Top 5 Reasons All Christian Men Should Have A Beard
Beards.
First they were a thing. Then they weren’t. And now, what?
With all the different denominations and doctrines during the history of Christendom and down until today, it seems like every church has a different answer on any given subject.
Finding a good, solid foundation involves more than just copying your local pastor, prophet or priest.
Here’s my Top Five Reasons All Christian Men Ought To Have A Beard:
- Jesus Had A Beard.
As Christians, Jesus should be our example in all things. Let’s face it, they didn’t give us WWJD bracelets as kids to remind What Johnny, Jeff or Jimmy Would Do.
Jesus made it quite clear that it’s not enough to take his name upon ourselves; we need to come unto him, follow him and do as he did and taught.
Now, despite all the artwork we have of Jesus being bearded, it’s true that we don’t have an actual photograph of him to verify it personally.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t know.
Besides the obvious conclusion that (as an Israelite man at least thirty years of age known as a Rabbi) he must have had a beard to be considered by the people a spiritual leader, we actually know from scripture that he did.
“I offered my back to smiters, my cheeks to those who plucked out the beard; I hid not my face from insult and spitting.” (Isaiah 50:6, Gileadi Translation)
Part of Jesus’ scourging at the hands of Rome involved not only the whipping and mockery but even the plucking out by hand of chunks of his beard.
And there’s actually a lot of much older precedent for that.
2. The Old Testament Agrees With the New
In the mouth of two or three witnesses shall every word be established. (2 Corinthians 13:1 KJV)
Even though Christ fulfilled the older covenant and Mosaic law for us, it would be downright foolish of us to ignore the 613 commandments God gave to the people of Israel as the letter of the law in their day.
At the very least, we ought to ask ourselves why God would command such a thing and how we might apply the same spirit of the law in our day.
In Leviticus chapters 19 and 21, God commands the both the Israelites and their priests not to “mar the corners of thy beards”.
Why would God command this? Men having a beard was so important to God in Moses’ day that they weren’t even to partially shave. It seems the only time it was really acceptable was during some intense mourning period.
As to reasons why… well, some commentaries have suggested that the purpose was to separate themselves from the heathen nations around them. God wanted them to be in the world, but not of the world.
Joseph is the only godly man in all scripture that we know clearly shaved in the custom of the Egyptians. And this physical difference alone was sufficient for his brothers to mistake him for an Egyptian when they came face-to-face with him. It wasn’t something they associated with a man of Israel.
Furthermore, in 2 Samuel chapter 10, King David’s army is defeated at the hands of Hanuk, and to humiliate and ridicule them, the victors shaved half the Israelites’ beards off.
Now, instead of just shaving off the other half to make it equal and return home defeated, David commanded his men to remain where they were for many months until their beards had regrown enough that they might return home without shame.
Do you hear that? A face shaven like a woman’s was just as intolerable and ridiculous to Israelite men as a half-shaven face was.
And there are several other OT passages in Jeremiah (41:5, 48:37) and Isaiah (7:20) in which the Lord’s judgment is likened to men having their beards shaven, and implying that it was humiliating.
God simply didn’t create men to look like women.
3. We Are Made In The Image of God
When Jesus Christ, the Word of God, was in the beginning with Him and creating the world and plants and animals, they made mankind, male and female, in God’s own image.
Without letting this article devolve into myriad philosophical speculations about the gender of God and why Elohim in Hebrew is a male-and-female plural and so on, it suffices me to logically conclude that if God is eternal in nature, and both men and women are made after God’s image, then the male-female gender dichotomy must be eternal also.
As we are intelligently designed, the thousands of inherent differences between the sexes are intentional and serve a purpose.
What purpose could beards serve from an evolutionary standpoint? Just how on earth would they have “evolved” as a result of natural selection? What, one guy grows some stubble on his chin or extra long sideburns and suddenly he’s a better provider and all the cave women want him?
Nonsense.
If evolution were remotely true, you’d expect the appearance of beards or lack thereof to be based on climate conditions, not gender, with both men and women in cold climates having the extra hair on their face and both not having them at all in more tropical climates.
