As we close out this Fatherhood Month series, we return to the Andrew Tate phenomenon that is impacting teen guys in our churches, with which we began this series. Tate is a former kickboxing champion-turned-social-media-influencer who has become so popular among young men for his views on masculinity that he has ten million followers on X. Tate’s message to our rising sons about marriage typifies the anti-family messages and policies coming out of Hollywood, progressive government leaders, the media, academia, and corporate America that are impacting our guys. University of VA Researcher, Brad Wilcox, describes Tate’s influence in his excellent book, Get Married. He writes:
“The biggest voice in the online manosphere today—with more than twelve billion views on TikTok alone—is no fan of marriage. Andrew Tate, former kick boxer, who has been described as the ‘king of toxic masculinity,’ has made it clear that he does not think much of our oldest social institution. ‘The problem is, there is zero advantage to marriage for a man,’ said Tate. ‘There is zero statistical advantage. If you use your mind, if you use your head instead of your heart, and you look at the advantages to getting married, there are absolutely none.’”
But the facts discovered in Wilcox’s research show that Tate is dead wrong. The facts show, for example, that:
- Both men and women who get and stay married accumulate much greater wealth than people who don’t marry.
- Married men and women with families report more meaningful lives compared with their single and childless peers.
- Couples who take a “we-before-me” approach to married life, for instance sharing joint checking accounts—are happier and less divorce-prone than couples who do not.
- Couples who form “family-first” marriages—with frequent date nights, family fun time and chores done with the kids—enjoy the happiest marriages.
This episode shows how my book, Men Helping Sons, is written to attract our sons to marriage by presenting the biblical worldview of its glorious design.
The Biblical worldview of civilization reveals God’s design for marriage to be the foundation of civilization. To begin with, God’s design of Adam and Eve to complete each other in the loving union of marriage is God’s fundamental purpose for creating humankind—that is, to bear the image of the Triune God. Furthermore, in Genesis, the institution of marriage is given before the institutions of the church or civil government. For this reason, it should not surprise us that marriage and the sexual union that are fundamental to it are under assault by God’s enemy. As protectors of our families, assisting them to take captive every thought making it obedient to the truth revealed in Christ (2 Cor 10:4-5), we must counter the anti-family cultural forces that undermine the glory of God’s design of marriage and the family. Here is a summary of chapter four of Men Helping Sons.
Chapter 4: God’s Creation Design of Marriage
Discuss: Both. As you consider what you’ve heard or know about marriage, why do you think God invented it? What do you think an ideal marriage would look like?
Note: Of course, marriage involves sex, a topic that is embarrassing and private. There are no questions in this section that ask you to reveal private matters. In fact, the leader, not the son is assigned to read all of the section, “The Bible’s High View of Sex.”
Four Biblical Purposes of Marriage
A. A fundamental purpose of the male-female love union in marriage is to reflect the image of God. God exists as the Trinity, the union of three persons who love one another, which is why John tells us that God is love. So, God creates an image of himself—the being called “man.” But that single being “man” exists as the union of two persons, male and female. Notice the way the use of the singular and plural for man parallels God as both singular and plural. Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness...’ So, God created man in his own imagine, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Each gender is designed with deficiencies that only their opposite-gendered spouse can meet. Thus, through the union of marriage, male and female complete what is lacking in the other and, in their union, bear the image of God.
Discuss: Both. Since God designed manhood and womanhood to be incomplete without the other gender, why don’t we celebrate this interdependence and value the other gender more?
B. A second purpose for marriage is revealed in Genesis 2:18, where marriage is designed by God as the remedy for the aloneness of Adam. The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him. Each part of the creation narrative closes with God’s statement: “And it was GOOD,” until the creation of man. After Adam is created, God says. “It is NOT GOOD that man should be alone. In naming the animals, Adam realizes that none can be a true partner to him. They cannot alleviate his loneliness. So, God creates woman to be his partner, soulmate, and lover.
God’s plan to eliminate loneliness is for marriage partners to pursue LOVING INTIMACY. Eve is created with a spirit, heart, and body which correspond to Adam’s (“bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”). Genesis 2:24-25 gives the familiar portrait of marriage; Therefore, a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. Notice this two-step description of marriage. It is first the joining of lives. The man leaves his father and mother and joins lives with his wife. They share their ideas (minds), their decisions (will), and their feelings (emotions). Then this joining of lives is celebrated by the joining of bodies in sex.
