Don’t Let Your Young Man Become an Un-man

The Danger of Our Own Unmaking

Today’s post is about how we can become our own worst enemy with the aid of persuasive dragons.

Yes, I said dragons.

I’m also going to attempt to show you another lens through which you may see the world.

But first… dragons.

There are dragons in the world and they don’t mind helping us along the broad path to self-destruction.

Information leaks from enemy communications have disclosed these chaos monsters find us crunchy and taste good with ketchup. Oh, we laugh to ease the tension. We may even try to tame and domesticate our dragons. Whether real or symbolic, dragons have represented a threat for centuries, yet there are direct threats that lurk closer to heart than we realize.

I’m mostly referring to the symbolic in this post but that doesn’t rule out the real thing.

Dragons and other forces “out there” will band together to inflict greater damage than they could on their own, but they’ll never be able to achieve the level of harm we can self-inflict. The cords of Poseidon don’t mind twisting into a single strong cord that is not easily broken. They don’t always remain separate as if they were flailing tentacles of the same giant squid.

(As a quick recall, when I’m talking about Fightin’ Poseidon, the three cords that must be fought are: natural forces (including human and elemental), spiritual forces, and ourselves. It’s been a while since I wrote that original post so don’t feel bad if you missed it or forgot it. You can click here to go back and read it if you like.)

These three cords can work together to form a serious existential threat, like an elder god waking from dreams in the depths of R’lyeh. Lest I sink any further into Lovecraftian horror to find cyclopean ruins in the depths of madness, let’s return to the surface.

We were talking about dragons.

I’ve come to see dragons in a new way, thanks to the Chaos Dragon podcast series from Bible Project. God has no rivals. No devil, no demon, no man, no beast, no dragon. Dragons do, however, rival creation when out of submission to the Lord. As rivals of creation, they can act as agents of decreation. Creation is an act of God. Decreation is not an act, but an UN-act. It’s a lack, not a presence, in the same way a shadow is an absence of light but does not exist of its own.

If this sounds too weird, please hang with me.

There are two forces at work in the world. Creation and decreation. There’s a pressure differential between the two that doesn’t allow a neutral “at rest” state. In each small corner of the world, we make daily decisions that contribute to the world being made or being unmade. We don’t exist apart from this drama. We take an active part in it by applying pressure against creation or decreation with our actions, beliefs, loves, relationships, service, worship, and overall ways we live our lives.

Here’s where it get crazy. This doesn’t merely have an effect on the world around us but also on the person within us. You’re not only fighting your own inner demons that whisper reminders of your past sins and emotional baggage every chance they get. You’re fighting for yourself. You, the unabstracted physical you who is reading this very sentence, is in a state of being made or unmade. I’m not talking about the natural toll of life in a fallen world that manifests in the way your health fails as your body betrays you, but your very humanity. Your very existence as an image of God hangs in the balance. John Owen knew what was up when he said, “Be killing sin, or sin will be killing you.”

This is hard. I’ll give you a chance to rub your temples for a second.

As we make small choices that seem inconsequential, we will either work to bring life or death into this world. As we work for creation, we image the Heavenly Father. Yahweh, the God of the Bible. If we work for decreation, tearing down His image in ourselves and losing our humanity to become beast-like, we begin to look much more like dragons. We become like Nebuchadnezzar and lose ourselves to live like a beast in the field. We surrender the gifts God has given us to sacrifice ourselves on the altar of base instincts. Yes the big sensual impulses that war within us but also our reactions to not getting what we want or indulgences that don’t seem like a big deal. Sin is not simply missing the mark but joining enemy forces in opposition to the creative work of God. No wonder R.C. Sproul said that sin is cosmic treason.

The question is this: will we be our own undoing? Will we, by our own affections and loves and actions and compromises, take part in our own decreation?

I am literally suggesting that we can become less than human the further we get from God. Think of the extreme ends of that spectrum from movies as an example, like Saruman, Hannibal Lecter or the Sawyer family. This flying space rock has no shortage of people who behave in ways that make it easy to believe they’ve become beasts or melded with dragons. There are agents of decreation operating at all different levels. You may be thinking of someone on the news, or maybe the news itself, but…. it gets worse.

They can be us. It all starts with small compromises. We may not be as far out as the previous examples, but you and I can both become agents of decreation in our families, churches, neighborhoods, workplaces, and internet circles as we work against the knowledge of the glory of the Lord covering the earth as water covers the sea (Habakkuk 2:14). In doing so, we become undone ourselves. Like Dr. Weston in Perelandra, we become the un-man.

Dragons can do us harm, but lies will harm more than claws, fangs, and fire breath.

Have the lies of dragons been tickling your itching ears? We will probably compromise and sell ourselves for far fewer trinkets than a hoard of glittering gold treasure.

Truly, truly, our highest danger comes from getting what our hearts desire and being unmade at our own hands.

The Task

So what do we do?

As fathers (and mothers, because there’s also a few of you reading this), control is not how we’re going to win this cosmic battle. This is a matter of first loves.

All of our actions are born out of what we believe.

