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Musicians refer to Franz Joseph
Haydn as the father of the symphony. In one of his greatest musical
masterpieces, Haydn sets the biblical account of creation
to dramatic choral music. He called his choral masterwork
simply Die Schöpfung, The Creation. His creation oratorio opens like
all choral pieces should, with a tenor voice." Amen. Thanks for that witness,
brother, fellow tenor. The oratorio opens with a tenor
voice piercing the chaos, singing, the gray shadows of black darkness
vanish before the holy beams. The first of days appears. Now
chaos ends, now chaos ends, and order fair prevails. For God
said, let there be light, and there was light. Friends, if
you can accept the opening words of the Bible, then nothing else
will be hard for you. In the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth. Now chaos ends, and order fair
prevails. The next four to five weeks,
I want to take these lines from Haydn's creation masterpiece
and use them as we look at the topics of gender, singleness,
marriage, and parenting. Our short sermon series will
set us up for our Sunday school series and then our marriage
retreat in October. This morning, I want to talk
about the divine design of gender. The divine design of gender. When God speaks, chaos ends and
order fair prevails. And don't we need order fair
to prevail in our world gone mad about gender? Let me share three examples.
First, you probably know of some of these, but two years ago,
the candidate for the Supreme Court, who now sits on the bench,
was asked in the confirmation hearing to define what a woman
is. The USA Today recorded the response. Jackson, appearing confused,
responded, I can't. I'm not a biologist. Two weeks
ago, however, the world was told that biologists can no longer
answer the question of what a woman is either. Here is the second
example. The revelation that biologists
cannot answer the question about what a woman is came in response
to a controversy that erupted over two boxers competing in
the women's division of Olympic boxing. two boxers had failed
a sex identification test administered by an outside sports agency. And in spite of failing those
tests and demanding others, the boxers were allowed to beat up
women in the ring and were then praised and protected for doing
so. Now, in response to all of this,
here's what I want us to hear. The head of the International
Olympic Committee, President Thomas Bach, suggested during
a press conference on Friday of that week that identifying
people by their biological sex based on chromosomes is outdated. Thomas Bach said, quote, in the
conference, it's not as easy as some say that the XX or the
XY chromosome gives a clear distinction between men and women. It's scientifically
not true anymore. So two years ago, a current Supreme
Court justice wouldn't answer the question because she's not
a biologist, and now two weeks Ago, the head of the International
Olympic Committee told us, biologists can't answer the question anymore
either. Oh, for chaos to end and order
fair to prevail. If those responses are not Orwellian
enough, there are some professing Christians who came to the defense
of the two boxers whose sex was in dispute. They did not come
to the safety of the women, mind you, but the defense of those
whose sex was doubtful at best. The reasoning was something like
this. Because we really don't know if that person is a woman
or man, it will do psychological harm to the person who self-identifies
to a woman and the trans community if we don't let the boxers fight. To be clear, some professing
Christians were alleging that the potential psychological harm
to somebody who might be potentially misgendered was greater than
the actual physical harm of a woman getting punched in the face by
someone who was a man or who might be a man. The reasoning
seems to have forgotten Paul's words in Romans 1.32, where he
says, those who practice such things deserve death, and so
also do those who give approval to such things. Romans 1.32. Two years ago, two weeks ago,
and then some 24 hours ago, a third example came. I was coming back
from Chicago where the DNC will be held, and I saw a job posting
in Chicago for the Harris-Waltz presidential campaign. Curious,
I'm not looking to leave, but I was curious. I clicked on the
campaign website and selected the tab Apply for This Job. When I did, I saw that as an
applicant, I could select nine different pronoun combinations. The traditional options of he,
him, and she, her were there. Then to move on to they, them,
and then on to options, I'm not being funny, I'm not sure I know
exactly how to pronounce. There was zee, zem, zee, here,
a, em, here, here, hoo, hoo, and fay, fair. And if those nine
options are too exclusionary for me as an applicant, there
was an option that I could click custom and give my own. From the Supreme Court to the
International Olympic Committee to a presidential campaign and
some professing progressive Christians, we have mainstreamed the idea
that gender fluidity and confusion are virtuous. This is not a time... Can I scold
this briefly? It's not a time for laughing.
