You are listening to Bible Direction for Life, the sermon podcast of West Side Baptist Church in Bremerton, Washington. We pray that the preaching and teaching you hear on this podcast connects the truth of the Bible to your life, that you would learn more about the triune God who made you and what he made you for. And now here's today's message. All right. You can go ahead and open your Bibles to Genesis, Genesis chapter 1. We'll be working through quite a bit of text, won't read all of it explicitly, but it'd be good to follow along as we work through it. Our title for this year's men's retreat, we'll get to the title here in a second, let's open in a word of prayer and then we'll dig in. Father, I come before you tonight. I thank you for each of these men. I thank you for this opportunity to share from your word and indeed also from your world. the goodness of your design for men and women. What you have designed is good for us. You are not trying to hold things back from us, limit us, restrict us, but you are trying to enable us to bear the fruit for which you created the world. Help us to see this. In Christ's name, amen. Our title for this year's men's retreat is Reclaiming Reality, the Goodness and Glory of Sexual Difference. Now, for many in our society, sexual difference is a problem to be solved rather than a glory to be celebrated. Writing in 1970, the influential radical feminist writer Shulamith Firestone was very clear about what she was after. She said this, the end goal of feminist revolution must be Not just the elimination of male privilege, but of the sex distinction itself. Genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. Now, no professing Christian would go quite as far as Firestone does, who goes on to describe the biological family as a tyranny that must be broken. But there are many professing Christians who actively push for sexual difference to be intentionally minimized as much as possible. In 1974, Letha Skanzoni and Nancy Hardesty published the profoundly influential book. Christianity Today has listed this as one of the 50 most influential books on evangelical Christians. Published the book, all were meant to be a biblical approach to women's liberation. Here's how they describe the sort of genuinely egalitarian marriage they think Christians should strive for. So here's what they're advocating for. True egalitarianism must be characterized by what sociologists call role interchangeability. Both spouses can fulfill the roles of breadwinner, housekeeper, encourager, career achiever, child trainer, and so on. And then they say this that has just burned into my mind ever since I first read it. Specialization according to sex disappears. Specialization according to sex disappears. Men and women become functionally interchangeable. Over the past 50 years, these ideas and others like them have made a deep impact on our society. The rejection of sexual difference, the quest for interchangeability to the greatest extent it can be achieved, is now enshrined in our laws, it's regulated by our courts, and it is celebrated throughout our culture. No matter how much we may disagree with it, this societal shift shapes every area of our lives as modern Americans. It impacts our homes and our workplaces. It shows up in the shows that we watch and the books that we read. One of the things that stuck out with me, just a little example, ETHI, they have these little board books that you find different people in. And it was a book about firefighters. And in reality, in the real world, men are the vast majority of firefighters, because men are stronger than women, as we'll see. But in this book, they had complete gender equality, an exactly equal amount of male firefighters and female firefighters. Not only that, but all the heavy things were being carried by the female firefighters, and all of the more domestic tasks were being performed by the male firefighters. It was being taught to toddlers in a book that did not have rainbows on it or anything of the sort that men and women are completely interchangeable in every area of life, in ways that we may not even notice. It shows up in the shows we watch, the books we read, and it even affects self-consciously conservative churches like ours. Sexual difference has a problem to be solved. Specialization, according to sex, has something that is fated to disappear. This view is everywhere in our society. But the reality is that sexual difference is not a problem to be solved. It is instead a gift to be celebrated. Specialization, according to sex, is the cornerstone of every well-functioning household, every well-ordered community, and every well-structured society. My hope and prayer is that in our time together this weekend, we'd both deepen our understanding of God's design for sexual difference and strengthen our commitment to conforming our lives and our culture, our community, as a body of believers at Westside Baptist Church to that design. So over the course of today and tomorrow, we're going to have three sessions. And our time tonight will deal with the pattern of reality, the fundamental structure of sexual difference that has been revealed in God's word and can be seen in God's world. Tomorrow morning, we will address the problem of rebellion. We'll see the way that the goodness and glory of sexual difference that is so plain in the word and in the world has been distorted by personal depravities and false ideologies and broken economies. We'll deal with each of those in turn. Tomorrow night, we'll conclude by turning to the program for repentance. If we're going to recover the goodness and glory of sexual difference, then we must change what we want, change how we think, and change how we live in society. And we'll follow that up with some time for discussion. Tonight, as I mentioned, our focus is going to be on this pattern of reality, the fundamental goodness and glory of sexual difference. And we'll have two big chunks to get through. First, the pattern of reality has been revealed in the Word. Second, the same pattern of reality that we see revealed in the Word can be seen in the world, despite the brokenness that has come into God's creation. Since we have a lot of ground to cover, we'll take a short bathroom break in between these sessions. And now, the first stop on our journey to reclaiming the goodness and glory of sexual difference is the account of creation in the first chapters of Genesis, which will be the primary textual basis. We won't be able to work through it verse by verse, but we'll be referring to what we find in Genesis over and over again in this first session. But before we dive into the details of the text itself and the patterns that are there, these patterns, I'm so just thrilled by some of the things that are here and how they go all the way down in ways that I wasn't even aware of, even though I've thought about this lots of times and read it hundreds of times. I saw new things that I had never seen before in preparing for this that I'm excited to share with you. But before we get into those first chapters of Genesis, we need to take a moment to go to the eye doctor, as it were, and consider the glasses through which, I better put these back on because I cannot read these notes now without these glasses, to consider the glasses through which we see the patterns in the word and in the world. First, when we as modern American Christians read the scriptures, we have a tendency to hunt for specific instructions, clear commands that directly answer our questions. Here's my question, is there a Bible verse that speaks to this? This is our tendency. And the flip side of this is the common assumption, well, you don't have a Bible verse to tell me I can't, so I can. If there's not an explicit command, I can do what I want to do, and you can't tell me any different, it's just your opinion. We might call this approach to reading scripture biblical minimalism, or perhaps simply biblicism. Let me give you an example of the way that this approach shows up in the way that many understand what the scriptures have to say about sexual difference. Scripture is very clear, both that women may not serve as elders or pastors, and that wives must submit to their husbands. We find these rules repeated several times in scripture. These are the specific roles that we have a Bible verse for directly. Scripture does not directly answer our questions about women in combat or say anything about whether or not women should serve as police officers or firefighters or how businesses should be organized. There's no Bible verse about who should fight fires. As a result, many otherwise conservative American Christians conclude That scripture is clear about the vocations of men and women in the church and the home, but it is silent about the relationship between men and women in every other area of everyday life. This is a very common approach, even among very conservative Christians. But I want to suggest from the outset that this approach to scripture is fundamentally misguided, though often well-intentioned. Scripture does contain clear commands, and we absolutely must obey those commands. But the authoritative instruction that we find in the scriptures is by no means limited to the explicit commands that it contains. As we read in 2 Timothy 3.16, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. And that is literally all scripture is breathed out by