If a chaos dragon has taken hold of our affections, our first step is to cast ourselves on the mercy of God in Jesus Christ like Eustace cast himself on the mercy of Aslan in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We need divine intervention to be undragoned because we cannot undragon ourselves with any amount of income, weight lifting, or Jordan Peterson talks.

Wait up, you may be saying. “I work very hard to leave a positive mark in this world. I try to create instead of decreate.” If you are that person, the Lord’s work is already a seed that’s been cast into the soil of your heart. Be encouraged! But also consider carefully what kind of soil your heart is, for Jesus told us that every seed will not be fruitful. (See Matthew 13:1-23, Luke 8:4-15, Mark 4:1-20)

If we’ve had the scales removed from our eyes and been remade into a new creation in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17), we must see what that means for the world.

By including this quote from Aquinas, I’m trying to sail us away from the rocks of a disconnected belief system. There are spiritual realities, but those beliefs manifest themselves in real life. If we believe that life is only spiritual, or if what we believe with our heads is separate from what we do with our bodies, then we’re in dragon danger. If we take the grace God has so mercifully poured out on us and say its realities are only spiritual but have no effect on our own nature or the world around us, then are we really creating anything? Now who’s living in abstraction.

This is the lens I want you to try and see through. I’m saying the task is to see how acts of spiritual creation in us will lead to outward acts of physical, relational, and natural creation from us. The seed will grow. The Kingdom of God is not of the decreating shadow systems of this world, but the Kingdom of God is spiritual and physical and growing in this world. Creation is on a trajectory that began and is not yet finished.

The negative is also true. If our actions of any size tilt in decreation, there will be physical manifestations from us that come from the spiritual treason against creation and Creator in us.

Seek and Sail

If you’ve made it this far, you’re very patient. Ok I confess. The nautical or fantasy imagery I resort to in many of the writings here is a bit indulgent but to the point of the task above, the goal is to take these Poseidon and dragon abstractions and make them a reality in our own homes.

That’s why you signed up for this newsletter to begin with, isn’t it? To build your home, to raise your sons, to make a difference in your family sphere of influence?

These are all tall orders. We can’t do it on our own. We also can’t live like only spiritual or only physical elements matter. We have to work to build a better tomorrow while also teaching our children skills to work toward building a better tomorrow. If we live as if only spiritual things matter, other dragons will decreate the world, the knowledge of the Lord will depart from places, and then there will be no spiritual hope there. Spiritual and natural go hand in hand, and they will each build off the other until the final dot of John’s Revelation is fulfilled. For those who aren’t hoping to be crushed beneath the mountains at that time, I suspect we will hear words that echo Aslan in my favorite Chronicle of Narnia, The Last Battle: “The term is over. The holiday has begun. The dream has ended: this is the morning.”

But before you act on all this excitement…

Before you do anything…

Pray to God.

Seek the Lord before you set sail.

Search and study the Scriptures, then pray them back to God before you even chart your course or take your heading or embark on the journey.

There’s a world to build, and we don’t want to become dragons while taking up a good thing. Self-deception is an unfortunate but unavoidable danger.

Our thing in our way in our timing.

That’s how we want it.

That’s where the slow descent into becoming an un-man starts. We become wise in our own eyes and climb up to a roof so we can survey all that’s before us. It’s tempting to proclaim our own strength and glory. If we do, it would be a mercy to notice our voices have become deep and raspy. Our backs will hunch until we’re on all fours eating the dust of the earth or grass in a field.

In seeking to become majestic dragons, we become beasts of burden, forsaking even the image of our Creator. We will have unmade ourselves. We will have successfully been our own undoing. The self will have bent in on the self until it is no more. This is how sin works. Once undone, future generations will have no one to propagate creation and truth. If we do not parent our sons with a balance of maturity in spiritual discipleship along with physical and relational skill and an optimistic eye towards the future, then they will fail to launch. They will be stuck in immaturity. They will leave our homes on a trajectory of becoming un-men, and we will unleash a seed of horror on the world as it blossoms with terrible, blasphemous fruit. The image of God will have become an image of the beast, successfully discipled in the decreating act of unmaking the world around him. Then we will look back and ask how we got to the place we’re in. Thanks to the unraveling, we won’t even have the wisdom to see it was by our own doing. The abolition of man will be complete. The serpentine covenant fulfilled.

These are high stakes.

Yet, there is hope. The serpent will bruise the heal, but the Son of Man will crush his head. (Genesis 3:14-15) The dragon will not win in heaven or on earth. We can’t live like the world is lost and we’re waiting to get beamed up.

Once you’ve prayed, trusted in the Lord with all your heart, and leaned not on your own understanding, you’ve got paths to walk. Trust He will make them straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

Your sons need you to do this. Your Lord calls you to join Him in His Kingdom of creation, where the dead shall live, the blind shall see, the thorn shall cease and the Myrtle shall blossom.

And it’s not only spiritual. His kingdom will cover the earth.

There are distant shores to be won and we must start at home with our sons and daughters. They will need to be up to the task.

Talk to y’all soon.

~ J.P. Simons