In Judges 8:12, during the aftermath of his crushing victory over the Midianites, the Israelite leader Gideon captures two Midianite kings, Zebah and Zalmunna.  Because they played hardball in those days, in v. 20, Gideon commands his son, Jether, to execute the captives.  Jether, who is still young, shrinks back from the unpleasant task.

In response, the kings taunt Gideon.  According to v. 21, they tell him, “Strike us down yourself, for a man is judged by his strength.”  Gideon promptly complies, which seems like a counterproductive outcome for Zebah and Zalmunna.

Nonetheless, strength has been an essential attribute of masculinity ever since God created them male and female.  Though there are exceptions, men generally are the ones with the big muscles.  It changes the way we think and think of ourselves.

Though nobody ever would have confused me with Charles Atlas, I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to keep in shape.  I’ve worked out regularly for years, even taking my exercise regimen on the road when I travel.  It allowed me to do things that I valued:  lifting heavy things for my wife, helping brethren move, and being able to throw my body into any task without fear of failing or getting hurt.  Being strong and capable made me feel good.

Those days end for every man.  For me, they ended early.  I found myself unable to gain strength and muscle without halfway killing myself to get there.  On the other hand, losing strength became very easy.  Spend a week sitting on the couch, and boom!  98-pound weakling. 

I figured it was middle age.  It wasn’t.  It was ALS.

Since my diagnosis, my decline has continued.  I can stroll, but I can no longer walk briskly, much less jog or run.  I’ve lost most of my pinch strength in both hands.  I used to open stuck jars for Lauren; now she must open food wrappers for me.  All the body-weight exercises I used to perform regularly are out of reach.  Barring a miracle, whether medical or otherwise, my condition will worsen until I become a quadriplegic and eventually die.

There have been many lessons in this.  First, it showed me how strength has shaped my worldview, even in matters not involving physical strength.  If you are strong enough to rely on direct action and bulling your way through, that will affect the way you solve every problem.  I spent 40 years of my life doing that without realizing why.

Conversely, my recent experiences have taught me greater sympathy for women.  I simply didn’t understand what it was like to belong to “the weaker sex”.  If you can’t rely on your own strength, if you are surrounded by people who are stronger than you are, and if you often have to ask for help, all that will shape the way you behave too.  It will make you less direct, more cautious, and more concerned with maintaining relationships. 

Being forced into a position of weakness is hard, especially if you are used to a position of strength.  I hate, hate, hate having to ask Lauren for help when I’m getting dressed Sunday mornings.  Buttoning a shirt used to be a trivial matter; now it is an exercise in hand-cramping agony.  Any rational person would get somebody whose fingers still work right to do it, but if I have time, I will fight with those buttons for 20 minutes or more.  My pinch strength has left me, but I apparently am determined to cling to my self-reliance.

Finally, of course, this experience has transformed the way I see my relationship with God.  It is evident to me now that I’ve spent my preaching career not understanding 2 Corinthians 12:1-10.  I knew what all the words meant and thought I understood it, but I didn’t get it.  Yeah, yeah, thorn in the flesh.  That’s like when your knee hurts, right?

Not exactly.  It was a messenger of Satan.  It tormented Paul.  I believe that when Paul says he pleaded with the Lord three times to remove it, that doesn’t mean one-two-three prayers.  It means praying about a subject so comprehensively that your prayer is complete in the same way that the triune God is complete.  Paul prayed thus; Jesus said no.

Therefore, when Paul says in v. 9 that he intends to boast in his weaknesses, that’s not a well-OK-then-moving-on.  It represents the wrenching acknowledgement that strength that mattered desperately to him is never going to be restored to him, and he is going to have to spend the rest of his life without it.  Indeed, more subtly, the weakness that is the subject of Paul’s boasting is not only the thorn in the flesh.  It is the pride that only could be defeated by the application of the thorn.

I’ve spent a lot of time wondering why God allowed me to have ALS.  I know there’s a reason.  Christ doesn’t keep us from suffering, but He does make our suffering meaningful if we seek Him through it.  Is it because my ALS is supposed to teach me to be kinder and more compassionate to others?  Is it because I’m supposed to use my writing about it to enlighten and inspire?

