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The Warhorse, the Sword, and the True Meaning of Meekness
There is a word that has been stolen from you. A word twisted by religion, diluted by society, and weaponized to keep good people small, quiet, and compliant.
That word is meekness.
For centuries, the beatitude declared by Jesus of Nazareth— "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth" (Matthew 5:5)—has been read through a lens of passivity. The cultural assumption is familiar: the meek are the doormats, the pushovers, the spineless souls too afraid to fight, who inherit the earth only because nobody else wanted what was left over. It is a consolation prize for the powerless.
This interpretation is not just incomplete. It is a lie from the pit of hell.
If you believe meekness equals weakness, you are insulting your Creator. You are denying the very power that was placed inside of you before you drew your first breath.
"The thesis of this article is straightforward and unflinching: True meekness is not the absence of power—it is the absolute surrender of power to the purpose for which you were created. It is the trained warhorse on the battlefield. It is the sheathed sword in the warrior's hand. It is the most dangerous person in the room choosing restraint—not because they are afraid, but because they answer to a higher command."
What follows is a deep dive—theological, linguistic, philosophical, and fiercely practical—into the true meaning of one of the most misunderstood concepts in human history. This is not a vocabulary lesson. This is a matter of life and death. This is about whether you die as a copy or live as the masterpiece you were designed to be.
Listen on the Go
Before we can reclaim a word, we have to understand what was taken from us. The English word "meek" descends from the Old Norse mjúkr , meaning "soft" or "gentle." It is a tragically anemic translation that fails to carry the muscularity of the original biblical terms: the Greek praus and the Hebrew anav. These are not words for the faint of heart. They are words forged in furnaces and proven on battlefields.
The New Testament text of Matthew 5:5 uses the Greek adjective praus (pra-oos), or the noun prautēs. In the classical Greek world, this was never a word associated with weakness or a lack of spirit. It was a sophisticated ethical term central to the Aristotelian conception of virtue.
In his Nicomachean Ethics , Aristotle defined virtue as the "golden mean" between two opposing vices—one of excess and one of deficiency. When it came to anger, passion, and the assertion of will, Aristotle placed praus as the virtuous center:
| Category | Term | Description |
|---|---|---|
| The Deficit | Aorgisia | A total lack of feeling—cowardice, the inability to be roused to anger even when injustice demands it. This is the "doormat" persona that is constantly confused with meekness. |
| The Excess | Orgilotes | Unbridled rage, recklessness, the volatile explosion of power without constraint. This is the tyrant, the uncontrolled aggressor. |
| The Mean | Praus | The person who is angry "at the right time, with the right people, and in the right way." Calm not because they are empty, but because they are balanced. The sword is present—but sheathed. |
Read that again. A person who cannot get angry is not meek. They are deficient. True meekness requires the capacity for anger—the sword must exist—but it demands the wisdom to deploy it only when justice, not ego, calls for it.
The most electrifying evidence for the power inherent in meekness comes from the ancient military writer Xenophon. In his treatise The Art of Horsemanship , Xenophon uses praus to describe a warhorse that has completed its training.
Close your eyes and picture it. A beast—1,200 pounds of muscle, sinew, and raw aggression. A creature bred for stamina and violence. Thundering hooves. A body built to kill.
Now place that horse on a battlefield. Cannon fire is screaming. Men are falling. Chaos erupts in every direction.
A wild horse—a horse with no training—panics. It bolts. It tramples its own soldiers. It is useless, because it is enslaved by its own fear and instinct.
But a meeked horse—a praus horse—stands like a statue in the middle of the fire. It is trembling with energy. It has the power to destroy everything around it. But it waits. It waits for the rider. It responds to the slightest touch of the rein, a whisper. And when that rider says "Go," that horse explodes with focused, devastating power directed toward a single objective.
The process of "meeking" a warhorse did not involve breaking its spirit. It did not diminish the animal's strength. The training taught the horse to bring its wild nature under the absolute authority of the rider. The fire remains. The ferocity remains. But it is now integrated into a higher will.
