When I was a kid, the worst thing you could be was weak. Weakness was dangerous. A “weak” kid walking into school—like me as a sensitive, uncoordinated, bookish, artsy, and nerdy boy—was like a side of beef tossed into a den of hungry lions. As a result, I’m not predisposed to view weakness positively.
Yet, as a Christian, I’m called to weakness. According to the gospel, I am weak. And that’s a good thing. In The Good Gift of Weakness: God’s Strength Made Perfect in the Story of Redemption, Eric Schumacher explores the purpose of weakness in our lives through the lens of the Bible’s redemptive narrative.
Dependent in Everything
Weakness didn’t emerge as a result of the fall. Weakness was with us from the beginning. “Weakness isn’t a bug in the design of the universe. It’s a feature. It’s how God made us,” writes Schumacher, a pastor and author (14).
Why did God make us weak? Why are we subjected not just to relative weakness (our inability compared to another’s) and consequential weakness (the sort of weakness introduced and magnified by sin’s presence) but also to natural weakness—something inherent to our being?
A cynical reader might see it as God needing to be needed. But this misses the point of who God is. God is the only being who isn’t weak. He lacks nothing. He’s entirely self-sufficient. And even if he did have a need, if he were hungry, he wouldn’t tell us, because the world and everything in it are his (Ps. 50:12). So why? Because our weakness is designed to point us to our Creator as the source of life—to help us live by faith.
As Schumacher notes,
He didn’t create us to live by our own power, only introducing the need for faith once we needed to be saved from sin and death. Life, liberty, and happiness aren’t founding our independence. They’re rooted entirely in our dependence on the Lord. From the beginning, God made us look to him for all we are and all we need. Weakness is the soil in which faith grows—and faith is where life flourishes. (27)
Every aspect of our lives reminds us we aren’t self-sufficient. We depend on God for everything, from the food we eat (Ps. 145:15) to the atomic structure of the universe holding together (Col. 1:17). If we reject this sort of dependence, we’re really rejecting God.
Weakness in Scripture
Scripture highlights weakness in the characters of many of the heroes of the faith. We see it in the stories of Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. The same is true for Moses and Gideon. Though it isn’t immediately obvious, we even see the call for weakness when Joshua is called to be “strong and courageous” (Josh. 1:9). As Schumacher notes, “Joshua did not need to be afraid of failure, because the Lord would be with him” (77). Joshua’s strength was borrowed; it came from God.
Every aspect of our lives reminds us we aren’t self-sufficient. We depend on God for everything.
In many cases, God’s people in Scripture fail because they reject their God-ordained weakness. They don’t see themselves the way God does. They fail to trust him; they go their own way.
Israel pleaded for a king. God knew they’d want one long before they asked (Deut. 17:14–20), and he called for the king to model dependence on the Lord. He was to lead in his example of living by faith for the well-being of the nation. But this is exactly the opposite of the king the people wanted: “There shall be a king over us, that we also may be like all the nations, and that our king may judge us and go out before us and fight our battles” (1 Sam. 8:19–20). By saying this, they were rejecting God’s design for their monarchy, and also God himself.
This is why they rejected Jesus—by human standards, he was a weak king without splendor or majesty. They were too focused on being liberated from Rome to see how Jesus’s weakness would liberate them from a greater tyranny (2 Cor. 13:4).
Weakness Is the Way
We have to reject the mindset that forsakes dependence on God for worldly strength. This isn’t a new problem, of course, nor are we immune to it. The provocative and performative nature of “muscular Christianity” in its many iterations holds up worldly strength as the ideal.
Societal influence, political power, and wealth are powerful drugs that leave us with a powerless, compromised, weakened witness—one that’s weak because it requires pursuing strength on the world’s terms. This is the sort of Christianity that is sometimes found among Christian nationalists like Stephen Wolfe who, in his The Case for Christian Nationalism, asserts, “Christian nationalism should have strong and austere aesthetic” (469). The Jesus of a muscular Christianity is often a fabrication: someone who loves and hates what those who idealize worldly strength love and hate. That’s Talladega Nights Christianity, where we choose the Jesus we want and the things about him that make us comfortable. It’s often barely recognizable as Christianity at all.
Societal influence, political power, and wealth are powerful drugs that leave us with a powerless, compromised, weakened witness.
We shouldn’t mistake Schumacher’s (and, indeed, Scripture’s) rejection of that sort of strength as a rejection of strength altogether. If you read the book too quickly, you might. But God calls us to a certain kind of strength. For example, Scripture includes many athletic (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:24–26) and battle-oriented (e.g., Eph. 6:10–20) metaphors to describe the Christian life. And, of course, we need grit and tenacity to live faithfully in our “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4). Scripture reminds us we need real strength.
Yet God’s power is “made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:9). True strength doesn’t exist in contrast to weakness. It’s born out of it. And that’s the encouragement readers find in The Good Gift of Weakness. Let’s be strong the way God intends us to be—even when it seems dangerous. We’re strong in the Lord when we embrace our weakness and accept his strength.