Young man, young man, your arm's too short to box with God.

This line is best known from James Weldon Johnson’s poem “The Prodigal Son,” part of his collection of sermonic poems that draw on the cadences, imagery, and rhetorical strategies of African American preaching. Johnson—poet, novelist, NAACP leader, and a key figure bridging the Harlem Renaissance and earlier Black literary traditions—published the poem in 1927 in *God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse*. In the poem, a preacher addresses a wayward “young man” who imagines he can defy divine authority and moral law; the warning crystallizes the sermon’s admonitory climax, using a vivid, colloquial metaphor to dramatize human limitation before God.

The metaphor of “boxing with God” frames rebellion, pride, or self-will as a futile fight against an omnipotent opponent. “Your arm’s too short” compresses the idea of human inadequacy—moral, spiritual, and existential—into a physical image: you cannot even reach, much less defeat, the divine. In Johnson’s sermonic mode, the line functions both as chastisement and as an invitation to humility and repentance, echoing the prodigal-son tradition in which defiance leads to suffering and return. Its enduring power comes from its blend of streetwise idiom and theological claim, capturing the preacher’s authority in a single memorable warning.