It stands steady in the face of screaming chaos. It responds to a whisper. It explodes into a gallop only when commanded, directing every ounce of muscle toward the rider's objective. The horse retains its power—it is still a creature capable of killing—but that power is now surrendered to purpose.
"Meekness is not the absence of power. Meekness is power under control."
While the Greek praus gives us the nuance of controlled power, the Hebrew word anav (used in Psalm 37:11, "The meek shall inherit the land," which Jesus directly quotes) adds a dimension the Greek alone cannot provide: the dimension of relationship, suffering, and spiritual refining.
Anav is derived from the root anah , which means to be bowed down, afflicted, or humbled by circumstance. Originally, the term described the socially marginalized—those stripped of autonomy by oppressors or economic ruin. But in the theology of the Psalms and the Prophets, anav evolved from a sociological description into a spiritual virtue.
The anav is not merely someone who is poor. They are someone who has learned from their affliction. They have discovered, through pain and stripping, that their own strength is insufficient to save them. And they have transferred their trust entirely to Yahweh. The bowing down is no longer forced by an oppressor—it is freely offered to God. It is the gracious refusal to advance one's own cause by force, trusting instead in divine vindication.
The bridge between these two concepts—the Greek warhorse and the Hebrew refined saint—is found in one man: Moses.
Numbers 12:3 describes Moses as "very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth." And yet, consider his résumé. He was a prince of Egypt, trained in military and political strategy, capable of killing an Egyptian overseer with his bare hands in his youth. That act—that explosion of uncontrolled fury—was orgilotes , the excess Aristotle warned about. Raw power without a bridle.
God's response? Forty years in the wilderness. Forty years of stripping. Moses lost his Egyptian status, his self-confidence, his autonomous power. He was reduced from a prince to a shepherd, tending sheep instead of commanding armies, until he recognized his utter dependence on the "I AM."
When Moses returns to Egypt, he wields power that dwarfs his previous capabilities—calling down plagues, parting seas, confronting the most powerful empire on earth. But it is no longer his power used for his anger. It is God's power flowing through a surrendered vessel. His meekness was proven not by silence, but by the fact that he only moved when the Pillar of Cloud moved. He was the warhorse who had accepted the bridle of the Almighty.
By combining the Greek virtue of self-mastery and the Hebrew virtue of covenantal submission, we arrive at a definition of meekness that shatters every passive misconception:
| Dimension | Common Misconception | Biblical / Classical Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Nature | Weakness, timidity, spinelessness | Strength, conviction, controlled power |
| Reaction | Passivity, being a doormat | Restraint, strategic patience, integrated aggression |
| Source | Fear of conflict or lack of capacity | Trust in God's sovereignty and alignment with purpose |
| Metaphor | A lamb to the slaughter (passive) | A trained warhorse (active but surrendered) |
| Outcome | Loss, victimization | Inheritance, dominion, long-term victory |
Here is where the concept moves from interesting linguistics to a matter of life and death. The word teleology comes from the Greek telos —meaning "end," "goal," or "purpose." And the connection between meekness and teleology is the key that unlocks everything.
If you were created for a purpose—if there is a blueprint for your soul—then the most dangerous thing you can do is ignore it. And the most powerful thing you can do is surrender to it.
In a worldview that rejects design, there is no inherent purpose for a human life. If there is no Creator, there is no "created purpose," and we are left to invent significance through the sheer exertion of will—what Nietzsche called the "Will to Power." In that framework, meekness is indeed a vice, because surrendering your will means giving up the only mechanism you have for meaning.
But the biblical worldview is inherently teleological. It insists that every human being is designed with a specific intent: "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them" (Ephesians 2:10).
This creates a fundamental fork in the road for every person alive:
| Path | Operating System | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Autonomy (Self-Law) | Using your strength to carve out a place in the world, defend your rights, accumulate resources. Power used for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. | The wild horse. Enslaved by instinct, fear, and reactivity. Unable to achieve anything beyond survival. |
| Theonomy (God-Law) | Recognizing: "I am not the main character of my story. I am a supporting character in a cosmic drama." Power surrendered to the Creator's command. | The praus warhorse. Empowered for battles, parades, and glories it could never achieve alone. |
This surrender is not a negation of the self. It is the fulfillment of the self. Consider: a hammer finds its purpose only when it surrenders to the hand of the carpenter to drive a nail. A Ferrari finds its purpose only on the open road, not sitting in a garage as a paperweight. A human being finds their true power only when they surrender to the purpose for which they were created.