It's a time for lament. For Paul said in Romans, having
rejected God as the loving creator, listen, they will now dishonor
their bodies. And have minds unable to come
to the truth. Wholesome body parts made good
are sawed off. beautiful minds corrupted as
we bow down to the gods of feeling and desire. And the image of
the incomparably beautiful God is marred like a middle finger
spray painted on a Mona Lisa or scapel slicing across Monet's
Lady with a Parasol. No wonder the creation itself
is groaning for what we have done to it. The times of stress in which
we seem to be living are very distressing, wrote John Stott.
Sometimes one wonders if the world and the church have gone
mad. So strange are their views and lax their standards. Some
Christians are swept from their moorings by the flood tide of
sin and error. Others of us go into hiding as
offering the best hope of survival, the only alternative to surrender. Beloved, we must be those who
stand unembarrassed and unashamed of the beauty and fair order
our loving wise king has made. We are to be lighthouses on the
shore of gender confusion and egalitarianism. We are to be
like those ministers of whom it was written in the dark days
of 1646, a tract was written, a true gospel minister must be
a man who stands foursquare, immovable at all times, so that
they who in the midst of many opinions, who have lost their
view, May return to him and find the way to God there. Friends. Listen, if you are here this
morning. And you experience what is called
gender confusion. You need to know that you are
far more than the sum of your desires. You need to know that
you are made with value and purpose. That you are loved. and should
not be mocked or shamed. You also need to know that the
culture and campaigns are using you to divide people and are
not loving you. You are lying to yourself and
you are being lied to by everybody else. The liberating capital
T truth is that every one of us was formed and fashioned by
a creator who knows us and loves us in spite of what we deserve. He loves you so much that He
sent His only Son to live and die in your place for your sins,
that if you believe in Him, you can be made whole in your body
and in your soul forever. Jesus came into the world to
make everything new. turn from your self-love and
treasuring your gender identity and treasure the one who made
you and you will find chaos ending and fair order prevailing. This is the divine design of
gender. Let me give us three summaries
of where we are going and then we are going to look at the text.
three summaries. First, we're going to see from
the opening chapters of the Christian Bible that God declared our physical
bodies made from the dust as very good. Our bodies, therefore,
are not amoral pieces of plastic to be shaped like raw materials
for our desires. If our children should not be
trusted to run with scissors, every time I pick up scissors
now as a man who is almost 50, I hear my mom say, don't run
with those. Still, if we children should
not be trusted to run with scissors, they should not be given scissors
to give to surgeons to remove parts of their body and then
praised for doing so. Our bodies, from our fleshly
skin down to our DNA, it's very good. They are made with a purpose.
The human body, God declared, good. So whoever you are, you
are not an accident. Your body was not randomly assigned
to you as an accident. You are made. by a loving God. And your body and your cells
are good. Very good. Second, into the physical
body that God declared as good, God personally breathed the Nishmat
Hayyim, the breath of life into man, and the man became an embodied
living soul. What a marvelous harmony then
we are of physical material and living immaterial being. We are
embodied souls. Third, we are gendered human
beings. and our bodies declared to be
good, and our embodied souls we are created as either male
or female, sounding our distinct notes as male or female in the
shared chord of our humanity. The male body was made to provide
and protect life. The female body was made to nourish
and give life. For God created male and female
in His own image. So to summarize, we are made
in God's royal image, we are gendered human beings, and a
good physical body and living soul. We are the crown of all
that God has made. This is by design. God declared
our body and our soul and our gender as very good. And here is one point. As the
moon reflects the glory of the sun and creates a glow of wonder
in the dark sky, we reflect God's glory too when we live our engendered
embodied existence as men or as women. When we live out our
gendered existence as male or female, when we love our bodies
as divine gifts to be stewarded, when we embrace our bodies and
live in accord with our gendered design, when we treasure that
and celebrate it, then like the moon, we reflect the glory of
God and shine like a bright light in the darkness of gender confusion.
Beloved, we must not eclipse the glory of God as Creator with
ideas that result in so minimizing, flattening, or erasing the differences
between men and women that we end up creating a functional
androgyny in which we are no longer male or female, no longer
mom or dad, we're just humans. That doesn't glorify God, it
demeans Him as Creator. We are not only human, we are
male and female in body and soul to the glory of God. This is
the divine design of gender. And now chaos will end and fair
order prevail. God has spoken. Let me summarize
this. Here is a female professor summarizing
the opening chapters of Genesis that we are going to turn to
in a moment like this. Here is how she describes this. The reality
is that we inhabit a divinely created order, a harmonious cosmos. This order is good, intentionally
and patiently called into being by an uncreated creator. Human
beings, male and female, are endowed with a unique dignity
marked by the image of their creator and entrusted with the
sacred work of cultivating life according to their gender. Sexual
difference, then, is not an extraneous or faulty feature, but an essential
part of its goodness. Such is the beauty of gendered
design. We need the beauty and loveliness
of our embodied gendered existence. Let's turn now to Genesis 1.