God. It's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness. If we're to read Scripture well, it isn't enough to treat it like raw material, a mine to be ransacked for rules that we can then go on to elaborate and extrapolate from. The Scriptures are not first and foremost a repository of timeless commands. They are full of narratives and poems, genealogies and parables, and all of these are breathed out by God as well. They're written down for our learning and instruction, and many of them are directly relevant to our understanding of the goodness and the glory of sexual difference. In other words, rather than coming to the scriptures with our own ideas about how to read them, we need to allow the scriptures themselves to teach us how they ought to be read. We don't go to the scriptures with our own ideas, this is what literal reading looks like, or this is what good reading looks like, now I'm going to read the scriptures that way. Rather we go to the scriptures and we ask ourselves, how do later scriptures read earlier scriptures, and then we allow those to be the spectacles through which we see all of the scriptures. And when we attempt to do this, we'll quickly see that Jesus and Paul did not practice biblical minimalism, as I described it, or anything remotely like it. You see, when Jesus confronted the Pharisees about their false views of divorce in Matthew 19, he didn't hunt for a proof text that addressed their specific question. That's what they were doing, that's not what Jesus did. Instead, he responded to their cherry-picked proof text by pointing them to the foundational pattern of marriage in Genesis 2, even though Genesis 2 says nothing at all about divorce. Jesus didn't go to the divorce-proof text. Jesus turned from the divorce-proof text to consider the foundational, creational pattern there was in Genesis 2. When Paul in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians sets out to give instructions regarding the respective roles of men and women in the church, he appeals repeatedly to the overall pattern and order of the creation narrative. In other words, these respective, when they come up with a specific situation and they give specific instruction, they do so on the basis of a broader and more fundamental pattern that they derive from their reading of the creation account. And so when we want to know how to address a situation that is not directly addressed in the word, we should do the same. We should do what they did. If we're going to reclaim the goodness and glory of sexual difference, we must learn to read the scriptures like Jesus and Paul. We must learn to be attentive to the foundational patterns of scripture as well as to its explicit commands. And this same approach that limits our reading of scripture distorts our reading of the world. So this way of reading, this way of seeing reality isn't just something, these aren't just spectacles that we put on when we read the scriptures. The scriptures aren't just teaching us how to read themselves, they're teaching us how to see the world as a whole. You see, most of the time, modern Westerners don't listen to the world at all. We don't think that the natural order has anything to say to us that we need to hear. Even Christians very often treat the natural order as nothing more than a mind of silent Legos given to us to rearrange as we see fit. But the scriptures confront us with the reality that creation is not mute. As we read in Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God. They're saying something. The firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech. Night unto night showeth knowledge. There's no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their line has gone out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world. Nature has something to say. Though nature has been deeply marred by sin, it still displays the glory of its creator. The world is not mere raw material for us to manipulate as we please. It has a message for us. A message we ignore at our peril. There's an order to nature, and the natural order tells us something about God and his purposes for humans. And because our bodies are part of that natural order, our bodies can tell us something about God and his purposes for humans, and we need to listen to what they have to say. Paul, after all, in Romans 1, does not hesitate to appeal to what nature has to teach us about appropriate sexual relations. How do the bodies fit together, Paul says? If you put them together differently, you are missing what nature is telling you. If we're going to reclaim the goodness and the glory of sexual difference, we must learn to be attentive to the patterns in nature as well as to the patterns in scripture. So now we've finished our visit to the eye doctor, we have to consider what spectacles are we going to use to look at the word and to look at the world. So we've covered that, and now we're going to examine the profound pattern of forming and filling that is displayed in the account of creation given in the first chapters of Genesis. So we'll begin with the pattern of creation that we find in the days of creation in Genesis 1 through 2, 3. In Genesis 1, 1 through 2, 3, we have the initial account of the creation of the heavens and the earth over the course of six days, followed by the blessing and sanctification of the seventh day. These six days, the six days of creation, fall into a clear pattern. In the first verse, which in Hebrew is exactly seven words long, We're told of the initial creation of the heavens and earth. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And in the second verse, this newly created earth is described as formless and void. It's without organization and it has not been filled. So what is formless stands in need of being formed. What is empty stands in need of being filled. And so it's no accident then that the six days of creation have been deliberately organized as a sequence that addresses these two needs. First a pattern of forming and then a pattern of filling to fix the problem of the formless and void earth. If you compare the first three days of creation to the second three days of creation, you will see that there's a correspondence between these two lists. The first day describes the creation of light and the division of light from the darkness, the forming of this domain of light and darkness into which the sun and moon and stars will later be placed. So if you can visualize this, we've got first three days, second three days, and so the fourth corresponding day, the fourth day corresponds to the first. It describes the filling of the heavens with the creation of? Heavens. No, no, no, no. First we get the heavens, but what goes in the heavens? The sun, moon, and the stars. The sun to rule by day, the moon to rule by night, so we've got this division, and then we have a filling of this category that has been created. The second day divides the waters from the waters, and that creates the sky. So what do we find on the fifth day? We find birds and we find fish in the sea. So we've got the waters from the waters and then we've got birds and fish. The third day separates the waters from the earth and we get what? dry land. And then on the sixth day, so we've got, you know, this division, this division, this division, this filling, this filling, this filling, the sixth day we get the creation of land animals, and this is the day on which we're told about the creation of humanity. As Alistair Roberts, who I'll be referring to quite a bit in this first session, summarizes, days one to three are days of structuring, division, taming, and naming. These days involve the establishment of stable regions with their boundaries. Days four to six, which are found in verses 14 through 31, are days of generating, establishing a succession, filling, glorifying, and establishing communion. The heavens and the earth that are structured on the first three days are populated with their host in the second three days. So we have a pattern, a basic pattern of forming and filling, formlessness and emptiness being repaired by forming and filling. Creation follows this pattern. But this same pattern of forming and then filling shows up in the commissioning of humanity in Genesis 1, 26-28. So we've got this big picture, the six days of creation, but we actually have the commissioning of humanity. Adam and Eve were created to image God's good will over his creation. As the remainder of scripture makes clear, the language of the creation account is the language of royal sonship. As the obedient human son of God, Adam was supposed to follow in his father's footsteps. It's therefore no accident that when, so Adam and Eve, they're set up as God's representatives. We have what God is doing, and now God is going to tell them, you go do that too. It's no accident when God commissioned our first parents as his representatives in verse 28, the pattern of the commission follows the pattern of the creation. On the one hand, they were supposed to continue the work of forming by taking dominion over the earth. That's the work of forming. On the other hand, they were supposed to continue the work of filling by being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth. We have the same two-part sequence that we have in the days of creation in the commissioning of humans. As Roberts explains, dominion relates to the first three days where God