As a gesture symbolic of personal trust and surrender, it requires a setting or structure of perfect surrender in which to take place. It requires the security of the most perfect of reassurances and commitments in which two people enter, which is no other than the loving contract of marriage.
Discuss: Both. How does this paragraph compare to the way sex is portrayed in movies, TV shows, and social media?
So, marriage is the joining of both lives and bodies. But the text doesn’t end there. It continues, pointing to the objective that marriage is intended to achieve. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Marriage is the one safe arena where husband and wife are naked, body, soul, and spirit—laid bare and vulnerable to each other. Adam and Eve’s like natures, combined with their covenant pledge of unconditional love, makes safe the experience of baring their hearts and bodies to one another. It enables them to experience loving intimacy, i.e. oneness of spirit, oneness of heart, oneness of body that sex is designed to promote.
The Biblical design for loving intimacy in marriage requires the pursuit of BOTH oneness of soul and oneness of body. Joining bodies in sex apart from joining lives in marriage is wrong. But so is joining lives in marriage without joining bodies in sex. Biblically, body and soul belong together. Christians don’t just share the gospel, they feed the hungry. Unlike pagan philosophies like Gnosticism, Christianity has always upheld a high view of the physical body and therefore of sexual union.
C. A third purpose of marriage is to give us a foretaste of the joy we will experience when we are forever spiritually united in love to Christ our bridegroom. We, the church, are betrothed to Christ as his bride. The final return of Christ to receive us to himself is portrayed as the wedding of the lamb. The richest pleasures of sexual union are a foreshadow of the intense joy that will be ours when we are united to Christ, spiritually, forever. This astonishing truth is spelled out by Paul, For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife and the two will become one flesh. This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. The sexual union of marriage takes Paul’s mind to our spiritual union with Jesus.
Discuss: Leader. When you were growing up, how were you taught to view sex. Did this view rightly or wrongly reflect God’s design?
Discuss: Both. Do you think the average non-believer thinks of God as having a positive view of sex or a negative one?
D. The fourth purpose of marriage is to create a safe environment into which the next generation of God’s image bearers are born and nurtured. We read, And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.” The family is the most foundational institution on earth. God established it before the church or civil government. The family is the mechanism through which God planned for humanity to continue beyond Adam and Eve.
Headed by one man and one woman united to one another by the covenant of marriage, the family is the environment designed by God for the nurture of children. Only after entering into the covenant of marriage are the perfect conditions met for the creating of a child, conceived as a result of his mother and father’s passionate lovemaking to celebrate their covenant promise never to forsake the other. It is God’s perfect design of the greatest possible security for a child—a family in which both a mother and a father are present to care for him and are in love with each other.
Discuss: Both. God’s design does explain why it is tough raising kids as so many must, as a single parent. What have you observed about the difficulties for kids and parents if both parents aren’t present in the home?
The Bible’s High View of Sex
Here is a summary of the eight points that are read by the adult leader (with the supporting material and interactive questions missing):
A. It is a wonderful, God-designed attraction that drives adult males and females towards one-another. One author notes, Strong sexual feelings are common to all normal men. They are determined more by hormones than by evil desire. They are not sinful in themselves. Sex is designed to be the pleasurable, powerful glue that binds husband and wife together during the tumultuous process of overcoming their selfishness to merge their lives together. It provides the bonding power needed to build their marriage as the foundation of their home.
B. Sex is utter, vulnerable, nakedness—safe only when we expose our nakedness to one who has vowed in a public covenant never to reject us. We all sense the vulnerability of nakedness. We instinctively feel uneasy if we are naked in front of another. Such modesty is God’s way of saying “Total nakedness is not safe (even in romance) until each partner has vowed publicly to unconditionally love the other.”
C. Sex is the outer, physical joining of two bodies, which celebrates the inner joining of two hearts, souls, and lives in marriage. It is like celebrating the sacrament of Communion. We take the bread and drink into our bodies, physically partaking of the bread to celebrate the spiritual reality of being united to Christ. Similarly, in sex we physically partake of each other’s bodies to celebrate the spiritual reality of our hearts and lives being united to our spouse in love. As celebrating communion strengthens and renews our love relationship with Jesus, so sexual union strengthen and renews our love relationship with our spouse.
