Are You a Gentle Man?
Gentleness requires wisdom because there are times when we should not be gentle. We need God’s wisdom to know when to be gentle and to what degree. Gentleness is not simply niceness or mildness. I’m guessing that most English speakers today misunderstand gentleness as essentially being nice—that is, to be pleasant and agreeable like Mr. Rogers.
Everybody agrees that it is virtuous for a man to be gentle. Gentleness is a virtue that all Christians should value and grow in:
- Jesus taught, “Blessed are the meek [NASB: gentle], for they will inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5).1
- Gentleness is part of the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23).
- God exhorts us to “walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Ephesians 4:1–2).
- God commands us, “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness [NASB, NIV, CSB, NET, NLT: gentleness], and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive” (Colossians 3:12–13).
- The man of God must pursue gentleness (1 Timothy 6:11).
- Peter tells wives that “a gentle and quiet spirit” is “very precious” in God’s sight (1 Peter 3:4).
- God commands, “Let your reasonableness [ESV note, NIV, NET: gentleness; CSB: graciousness] be known to everyone” (Philippians 4:5).
God commands us to be gentle. But what exactly does it mean to be gentle? And what does it mean for a man to be gentle? Is a gentleman a soft man?
It’s crucial that we define gentleness according to the Bible and not according to modern cultural sensitivities. Is it sinful for a man to be aggressive? What exactly does the Bible say about gentleness?2
What Words in the Bible Refer to Gentleness?
In order to discover what the Bible says about gentleness, a word study on gentleness is a good place to start.3 It’s challenging to study the concept of gentleness because there’s not just one Hebrew word and one Greek word that our English translations render as gentle. There is a cluster of at least thirteen words—five Hebrew and eight Greek.
I did an exhaustive word study, and I’ll spare you all the details. The gist is that I studied every passage that uses a word for gentleness, and as I reflected on the various passages, I attempted to synthesize them. I unfold that synthesis in the rest of this article.4
What Is Gentleness Like and Not Like?
Ten Illustrations
As I reflected on the various Bible passages in which the word or concept of gentleness appears, I discovered the range of meanings and determined what these words for gentleness most likely mean in key passages. What most helped me define the word was meditating on ten pictures that illustrate gentleness. In these illustrations, the Bible compares and contrasts gentleness. In other words, God tells us what gentleness is like and what gentleness is not like:
- Isaiah 8:6 says, “The waters of Shiloah … flow gently” or “slowly” (CSB). Running water can flow gently or violently. Gentleness is like a slowly flowing stream. Gentleness is not like dangerously surging rapids.
- The word of the Lord came to Elijah, “‘Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.’ And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper (KJV: a still small voice; NASB: a gentle blowing; LSB, NIV, NLT: a gentle whisper; CSB, NET: a soft whisper)” (1 Kings 19:11–12). Gentleness is like a soft whisper. Gentleness is not like a great and strong wind or an earthquake or a fire.
- King David ordered his military commanders Joab and Abishai and Ittai, “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (2 Samuel 18:5). This illustrates the qualifications for an elder in 1 Timothy 3:3: “not violent (NASB, CSB: not a bully) but gentle.” Violence is intentionally using physical force to hurt, damage, or kill. A bully tries to harm or intimidate people he thinks are vulnerable. Gentleness is like soldiers dealing mercifully with an enemy. Gentleness is not like violence.
- “Thus says the Lord GOD: ‘I myself will take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and will set it out. I will break off from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one, and I myself will plant it on a high and lofty mountain” (Ezekiel 17:22). The word for gentle here is tender with reference to a twig. It seems that the concept of gentleness here is how God treats a tender twig—that is, gentleness is like carefully handling a tender twig and nurturing it so that it can flourish. Gentleness is not like breaking a twig.
- “A soft (NLT: gentle) answer turns away wrath, / but a harsh word stirs up anger” (Proverbs 15:1). Gentleness is like speaking in a peaceful way that reduces the intensity. When someone is angry, you can respond with speech that de-escalates, calms, and subdues. In contrast, gentleness is not like speaking harshly. When someone is angry, you can respond in a harsh way that intensifies someone’s anger into a flaring temper.