divides, establishes, tames, and names the fundamental structures of creation. Filling relates to the second three days where God generates new beings, fills, populates, glorifies, and establishes communion within his creation. Here we find an initial indication that humanity's vocation within the world is to reflect, continue, and to extend God's own creative rule of Genesis 1. The same pattern of forming and filling that we see in Genesis 1 is echoed again in Genesis 2. So we've got the big picture, the days of creation, we've got the little picture, the commissioning of humanity, but then we go to the close-up of the creation of humanity in Genesis 2, and we see this same basic pattern again. In fact, it deliberately and repeatedly echoes what we've already seen. In verses 4 to 6, we have a general statement about creation together with a mention of a specific lack, just as we do in verses 1 to 2 of Genesis 1. Then, just as we do in Genesis 1, we get three acts of fundamental formation. First, the man, the one who bears the glory of God, is formed from the ground, paralleling the creation of light on the first day of creation. Then the garden is formed. As a sanctuary slash temple with specific boundaries in which the earthly presence of God will dwell, it parallels the forming of the firmament on the second day of creation. Then the four rivers that flow down from the Temple Mountain of Eden are formed, paralleling the separation of the sea from the land on the third day of creation. And these three acts of formation are followed by three corresponding acts of filling. The man, the earthly light of the glory of God, is then placed in Eden and commanded to tend and to guard the garden. We'll come back to that guarding the garden tomorrow. Then the garden was filled with the birds and animals which were brought to Adam to see what he would call them. Then as the culmination of the whole process, the woman who alone could enable Adam to fill the earth was built from his side. So just as the first creation account ends with God resting, the second creation account ends with God's representatives resting in the garden, naked and unashamed. So there's a pattern in the days of creation that is echoed in the way the closeup of the creation of humanity is structured. But it gets better. As we've seen, the same pattern of forming and then filling that structures the creation account also structures the mission of humanity, the commissioning of Adam and Eve. But this pattern doesn't just show up in the creation of the heavens and the earth, or in the close-up of the creation of Adam and Eve, it also shows up in the details of the specific creations of Adam and Eve. So we saw this big picture, days of creation, close-up, the commissioning of humanity, but we see that same big picture close-up pattern, in the whole account of Genesis 2 and the distinctive verses that relate to the creation of Adam and Eve within Genesis 2. As Paul emphasizes in 1 Timothy 2.13, Adam was formed first and then Eve. This is how Paul is reading the account. He's showing us the way we're to look at the text. But there is more gold in this mine. For Adam was not only created before Eve, he was also created differently from Eve. And the distinctive pattern seen in the creation of male and female points to the distinctive natures and distinctive vocations of men and women. We must give attention to both what each sex was formed from and to where each sex was created. You see, Adam was formed from the un-gardened ground outside the Garden of Eden. First, the man is formed. After his creation the man Adam was given the masculine vocation of tilling the earth in guarding the garden of providing and protecting it When God formed the garden if you look at the sequence of the text you see this when God forms the garden Adam was there to watch him do it first the man is made then God makes a garden with the man there to watch and He was there to watch what it looked like to organize a garden because he was given the job of taking the lead in taking dominion over the rest of the as yet un-gardened earth. This was his job description. God has created him as his representative and he shows him, here's what you're supposed to do, Adam. Here's what I'm doing. Now go do this everywhere. As Michael Clary puts it, well, Adam was created from the ground because God created him for the ground. Joseph Minnick's expansion of this point is profoundly important for our understanding of work and our understanding of the masculine vocation in particular. Minnick says this, in the second chapter of Genesis, God creates Adam from the dust of the ground outside the garden, and then makes the garden, and then places Adam inside the garden. The significance of this is that God has taken Adam from an uncultivated ground, started a work of cultivation, and then placed humankind inside that project to continue and expand it. Adam is to serve and keep or to guard the garden. In the larger task, as described in the first chapter of Genesis that we already covered, Adam is to fill the earth, apparently expanding God's original cultivating project across the uncultivated spaces of the world, which were presumably the first things he saw. Eve was created very differently. Eve wasn't born from the dirt outside the garden. She was built from the side of man and she was created inside the garden after the garden had already been formed and the animals had already been maimed. Eve never lived in a world in which there were no other human persons. Just as God gave Adam a masculine vocation that corresponded to the way that he was created, so also he gave Eve a feminine vocation that corresponded to the way that she was created. God made the man from the ground because God made the man for the ground, and God made the woman from the man because God made the woman for the man. God made the man in the land outside the garden because God intended the man to take dominion over that land by forming it into the garden. In a corresponding way, God made the woman inside the garden because God intended the woman to fill the garden with glory. As Clary sums up, what each was created from indicates what each was created for. Roberts is once again helpful. Men and women are formed separately and differently, and there is a correspondence between their nature and their purpose. The man is formed from the earth to till the ground, to rule and to serve the earth. The woman is built from the man's side to bring life and communion through union. In other words, it isn't just the order of creation that suggests that men have a fundamental vocation to form the earth, and women have a fundamental vocation to fill it. The same point is also made by the way in which each of them was created. Where they were formed at points us to where they were formed for, and what they were made from points us to what they were made for. This is the heart of the argument that Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 11. As the ESV well translates verses eight to nine, for man was not made from woman, but woman from man, neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. This is how Paul is reading the account. Paul tells us explicitly that the creation of male and female in the beginning has something to say about the vocations of men and women in the present. We do not have to come up with our own way of reading the text. Indeed, we must not do so. We must submit not only to the rules we find in Scripture, but to the readings we find in Scripture and the pattern of reading we find in Scripture. The creation and the commissioning of Adam teaches us that forming is the fundamental vocation of man, one they are uniquely equipped to excel at. The creation and commissioning of Eve teaches us that filling is the fundamental vocation of women, one that they are uniquely equipped to excel at. As Roberts explains, although both sexes participate to some extent in both tasks, exercising dominion and being fruitful are not tasks that play to male and equal capabilities in an equal manner, but rather are tasks where sexual differentiation is usually particularly pronounced. In the task of exercising dominion and subduing creation, the man is advantaged by reason of the male's taxes, significantly greater physical strength, resilience, and willingness to expose itself to risks. He is also advantaged on account of the greater social strength of vans of men. In the task of being fruitful, multiplying, and filling the creation, however, the most important capabilities belong to women. It's women who bear children, who play the primary role in nurturing them, and who play the chief role in establishing the communion that lies at the heart of human society. When we grasp this biblical pattern, we can see why God calls on wives to subordinate themselves to their husbands. This isn't an arbitrary rule that God came up with, or Paul came up with, or some cabal of men came up with to oppress women. No, this is part of the order of creation. Subordination is not an arbitrary rule invented by men to oppress women. The point of subordination is not that men are more important or more valuable than women. Perish any such thought. The subordination of wives to their husbands is instead a reflection of the reality that the task of forming is foundational and prior to the task of filling. It's an ordering. The creational intention of the biblical instructions