Those things may be true, but I must at least entertain the possibility that I needed to develop ALS for my own sake.  When I was strong, it was awfully easy to trust in my own strength, not merely for the lifting of heavy objects but for making my way through life.  ALS has rubbed my nose in the foolishness of such a delusion.  It’s hard to be self-reliant when you can’t button your own shirt. 

I must learn to boast in my own weaknesses too.  I must learn to embrace them and the emptiness they leave in my life.  As with Paul, only then can my weakness be filled with the strength of God.

One of the longest modesty texts in the Bible never mentions the word once.  It appears in Colossians 3:12-17, a passage about the virtues in which Christians should clothe themselves.  They are the things that others should see when they look at us.

To many Christians today, this application might seem contrived.  They have been trained to think of modesty as women dressing so as not to excite the lust of men.  While I appreciate it when my sisters in Christ choose to dress considerately, we must recognize that this focus on revealing clothing has little to do with the Biblical witness about either modesty or lust. 

In the New Testament, immodest dress is that which flaunts one’s wealth, not one’s physique, and the law of Christ uniformly places the responsibility for lust on the one doing the lusting, not its object.  Instead, the modesty contexts, 1 Timothy 2:9-10 and 1 Peter 3:1-4, are concerned with a different problem—the splendor of a woman’s outward adornments eclipsing the splendor of her holiness.  

This is really a focus issue.  The first-century sister who bought a slave to style her hair elaborately was spending her time and money on the wrong things.  Her hair revealed her wealth and status, but it concealed her good works and discipleship.  People who looked at her saw riches, not Christ.

Today, we too must beware of Christ-concealing adornments.  Sometimes these are physical, like the dress of the daughters of Zion in Isaiah 3:16-26.  Perhaps more commonly, they are spiritual.  It is no coincidence that in Colossians 3:10, Paul tells us to “put off” the vices of the old self.  If flashy jewelry is a distraction from Christ in us, how much more are sexual immorality, greed, and malice!  They focus attention on the old self that we were supposed to have put to death.  They are immodest.

By contrast, the godly change of clothes (“put on”) in 3:12-17 puts the emphasis on Him, not us.  Selfish, worldly people aren’t compassionate, forgiving, or loving.  They don’t seek the peace of Christ, sing the word of Christ, or act under the authority of Christ.  In fact, people only do these things when they are determined to glorify Him. 

This is not a change that we can make by blowing thousands of dollars on a new wardrobe.  Instead, it is an attitude that we put on patiently, humbly, every day.  Nobody is going to stare at us or build a statue of us because of these things, but they might be moved to contemplate our Master.  We have modestly deflected the glory from us to Him.

It is good for us not to dress in a way that might put a stumbling block before another.  It is better for us to remember that the most important adornments of the disciple can’t be seen in a mirror.  A Christian in a burqa who is bitter and spiteful is still showing too much of the wrong things.  By contrast, when we resolve to exalt Christ in every area of our lives, comparatively unimportant matters like our clothing will sort themselves out.

“Jesus, Name Above All Names” to the contrary, Christ is not the hope of glory.  Instead, according to Colossians 1:27, Christ in us is the hope of glory.  If Christ dwells in us, ours is the hope of dwelling eternally with Him.  In Colossians 2:6, Paul says that this involves receiving Him as Lord and continuing to walk in Him.

However, he spends the next context of Colossians warning us against attempts to add anything to this Christ-centric formula.  He highlights two related manifestations of this problem.  The first is submitting to the judgment of those who want to enforce regulations concerning food and drink, festivals, new moons, and Sabbaths (2:16).  The second is deferring to those who delight in asceticism, the worship of angels, and visions (2:18).

In the former, especially given Paul’s earlier discussion of circumcision, we have no trouble recognizing Judaizing false teachers.  They taught that believing, baptized Gentiles also had to submit to the ordinances of the Law of Moses, especially circumcision.  The grace of Christ and walking in Christ aren’t enough.  You need Christ plus.

This same impulse appears today in those who want to bind things outside the law of Christ on other Christians.  Often, these brethren are acting with good intentions.  They’ve come to their own conclusions about the application of certain passages (as indeed we all must), they see other Christians acting contrary to those conclusions, and they speak up because they genuinely can’t tell the difference between what they’ve concluded and “thus says the Lord”. 

From this, there are two lessons that we should draw.  First, whenever anyone tells us to do anything in the name of Christ, we always are right to ask, “Where is it written?”  The most “conservative” approach does not deserve deference unless it also is the most Scripturally founded. 