- “With patience a ruler may be persuaded, / and a soft (NASB, NIV, CSB: gentle) tongue will break a bone” (Proverbs 25:15).5 The tongue is one of the softest parts of your body, and bone is the hardest. In this proverb, “tongue” symbolizes your speech, and “a bone” symbolizes an authority who seems immovable. Gentle or soft speech can persuade someone who stiffly opposes you. Gentleness is like speaking softly and patiently with the result that you disarm and persuade. Gentleness is not like speaking harshly.
- When Paul appears before Felix at Caesarea, he politely requests, “To detain you no further, I beg you in your kindness to hear us briefly” (Acts 24:4). Gentleness is like a disposition that is kind, generous, and gracious. Gentleness is not like a disposition that is unkind, ungenerous, and ungracious.
- “Now when the south wind blew gently [NLT: When a light wind began blowing], supposing that they had obtained their purpose, they weighed anchor and sailed along Crete, close to the shore. But soon a tempestuous wind [NASB: a violent wind; NIV: a wind of hurricane force; NET: a hurricane-force wind; CSB: a fierce wind; NLT: a wind of typhoon strength], called the northeaster, struck down from the land” (Acts 27:13–14). “Blew gently” translates a Greek word that contrasts with a tempestuous wind. Gentleness is like a light breeze that is refreshing, desirable, pleasant, and helpful. Gentleness is not like a hurricane-force wind.
- “Servants [CSB: Household slaves], be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle [NIV: considerate] but also to the unjust [NIV: those who are harsh]” (1 Peter 2:18). Gentleness is like a good and considerate master. Gentleness is not like an unjustly harsh master.
- Jesus exhorts, “Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls” (Matthew 11:29). Paul appeals to Jesus’s gentleness: “I, Paul, myself entreat you, by the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:1). Jesus embodied gentleness in his triumphal entry: “Behold, your king is coming to you, / humble [NIV: gentle; NET: unassuming], and mounted on a donkey, / on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden” (Matthew 21:5). Gentleness is intertwined with humility. Gentleness is like Jesus. Gentleness is not like people who are arrogant, hardened, and brash.
Here are all ten contrasts in a table.
So How Should We Define Gentleness?
Here’s my attempt to define gentleness:
Gentleness is the virtue of humbly and wisely showing tender kindness to someone.6
Let’s unpack that definition in four parts:
- Gentleness is a virtue—that is, a morally good quality in a person.7 A Christian should be growing in this virtue (2 Peter 1:8).
- You express the virtue of gentleness when you treat a person with tender kindness. Kindness is “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate” (New Oxford American Dictionary). But expressing kindness alone is not gentleness. You must express that kindness tenderly—that is, with compassion or sympathy.
So what might it look like for a father to be gentle toward his children? Fathers, you should honor the Lord and serve your children by responding gently when they are hurting, sick, scared, confused, squabbling, obnoxious, inconveniencing you, or irritating you. This is obviously easier said than done. We need God’s grace to be gentlemen!
- Gentleness requires both strength and humility. One of the main Greek words for gentleness (πραΰτης, praütēs) refers to not being overly impressed by a sense of your self-importance. A gentle person is not so insecure that he needs to show off his full strength. A gentle person has the strength to be forceful and harsh—like surging rapids or a hurricane-force wind. But a gentle person humbly harnesses that strength for the good of others—like a slowly flowing stream or a light breeze.8
Contrast two scenarios: (1) An infant is incessantly crying, and an irritated father becomes irrationally angry and violently shakes the baby. That is not gentleness. (2) An infant is crying after pinching her finger, and a patient father securely holds and comforts the baby. That is gentleness. As David Mathis explains,
Gentleness is not the absence of strength but the addition of virtue to strength. … Gentleness is often used as a positive spin for weakness. But gentleness in the Bible is emphatically not a lack of strength; it’s the godly exercise of power. Gentleness does not signal a lack of ability but the added ability to steward one’s strength so that it serves good, life-giving ends rather than harmful ends. …
We want gentle leaders, not weak ones. We want leaders with strength and power, not to use against us to our harm, but to wield on our behalf for our good to help us. This is what makes the image of a shepherd so fitting in both the Old and New Testaments. Sheep are manifestly weak and vulnerable. They need strong shepherds, not weak ones. They need shepherds who are “good and gentle” and will use their power to help the sheep, not use and abuse them.9
- Gentleness requires wisdom. That’s why I include the word wisely in the definition: “Gentleness is the virtue of humbly and wisely showing tender kindness to someone.”
