Role Models

One question I often like to ask people at church is, “Who is your role model in the Bible?”

Role models are a keenly discussed topic in our day. It is said that children follow news about their favourite footballers. If the player has hit the headlines because of scandalous behaviour the child may absorb that behaviour and view it as something normal and good - after all, his or her hero does it.

Much agonising is done about a lack of male teachers in some schools. Children, so the argument goes, see too few men in everyday life that they can look up to as good male role models. But then, clean living people often do not attract a child’s attention because they do not hit the headlines!

The rest of us may well feel we have lived long enough not to idolise anybody. We may admire some people more than others but experience and wisdom have shown that all are afflicted by temptations and weaknesses. We feel a responsibility to live according to our best lights, not someone else’s.

So which role model do you choose from the Bible? Clearly there are some bad ones. The Bible writers never intended that we should see them as anything else. Nobody would pretend that Queen Jezebel of Israel was anything but a bad role model. She consistently championed idol gods and the political interests of her husband, the unrighteous and misguided king Ahab.

Of course there is one easy answer to the question of the best role model, and that is “Jesus!” Certainly there are aspects of His character that I envy. I wish I had more of His human warmth and His ability to read human nature like a book. However, it is too simplistic to say He is a role model to the exclusion of everyone else we might look up to. The apostle Paul, for instance, says,

“Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1 ESV).

Paul is not being big-headed. He doesn’t expect people to imitate anything about him that doesn’t reflect Christ. In this instance he holds himself up as not seeking personal advantage but the good of the many:

“… I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved” (1 Corinthians 10:33).

Paul in turn imitates his Master. Jesus Christ would have been the foremost person with a right to proclaim His own importance. He is the creator of the world and is normally exalted at God the Father’s right hand. But He humbled Himself, even to the point of dying on the cross. Mark’s gospel says about Him,

“For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45).

If I were asked to choose a role model (apart from Jesus!) it would be Caleb in the Old Testament. When Moses sent out twelve men to reconnoitre the Promised Land before the people entered, they came up with a discouraging report. Only Caleb and Joshua objected and said how good the land was, just as God promised it would be. But that isn’t the last we hear of Caleb. At 85 years old he presents himself to Joshua, now leader of God’s people in Moses’ place, and announces,

“… my brothers who went up with me made the heart of the people melt; yet I wholly followed the LORD my God. And Moses swore on that day, saying, ‘Surely the land on which your foot has trodden shall be an inheritance for you and your children forever, because you have wholly followed the LORD my God.’ And now, behold, the LORD has kept me alive, just as he said, these forty-five years since the time that the LORD spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. And now, behold, I am this day eighty-five years old. I am still as strong today as I was in the day that Moses sent me; my strength now is as my strength was then, for war and for going and coming. So now give me this hill country of which the LORD spoke on that day, for you heard on that day how the Anakim were there, with great fortified cities. It may be that the LORD will be with me, and I shall drive them out just as the LORD said” (Joshua 14:8-12).

I don’t say I’m like Caleb, only that I aspire to be like him, with his positive spirit and his refusal to be beaten by age and frailty. May God make me a lifelong soldier for the Christ who saved me. And may I reflect Christ so well that others will see something of Him in me.