I spent too much time loading up the train. It's time for it
to pull out of the station. Genesis 1, as you're turning
there, Some people come to the Bible and they say, you know,
there are lots of creation accounts, and the one in the Bible is just
one of many of those. I mean, every culture, especially
pre-enlightened cultures, have things like myths to explain
the phenomenon of the world. But I want to tell you how different
they are and how unique this account is. Let me give you one,
as your Genesis 1 will read. The Enuma Elis is a Babylonian
story of creation. that's compared to the Bible.
Listen to how one historian summarizes the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian
story of how we came into existence. The Enuma Elish is a story about
a highly dysfunctional divine family engaged in a major power
struggle at the dawn of time. The heart of the story is where
the god Marduk kills his female god nemesis, Tiamat, and then
fillets her body in two, making the sky out of one half and the
earth out of the another. Thus Marduk claims the throne
as the high god in the pantheon by murdering a female deity and
making everyone else serve him. That's a polytheistic account
that opens in chaos and captures a creation that involves a war
between gods, the murder of a woman, and a man sitting down to rule.
How different that is from what really happened. What we're about to read, there
is nothing like this in any ancient world tale of the beginning of
the world. I want you to notice the simplicity,
the order, the power, and the beauty of men and women. Genesis 1. We're going to read
verses 1 to 5 about the first day and then jump down to the
end. In the beginning, God created
the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and
void and darkness hovered over the face of the deep. And the
Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. God said,
let there be light. And there was light. And God
saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from
the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he
called night. And there was evening and there was morning. The first
day. Look down to verse 24. on to the sixth day. God said,
let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their
kinds, livestock and creeping things, and beasts of the earth
according to their kinds. And it was so. And God made the
beasts of the earth according to their kind, and the livestock
according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the
ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, Let us make man
in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over
the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and
over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping
thing that creeps on the earth. So God created man in his own
image and the image of God, he created him male and female,
he created them. And God blessed them and said
to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue
it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves
on the earth. And God said, Behold, I have
given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all
the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall
have them for food. and to every beast on the earth,
and to every bird of the heavens, and to everything that creeps
on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I've
given every green plant for food." And it was so. And God saw everything
that He has made. And let me summarize, put this
in, and after He made man and woman, He said this for the first
time, it was very. and there was evening, and there
was morning. The sixth day, thus the heavens
and the earth were finished, all the host of them." This is
the Word of the Lord. It's simple, beautiful, ordered,
designed, full of purpose. Let me give words to hang our
thoughts on. Created. Gendered. Sacred. Designed. Redeemed. Created. Gendered. Sacred. Designed. Redeemed. Look at verse 27. We are created. So God created
man. The Bible does not begin with
arguments for the existence of God, but with the bold assertion
that He is. And then this uncreated God creates. And He creates with a word out
of nothing. There is lovely symmetry and
balance to everything that He made. Artists and mathematicians
call it the golden ratio, the Fibonacci sequence, a proportion
and ratio of things to each other that reveals beauty. And when
artists want to recreate the golden ratio, when they want
to create beauty, they imitate the golden ratio, the Fibonacci
sequence, and all of their art and their music and their mathematic
computations. God stands behind all beauty,
the symmetry, the proportionality, the harmony, the ratio of things
that make beautiful. If art reflects the beauty of
the artist, how beautiful must God be from the world He has
made? It's a beauty that if you saw
it, it would unmake you. The heavens do indeed declare
the glory of God. And on this penultimate day of
the first week, the final day of creation, like you do with
dessert, God saved the best for last. He created two genders,
two sexes, man and woman, and He crowned them as vice-regent,
king and queen, and said, now this is very good. If a passage or story, you know
this as we've been showing this again and again, if a passage
or story ends with the same theme, then the author is telling you
that's an important theme. Well, this theme is God as a
creator appears here at the beginning of the Bible and again at the
end of the Bible. So seeing God as creator must
be a big, important way to see God. Listen to the end of Revelation
4. Worthy are you, O Lord, to receive
honor and power and glory, for you created all things. The fact that we are created,
that we did not make ourselves, that we have come from a powerful
yet personal God grounds all human responsibility and all
accountability. We are accountable to the one
who made us. God made us and we owe him our
lives. We owe him our deepest loves
and our highest worship. He made us. We owe everything
to him. Now, one implication of this
for gender is that failing to live in light of how we were
designed as a man or as a woman is a failure to worship the Creator
and give Him the glory due His name. The fact that we are created
and God is the Creator also means that We don't live in a polytheistic,
animistic world, nor has God a part of His creation like the
pantheists believe. The creation narrative reveals,
particularly in chapter 1, God standing over all, supremely
transcendent, holy other. There is no one like Him. There
is no God beside Him. He alone made the heavens and
the earth out of nothing. He is transcendent and holy. He is the Elohim. We are then
in a word created. Created with accountability.