"To refuse to answer the call—to refuse to do what you were born to do—is the ultimate insult to God."
The primary enemy of this surrender has a name. It is not the devil. It is not the culture. It is the Ego.
Theological and psychological analysis reveals a useful acrostic: E.G.O. stands for Easing God Out. When leaders—when any of us—operate from ego, we are driven by three exhausting engines:
Insecurity —the relentless need to prove our worth. Defensiveness —the desperate need to protect our image. Competition —the toxic need to be better than others.
This ego-driven state devours energy. It is busy, painful, and perpetually empty. Meekness is the spiritual cure. By surrendering the need for status, recognition, and control to God, the meek person frees up enormous reserves of energy to focus on the work itself—the actual purpose. They become self-controlling and other-centered, capable of looking in the mirror to take responsibility for failures and out the window to give credit for success.
Here is the irony that should stop you in your tracks: the wild horse is actually less free than the meek horse. The wild horse is enslaved by its own instincts—fear, flight, and reactivity. It cannot perform complex tasks. It cannot achieve great feats. It can only survive.
The meek horse, by submitting to the rider, gains access to battles, parades, and glories the wild horse could never dream of. It becomes untethered from its lower instincts and empowered to use its gifts for something bigger than itself.
"Surrender is not the death of freedom. It is the birth of it."
This is the question that separates shallow reading from genuine understanding: Why is the specific reward for meekness the inheritance of the earth? Is this a spiritual platitude? A feel-good bumper sticker? Or is there a mechanical, operational logic to it?
The research is unambiguous: in both theology and organizational theory, only the meek possess the stability required for sustainable dominion.
The concept of "inheriting the earth" is rooted in the Dominion Mandate of Genesis 1:28—"subdue the earth and have dominion." But biblical dominion was never designed to mean domination or exploitation. It means stewardship.
Consider two models of authority:
A leader who lacks meekness treats the earth and its people as resources to be consumed for their own pleasure. This leads to destruction, rebellion, and eventual collapse. They may conquer the earth temporarily, but they cannot inherit it—they cannot keep it.
The meek person treats the earth and its people as a trust from the Creator. Because they view themselves as servants rather than owners, they care for the asset. God, the ultimate Owner, entrusts the estate only to the heirs who have demonstrated the character to manage it according to His will.
"You do not give the keys to the family business to the reckless child. You give them to the one who is disciplined. Self-mastery is the prerequisite for world-mastery."
Understanding the political context of Jesus' words amplifies their power exponentially. In the Second Temple Jewish world, the "inheritance of the land" was a highly charged political hope. Israel was living under Roman occupation—the rule of the strong, the arrogant, and the violent. The Zealot movement argued that the path to inheriting the land was through armed revolt—to out-kill the Romans.
Into that powder keg, Jesus dropped a bomb: the meek shall inherit the earth. He was declaring that the Roman model of dominion—force, coercion, ego—was self-terminating. The Kingdom of God would be established not by those who seized power, but by those who, like a sheathed sword, waited upon God's timing.
The "earth" (Greek: ge ) here extends beyond the land of Israel to encompass the renewed creation. In the final analysis of history, the Caesars and Napoleons will be forgotten or reviled, while the saints who served with power under control will be the ones left standing to govern the new world.
Dr. Jordan Peterson's interpretation of this verse has gained significant cultural traction because it bridges theology and evolutionary psychology. His paraphrase: "He who has a sword, and knows how to use it, but keeps it sheathed, shall inherit the earth."
This aligns with what researchers call the "integrated aggression" model. A person who is harmless—who has no sword, no capacity for aggression, no dangerous competence—is not meek. They are merely weak. You cannot sheathe a sword you do not have.