D. God loves the lovemaking of husband and wife. God not only created sex for our pleasure, but he also URGES us to drink deeply of it! Dennis and Barbara Rainey write, In the Song of Solomon, God enters the bridal chamber, where the newlyweds lay entwined in each other’s arms. He raises his hand over them and blesses them. His benediction urges them to feast on the joy of their sexual union. “EAT FRIENDS: DRINK AND IMBIBE DEEPLY, O LOVERS.”
E. Married couples are urged by God to be drunk with sexual love for each other. God tells us that the best defense when it comes to married men staying faithful to their wives is a great offense. “May your fountain be blessed, and may you rejoice in the wife of your youth. A loving doe, a graceful deer—may her breasts satisfy you always. May you ever be intoxicated with her love.”
F. The male sex drive is God’s good gift to us. A man naturally desires release regularly, driving a husband to his wife whose arms and body surround him with the love and nurture he needs more than his independent nature likes to admit. Two female writers try to explain the male sex drive to fellow wives this way: “A man has seventeen sexual glands, which is stored in an inner sack in the testes. When the sack fills up, his testes tell his brain, ‘Do something quick before I explode.’ A man’s need for sex is not all in his mind; his sexual command center demands release from the accumulated buildup.”
G. Premarital sex, called fornication was a capital offense in Israel. God’s law is given to protect us from harm. He wouldn’t attach such severe sanctions to sex outside of marriage unless he knew some things that we don’t know about how harmful it is. The joining of the most intimate parts of us to another’s most intimate parts is like glueing two pieces of paper together. But when sex isn’t connected to the permanence of marriage, when the casual partner moves on, it is like trying to separate those two pieces of paper. It can’t be done without tearing both partner’s souls. Sex cannot be emptied of its profound reach into our inner selves. We all know that sexual assault is much more traumatic than physical assault. Our bodies heal from physical assault: but the soul of a woman who is raped may never heal because sex isn’t just physical. We all know that. It touches the deepest inner parts of us.
H. Love for Jesus calls us to put our bodies on the altar as a living sacrifice. After devoting eleven chapters to helping the Romans understand God’s gracious plan of redemption through the death of his Son to atone for our sins, in Chapter 12:1 Paul tells us what the only logical response to such love can be. With eyes wide open to the mercies of God, I beg you, my brothers, as an act of intelligent worship, to give him your bodies, as a living sacrifice, consecrated to him and acceptable by him (J.B. Phillips). Saving sex for marriage is not the result of a low, prudish view of sex, but a high one. It is true that premarital chastity is enormously beneficial to the health of our future marriage. But for the Christ follower, what is even more important is that it honors Jesus.
Men, here are three ways you could help men and high school guys study this booklet together:
- Ask your men’s ministry to consider studying Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood at its monthly men’s breakfasts (from September to January), to which your high school guys are invited. Each of the five chapters would be discussed after breakfast in a group of 5 or 6 guys composed of a mix of men and high school guys, with one of the men leading the discussion.
- Give it to the father of a high school guy.
- Give it to a youth pastor to study with his high school guys
Let me close by asking, “How might a Christian high school guy be impacted by these words, which close out Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood?”
DARE GREATLY to Show the World Manhood That Is Being Redeemed by Jesus
You have now seen the high bar of biblical manhood. Don’t let it overwhelm you; let it challenge you. There may have never been a time when our nation more needed the rising generation of Christian men to show it Christ’s power to redeem masculinity—restoring manhood to God’s intended design. But, have no illusions. Should you accept the challenge to show the world manhood that is being redeemed by Jesus in a fresh way after completing this study, you will be in for the fight of your life. To sacrificially love others, unselfishly serve others, selflessly protect others while exhaustingly seeking to win their hearts will require you to struggle, daily, to die to yourself. Such a lifelong battle with deeply embedded selfishness is certain to bring many defeats.
Remember, however, your call to display manhood that is being redeemed by Jesus does not require perfection. But it does require leaving the sidelines and getting into fight! As Teddy Roosevelt said so well,
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with the timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Will you tell Jesus you are stepping whole-heartedly into the arena to fight to show the world manhood being redeemed by Him?
For Further Prayerful Thought:
- Which of the four purposes of marriage most stood out to you. Why does it make sense that God’s design for conceiving a child is a husband and wife united in the covenant of marriage who have promised to love each other, “till death us do part?”
- What stood out most to you in the Bible’s High View of Sex? Which of these truths do you wish you knew earlier?
- How do you think this material on marriage and sex might change a high school guy’s view of God and sex?