regarding male rule and female subordination is not at all about keeping women down, controlling and dominating them, treating them as less than fully human. It's instead about enabling women to exercise their unique gifts, establishing for them an environment in which they can flourish by causing others to flourish. Far from turning women into doormats, the purpose of male headship is to provide them with a canvas to fill with glory and beauty, and if what someone calls headship is not accomplishing that goal, then it is not what the scriptures are talking about. I love the way one writer put it. This is one of my favorite quotes that I found in this whole preparation. Without man, woman has no place. But without woman, man has no future. Forming comes before filling. But without filling, the day will come when there will be no more forming. A house must be formed before it can be filled with the nurturing love that makes it a home. Grain must be harvested before it can be transformed into bread. Seed must be sown in the womb before it can be grown into a child. Now, of course, as we all know, and as we'll discuss in more detail tomorrow morning, we live in a world that has been deeply corrupted by sin. The correspondences of creation do not always function as they should. In fact, they often do not. But if we read carefully, and if we listen closely, we can still see and hear the creational pattern of forming and filling that has been woven into the very fabric of reality. At every level and in every way, the unique giftings of men and women correspond to one another. This is the pattern of creation. It's the way that God made the world. And if we want to flourish in the world that God made, it is a pattern we must conform ourselves to. This pattern can be summed up by three basic principles of what I like to call creational correspondence. So we'll be returning to these over and over again. These are the three fundamental principles of this pattern. So we take the whole pattern and we boil it down into three principles. Here's what we would come up with, or at least here's what I have come up with. First, men and women are equal in value. Second, men and women are different in nature. Third, men and women are corresponding in function. Equal in value, different in nature, corresponding in function. First of all, we must insist that men and women are equal in value, of equal dignity in God's sight, and of equal importance in God's plan. As Walter Neuer put it well, the Christian view of the sexes starts from the premise that both men and women are, in every respect, God's creatures and of equal value. Both men and women were equally created by direct divine action. Both men and women have been equally called to participate in God's plan for humanity. Both men and women are equally redeemed by the same precious blood of Christ. And as Paul argues in Galatians 3.28, both men and women are full covenant members in the new covenant people of God. Even as we respond to the wicked lies of those who say that men and women are interchangeable, we must not fall prey to the equally wicked lies of those who say that men are more valuable than women or that women are more valuable than men. Though men and women are not generically human, they are most emphatically equally human. Though men bear the image of God as men and women bear the image of God as women, both men and women are created in the divine image and after the divine likeness. So this is the first basic principle of creational correspondence, men and women are equal in value. The second principle of creational correspondence is that men and women are different in nature. The creation account could not be more clear. God did not create generic humans and then assign some of them to the role of man and others to the role of women. He didn't create a bunch of people and then say, OK, men over here, women over here, red team, blue team, first team, second team. That's not how it went. It does not go far enough to say, as many do, that scripture teaches complementary roles for men and women. This is certainly true, but it's merely a consequence of a truth that is both much more important and much more foundational. As Zach Gares puts it well, men and women share equal worth before God, but they are also different. These differences are most apparent in the physical differences between men and women, but contrary to much modern thought, these physical and biological differences affect a person's entire being. Men and women have different bodies, minds, personalities, and dispositions. We'll talk about the evidence for some of that here in a few minutes. But another way of saying this, Gares goes on to say, is that men and women have different natures. God has designed men and women differently, and he has designed them to relate to one another differently. The reality is that the complementary roles of men and women are rooted in the corresponding natures of men and women. The complementary roles of men and women are rooted in the corresponding natures of men and women. Men are called to masculine roles because men were created with masculine natures. Women are called to feminine roles because women were created with feminine natures. Now, the suffering and confusion caused by disorders of sexual development is real and must not be trivialized or treated flippantly. We'll talk about this more in a moment. We must at this point robustly insist that God did not create generic humans. God created men and God created women because God wanted there to be men and women. As men, our masculine bodies are not meat suits for our sexless souls. While we are never merely our bodies, there is still a very real sense, we talked about this in our series on embodiment, in which we are our bodies. Our bodies are not something that we have, they are the someone who we are. And this is why our hope as Christians is not merely in some sort of vague life after death, but rather in life after life after death, in the resurrection and the renovation of our male and female, or female bodies. We're not generic humans who rather unfortunately happen to be trapped in differently sexed bodies. God created men and women differently because God wanted men and women to do different things to together carry out his mission. Specialization according to sex is not an obstacle to be overcome or an enemy to be destroyed. Specialization according to sex is the crowning glory of creation. So first, men and women are equal in value. Second, men and women are different in nature. Finally, men and women are corresponding in function. This is one of the fundamental points of the Genesis account. Adam and Eve were not only made different from each other, but they were also made different for each other. When we speak of the difference between men and women, we're not simply partitioning humanity into different jars, as though we were compulsively sorting M&Ms by color. We are instead discussing a polarity in which the function of the whole comes from the corresponding difference between the parts. So you might think of a battery, and like all analogies, this could break down. It is not arbitrary that you have a positive and a negative terminal. Indeed, it is through the interplay of positive and negative that the battery works. You can't have a battery with only a positive terminal or a battery with only a negative terminal. It's when the two function together that you get electrical power. All the electricians out there, do I have that right? All right. The old analogy between man as the head and woman as the heart is helpful to see how this point fits with the previous two. Like man and woman, the head and the heart are equal in value. Both of them are absolutely essential for the continuance of human life. As far as I can tell, no one has died yet tonight. Night is still young. And as far as I can tell, you all have brains, or at least you all have heads, and you all have hearts. The reason I know that is because the former statement, you're all alive, would not be true if either of those things were missing. Like man and woman, the head and the heart are equal in value, but both of them are absolutely essential for the continuance of human life. Like man and woman, the head and the heart are different in nature. But the head and the heart are also corresponding in function. On the one hand, this means that the head and the heart are mutually limiting. The head depends on the heart, and the heart depends on the head. What the head does is never independent of what the heart does, and vice versa. So heart attacks can cause brain damage. And neurological disorders can cause a perfectly healthy heart to badly misfunction. Nothing wrong with the heart. It's all wrong in the head. But the heart stops working because the head has stopped working correctly. Yes, the heart can sometimes continue to beat while the brain is in a persistent vegetative state. During bypass surgery, the functions of the heart can temporarily be taken over by a machine. But under normal conditions, the head and the heart exist in a state of profound interdependence. So the head and the heart are mutually limiting. You can't have one functioning well and correctly without the other functioning to some extent at least. But on the other hand, the head and the heart are mutually enabling. The head does not simply add its abilities to the heart. You've