It’s a verse that every Christian knows well: “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong”(1 Corinthians 16:13). But it’s easy to know the verse and not see it in context – and this is the kind of verse where context is everything.  To really understand Paul’s powerful statement, we must notice his very next words, where he writes: “Do everything in love.” This is actually not a separate thought, as it might appear to be in our modern Bibles where thoughts are artificially separated into numbered verses.

Looking at the context in the sixteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, we can clearly see how verses 13 and 14 really belong together – the verses before vs. 13 are about Apollos, and the verses after vs. 14 are about a different subject, the family of Stephanus. The two verses 13-14 are a single thought that Paul has in mind, and when we read the two verses together – as they should be read – we get what Paul wanted to tell us: “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.” 

But when we read the two verses together, they still sound like two separate thoughts – not because they are, but because of our flawed sense of what strength looks like.  What does strength have to do with love?  According to Paul, everything.  Paul’s thought is simply that strength and love have to operate together, because without the one, the other is incomplete. 

That may not sound like a profound concept, but it is one, nonetheless.  In our culture Christians – and especially male Christians – can often be divided into two groups: what we might call the muscular believers and the loving believers. It’s not that those who stress love can’t have muscle tone and those who stress strength can’t be loving – but that most of us simply tend to fit one of those stereotypical groups better than the other.  

Society in general forms along the same fault lines, of course:  the jocks and the nerds, the powerful and the poets, the assertive and the sensitive. But is one of these approaches to life somehow better (or more “manly”) than the other?

Consider the story of Jacob and his brother Esau (Genesis 25, 27).   Esau was an outdoorsman with hair on his chest – a hunter who liked to spend time in the wilderness. Jacob, on the other hand, was a man of the great indoors – he preferred to stay at home, liked to cook, and was clearly closer to his mother, while Esau (as you probably guessed) was his father’s favorite.  The contrast could hardly be stronger – the “rugged” man and the “milder” kind of man.  But you know what? God loved Jacob (Malachi 1:2) and chose him as the one whose name would identify the nation God wanted to build (Psalm 135:4). Clearly, God knew that being an outdoor “manly” man was not the only way to do masculinity. 

But the story doesn’t end there.  We see Jacob having to apply strength as God worked with him. Perhaps in that sense Jacob had to “toughen up,” but he wasn’t changed to a kind of “man’s man” identity – Jacob just developed a side he may have been somewhat lacking in.

When we look at the biblical record, all the “mighty men” of God exhibited or came to exhibit both sides of the strength-divide.  David is the classic example, of course. David was a gentle shepherd as well as a giant slayer, a poet and musician as well as a powerful and mighty man. The same can be said of Jesus himself. The Jesus who forcefully cleared the temple and the Jesus who wept for his friends were one and the same – the loving-tough Jesus who talked about sparrows and flowers in his parables yet was strong enough to endure great hardship (Luke 4:1-2) and to sacrifice himself for others (Hebrews 12:2).   

The balance of strength and love is something that Jesus also taught his followers. There were times when he urged his disciples to “toughen up” (Matthew 26:40), but there were other times when he showed them they needed to roll back the tough stuff – like the occasion some of them wanted to call in an air-strike on a Samaritan village that had refused Jesus hospitality (Luke 9:54).  Jesus made the point that mere insults do not call for munitions – heavenly or otherwise. He showed his followers that strength and love are both necessary: that strength must never prevent us from applying love and love need never prevent us from being strong.

Paul himself exhibited the same balance.  The apostle who suffered hardships with great strength – ranging from being repeatedly beaten to being shipwrecked three times (2 Corinthians 11:25) – was the same apostle who penned the Bible’s greatest chapter on love (1 Corinthians 13). He knew that strength and love are both needed.

And that is Paul’s point in 1 Corinthians 16:13-14.  We need to learn a right balance if we do not already have it – we are called to be strong and we are called to love. We are called to let our love be expressed without weakness and our strength to be used continually in love. 

If you were to think of a hero who seems to come out of nowhere to block tyranny, thwart injustice, and assist those needing help, perhaps you would think of some fabled medieval knight or a caped comic book hero. But one person mentioned in the Bible displayed the trait of heroically fighting against injustice to an exceptional degree, and that individual, surprising as it may seem at first, was Moses.

You may not have thought about it this way before, but the Bible paints a very interesting picture of the character of Moses before his calling.  Of course, the evidence we have comes from the first five books of the Bible – written by Moses himself – but what I would like to look at here is the way Moses is portrayed: the characteristics he displayed and chose to record as opposed to any other traits he may have had. Remember that Moses tells us nothing about his childhood and youth apart from the fact that he was raised by Pharaoh’s daughter (Exodus 2:10). The first time we are given a glimpse into the adult life of this future leader we are told that:

“One day, after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Looking this way and that and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand” (Exodus 2:11-12). 

Fighting injustice on the work site

We must understand that this was no simple homicide on Moses’ part. When the text tells us he “looked this way and that and saw no one,” it probably does not mean that he checked to see that he could get away with intervening, but rather that he saw there was no one who would help the man and so intervened himself. We are not given the details, but the furious slave driver may then have turned on Moses who may have killed him in self-defense as well as defense of the slave who was being ruthlessly beaten.  We should remember also that the word used of the slave driver’s “beating” of the Hebrew man is makeh – which can have very strong connotations involving injury and even death. Moses stepped in and halted a tyrannical situation that may well have been life-threatening for the man he protected.  
 