Wisdom is skill or ability. Here are five examples:10
- Joseph is wise in that he can skillfully govern Egypt (Genesis 41:33).
- Bezalel is wise in that he is skillful at craftmanship and artistic designs (Exodus 31:2–5).
- Hiram is wise in that he can skillfully make any work in bronze (1 Kings 7:13–14).
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The Story of COVID Cries Out for Common Sense
We’ve seen through the charlatans like Fauci, claiming that they are the experts, and we are not. In fact, we have what they fear most: plain, honest, and straightforward common sense. We are individuals with our own capable minds, and we will continue to question and debate and draw our own conclusions.
When the pandemic struck, I was living in Luxor, Egypt. I had started the first boxing club for girls on the West Bank and had hoped to start a writing and art program connecting kids in Luxor with kids in Los Angeles. Then this mysterious illness called COVID-19 appeared and the programs fizzled out.
Word traveled fast through the villages. The illness had been identified on a cruise ship that had docked in Luxor. Authorities made a few half-hearted rules, but nobody paid attention.
Life in Luxor went on as normal. Masks? Only women covered their faces! Social distancing? An impossibility when families lived so close together. After a few days of uncertainty, I went back to my daily routine of meeting friends at a favorite arts café, shopping for food, riding my bike along the Nile and to the Valley of the Kings.
The tourists quickly fled back home to lock themselves inside. From afar, I watched as the Western world fell victim to hysteria and fear.
I’d been raised by God-fearing parents to have a healthy skepticism of the media and government. But nothing prepared me for the lies and manipulations that became the story of COVID.
Stories are the most powerful force we have, either to solidify beliefs or to change them. People quickly invested in the official COVID narrative, trusting Anthony Fauci’s assertions that only through mindless submission to the rituals of obsessive cleanliness, masking, and lockdowns would people be saved from illness and death. Even when evidence surfaced to the contrary, people still clung to their newfound faith.
From my vantage in Luxor, I was able to see the big picture without being engulfed in it. I noticed how every story popping into my newsfeed parroted state propaganda. In the 1980s, I’d lived in Yugoslavia under communism and the coordinated, almost hypnotic repetitiveness of the media was beginning to look eerily familiar.
Social media descended into a dark and cruel place policed by “fact-checkers” and social justice warriors. Those who dared to question the official narrative were labeled “grandma killers” and in some cases disowned by family and friends. Doctors and scientists who bravely stood up against the lies were demonized and their careers were ruined.
The message was clear. Expressing alternative viewpoints was selfish and irresponsible, endangering not only your life but the lives of the “collective whole.” State-sanctioned “experts” knew what was best for you. Leave the thinking to them.
By late June 2020, I had managed to get out of Egypt under challenging circumstances (a whole other story) and back to Los Angeles. I started researching and writing about what was going on.
When Fauci admitted with all the arrogance of a self-identifying demigod that he had lied to the public about masks, complaining in the same breath how “antiscience” the doubters are who “don’t believe authority,” I thought surely people would object.Related Posts:
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The Uniting Together of Heaven and Earth
Christ in His humanity could not bear the weight of all the transgressions of the world because the finite cannot handle the infinite. If against God and God alone have we sinned, and if one break of the law is as if we broke the whole of the commandments then our Lord needed to atone for an infinite infinite amount of demerits. That’s why again to fulfill the proper works Jesus had to be first of all born of a virgin, that is without the stain of Adam’s unrighteousness, and of the Holy Spirit so that divinity could take on flesh and be the right sacrifice that we need to be saved from eternal death.
