culture is weird. But when evangelical culture/sub-culture has become weird in the wrong ways, we need to work out why that is, and how to retrieve the things that make sense. We're meant to be in a place where people can look in their Bibles, and people can learn about Jesus there, and then look at us, and say "I see what it means, it's talking about being the sort of people that you are, because you're following him". If they instead say "sorry, not interested, you're way too weird", and they're not talking about our life of self-giving for Jesus but about something else that is part of our sub-culture, then, we need to ask God's help to see ourselves more clearly.

All of education is religious - the only question is, "which religion?"

Firstly, read this: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/muir-woods-queer-woods-california-wokeness-live-not-by-lies/

This illustrates a simple fact: there is no neutral territory. Everywhere where there is education, even a wood, even spiders, a world-view is being communicated. The question is not "shall we teach how to understand our observations?" but "in what context shall we teach how to understand our observations?". And the most important context - everyone realises - is how humans understand themselves, and the world they live in, and how to interpret their inner lives. When people swallow the untruth that some sort of secularism in which we just observe without adding any context, they simply end up as teaching that life should be lived according to atheist nihilism, by default. "There are only facts" is functionally the same as "there is nothing but self".

As we see illustrated in the above article, the world outside the church understands these truths about education well. They know that the world is not a simple, naked, meaningless brute fact. Rather, there is a narrative, a background, a context, in which it should be interpreted. And so, as the world's educators seek to educate others, and especially children, they seek to teach what they hold as the correct, righteous context. They teach their worldview, because that's what educators do. That's what education involves. In the modern world, that increasingly means they teach a self-centred, God-less world-view in which man and his personal desires are the ultimate realities, and ultimate good things.

Lots of Christians haven't accepted these facts about how education works. In my observation, that's usually for one of two reasons.

The first reason is that they've never thought about it. Despite living in a society that has undergone such radical change as Western societies have in the last few generations, they have not applied their mind to thinking about what this means for the task of educating our children. They haven't even begun to reflect seriously upon what it means to obey the Bible's instruction to be "bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ" (2 Corinthians 10:5). This is a terrible failure to love God with all our minds, in one of the major areas of our duty.

The second is worse: Christians know that education is not neutral, and that the secularist education they have chosen for their children is anti-Christian - but they aren't willing to endure any of the costs in doing otherwise. They knowingly send their children to be educated in a context of darkness instead of light, because doing otherwise would involve discomfort. It would involve change, effort, and the possibility of others in their social groups pulling funny faces at them, which might make them feel awkward. I hope and pray that a lot of these Christians come, or will come, into a third category: those whose eyes have been opened, realised that pleasing God necessitates a radical change of direction, and who are going by his grace and strength to get up and make those changes.

The church and culture

First, read this blog post by Justin Taylor. The gist of it is - the church is meant to be in the world, but shouldn't have any hopes of radically changing it; we "engage" culture, but don't "transform" it.

I could weep. Did someone shove Christ back into his tomb again? Thankfully there are some clarifications in the comments that seem to show Taylor's quotes aren't giving the full picture of the views of at least one of those he quotes from.

What I find puzzling about that kind of analysis is its anachronistic nature. Were our forefathers, who did transform culture in the name of Christ, not meant to do that? Would it have been more Biblical if they'd just handed over the culture to the rebels against Christ's Lordship, and said "actually, this is all yours; sorry for taking it from you and your evil master; we were only meant to 'engage' with you and we've been overstepping."

Then read this by Douglas Wilson, in which he points out that whilst believers can have fellowship in the gospel whilst disagreeing on these issues, yet we can't actually perform our Christ-given mission together effectively whilst in that state.