Created with responsibility. For it is He who made us and
not we ourselves. We are stewards then of our bodies,
caretakers of this gift, not freestyle artists who can impose
meaning on a blank amoral canvas of our flesh. We don't impose
meaning on our bodies and how our bodies were made with our
engendered physical flesh points to how we should live. Because
He made us. And it's good. There is a design
to our design. Second, we're not only created,
but we are gendered. Look again at verse 27 or listen
to me. God created them male and female. And Jesus, as we read this morning
from Matthew 19, when he wanted to make a point, he stood up
and said, you're confused about the nature of marriage and divorce.
Have you forgotten what was written at the beginning? He made them
male and female. Notice God created an engendered
body for us. God created male and female as
harmonizing notes with parody and dissimilarity. You remember
the symmetry of creation I just tried to talk about, the golden
mean, the Fibonacci sequence? Well, that symmetry not only
shows up in how beautiful things are, but in how God gave everything
an apropos, complementing pair. What happens on day one is completed
and complemented by what He makes on day three. What He did on
day two is complemented and paired with those things that start
to live on day four. And five parallels day six. Likewise, He gives the day a
golden-orbed light called the sun, and He gives the darkness
a corresponding light called the moon. There are beautiful,
complementing, binary pairs designed all through creation. And what
happened on day six? Turn to Genesis 2 because Genesis
1 gives us the summary. Genesis 2 zooms into the apex
of creation. What happened with this complementing
pair? 2.18, the Lord God said, it is
not good that man should be alone, so I will make him a helper,
translated this way, corresponding to him. Everything else could
reproduce according to its kind, according to its kind, according
to its kind. But God knows there was not another
person corresponding to Adam. So as a result, God did for the
Adam what He did for every other part of creation. I'm going to
create something that corresponds to Him, and I'm going to call
that a helper corresponding to Him. So, verse 21, the Lord caused
a deep sleep to fall upon the man. And while he slept, he took
one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the
rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into the
woman and brought her to the man. And Adam, who just went
through this experiment that naming all the animals, there's
nobody like me. When he woke up from his sleep,
the first thing he sees is the woman. And he says at last. Do you hear the beautiful surprise? It's there in the Hebrew text
at last. This, this Eshah, I'm Esh, this
Eshah is bone from my bones and flesh of my flesh and she shall
be called woman because she was taken out of the man and they
are one. So different is this from that
Enuma Elish creation account when the male God murdered his
female counterpart and filleted her body to make impersonal sky
and water. In the Bible, men and women are
created in the image of God and the woman is not an object to
be murdered but taken from His side to be treasured. Woman is
a gift to man and men and women are God's gift to creation to
rule over it and make it flourish and to bring life like caretakers
in a palatial garden. We are gendered beings then,
male and female. And it's not true that sex is
biology, but gender is a construct. Our maleness and our femaleness
includes our bodies, but philosophers and biblical interpreters will
tell us that our gendered existence goes deeper than our skin and
leaves an essential imprint into our soul as well. C.S. Lewis does this all the time
in his writings. He talks about it in Narnia,
or he talks about it in talking about the priesthood in the Anglican
Church, and especially in his space trilogy, The Hideous Strength,
in which two main characters are about to get a divorce, and
Lewis in his narrative says it's because they've forgotten what
it means for Jane to be a woman and live like it, and for the
man, what's his name, I forget, for him to live like a man and
to relate to each other as man and woman. Sex is not something
superficial, Lewis argued. It goes down to our being and
testifies to deeper realities. Think for a moment. Gender doesn't
mean marriage, but think of marriage. There's something about maleness
and femaleness that testifies to the nature of Christ and his
bride. These are not superficial, imposed
on our bodies, but designed into our nefesh, our being. One writer summarized how we
are gendered creations whose maleness and females soaks everything
about us. Our sexuality permeates to the
deepest metaphysical ground of our personality. As a result,
the physical differences between men and women are a parable of
the physical spiritual differences of a more ultimate nature. Sexuality
permeates one's individual being to its very depth. It conditions
every facet of a person's existence. As the self is always aware of
itself as an I, so this I is always aware of itself as a himself
or a herself. Contrast that for a moment with
feminist thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir who in 2010 wrote
an influential book called The Second Sex. She said this, one
is not born but rather becomes a woman. Now it sounds like,
oh yes, you grow into womanhood. She doesn't mean that. She means
woman is whatever you decide to make it to be. You are not
born with gender. You decide what woman looks like
for you. What is a woman? whatever you
want it to be. It also shows up in companies
that no longer speak about the men and women who work for their
company, but only of the humans who work for their company. That's
not an accident. It's an intentional way to downplay
our gendered humanity. And it shows up in the pronoun.