Today in our look at the Larger Catechism we will be spending time considering more about what it means that Jesus Christ is our Mediator. We’ve defined that word enough to be able now to dig deeper into why it matters and to see how it effects our daily walk and life. Some people like to look down on doctrine, saying things like “it’s a relationship, not a religion”. Yet, the problem with thoughts like that is when you utter it you are standing on the shoulders of men who spent a lot of time in concert with the Church in the blessed work of faith seeking understanding. There’s a bit of Paul’s concern at Corinth and Peter’s general worry to those he is writing to in his first epistle. Milk is good, but it’s not filling, it doesn’t make you stronger. There should be a desire to learn more and more of Jesus and His labors on our behalf. Can you get too deep? Sure, I’ll grant it’s possible in the sense of jumping into a pile of wires can entangle oneself, but unravelling them and finding out which cable is for which purpose has its own reward. As we get into the Q/A’s for this week read them, prayer over them, and let’s examine them in turn:
Q. 40. Why was it requisite that the Mediator should be God and man in one person?
A. It was requisite that the Mediator, who was to reconcile God and man, should Himself be both God and man, and this in one person, that the proper works of each nature might be accepted of God for us, and relied on by us, as the works of the whole person.
Q. 41. Why was our Mediator called Jesus?
A. Our Mediator was called Jesus, because He saves His people from their sins.
Q. 42. Why was our Mediator called Christ?
A. Our Mediator was called Christ, because He was anointed with the Holy Ghost above measure; and so set apart, and fully furnished with all authority and ability, to execute the offices of prophet, priest, and king of His church, in the estate both of His humiliation and exaltation.
In his commentary on these questions J.G. Vos helpfully explains why the Mediator had to be God and man in one person, he says:
Because the relation between the works of each of the two natures required that these two natures be united in one person. A divine Mediator could not experience suffering except through a human nature; a human Mediator could not endure the required suffering, except as sustained by a divine nature.
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Killing the Schoolmaster
Written by T. M. Suffield |
Sunday, September 3, 2023
Rancière wants to remove our ability to stand on the shoulders of others. I recall Anthony Thiselton drilling into me in his hermeneutics classes that we were pygmies on the shoulders of giants. Rancière would have us cut the giants off at the knees and then merrily dance into the sunset. As Christians we must instead confess that the tradition matters, the past matters, those who have gone before us show us the way.Some time last century Nietzsche killed God, or reported on our murder of the divine, anyway.
As the trends and forces which made him declare that God was dead accelerated we have systematically done the same to each authority figure we encountered, in diminishing scales of authority like repeatedly smashing Russian dolls, until they are all gone.
To have autonomy we have to not only kill God, but we must murder each authority figure that we find. After we subsume Nietzsche’s will to power it’s an inevitable climb up a hill of skulls. We become intellectual Oedipus’ who have to overturn the wisdom of the masters. We’ve stopped doing so actively long ago, instead we passively kill the wise daily.
This has allowed us to each enthrone ourselves as god of our demesne, and no god brooks rivals. So we separate one from another, each man an island, unmoored and solipsistically floating, lonely as a cloud.
Ok, so that’s overstated and overwrought—not least because reports of the Lord’s demise were greatly exaggerated, go and have a peek in the tomb—but what has happened in the last couple of centuries is a successive dethroning of God from every arena of public and private life. This is then followed, inevitably because vacuums must be filled, with a slow but inexorable enthroning of the self in each throne we find.
This is the backdrop, or part of it, that created the phenomenon we name (and inhabit) ‘expressive individualism.’ The problems with community that persist in our societies, well documented at this point, exist for all manner of structural reasons—and it can be difficult to tell cart from horse. However we arrived, we find ourselves in a place where we place community after our selves. I decry it and yet I do it, a product of the social imaginary in which I live and breath and have my being, it is difficult to not view the world through the prism of my ‘identity’ and sense of self.
Yet if we can break back into reality we might just discover a richer, wider, surprising world that wants to teach us stories of its and our maker. We might discover the world is much stranger and more delightful than we give it credit for, having explained away the mysteriousness and tied everything up in neat boxes. We’re wrong of course, but we need to begin to see the world again, to see the reality that everything we encounter participates in and points towards.
To see reality we will need teachers, and we’ve killed them all. Thank the Lord he’s the God of resurrection.
Not so long ago I worked at a different University where I was responsible for helping academics develop their pedagogy. This included evidence-based evaluations of whether new teaching methods ‘worked,’ coaching academics on their practice, and reading a lot of academic studies in pedagogic journals.
Once at a conference we were extolled the virtues of Jacques Rancière, a philosopher who was interested in ‘emancipatory pedagogy’ among other ideas.
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