got a head, and the head does its head things, and you've got a heart, and the heart does its heart things, and now they're sort of tied together, so if one breaks down, the other breaks down. Well, that's true, but that's not the reason we have heads and hearts. Rather, they multiply. The head multiplies the usefulness of the heart, and the heart does the same thing for the head. Because functioning together, you don't just have organ function, you have human function. a fully human life, functioning together. They don't simply sustain their own existence and activity, but they instead enable us to take meaningful action in the world. All the things that we do, running and jumping and sharing the gospel and reading a book and working and all the things that we might do in the world, they're all dependent on the head and the heart working together. They enable us to take action in the world and to carry out our mission as human beings. And what is true of the head and the heart is true also of men and women, not only in individual households, but also at every level of society. So on the one hand, men and women are mutually limiting. As Paul told the Corinthians, woman is not independent of man, nor man of woman. Men and women need one another. Men cannot flourish independently of women, and women cannot flourish independently of men. If men do not function as they should, women cannot function as they should, even if they want to. And if women do not function as they should, men cannot function as they should, even if they want to. And this applies at every level of society. In an individual household, if the wife is not functioning as she should, the husband cannot function as he should. This applies in a broader church community. If the men are doing well and the women are doing poorly, then the church community is doing poorly. And this applies at the level of a broader society. If there are functions where men are functioning well, but the women do not have correspondingly excellent and respected functions, then the society will begin to break down. But on the other hand, men and women are also mutually enabling. You see, the corresponding functions of men and women at the household, at the community, at the societal level, they're not simply additive. They multiply one another, enabling a profound synergy. As one writer explains, for example, if a man has 10 units of masculine goodness and a woman has 10 units of feminine goodness, when taken separately, they would add up to 20 units of goodness. But when men and women are working together synergistically, their interaction can result in 10 times 10. or 100 units of goodness. Together they create a child, a family, and much more, an entire culture. The Mausers put it like this, women's roles are a glory and a counterpart to man's roles. Man is father, she is mother. He is bridegroom, she is bride. He is husband, she is wife. He is king, she is queen. The feminine roles answer, compliment, and correspond to the masculine roles. The man cannot carry out his mission without the woman. The woman cannot enter into her vocation without the man. Without a bride, no man can be a bridegroom. Without a bridegroom, no woman can be a bride. Without the gift of seed, a womb can only bleed. Without the hospitality of the womb, seed can only be wasted. If there is no forming, there can be no filling. If there is no filling, there is no reason to bother with forming, and history shows that forming will stop. when filling begins to cease. Though men and women are different in nature, they share a common project, a project that neither is sufficient to carry out on their own. Men and women are equal in value. Men and women are different in nature. Men and women are corresponding in function. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh. This pattern that we see in individual household applies also to the community of the local church, and to the society as a whole, you can play this pattern up, level by level, and everyone finds their place, male and female, within it. The pattern revealed in the word is clear. Specialization according to sex is foundational to God's design for humans. Let's take now a five-minute break. When we come back, we'll consider how the same basic patterns that have been revealed in the word can also be seen in the world around us. So let's take a five-minute short break, and we'll come back and finish. The title of this series is Reclaiming Reality, the Goodness and Glory of Sexual Difference. In our time together tonight, we're focusing on the fundamental pattern of reality. Already we've seen how this pattern of reality has been revealed in the Word. The basic principles are clear. Men and women are equal in value, different in nature and corresponding in function. What we need to see now is that there is a fundamental correspondence between the patterns we've seen revealed in the word and patterns that can be seen in the world. We'll focus on two truths. First, our bodies are biologically binary. Second, our bodies correspond to our masculine and feminine vocations. Human bodies are biologically binary. This is not an opinion. This is not scientifically disputed. It is simply reality. To use a technical term, humans are a sexually dimorphic species. That means that no one has ever seen a merely human body. No one has ever seen a merely human body. There are only male bodies and female bodies. Tragically, some of those male and female bodies suffer from a variety of conditions that have disordered or even obscured their sexual development. Sadly, some otherwise healthy male and female bodies have been deliberately deformed or disfigured in desperate attempts to escape reality. But while the suffering, physical or psychological, of those whose sexual development has been disordered or deliberately deformed is real and must never be mocked or minimized, it does not change the fundamental reality of the biological binary. Once again, I repeat it. No one has ever seen a merely human body. There is no such thing. There are only male bodies and female bodies. And because we are our bodies, there are only male humans and female humans. I know that most of you do not question this. If you were concerned or confused about this, you probably wouldn't be at this retreat. And much of which I will cover in the next few minutes will not be new to many of you. I also know, fair warning, that some of the words I will use will be a little shocking for some of you to hear a pastor use from a pulpit, even from a podium such as this. But I don't apologize for either of these things. Because we live in a society that is in open war against reality, we cannot take even the basics of biology for granted. We need to know how to speak plainly, accurately, and without embarrassment about our sexual design as men and women. So let's dive in. Ryan Anderson provides a clear description of the scientific basis for the biological binary that renders humans a sexually dynamorphic species. He says this, males are organized to engage in sexual acts that donate genetic material, while females are organized to engage in sexual acts that receive genetic material and then gestate the resulting offspring. As McHugh and Meyer go on to emphasize, it is these reproductive roles that provide the conceptual basis for the differentiation of animals into the biological categories of male and female. There is no other widely accepted biological classification for the sexes, either in biology, zoology, considering animals, or with humans. Now, this language of structure and organized is very important. We have to be precise here, because when you talk to someone who disputes this, they are looking to trip you up. And so being careful and precise is important. This language of structure and organization is very important. A man does not actually have to father a child or even to be able to father a child in order for his body to be organized for the donation of genetic material and thus male. A woman does not have to actually give birth or even to be able to give birth in order for her body to be structured for the reception of genetic material and thus clearly female. To use an analogy, our eyes remain clearly and obviously structured for the purposes of sight, even if darkness or defect prevents them from actually seeing. Even if someone is blind and deaf, we do not struggle to discern the difference between their eyes and their ears, because their eyes and the ears, even if neither of them are working, are structured in fundamentally different ways and toward different purposes. The basic biological binary is rooted in this reality. Males contain one half of the human reproductive system and females contain the other half. Each was made for the other and each is incapable of functioning without the other. There are two basic parts to the human reproductive system. The first and most obvious are the external genitalia. Men have penises and women have vaginas and the two fit together to enable fruitful sexual intercourse. In view of the pattern we saw in the creation account, it's not irrelevant to point out that male genitalia are on the outside of their bodies and female genitalia are on the inside of their bodies. It fits the pattern, inside and outside the garden. It is also not irrelevant that it is the man who enters the woman who takes the initiative and not the other way around. This is