Thus, the very fact that God gave beards to men and not women is not only one of a million proofs of creation, but reason enough to suppose God might want us to wear them.
To reinforce this fact, Paul mentions several times that our bodies are sacred, they are temples of God, that the kingdom of God is within us, that the Holy Spirit dwells within us, and that we ought to be conscious not to defile our bodies/temples.
If God intends for man to have a beard, as all of the scriptural evidence seems to indicate, wouldn’t shaving it off all the time constitute a form of defilement?
If God created men and women to look physically different, shouldn’t we embrace those differences, not attempt to diminish them?
4. The Early Christian Fathers Knew It Too
This is the part where some of you hear the word “history” and tune out. Don’t. I’ll be brief.
For literally hundreds and hundreds of years of early Christendom, before the near-total usurping of Christianity by the Roman Empire, a whole bunch of notable church fathers and Christian philosophers spoke about the importance of men having beards as God designed them.
To name just a few, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine all spoke about men being adorned by God like the lions, courageous and strong, or the importance of beards in rightly distinguishing mature men from boys, denoting beards as a sign of community and church leadership.
Years later, many notable Christian Reformers such as William Tyndale, John Knox and Charles Spurgeon wore beards to show outward protest against the Roman clergy, and condemned Catholic priests as heathen for (among many other things) the shaving of their faces.
Given the sheer amount of practical distortion of scripture that occurred during the Roman Church’s occupation of Christendom, also known as the Dark Ages, let us reasonably conclude that their lone example among all Christendom to the contrary of the topic at hand is no indication of God’s will on the matter.
5. We’re In A Spiritual War Right Now
C S Lewis’ Screwtape Letters are a fictional back-and-forth between a senior demon instructing his junior companion how to trick mankind into sin. One of the many points he makes is this:
“Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females–and there is more in that than you might suppose.”
In this fictional narrative, we see a truth so poignant and relevant in today’s world, that it bears focus and emphasis.
The devil always inverts what is natural to God’s creation.
In the Revelation of John, we are told that in the last days, Satan will deceive the whole world.
We don’t need to get into all the ways we are seeing the fulfilment of this scripture right now, because it should be obvious to all of us. It seems like every day there’s one more way the world is calling good evil, and evil good.
The pattern is sufficient for us to use as a guide. Deception and subversion is everywhere, and there’s probably something each of us are still deceived about.
In the last hundred or so years, we’ve seen the feminist movement push women to leave their natural nurturing role to compete with men in the workforce. In the same time, we’ve seen men become so emasculated and weak that testosterone levels are now half of what they were 50 years ago.
The result of these trends has been a destruction of the family, marriage and the very concept of gender itself.
And it hasn’t helped women in the slightest. Many single working women realize far too late (in their late thirties early forties) that this wasn’t what they wanted out of life at all.
Obviously I’m not speaking for women here, but I’ve seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Christian women tricked by a corrupt tax system and corporate media programming to believe that what they wanted most in life during their peak childbearing years was to focus on some office career and completely neglect the idea of marriage and children until 98% of their eggs are all gone and dried up, and then regret it horribly the rest of their life.
Women are designed by God to love babies and small children, and want to nurture their families. That is a gender distinction they should embrace.
Men are designed by God to protect, provide for and preside over their women and children. And that is something we need to embrace.
The scriptures are clear on this. Paul laid it all out for the Corinthians; God leads Christ, Christ leads man, man leads woman, woman leads child, and then the innocence and joy of children edifies God. It’s a natural cycle.
It is the God-given responsibility of men to lead their families, communities and nations by following Christ.
In this upside-down world we live in, we have all these female monarchs and leaders of nations, trying to mollycoddle the people with socialism, and no real man can actually respect them as a leader, because men are not designed by God to be led by women.
God designed men to lead, and God gave men beards as a simple, recognizable physical sign of leadership and maturity. Beards separate men from women. Beards separate men from boys.
Now, the Holy Spirit may come upon you for whatever reason and prompt you to be clean-shaven for a specific purpose or period of time, like a period of mourning mentioned in the scriptures.
But that certainly shouldn’t be the rule for your life.
And any Christian man or leader who professes to tell you that God wants you to shave your face like a woman is probably a false prophet.