True virtue requires the potential for mayhem, brought under voluntary control. Integrating your "shadow" (the capacity for aggression and self-interest) allows you to be dangerous to evil but safe for good. A meek person can protect the vulnerable because they have teeth—they simply choose not to bite unless necessity demands it.
And the science backs it up. Genetic and behavioral studies on self-regulation—a secular proxy for meekness—consistently show that individuals with high self-control "inherit the earth" in a literal, measurable sense: better health, higher wealth, stronger relationships, and longer lives. Meanwhile, impulsivity—the absence of meekness—leads to what Proverbs 25:28 describes as "a city broken into and left without walls."
If you think this concept applies only to personal spirituality, think again. Modern research into organizational greatness confirms that the biblical definition of meekness is the single most important predictor of sustainable success in business, leadership, and legacy-building.
Jim Collins, in his landmark study Good to Great , identified a hierarchy of leadership capabilities. At the top—Level 5—he found a paradoxical combination that stunned the business world: Personal Humility + Professional Will.
This is an exact secular mirror of biblical meekness:
| Component | The Sword (Professional Will) | The Sheath (Personal Humility) |
|---|---|---|
| Description | Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, possessed by an incurable need to produce results. They have the ferocious resolve of the warhorse. | They display compelling modesty, shun public adulation, and are never boastful. They channel ambition into the mission—not into their own ego. |
| Behavior | Unwavering commitment to standards and purpose. Will make difficult, unpopular decisions for the long-term good. | Credit the team for success (look out the window). Take personal responsibility for failure (look in the mirror). |
| Legacy | Builds organizations that outlast them. | Creates successors and systems, not dependency on a single personality. |
Collins' critical finding: companies led by high-ego, charismatic titans who lacked meekness often collapsed after the leader departed. Companies led by Level 5 leaders—the meek—created enduring legacies. The meek literally inherited the market.
Meekness functions as a force multiplier in leadership through three specific mechanisms:
Trust. When a team knows their leader is surrendered to the mission and not their own glory, they trust the leader's decisions—even the painful ones. "He who cannot obey a higher purpose cannot command."
Truth-Telling. A meek leader does not shoot the messenger. This allows truth to flow up the chain of command, preventing the catastrophic errors that plague ego-driven autocracies.
Succession. Meek leaders build others up. They are "plow horses" who prepare the field for the next generation, ensuring the inheritance continues beyond their own tenure.
While meekness shares DNA with Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership model, it adds a crucial distinction. Servant leadership focuses on the activity of serving. Meekness focuses on the disposition of the will. A person can perform acts of service while still being internally consumed by pride. A meek person, however, has fundamentally settled the question of rights—they have surrendered their "right" to be recognized, which frees them to serve authentically, without performance, without scorekeeping.
If meekness is not a personality trait—not timidity you are born with—but a spiritual discipline that must be cultivated, then the obvious question is: how? How do you train the wild horse inside you to respond to the Rider's whisper?
The research points to specific, time-tested spiritual practices that function as the training ground for the warhorse of the human will.
St. Ignatius of Loyola taught the concept of "Holy Indifference"—and this is emphatically not apathy. It is the state of being indifferent to everything except the purpose for which you were created. The meek person reaches a point where they can declare: "I do not care if I am rich or poor, healthy or sick, honored or dishonored, long-lived or short-lived. I care only that I fulfill the end for which I was created."
"Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will. Give me only your love and your grace—that is enough for me."
— The Suscipe Prayer of St. Ignatius
This is the deliberate act of handing the reins of the warhorse to God.
Theologian Dallas Willard connects meekness to the "easy yoke" of Jesus in Matthew 11:29. His argument is penetrating: the exhaustion of modern life comes from trying to control outcomes that are beyond our power—the "wild horse" panic of a soul untethered from its Rider.
The practice of meekness involves doing your work with excellence—wielding the sword—but abandoning the outcomes to God. This sheathing of anxiety brings "rest to the soul" because the burden of ruling the universe is taken off your shoulders.
Willard's practical instruction: Decide before your feet hit the ground each morning that your power will be used for God's agenda, not your own defense.
