Welcome to the Daily Blade. The Word of God is described as the sword of the spirit, the primary spiritual weapon in the Christian's armor against the forces of evil. Your hosts are Joby Martin and Kyle Thompson, and they stand ready to equip men for the fight. Let's sharpen up.

Welcome back. Let's get after it. All week long, we're going head to

head with the culture's narrative about toxic masculinity. We'll examine the claims, test them

against God's word, and build a better framework, and that that better framework is what we're

calling tethered masculinity. Here's the definition. It's the identity and actions of a man submitted to

the authority of scripture. So let's go to cultural claim number four. Male strength is a weapon

of intimidation. So I'm sure you've heard from some form of this or heard of some form of this

at some point in your life. And this is a bit of a downstream argument from some

of the stuff that we talked about earlier this week, like the claims about masculine aggression

being toxic and masculine leadership being oppressive. And a lot is made about the patriarchy

and whatnot. But for the people making these claims, ultimately it boils down to this.

Strong men make people uncomfortable. And look, the cultural

claim isn't all wrong. I mean, just look at your own childhood. Didn't you have moments when a

stronger or bigger man made you feel uncomfortable, whether they did it on purpose or accident?

I mean, look at movie and TV villains. Some of the characters were diabolically evil and they used

their brains to hurt people. But most of the villains, especially like in, you know, the 80s action

movies or whatever, they were physically imposing. They were big, they were jacked, and they used

their size to take advantage of people, to bully people. And I think most of us have had a bullying experience

or two in our lives. I mean, for me growing up, like, I wasn't the smallest kid and I was never the

biggest kid, so I actually experienced both sides. I bullied smaller kids sometimes, and I got bullied

by bigger kids sometimes. It's just kind of one of those things that happened. So pretty much all of

us have experienced the actual toxic masculinity of someone

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