teaching us something about the respective roles of men and women, not only in the act of sexual intercourse, but in life and society as a whole. But our external genitalia are only the beginning of the story of sexual difference. Because by themselves, our genitals would never be able to generate life. We need our gonads for that. Once again, males contain one half of the human reproductive system and females contain the other half. Males have testes that produce sperm. Females have ovaries that produce eggs, eggs which can only be fertilized by male sperm. They cannot fertilize themselves. Male sperm alone can never generate life and neither can female eggs. Only when the two come together can reproduction occur. It cannot be emphasized strongly enough that there are two and only two gonads that contribute to human reproduction. While there are any number of ways, we'll talk about this in a moment, in which our sexual development can be disordered or our sexual performance can be dysfunctional, there is no third half to the human reproductive system. While gonads do not always function as they should, gonads do not exist on a spectrum. There is no third gonad. There is instead a clear biological binary between the two gonads that together make up the human reproductive system. Anyone who says otherwise has either been greatly deceived or is being grossly deceptive. This is not one opinion among others. This is reality. Yet while the definition of male and female is rooted in their respective organization for reproduction, the differences between male and female bodies are by no means limited to those reproductive systems. Reproduction is only the beginning. Humans are sexually dimorphic all the way down. Though it does not become visible until between 12 to 14 weeks later, sexual difference begins at conception. The differences between men and women begin with the differing chromosomes in our cells. As a standard textbook of clinical embryology explains, the embryo's chromosomal sex is determined at fertilization by the kind of sperm, X or Y, that fertilizes the oocyte. I'm not sure I'm pronouncing that right. The technical term for the female egg. Fertilization by an X-bearing sperm produces an XX zygote, which is the technical term for a fertilized egg, which normally develops into a female, while fertilization by a Y-bearing sperm produces an XY zygote, which normally develops into a male. Now the word normally is important here, because as we'll see in a moment, there are times when things go wrong in the womb. But the fact remains that given normal development in healthy human bodies, every one of the tens of trillions of cells in our bodies is genetically sexed with far-reaching consequences for every area of human health and development. We've talked about our reproductive systems, that's where the basic biological binary, that's where the safest and the most accurate way of defining the difference between male and female. We've talked about our chromosomes, now it's time to talk about hormones, which are much more important than I realized before I began preparing for this study. Beginning in the womb and continuing throughout life, the hormonal systems of men and women are massively different. Important, as our chromosomal differences are, it is in fact the action or non-action of testosterone that determines whether or not we develop male or female bodies, both in the womb and at puberty. No testosterone, no male body, even if you have XY chromosomes. This is the reason why the basic biological binary is rooted in our overall reproductive organization rather than the difference between our chromosomes. Well, I don't have the competence and we don't have the time for a full discussion of the many endocrinological differences between men and women. There is a binary here as well, both in the womb and throughout our lives. And the most important of these differences is the fact that healthy men have vastly greater amounts of testosterone than healthy women. This reality has far-reaching effects on every area of our lives. As Carol Hoeven points out, testosterone levels in healthy men and women do not come close to overlapping. Men's are 10 to 20 times those of women's. In puberty, the gap in testosterone levels is even wider. Puberty boys have about 30 times as much testosterone as girls do at puberty. Unlike the differences in height and strength that we'll discuss in a moment, when it comes to our hormones, we're not simply dealing with large averages, but with a true and hard binary. Absent serious medical conditions or dangerous experimental interventions, a healthy man with low testosterone levels for a man still has many times the amount of testosterone as a healthy woman with high testosterone levels for a woman. They don't overlap. Here's the distribution for women, here's the distribution for men, and there's a valley in between them. They don't overlap at all, unless there is a disorder of some kind. As Hoeven goes on to demonstrate through her very interesting book on the subject of testosterone, it's this difference in testosterone levels more than perhaps any other biological factor that causes men to act in stereotypically masculine ways and women to act in stereotypically feminine ways. But the differences between normal men, healthy men, and women are not limited to our reproductive systems, our chromosomes, or our hormones. Our bodies are different, in part as a result of all of these other factors, and they're different in significant ways. On average, for example, men are both much stronger and significantly taller than women. Of course, it is true there are some women that are stronger and taller than some men. So these overlap a little bit. That's the nature of large averages like this. But the fact remains that, as one author pointed out, only five to seven percent of women are as strong as the average male. As Louise Perry recently noted, this means that almost all women are weaker than almost all men. The constant Hollywood mantra of girl-boss superheroes taking down muscled-up bad guys is a fantasy with no roots in reality. That does not happen in real life. While the differences in speed are not as great as the differences in height or strength, they're still very significant, which is why teenage boys, depending on the sport, can outperform the best women in the world because of testosterone and because their bodies are different, which is why boys and girls should not play competitive sports on the same teams. But that's a subject for a different day. In short, when the apostle Peter describes women as weaker vessels, he is not being a misogynist. He is simply stating reality. The fact that men are stronger and faster than women only diminishes women if you think that superior strength and speed of men is more valuable than the superior grace and tenderness of women. Now that would actually be sexist. The significant differences between men and women aren't limited to our bones and our muscles. Our brains are different, and they're different in significant ways. As Margaret McCarthy, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, explains, every cell in a male brain is to some degree fundamentally different than every cell in a female brain. In a shocking development that no previous generation of humans would ever have anticipated, it turns out The latest research shows that there are massive differences between the way that men and women process the world. This could not have been predicted without the most advanced medical scanning technology. The significant conclusion of a recent study mapping the brain activity of a large number of both males and females were this. Men's brains were wired for perception and coordinated actions, and women's brains were mapped for social skills and multitasking. One co-author noted, it's quite striking how complementary the brains of women and men are. Newsflash. Of course, I was joking a moment ago. If you could explain the concept of brain scans to our great grandparents, I said, what do you think we'll find? They would have told us this. Yet in a society that seems to relish the force-feeding of lies, it's worth taking the time to restate the evidence even for those truths that ought to be obvious. When people deny that there's a difference between black and white, then sometimes we need to stand on a street corner and say, black and white, black and white. Here is a difference. Here's a black card. Here's a white card. They are not the same. We need to do that with this matter of biological difference. Because if we don't, we are not immune to forgetting that there is a difference between the two. Before we move on to our final section, I need to say a few brief words about the tragic reality of what scientists refer to as disorders of sexual development, or DSDs. Just as the brokenness of the curse affects every area of human life, so also does it affect every area of sexual development. Almost everything that could go wrong, in theory, at least occasionally does happen in reality. In some cases, genital structure may conflict with your chromosomes. In other cases, external genitalia may fail to match internal gonadal structure, or even more strangely, may only begin to do so at puberty. There are indeed times, very rarely, but there are times when it is genuinely difficult or even impossible to quickly determine whether an infant is in fact