Richard Foster identifies specific outward disciplines that cultivate meekness—what he calls the Discipline of Submission. These are not abstractions; they are daily, concrete acts:
Submission to Truth: Yielding to the facts, even when they contradict your ego. Especially then.
Submission to Community: Listening to others and laying down what Foster calls "the terrible burden of always needing to get our own way."
Submission to the Broken: Serving those who cannot pay you back, which breaks the transactional nature of ego-power at its root.
| Discipline | Objective | How It Works |
|---|---|---|
| The Daily Examen | Awareness | Reviewing each day to identify where Ego asserted itself over Purpose—and where Surrender produced fruit. |
| Silence and Solitude | Restraint | Breaking the addiction to being heard or recognized. Training the tongue—the bit in the horse's mouth. |
| Fasting | Self-Mastery | Denying the physical appetite to strengthen the spiritual will. Teaching the body that it answers to a higher authority. |
| Secret Service | Ego-Death | Doing good deeds where no one can see them. Starving the desire for applause. Killing the performer inside. |
| Sabbath Rest | Trust | Ceasing from work to acknowledge that the world runs without your effort. God is in control—you are not. |
| Morning Surrender | Alignment | Before anything else: "God, here are the reins. You are the Rider. I am the horse. Where do we go today?" |
Why does this matter? Why write thousands of words about a single beatitude?
Because the world is tearing itself apart. Look around. People are chasing power, chasing fame, chasing control—and they are destroying themselves and everyone in their orbit. They are wild horses running off a cliff.
The lie that meekness equals weakness keeps good people—gifted people, called people—locked in a Shadow Prison. It convinces them that to be holy, they must be harmless. That to follow God, they must shrink. That their gifts, their fire, their righteous anger are somehow ungodly.
The biblical reality is the opposite. To be holy, you must be dangerous but disciplined. You must have a sword. You must know how to use it. And you must surrender it to the King.
If you have a gift—whether it is media, business, art, healing, technology, or simply the ability to listen—and you are sitting on it because you are afraid, or abusing it because you are arrogant, you are missing the point of your existence. You are using a Ferrari as a paperweight. You are a warhorse that has refused the bridle.
Here, in its clearest form, is the logic of meekness—the physics of spiritual power:
| Step | Principle | Explanation |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Purpose Requires Power | You were created for a purpose (teleology). Achieving that purpose requires strength, aggression, and will—the sword. |
| 2 | Power Requires Control | Uncontrolled power destroys the vessel and the environment—the wild horse. It leads to tyranny, burnout, and ruin. |
| 3 | Surrender Is the Mechanism | The only way to maximize power without destruction is to surrender it to a higher authority—the bridle. This is meekness. |
| 4 | Inheritance Is the Result | God entrusts the management of His creation—the earth—only to those who have surrendered their power to His purpose. |
The meek do not inherit the earth because they are too weak to fight for it. They inherit the earth because they are the only ones strong enough to hold it without crushing it.
They are the praus warriors—the surrendered champions who have stopped fighting for themselves so they can fight for the Kingdom.
The world does not need more tyrants. And it definitely does not need more doormats. The world needs Dangerous Saints—men and women who possess immense power, immense talent, and immense capacity for aggression, but who have surrendered it all to the Creator.
"Meekness is the absolute surrender of your sword to the King's command, so that you may reign with Him."
Joshua T. Berglan, known globally as The World's Mayor, is an Omni Media Architect, Advocacy Actuary, 4x international best-selling author, award-winning producer with 126+ IMDb credits, United Nations speaker, and SCORE Certified Mentor. A man openly navigating Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Autism Spectrum, Joshua has dedicated his life to proving that your greatest struggles can become your most powerful credentials.
Through The World's Mayor Experience and his proprietary frameworks including "Media Company in a Box," "Failure to Framework," and "The Bridge to Media Empowerment," Joshua helps visionaries weaponize their story to serve the world—building brands that are cancellation-proof because they are anchored in God-given purpose.
For resources on mental health, spiritual warfare, purpose discovery, and building your media platform, visit JoshuaTBerglan.com and explore The Archives—a custom search engine with thousands of free resources. No gatekeepers. Just truth.
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