I looked up one of those things that I could click on in the
campaign. I said, what is H-U slash H-U
means? It means I'm a human and above
gender constructs. It turns us all into an androgynous
humanity moving around like androids with exchangeable Lego parts
and the name of advocating for women, they erase the distinctiveness
and the need for women entirely. We're just humans who work in
this company. Well, thank you C3PO and R2D2. We are gendered humanity. with
parity and lovely dissimilarity. So keep this in mind when you
read Galatians 3.8 and someone says, see, it says there is neither
male nor female. You remember, have you not read,
Jesus said, that in the beginning He made them male and female?
So is Paul really saying in Galatians 3.28 that God is now going to
undo His gendered creation? that He declared very good? Is
He going to undo male and female? Is that what He is saying? Or
is He telling us that no one, male or female, slave or free,
is outside the justifying righteousness of Christ through union with
Him by faith? Which do you think it is? Keep this in mind, how you live.
I want to ask a simple question. If you are a man, are you living
like a man? If you are a woman, are you living
in keeping with your gendered body that he gave to you? It is a mark of humility to live
in accord with how a loving God made you. I was talking to a brother in
Chicago, and he's got a little boy who's two, and he said, I'm
starting to ask, what does it mean to raise my boy as a boy? If you have a girl, are you raising
your girl as a girl that God made? Have you thought about
what it would mean? Are you raising your boy as a
boy? And don't fall into the trap
of pretending it doesn't matter, I raised them to be both. That's
not good. what our world has done. I probably
read over a thousand pages this last month and two big thick
books on the history of feminism and wars between men and women
by secularists. And here's what many of them
said. Our world has told us that women have the most value if
they have jobs like men, hold their beer like men, live without
regard for children like men, act like men, and have the most
value if they can just have the life of a man. And men are told
they have the most value if they act like women, nurture like
women, empathize like women, feel like women, and show themselves
an ally to women by painting their nails and wearing a dress
every now and then. That's real. Oh, but we are gendered creations. Live as a male to the glory of
God. Live as a female to the glory of God. Raise your children
according to the way that God made them. Raise your children
according to the way that God made them. Anything else is a
form of child abuse and is defacing the God who made them. Don't get Genesis wrong. There's
great parity, to be sure, in our gendered humanity. For woman
is from the man, and the husband and wife are one flesh. But there's
also complementing dissimilarity, we'll see in a moment. God did
not make them male and male. He did not make them female and
female. He did not make a male that acts like a female. He did
not make a female that acts like a male. We neglect our parity
and our complementing dissimilarity, and we neglect it to our own
hurt. We think the solution is to emasculate men and emasculate
women, leaving us with neither in the end. If you cover up the
sun with the moon, you lose both of them. C.S. Lewis described a problem
like this in a talk about roles for men and women. He said it's
no cure to say that all those who are females have to act more
like men and those who are males have to be more feminine. He
writes, a certain man may make a very bad husband. You don't
mend matters by trying to reverse the roles and asking them to
act like the wife. He may make a bad partner in
a dance. The cure for that, man, is that he needs more dancing
lessons, not that the ballroom should henceforth ignore distinctions
of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. What we need is men
and women and boys and girls to relate to one another in their
engendered bodies as God made them. Genesis affirms a balance of
sameness and differentness in the sexes. This is a delicate
balance that's difficult but necessary to maintain. This is
on the front of your order of worship. Most theories of gender
lose this balance veering into extremes of uniformity. Men and
women are interchangeable. Or polarity. Men are from Mars
and women are from Vetus. But both extremes lose the fruitful
tension in Genesis. The origin story of sexual difference
between men and women proclaims that our identities as men and
women matter. They carry sacred significance
and occupy a prominent place in the story. Which leads me
to say we are sacred. We're created, we're gendered,
we're sacred. He writes now, we are created
in God's own image. Here we come to a part of our
design. Our creatureliness Our engendered
embodied souls points to something beyond ourselves. Our lives,
our bodies, our gender point to the image of God. And what
exactly does this mean? Some take it to mean that in
the image of God, we reflect certain of God's attributes.
