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.