male or female. And we do ourselves no favors by ignoring or denying these tragic realities. And as we respond to them, though, because when you have a conversation and you want to say, there are male bodies and female bodies, this is the point that anyone who is wanting to contest that is immediately going to bring up. And as we respond, there are two things we need to remember. First, those who suffer from disordered sexual development remain the image bearers of God, just as those who suffer from any other sort of disordered development. Image bearers of God should never be treated as mere pawns in a cultural struggle. They are instead deserving of our utmost compassion and a patient willingness to seek the best medical solutions possible. But second, we should not allow the real struggles of those who suffer from such disorders to blind us to the reality that these are indeed disorders. Something is wrong, otherwise they would not be deserving of compassion. You have compassion on someone who is suffering from something that is not the way it should be. and it is not compassionate to anyone to take broken bodies as the paradigm of health. As one writer put it in acknowledging the very real presence of children with abnormal sexual development, the basic complementary orientation of humans as male and female remains. People with ambiguous genitalia do not represent a third sex or an infinite spectrum of additional sexes. There are two and only two gonads that contribute to human reproduction. Anything that does not conform to that pattern is disordered and deserving of compassion. Our bodies are biologically binary. Humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Our bodies are either male or female. And while there are many ways in which sexual development can be disordered, there is no third. Go now. The cells of men and women have different chromosomes. Different hormones organize our development inside the womb and shape our behavior outside of it. Our bones and muscles are different. Our brains are different. And though disorders of sexual development do occur, and those who suffer from them must receive our compassion and care, they do not change the reality of this biological binary. But the pattern of reality that can be seen in the world does not teach us only that we are male and female, just as we read in Genesis. It also teaches us that the differing bodies of men and women correspond to the differing vocations of men and women. The male body corresponds to the male vocation of forming. The female body corresponds to the female vocation of filling. The differences between our bodies are not arbitrary. They correspond to our differing vocations. Men are optimized for the task related to forming. They're designed to take dominion by subduing the wild earth and making it a suitable place to live, turning it into a garden. Women are optimized for filling. They're designed to take dominion by turning that place into a home, and by filling it with people, and by nurturing and caring for those people. Men are designed to give women a place, and women are designed to give men a future. Men are designed to be conquerors, and women are designed to be carers. And while they often explain them as the result of evolution rather than design, so they give a different explanation for them, these same patterns that we have observed in Genesis have in fact been observed in the world by non-Christian psychologists, sociologists, and other researchers. Specialization according to sex is not just a theological principle that we read about in the scriptures, it's a biological reality that we see in the world. and it is a biological reality that affects every area of our lives. And sanity begins when we take the foundation of our existence as basic and work with the grain instead of constantly trying to work against it. Given our time constraints, we're going to be very selective. Men are more strongly equipped for forming by their higher levels of aggression, and by their greater aptitude for abstraction. And then even more briefly, women are more strongly equipped for filling by their higher capacity for nurture and their greater ability for integration. So men have this task of forming, and they're equipped for that by aggression and abstraction. Women have a task of filling that they're more strongly equipped for, and they're equipped for that by a higher capacity for nurture and a greater ability for integration. On average, men are both massively more aggressive than women and much more willing to take risk of just about every kind. As with height and strength, of course, there are some women who are more aggressive than some men. But this does not change the overwhelming difference between men and women in this respect. Simply measuring aggression is somewhat hard to do. People could have different definitions. But one thing that I think all of us would agree on is that murder is very aggressive and very risky. And men are massively more likely to commit murder. Male aggression is not always a good thing. We live in a broken world. For example, according to a 2013 United Nations study, they were not attempting to prove the biological binary. This is the United Nations. 95% of all of those convicted of homicide in the most recent year in this study were men, as were 79% of the victims. While rates of murder vary enormously between countries and time periods, Americans murder one another at much higher rates than most of the world. What does not change is the fact that men commit the overwhelming majority of murders, and the overwhelming majority of those murdered are also men. Even on the rare occasions when women do kill, they almost always kill a man rather than another woman. This is true of every society that has ever been studied, past and present. To put this another way, quoting another author, across cultures, there are 25 to 30 men who kill another man for every woman who kills another woman. Let that sink in. There are 25 to 30 men who kill a man for every woman who kills a woman. That's a big difference. Not only are men more aggressive than women, men are also simply less afraid than women, even when fear would be entirely appropriate. Men are vastly more likely to engage in and die from risky behavior of just about every variety imaginable, from reckless driving to picking up poisonous snakes to falling off the edge of a cliff. If it's risky, Men do it. There's a good reason insurance companies charge men more. They're not being prejudiced. They're living in reality. As the examples I've given so far show, men's greater aggressiveness and willingness to take risks can sometimes go badly and destructively wrong. But what some men use for evil or folly, other men use for good. Because just as men are overwhelmingly more likely to risk their future to kill their enemies, so also are they overwhelmingly more likely to risk their lives to save strangers. Since 1904, in the United States, this is a quote, in Canada, about 10,000 people have been awarded the Carnegie Hero Medal, which goes to a civilian who voluntarily risked his or her own life, knowingly, to an extraordinary degree, while saving or attempting to save the life of another person. About 10% of these awards have gone to women, which means that 90% have gone to men. And if you look at statistics about those who lose their lives to save strangers, it's more like 40 to 1. Because men are both more aggressive and less fearful than women, they're overwhelmingly more likely than women to take dramatic action in the world for good or ill. What we see in the world corresponds closely to what has been revealed in the world. Adam was created from the dirt because he was designed to take dominion over the dirt. He was created in the wild world outside the garden because he was created to conquer that world, to aggressively take the risk necessary to subdue it by expanding the boundaries of the garden to the far corners of the world. Male aggression is like a pickaxe. It's designed for breaking apart the hard soil and smashing rocks and getting things done and reshaping them in fundamental ways. Men's greater ability to take aggressive and risky action in the world is not arbitrary. It is instead these very abilities that are needed for the male vocation of forming, not only in the physical world, but in the intellectual world and in the spiritual world as well. Though they can and do go badly wrong in all of these domains, it's precisely these abilities that enable men to carry out their vocation in ways that benefit everyone, including and especially women. Not only are men more aggressive on average than women, they also have a greater average capacity for abstract thinking. As one writer put it, the male brain is predominantly hardwired for understanding and building systems. Men are better at systematic abstract and problem-solving tasks. Put generally, abstraction is the ability to distance oneself from the overall environment, focusing on a particular element of interest, often independently of its relationship to other things. As with aggression, abstraction can go badly wrong. As Walter Neuer explains, this male propensity for abstract system buildings carries the danger that their reflection may become autonomous and cut them off from the real world. Autism, for example, is much more common in males than females by a four to one margin. Four times as