God is loving and so are we. God is good and so are we. That's
helpful. It's true. We are to reflect
God's character. But I think the heart of God's
image lies elsewhere. In the ancient Near East, a ruler
planted his physical image in a foreign country with a sculpture
or a banner or the like wherever he was. Whoever then came with
the image of the emperor in sculpture or another form had the right
to rule the area. The image of the emperor was
a physical representation of the emperor's right to rule here.
And anybody who had the image of the emperor had the authority
to do whatever was needed in the land. Well, who then shall
be God's image in the world He's made? It's man and woman. Automatically
our lives then take a tremendously transcendent sacred purpose.
Our bodies aren't our own. The world is not our own. We
are to live as God's image in the world that He has made. If
you're an owner of a company, but you can't make an important
meeting and you ask an employee to go instead, hopefully the
employee replies, it would be in my honor to represent you
at the meeting. That's what it means to be God's
image in this world. We have the sacred honor to represent
God and his likeness in the world. And in particular, what's involved
in God's image. Be fruitful, multiply, subdue,
and exercise dominion. That's Genesis 1, 27 and 28.
You're made in the image of God. Very next verse, here's what
it means. Be fruitful and multiply, subdue the earth, and exercise
dominion over everything. To be in the image of God then
is to be His royal representative ruling in the earth. And He gives
to men and women. God created life. And we are
to care for all that He's made and cause it to flourish. God
also created life and we are to imitate Him and procreate. This is what it means to be in
his image. We exercise God's rule as his representative. And both men and women are to
exercise careful dominion over the world. And men, can I say
this? Men and women come together not to reproduce. That's the
impersonal thing that animals do. But men and women come together
to procreate, to create a living soul. cultural moods shift and they
can shift quickly. We can get out of here today
and it's something else. In times past, women were looked
down on and marginalized. I'm particularly now thinking
of the American context. But at the current time, one
scholar after another is pointing out that the gendered existence
of men is being marginalized and they're falling behind. This
is what the Brookings Institute scholar Richard Reeves points
out in the book of Boys and Men. Or you can read William Farrell's
The Boy Crisis or Boys Adrift by Leonard Sachs. None of these
men, none of these writers are believers. They ought to be read
with discernment, but they capture what's happening in the larger
culture. Masculinity is minimized, marginalized, or emasculated. But Genesis shows us that both
men and women are made sacred. in God's image, both co-heirs
of Christ, both indwelt by the Spirit, both necessary to display
the full range of God's existence. Together, they marvelously reflect
the community of the Godhead in some way, because whatever
it precisely means, let us make then our image, it implies at
some level we're made to live in community, but to partner
together in our calling to exercise dominion and to procreate. Our
engendered bodies carry sacred significance. We've been given
the responsibility to act like God as a creator and caretaker. At a very high level, if you
step back, you will see the garden is actually described as a garden
temple. Adam and Eve are in God's immediate
presence. And Adam in particular, in Genesis
2.17, is told to work it and keep it, the very words used
to describe the work of the priests in the temple. So male and female
have a sacred purpose and a sacred temple that is God's world. And
not only do they have a sacred purpose and a sacred temple garden,
but their bodies are sacred. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians
6, don't you know that our bodies are members of Christ? That our
bodies are sacred temples of the Holy Spirit. He then warns us of immorality,
because that kind of sin takes the very members of Christ and
joins them with the members of a harlot. Or we take the temple
of our bodies indwelt by the Spirit and turn it into a bed
for sexual sin. Our bodies are sacred, designed
with purpose, designed with inherent sacredness. to borrow and adapt
then from Shakespeare and Hamlet, what a piece of work man is,
how noble in reason, how sacred in body and purpose. How are you using your sacred
and gendered body? We are created, gendered, sacred,
and designed with complementarity. We've hit this already a bit.
