The promise stands: the gates of hell cannot withstand the advance of holy, righteous, dangerous men. The only question is whether we’ll rise up and take what’s been promised, or continue sitting while everything burns around us.

There is a passage in the book of Ezekiel that should make our generation shake in its proverbial boots. God looked down upon a dying nation and declared: “I searched for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before me for the land so that I would not destroy it. But I found no one.”

Let that sink in. The Almighty walked the length of a ruined city, searching among the leaders of a collapsing nation for just one man. One man who would stand in the breach, rebuild what was broken, and safeguard his people from destruction. What he found was priests and princes, officials with functioning male bodies and impressive titles. But what he didn’t find was men.

And because there were no men, destruction came.

When Men Stand, Nations Fall

Fast forward several centuries to the book of Acts, and the story flips dramatically. A handful of men with the courage of a thousand lions caused such an uproar that their accusers shouted: “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also!” (Acts 17:6)

The contrast between these two examples is staggering. When God found no men in Ezekiel’s day, Israel fell. When God found a few men in Acts, pagan Rome fell. This teaches us a profound truth. When hollow men abound within the visible covenant community, calamity for God’s people is not far away. But when real men build in joyful obedience to God, nations will eventually collapse as the Kingdom of God advances.

Isaiah described this phenomenon in the negative, the absence of godly men, as a curse: “Oh, my people. Their oppressors are children and the women rule over them” (Isaiah 3:12). To be clear, this isn’t an attack on faithful women. It’s a description of a world where the created order has been turned upside down because men who were appointed to bear responsibility have abandoned their post.

When men abdicate, Isaiah tells us that children become tyrants. When men sit idly by, entire nations burn around them. This pattern holds true in families, churches, and nations alike.

The War on Masculinity

To make matters worse, for more than a century our culture has waged deliberate war on masculinity. This assault has come from every direction (schools, universities, television screens, corporations, entertainment, etc.) Under all of these attacks has come the same message: men are the problem.

Your strength is dangerous. Your ambition is a disease. Your authority is oppression. Your desire to conquer and spread dominion needs medication. Your willingness to fight must be apologized for.

Turn on any television show from the past fifty years. How often do you see men portrayed as noble, wise, and courageous versus bumbling idiots who must be constantly rescued by their wives and children? Men are presented as serial morons or as permanent suspects, latent predators, dangers that must be quarantined and restrained.

But here’s the question: When this litany of accusations came knocking at the doors of the church, did we reject those lies? Did we answer from the Word of God? Did we put forward Abraham, Moses, Joshua, David, Daniel, Paul, Peter, and Jesus Christ as the picture of masculinity? No. We did not.

Instead of discipling masculinity, we’ve tried to sanitize it. Which has led us to the impotent state the church is currently in. Boldness became an embarrassment. Authority became something to apologize for. Leadership was stripped of its holy danger and replaced with toothy-smiled mediocrity. None of it has helped us.

Why Men Left the Church

In such a time as this, is it any wonder men stopped coming to church? Why would a man enter a place embarrassed by him, suspicious of his godly instincts, hostile toward his desire for authority, and uninterested in giving him a mission worth living and a cause worth dying for?

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