Second, we must beware of this tendency in ourselves.  It’s fine to have views about godly living.  It’s even fine to share them with others.  However, we must take care to distinguish between what we think and what God has said.  Seating ourselves in the chair of Moses is a great way to shut down disagreement, but it’s hazardous to our spiritual health and the health of others.

Similarly, in the angel-worshiping ascetics of v. 18, we find those whose beliefs would produce Gnosticism in another several decades.  The name “Gnostic” itself came from the Greek verb ginōskō, “to know”.  The Gnostics were self-described knowers.  They believed that they had spiritual insights that ordinary Christians didn’t.

Most brethren don’t have to be warned against spiritual know-it-alls, but we must be careful not to become one ourselves.  We must beware of the intellectual pride that accompanies staking out a maverick position based on our superior knowledge of the Scriptures.  Maybe we just “get it” and those clods in Sunday morning Bible class don’t, but we also should consider the possibility that the clods get it and we’re the ones whom the devil has tangled up.  Frankly, years of teaching auditorium classes have, as a rule, left me more impressed with the collective wisdom of God’s people than with the folks I’ve encountered who think they’re on a higher spiritual plane.

If we want to have the hope of glory, humility is vital.  If we truly are wise and understanding, that will reveal itself in deeper reverence for our Lord, deeper obedience to His will, and deeper subjection of ourselves.  We don’t need anything but Christ, and the more we try to add anything, the more we will lose what we need.

The King came lowly to His own;
His humbling was complete;
He did not claim an earthly throne
But knelt to wash our feet.

He did not send us into war
Nor shed our blood in strife,
But with His blood, He went before
And offered up His life.

He summons us to follow now;
He beckons from above,
And He’ll exalt us if we bow
In servanthood and love.

Many modern attacks on the reliability of the Bible depend on the stupidity of the people of the ancient world.  Everybody Knows, the argument goes, that we are much wiser than our ancestors.  They were foolish, credulous people who were easy to trick with pious frauds.  Thus, we should dismiss ancient testimony about the resurrection, the miracles of Jesus, etc., because the witnesses can’t be trusted.

However, this doesn’t reckon with what the Bible itself reveals about the people of Biblical times.  Certainly, there were foolish, credulous people who lived 2000 years ago.  The Samaritans who were deceived by Simon the sorcerer in Acts 8 come to mind here.  Before we sneer too much, though, we should remember that there are plenty of foolish, credulous people in our society too, many of whom are well educated!

Conversely, many ancients were predisposed to reject evidence of the supernatural in their own time.  According to Acts 23:8, the Jewish sect of the Sadducees taught that there was no resurrection, no angels, and no spirits.  They were no more likely to accept the risen Christ than we are to accept the claims of modern-day miracles that our Pentecostal neighbors make. 

We see this rationalistic bias at work in Matthew 28:11-15.  There, the chief priests bribe the guards at Jesus’ tomb to say that His disciples stole His body while they were sleeping.  There are significant holes in the story.  If the guards were sleeping, how do they know who took the body?  More seriously, if the disciples stole the body, why are they willing to suffer and die for a Messiah they know is a fraud?

However, Matthew regretfully reports that this tissue of lies, holes and all, was spread among the Jews until the day when he wrote his gospel.  This isn’t the behavior of people who jumped at any opportunity to believe wild stories.  It’s the behavior of people who would seize any plausible excuse not to believe them.

Nor was such skepticism limited to the Jews.  The resurrection seemed every bit as foolish to Gentiles as to the Sadducees.  Everybody knew that dead bodies didn’t get up and start wandering around again! 

This bias finds its voice in Festus’s outburst in Acts 26:24.  When Paul asserts for the first time that Jesus rose from the dead, the Roman governor can’t control himself.  He accuses Paul of having been driven mad by too much study.  What other explanation can there be when an obviously intelligent, educated man says something so ridiculous?

Despite all this, Acts 6:7 reports that many of the priests (who were Sadducees) obeyed the gospel.  In Philippians 4:22, Paul conveys greetings from the Christians in Caesar’s household, the cynical, cosmopolitan heart of the Roman Empire.  The gospel didn’t only find a home in people who would believe anything.  It also came to those who were won over in spite of themselves.  When people like that (Paul chief among them) proclaim that Christ arose, we should pay attention.