But every other part of creation has a completion. So men and
women gloriously share the image of God. They share sacred bodies
declared as good. They even share many physical
traits. They have shared internal organs. They have two eyes and
two legs. They have two hands. They have
two feet. They have the same number of
fingers and toes and two ears and two eyebrows and so on. Why should this equality of the
bodies of men and women on one level be different? Because Adam
said, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. There
is correspondingness, a shared overlap in their nature. They
are human beings with a shared physical body. And at the same
time, particularly Genesis 2 shows us that the shared equality and
likeness of men and women, it also shows us the beneficial
designed differences of men and women. We live at a time when
we see all indifferences automatically as a sign of injustice and alleged
power dynamics. Differences are bad. we are told. It's an unexamined cultural assumption. Ahsoka, the teacher, the end
of the school year from a classical school, and she explained it
like this in her career where she is, after teaching now medieval
lit and modern lit, I think the underlining problem is we don't
understand the beauty of hierarchy. She said, when our imaginations
are trained to see equality as the highest good, anything less
or different than that will always be perceived as bad, no matter
how much evidence we have to the contrary. When we come to
Genesis, we see a shared, a mutual equality, but we see beneficially
designed differences. And the differences are not deficits. They're not for value comparison. Which one then is better? Men
and women marvelously fit together because of the differences. Let
me point out three fundamental designed differences that we
should reflect on First, God made our sacred engendered bodies
with differences designed to point to the other. God made
our engendered bodies with differences designed to point to the need
of the other. Listen, one writer says, we're
not talking about superficial differences like hair or eye
color. We're talking about a body that's designed to fit another
kind of body in an entirely unique way. Maleness points to femaleness
and femaleness points to maleness. Our sexed body signals our inherent
capacity and need for interpersonal communion. Our male and femaleness then
was designed to point to the beauty of the other. The loveliness
of procreation cannot be carried out without bodies that fit pleasurably
together. God made our sacred bodies to
point to the need of the other. Second, God made our sacred and
gendered bodies with designed differences to carry out His
image differently. I can't be long on this, but
just take virtue for example. Both genders express virtues,
but they express them differently. For example, J. Buzhezhevsky. I practiced pronouncing that.
It's not Sheshevsky, it's Buzhezhevsky. Buzhezhevsky has a thoughtful
little book called On the Meaning of Sex. He teaches at the University
of Texas, Austin. He observes that although men
and women are capable of the same virtues, they tend to practice
them in different modes. Both men and women can be wise
and honest and temperate and so on, and they should be, yet
each sex inflects the virtues differently. These are not the
only examples, but David shows courage by standing up to the
Goliath and taking his sword. But Abigail shows courage by
standing up to David, not with the sword and a roundhouse kick.
But she makes a meal, she shows respect. She appeals to him from
her engendered existence, both courageous, but they do so in
courageous, masculine and feminine ways. Or Abraham goes into battle
with courage to fight for a lot. But Peter says that Sarah showed
courage before Abraham by willingly submitting to him and, quote,
feared nothing that's frightening. Sarah then is a model for women
in a mixed marriage. Their courageous submission can
lead their spouse to Christ. Third, God made our sacred and
gendered bodies with differently designed roles. We have shared virtues. We even
carry out this differently. Our males and females point to
the other. But I want us to see that he
designed us for overlapping but distinct, harmonious, complimenting
roles. There are many ways to think
about this. But think about the curse. In Genesis 3, God cursed
man and woman, and He curses the man and the woman in the
area in which they were specifically made. In carrying out the creation
mandate, man, according to Genesis 2.15, is to use his strength
as the primary protector and provider. But God cursed the
man and the primary area of his work, Genesis 3.17. God made
the woman to help the man carry out the mandate and bring fruitful
and multiplying and flourishing the earth. The purposeful design
of a woman's body points to her primary role and ability to give,
incubate, nourish, and give life. Only her body is designed to
incubate life, to sustain it, to push it into the world, and
then to nurture life with milk that comes from her body and
affection that only a mother can give. There is a reason that
grown men on the battlefield cry out not for their dads. Grown
warrior men cry out for their moms. You know why? The strength of a man is stronger
than a woman's, but the nurturing affection of a woman is designed
stronger than a man's. That makes a man in battle cry
out, I don't care what you think of me, I want my mom. That's
designed. The male needs the female. The
female's nurture is made for this. Beloved, we have bodies
made with a purpose. that goes down into our being. And we know that because when
God cursed the woman in Genesis 3.16, He cursed her in her areas
of primary responsibility. You now will be cursed in nurturing
and giving birth. And you, dude, you're going to
be cursed in working. It will take all the strength
you have. And when you, woman, now give birth, it will cause
you great pain. And when you give life now, it
may cost you your life. The curse shows us essentially
what we're made for. Men are to lead lovingly and
sacrificially because they're made stronger. That's not offensive. It's any more to say that women
give birth. It's beautiful. Men are stronger. It's beautiful to see that. Women
give birth. It's beautiful to see that. Lean
into your engendered embodied existence. I'm going to make
an attempt here with somebody else's help. What is a male and
female? Because here's part of what I
want you to think about if I don't get this right. If you define
male and female in such a way that you could just swap the
descriptions, you've dishonored God. You can't just swap it. Yes, they're shared overlap.