Fighting injustice on the street

The very next day we are told that a similar situation arose in which Moses attempted to intervene in an unjust situation: “The next day he went out and saw two Hebrews fighting. He asked the one in the wrong, “Why are you hitting your fellow Hebrew?” (Exodus 2:13). Note that in this case there was no casual argument involved. The expression translated “the one in the wrong” (NIV) in the Hebrew is literally “the wicked one” – clearly an individual who was wrongfully assaulting another Hebrew. But once again Moses stepped in as soon as he saw the altercation and realized what was happening was an unjust situation.   

Fighting injustice at the well

Exodus tells us that Moses fled to Midian after this event, when the Pharaoh found out that he had killed an Egyptian taskmaster (Exodus 2:15). In Midian the next recorded incident is that Moses steps in to defend and help a group of women – the daughters of a local shepherd – when they tried to draw water from a well for their sheep: “Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock” (Exodus 2:17).

This is the third and final glimpse we are given into the life and character of Moses before God appears to him in the burning bush and calls him to lead his people out of Egypt. Although this event occurs quite some time after Moses arrived in Midian (see Exodus 2:23, a “long period”), we are not told anything more about his actions during that time – whether he worked hard or cared well for the flocks in his charge or anything else. What we are told – and all we are told – about the life of Moses before God called him to the great work he was given to do is that on three occasions Moses stepped in to fight injustice under various circumstances.

But notice that these incidents do not run from the least to the greatest – they do not show the growing heroism of Moses as an individual. Instead, they run from the most serious offense to the least, so they show his gradual coming to awareness of and willingness to stand up against even small injustices that he encountered. 

Perhaps there is a lesson in this. Perhaps Exodus is telling us that God called Moses to free his people because of his growing commitment to fight injustice. Perhaps God knew he could use such a person to fight the great injustice of the slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt. If this is the case, then this is a prime example of how the more we grow in our desire to fight what is wrong and to support what is right, the more God can use us, too.

​The story of David and Goliath may be the most famous conflict story in the Bible, but an earlier battle fought by Abram, before his name was changed to Abraham, was perhaps even more impressive.  The story is a fascinating one that carries important reminders for modern warriors of the Way.
                       
In Genesis 14 we are told that Sodom and Gomorrah and other cities of the Dead Sea Valley had long been subject to the kings of Mesopotamia (“Shinar”), but that while Abraham was living in the area of nearby Hebron they rebelled against this foreign rule. The Amorite Mesopotamian king assembled a large army including his Elamite, Hurrian, and Hittite allies. The massive force  overwhelmed Sodom and its neighboring cities, seizing the goods of the cities and taking many of their inhabitants as slaves.  In doing this they also carried off Abram’s nephew Lot and his possessions, since Lot was living in that area (Genesis 14:12).  But Abram was informed of what had happened and took decisive action:

“A man who had escaped came and reported this to Abram the Hebrew. Now Abram was living near … Mamre the Amorite, a brother of Eshkol and Aner, all of whom were allied with Abram.  When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan. During the night Abram divided his men to attack them and he routed them, pursuing them as far as Hobah, north of Damascus. He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people” (Genesis 14:13-15).

Many people may be surprised to read in this account that Abram had over three hundred “trained men” which shows the size of his household.  In fact, these trained men were not simply shepherds and other workmen hastily handed a sword or other weapon. The  Hebrew word hānīk means an “armed servant” and was used of men whose primary function was to provide military protection. These men were essentially a small private security force in full-time service to Abraham. Together these men pursued the returning Mesopotamians, catching up with them near Dan on what was later Israel’s northern border.

But what is truly surprising in the account is the daring raid that Abraham and his small force executed to rescue Lot.  Militarily, a raid is usually a carefully planned small-scale attack on enemy forces,  conducted covertly with speed and surprise – often at night and behind enemy lines – on an unsuspecting enemy.  An extraction raid is one planned to rescue captured soldiers, hostages or other friendly elements and  the  idea is almost always “quick-in, quick-out.” Abraham’s raid against the Mesopotamian allied  forces was a classic extraction raid, conducted under the cover of darkness in a skillfully planned attack – but it was anything but a “quick-in, quick-out.” 

After his attack Abraham and his small force continued to engage the enemy over an extended distance – a further fifty miles from Dan to Damascus.  These men did not just hit and run – they stuck with their mission until it was successful and Lot was rescued. Abraham’s men probably did not carry much food or supplies in order to travel quickly and catch up with the enemy force, but they travelled a considerable distance of at least 153 miles (247 km) – from Hebron to Damascus and beyond – and then returned to the Dead Sea Plain.
 
Abraham and his men gladly gave credit to God for their victory against a vastly superior force (Genesis 14:20),  but we should not forget the part these men played in the conflict and the things they did that were militarily sound.     Even apart from the successful tactics Abraham employed in utilizing  a night attack to maximize confusion and with divided forces closing from different directions (Genesis 14:15-16),  we see three key factors aiding the mission’s success.
 
Abraham didn’t set out unprepared. His men were properly trained and ready, as we have seen (Genesis 14:14).   He didn’t try to go it alone. He involved his allies, the  men of Mamre, Eshkol and Aner (Genesis 14:13, 24). These men were not just his neighbors – the Hebrew says they were “sworn allies” (literally “possessors of the covenant of Abram”), so these were allies Abram could trust.  Once the fighting began, Abraham and his men persisted – they “went the distance”  till their mission  objective was fulfilled.
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Simple as they may sound, these three principles are fundamental to our own spiritual warfare.  Warriors of the Way need to train well to be prepared for the battles we will inevitably have to face. We then need to utilize the allies we are given in the form of fellow-believers – allies we can trust.  And when the battles begin, we need to proceed with a warrior’s attitude of persistence till we have fulfilled the task we have been given.  The very characteristics so clear in Abram’s victory over physical enemies are ones we need to develop in our spiritual lives, too.