many boys are autistic as girls, and it's because autism is essentially this male capacity and propensity for abstraction taken to an extreme that is unhelpful and destructive. But the same greater ability for abstraction can go beautifully right. As Clary put it, men have the unique ability to look at the unshaped world around them and determine how to shape it into something good and useful. The technological innovations of the modern world were overwhelmingly pioneered by men. It is abstraction that enables the composition of a symphony, the construction of a mathematical theorem, the invention of a scientific theory, or the winning of dozens of simultaneous chess games. To give one example, while women are often outstanding musical performers, the greatest musical composers, by any standard, have all been exclusively male. And this is not simply the result of male suppression of female accomplishment, because despite the many unjust prejudices against which they often had to struggle, any list of the greatest novelists of all time will include many women who are fully the equivalent of any male novelist. But composing a symphony requires a very high degree of abstract thought. That's something men are better at, and that's something why more of the greatest symphony writers have been men. It's the same ability of abstraction that gives men an ability to excel at mechanical traits. When you're listening, to an engine and you're trying to diagnose the problem, you're abstracting yourself from everything else around you and you're focusing on that one thing to hear what's wrong with it and what needs to be done to fix it. That's the same kind of strength and ability that a composer uses when he writes a symphony or a... a physicist uses when he discovers a theorem, or an advanced mathematics person does when he discovers a new mathematical formula, this is the male ability to abstract all the environmental variables and focus on the one thing of interest and make progress in solving it. Civilization, as Anthony Esalen argued at length in his book, No Apologies, depends on the strength of men. Take, for example, the astonishing system of aqueducts that supplied water to Roman cities. Without a high level of abstraction, it'd be impossible to design them. Without a high level of aggression, breaking up rocks and moving them far distances, it'd be impossible to actually build them. Many uniquely equipped for the work of forming. Forming alone is only one half of the creation mandate. Filling is different from forming, but it is not one iota less essential. Just as men are equipped for forming by their higher levels of aggression and greater aptitude for abstraction, so also women are equipped for filling by their higher capacity for nurture and greater ability for integration. We're very brief on these points, especially since this is a men's retreat. But it's important to know that this greater strength and ability is not just something that is for men. This applies equally to our women. Women's capacity for nurture begins with their unique ability to nurture a new life inside their wombs. As a quote I used earlier expressed it beautifully, without the forming work of men, women have no place. Without the filling work of women, men have no future. Men have a greater aptitude for dealing with things. Women have a greater aptitude for nurturing persons, a capacity that is already obvious in infancy and early childhood. Even just a few days after birth, this is not the result of culture. Infants of four days old have not been cultured. As all of you who have had four-day-old infants know very well, But even just a few days after birth, boys show more interest, as expressed by the time that they look without turning their heads, in looking at pictures of mechanical objects, and girls prefer to look at human faces, as a few-day-old infants. At four months, baby girls can distinguish photographs of the faces of people they know from the faces of people they don't, and boys can't. And there's so many different examples of this, of they respond more to the cries of other infants, and they distinguish voices better than boys do. Baby girls, even from infancy, are more attuned to the world of persons, and baby boys are more attuned to the world of things, which we could have figured out from Genesis without all the psychological experiments. Women's superior ability to nurture is by no means limited to those women who have actually had children of their own. This is where this idea of being ordered towards something, even if that something shows up in a different form in a particular individual's life. It shows up in girls who are not yet old enough to have children of their own. When older siblings watch over younger siblings, girls do a much better job of it than boys, and they get more satisfaction out of it. And yes, this has been surveyed by sociologists. Cross-culturally, even. This pattern has been observed in many different cultures. It also shows up in women who are not able to have children or who, for some reason, chose not to. On average, women are simply better at caring for the weak and vulnerable than men are, and they also get more satisfaction out of it. Despite what some may try to tell you, it is not at all misogynistic to say that men have, on average, a greater capacity for abstract reasoning than women do. It is simply an observation of reality. It is also not sexist to say that most women have a greater capacity to nurture other humans than most men. It is, again, simply an observation of reality. What is, in fact, both deeply sexist and despicably misogynistic is the suggestion that mathematical formulas are somehow more valuable than human infants, or that the creation of musical compositions is more important than the care of the vulnerable. That's misogynistic. The greater female ability to integrate, like the greater male ability to abstract, shows up in many ways. Biologically, it is an observable fact that women's brains are simply more integrated. One of the reasons women are often better able to talk about their feelings is because there are simply more neurological connections between the portion of the brain that controls speech and the portion of the brain that controls emotions. They're connected more, hence they find it easier, and they can talk about their emotions. Men have fewer connections between those parts of the brains. They have to work at it harder and develop the connections because they're not born with them. This greater capacity for integration shows up in many other areas of life. Not only are women themselves more integrated as individuals, they are also uniquely equipped to integrate men into civilization. If civilization depends on the strength of men, it's held together by the beauty of women. If men are the building blocks that carry the weight of civilization, women are the mortar that holds those blocks in place. Women are the ones who give boys a reason to become men. Women don't just give men a future by nurturing the next generation. Women give men a future by providing them with a motivation to settle down to the difficulties of the daily grind. But guess what? The difficulties of the daily grind that men think they're doing for women are actually good for men. On average, married men work harder, stay healthier, and do a better job of avoiding self-destructive behaviors. Married men simply live longer. They feel like they're giving all of this freedom up, but that freedom is actually self-destructive if it's used for themselves. But when they are harnessed to care for a household, they themselves are healthier. Civilization, as George Gilder demonstrated in Men and Marriage, depends on the ability of women to harness men for productive purposes. Without the nurturing that only women can provide, no society can last more than a single generation. Without the motivation that only women can provide, most boys won't bother to become men. Women are the ones who tame the barbarians, transforming them, transforming us, from loose cannons into the building blocks of civilization that we can be at our best. This series is a celebration of the goodness and the glory of sexual difference. Our time tonight is focused on the fundamental pattern of reality. We began with the patterns of creation that we see in the first chapter of Genesis. While Genesis does not give us a long list of rigid rules or tightly specified roles, it does provide a clear pattern of the differing fundamental vocations of men and women. Specialization according to sex is rooted in the fabric of creation. After the break, we continued on by considering the message of biology. Although we live in a world that is marred by sin, the message of biology is not in conflict with the message of scripture. If the heavens declare the goodness and the glory of God, then every cell in our bodies declare the goodness and the glory of sexual difference. When we resume tomorrow morning, we'll consider the obstacles that we face as we attempt to put this pattern to work in the world. Thank you for listening to this message. If you would like to learn more about the Westside Baptist Church, please visit our website, www.bibledirectionforlife.com. Subscribe to the podcast if you would like to hear new sermons and lessons each week. And remember that a sermon podcast is no substitute for opening up a Bible and reading it for yourself.