They're human beings. But they're sexual differentiation. I'm concerned about this because
I have a daughter and I have kids. I have boys. You do too. Let me try with some help, okay?
And maybe this will make you... You go back to Genesis 1 and
3 then. Here's an attempt on the basis of created engendered
bodies to say what makes a male male and a female female at a
minimum level. In his book on the meaning of
sex, J. Buziszewski defines a man like
this, a man is a human being of the sex whose members have
a different potentiality than women do. A man has the potentiality
for fatherhood. What is a woman? A woman is a
human being of that sex whose members are potentially mothers.
It might be physically impossible for her to be a mother, but we
should not say that she lacks the potentiality for motherhood
and the motherhood and fatherhood of male and female points to
something that includes but goes beyond children. Similarly, Abigail
Flavalli, I don't know how to say her name. That's my best
guess, Flavalli. Flavalli, I think that's how you say it. She defines
a woman similarly. The woman is a kind of human
being whose body is organized around the potential to gestate
new life. Man is a human being whose body
is organized around the potential of fatherhood, and woman is organized
around the potential of gestating life, of motherhood. That's how
they're designed. And how they're designed, that
potentiality points then how they are distinctively made and
ought to live that out in the world, children or no children,
marriage or not. In other words, somebody else
observed that the potential for fatherhood and paternity reveals
that men are to lead and provide and protect in primary ways,
and the potential of motherhood reveals women are designed for
nurturing and affirming and receiving and giving life. Now, if those
two attempts sound too sanguine or reductinistic or biologically
based, at one level, defining men and women according to biology
glorifies God because God gave us engendered bodies. But listen to how this data goes
together. I find these definitions helpful.
John Piper and Wayne Grudem wrote this back in the 90s. Put this
together, at the heart then of mature masculinity is a sense
of benevolent responsibility to lead, to provide and protect
for women in ways appropriate to a man's differing relationships,
or I'll say gender. at the heart of mature femininity
as a freeing disposition to affirm, receive, nurture leadership from
worthy men and ways appropriate to a woman's differing relationship.
And these God-glorifying differences, working together, lived out,
will cause life to flourish. Brothers and sisters in a world
gone mad, I just want to tell us, live as you were designed. Some of us might be living against
the grain of how we were made. I mean, as a man or a woman,
and it's showing up in your marriage and it's showing up in your body.
Let the Bible also shape our personality, and don't assume
that your personality is the default position of what's automatically
biblical. Welcome how God made women uniquely. Learn what it means. Lean into
it. and live in light of it. Welcome
how God made men uniquely. Learn what it means. We're created. We're engendered. We're sacred. We're designed with a beautiful
complementarity. And most of all, we need to be
redeemed. You can have a biblical view
of gender and go to hell. Men and women are equally sinners.
Being more masculine or being more feminine will not forgive
the wrongs in your life or clear away the guilt in your conscience. We need to be forgiven for not
honoring God as creator. We need to be forgiven for for
living contrary to our agenda. Perhaps he even designed our
gender to make us hunger not only for another, but for him.
And He came to make all things new, our bodies and our souls. This comes to us not by a right
understanding of gender, but a right understanding of our
need to be forgiven. Listen, have you been forgiven?
That's your greatest need. Adam, the first man, the first
man failed and we are here. Christ, the second man. One. And we are here. Have you not read in the beginning,
He made male and female redeemed to the glory of God? Go and learn
what it means to live according to the divine design. of gender.
Gender, The Divine Design
Series Redeeming Gender
| Sermon ID | 819244062076 |
| Duration | 1:02:58 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Bible Text | Genesis 1-2 |
| Language | English |
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