Gladiator, Braveheart, 300: quintessential man movies.

Maximus, Wallace, Leonidas: guys who fought for justice, with honor, to the death.

So why do we like these movies when the good guy dies in the end? Guy movies that make us …cry? Ok, maybe it was just allergies but you get the idea.

Let’s face it men we like these guys because they are SERIOUSLY dangerous individuals and somewhere, perhaps buried so deep we’ve almost forgotten it, we know we were made to be dangerous too. We’d love to be one of the good guys fighting in a just cause against tough odds surrounded by our buddies, kickin’ BUTT!

Now ladies don’t leave just yet. This isn’t a testosterone filled rant. First of all because this is good information that can help you understand your man and second because it will be your turn in part 2. The question you ought to be asking is WHY? Why do men want to be dangerous?

The answer is simple: We were created to be.

Go back and think through the story of creation as it plays out in the book of Genesis. We’re told throughout the Bible that God’s reflection can be seen in His creation. That ALL creation displays his majesty, wonder, and creativity and  at the pinnacle of the creation story God, as the creme de la creme, He creates man and woman “in His own image”.

Allow me to suggest a way of understanding that phrase, “in His image”, that may not have occurred to you. What if by “in His image”, the scripture is referring to men and women as being reflections or representation of the characteristics of the creator rather than some vague reference to physical form? In this thinking through this passage I have really come to believe that was we’re being told here is that man is a representation of God’s Justice while woman is a picture of God’s Grace.

I know that is quite a leap in such a short paragraph but hang with the idea for a second. Take a deep breath, look around a little, consider it from a couple of sides. You’ll laugh when you realize that even the secular world gets it! Men are from where? Mars (god of war) and Women? They’re from Venus ( goddess of beauty and love).

Put Justice and Grace side by side and you get an interesting tension that we as humans understand intellectually but find ourselves constantly at odds with how it ought to play out. Sometimes we lean more heavily in one direction or the other but the opposite attraction always pulls us back towards center. Funny how THAT is even a picture of marriage!

But hang on, there was another character there in the serenity of the garden. Let’s call him the enemy. If you read his part of the dialogue with Eve you learn his M.O. He takes the truth and twists it. That is a constant theme whenever we encounter this dude in the Bible.

So knowing that, how might we see that play out in terms of how were supposed to function as men?

If we men are truly representations of God’s Justice we’re created to be dangerous, God’s justice is a terrible and mighty thing if you find yourself on the wrong side of it facing His wrath. Knowing that the enemy can’t deny our nature, he can only manage to twist the truth what does he do faced with dangerous men? He tempts and tricks us into being dangerous in the wrong ways, at the wrong times, and in the wrong places.

Look at many of the “problems” that plague men in this light:

• Physical abuse: danger to their wives or kids
• Substance abuse: danger to themselves
• Sexual predation: danger to their victims
• Sexual addiction: fantasy danger
• Anger: unfocused danger

Adam’s failure in the Garden was not necessarily that he ate the apple but rather that he failed to be dangerous at precisely the time Eve needed him to step to the plate and be the dangerous guy he was created to be.

Now, I don’t want to give away the ending just yet. Fortunately this theme is creeping into a lot of the literature on what it means to be a man in a society that constantly tells men to be less dangerous in some good ways. But I will ask this:

If men are CREATED to be dangerous what are the right times, ways, and places to do what we were created to do?