a word before we begin

Most men are starving for something today they would not name if you asked them: real friendship with other men. Not the thin acquaintance of standing near a grill twice a year, not the man you nod to at work, but the deep, loyal, covenant kind of brotherhood the Bible holds up as good and even glorious, and that our age has very nearly forgotten how to see.

And I have to deal with something right at the front, once, plainly, and then set it aside for good. When I start talking about two men who loved each other deeply, who wept at parting, who bound their souls together in covenant, a certain reflex is going to fire in the back of a modern reader’s mind, and he is going to wonder whether there was something sexual in it. I will answer that flatly: there was not. And I want you to notice the reflex itself, because that reflex is the very sickness this booklet is about. There was a time, and it was most of human history, when a man could love another man like a brother and no one on earth would have thought to ask the question. That we cannot help but ask it now is not a sign that we have grown wiser. It is a sign of something we have lost, and are the poorer for.

So set the question down, and do not pick it back up. This is a book about brotherhood, the real thing, the kind that soldiers know and the kind the Scripture praises, and by the end I hope you will not only understand it but want it, and go and get it.

chapter one

the thing we have lost

Here is the plain and sobering fact, and I will not dress it up, because a man would rather have the truth straight. Men today are lonelier than men have perhaps ever been. Ask them and most will tell you they have no close friends at all, not one man they could call at two in the morning, not one man who truly knows them. They have coworkers and acquaintances and the other fathers at the ballfield, and under all of it a deep and aching isolation they would never confess to another soul.

It was not always so, and it does not have to be so, and part of the reason it has become so is worth naming right at the start. The culture has poisoned the well. It has taken the natural closeness of men and taught us to be suspicious of it, so that a man now keeps every other man at arm’s length by instinct, afraid that if he gets too close, if he shows too much, if he says out loud that he loves his friend, it will be read as something it is not. So he holds back. He keeps it shallow. He jokes and talks about the game and never once lets another man all the way in, and he calls this being a man, when in truth it is being a wounded and lonely one.

A man keeps every other man at arm’s length, and calls it being a man, when in truth it is being a wounded and lonely one.

And it is killing us, quietly. A man was not built to carry his life alone. We will come to it, but the God who made the man said, before sin ever entered the world, that it was not good for him to be alone, and He did not mean only that a man needs a wife. A man needs brothers. He needs other men who know him and stand with him and will tell him the truth. And the great tragedy of our age is that men are dying of thirst a few feet from a well they have been taught not to drink from. This booklet is here to send you back to that well, to show you from the Book that the deep friendship of men is good and godly and yours to have, and to press you to go get it honestly, and to stop pretending you are fine alone, because you were never made to be.

knit to his soul

is waiting for you

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sources & notes

  1. 1 Samuel 18:1. The word rendered “soul” is nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ), the whole inner life or self; the verb “loved” is from ’ahav (אָהֵב), the ordinary strong Hebrew verb for love, used also of loving God (Deuteronomy 6:5) and of a husband loving his wife (Genesis 24:67). See W. E. Vine / Merrill F. Unger, Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, entries “Soul” and “Love.”
  2. 1 Samuel 18:3–4. The covenant is berith (בְּרִית), the standard Hebrew word for a solemn, binding covenant, used of the covenants God makes with men (e.g. Genesis 9:9; 15:18). On Jonathan’s gift of robe, armor, and weapons as a self-emptying transfer of his own royal claim, cf. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on 1 Samuel 18.
  3. 1 Samuel 17 (David and Goliath) and 1 Samuel 18:7 (“Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands”); 1 Chronicles 22:8 (David a man of war, forbidden to build the temple); and 1 Samuel 14:1–14 (Jonathan and his armour-bearer routing the Philistine garrison, “there is no restraint to the LORD to save by many or by few”). These establish that both men were hardened warriors.
  4. David Herbert Donald, “We Are Lincoln Men”: Abraham Lincoln and His Friends (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and Charles B. Strozier, Your Friend Forever, A. Lincoln (Columbia University Press, 2016), on Lincoln and Joshua Speed sharing a bed for four years in Springfield (from 1837), understood by historians as unremarkable frontier custom. Montaigne, “Of Friendship” (De l’amitié), Essays I.28, on his friendship with Étienne de La Boétie; and the letters and poems of Wilfred Owen and his circle, on the affection of the Great War soldier-poets.
  5. John Ibson, Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography (Smithsonian Books, 2002), on the once-ordinary intimacy of men in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century photographs (arms around one another, hands held) and its later reclassification as the culture grew more suspicious of male closeness.
  6. 1 Timothy 1:2 and 2 Timothy 1:2–4 (Timothy as Paul’s “dearly beloved son,” Paul longing to see him and mindful of his tears), on the apostle’s tender fatherly love for Timothy; with Acts 20:37–38, the Ephesian elders weeping and embracing Paul at their parting.
  7. 2 Kings 2 (Elisha refusing to leave Elijah, and crying “My father, my father” at the ascent, v. 12), on Elijah and Elisha; and John 13:23–25 with 21:20, on “the disciple whom Jesus loved” leaning on His breast, traditionally identified as John the apostle.
  8. Proverbs 18:24. The verb “sticketh” is dabaq (דָּבַק), to cling or cleave, joined fast — the same verb used in Genesis 2:24, “shall cleave unto his wife.” That the one strong “cleaving” word covers both the marriage bond and the bond of a covenant friend is the point drawn out here. See Vine’s / Unger’s Old Testament dictionary, entry “Cleave.”
  9. John 15:13–15, where the Lord both defines the greatest love as laying down one’s life for one’s friends and calls His disciples “friends.” Read together with Proverbs 18:24 (“a friend that sticketh closer than a brother”), applied to Christ as the truest Friend.
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