Image of God 1
There is a lot of concern in the Christian community about our changing cultural morality, and perhaps especially about challenges related to gay marriage and a militant gay community. Anyone following those last two issues understands there is a good basis for that concern.
But often times our response as Christians is reactionary and simply a list of reasons why gay marriage or homosexuality is wrong. Though a good case can be made for that, especially from a Christian perspective, it is also a response without much value except as a negative response to our world.
I think Christians miss the great power and beauty of the Biblical message regarding these contemporary cultural issues because we are not grounded ourselves in what God has created in human gender or human morality. The Christian view of marriage and gender is not just “normal” or “Biblical”, it is amazing. And wonderful. And the answer to so much pain and emptiness that is engulfing our world.
Rather than be defensive about my “narrow” view of marriage I want to shout the wonder and glory of what God has made in gender – male and female, masculinity and femininity – which are God revealing expressions that the world has erased to replace with the selfishness of recreational sex. How sad! What loss! And yet we as Christians are often so unaware of what God has made that we spend our own lives seeing no more than a battle with sexual temptation. We have a sad message when Christians and non Christians alike believe the lie that male and female are ultimately about sexual gratification, but Christians must acknowledge they are not supposed to act on the belief!
The world justifies men having sex with men, or multiple women, or children, or worse, because the world does not know that sex is an aspect, a subset of something much greater and more profound. That sex has a place in a greater purpose, and it is in that greater purpose we discover who we are as men and women, and find a fulfillment – rather than an emptiness – which grows over time.
Most Christians probably know that in the Bible the terms male and female are introduced in Genesis chapter 1 as part of the creation account. What most Christians haven’t noticed is that “male and female” have a very important introduction – one which does not relate to biology. Although our first-thought definition for those words brings the notion of biology or sexuality, the Bible does not provide a basis for that definition in what we are supposed to take away from Genesis 1.
In Genesis 1:20-23 we find ourselves in Day 5 of the creation week. On Day 5 God creates the birds and the bees and tells them, as you might suspect 
, to be fruitful and multiply (He also creates the sea creatures). But we should note that this command to sexually reproduce is not where the Bible introduces the terms or concept of male and female. Nor are those terms introduced early in Day 6 when God creates the land creatures. “Male and female” is introduced later in the most remarkable context of the whole account – that of the image of God.
Genesis 1:26-27 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, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
As believers in both God and Scripture, we must believe that what God did and what God revealed to us about what He did all have a purpose. Every detail, every word, is accomplished and communicated to express something or reveal something to us. In that light, Genesis 1:26 is certainly among the most remarkable verses in all the Bible. The God who wanted His people to know, above all things, that “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deuteronomy 6:4), speaks at this unique moment of being God in the plural. And what is this unique moment? The bringing of His image into the creation. “Let us make man in our image…” Wow. The one God is an “us”. The one God is plural. The one God is Relationship.
What does the plural God look like, relationally? We are about to get the best picture ever brought into this creation. “In the image of God He made him (singular), male and female He made them (expressed in a relational plurality).”
So male and female are introduced to us in the most profound context possible. “Male and female” is not about the birds and the bees. “Male and female” is about God.
Does this mean the Mormons are right and God is a physical male being reproducing spirit babies into our world with a female? Not if the Bible is a revelation from God. We have already shown that male and female are not here intended to describe biology. They are relational terms pointing upward into the eternal “us”-ness of God, not downward to the physical creation around us. Remember, God is not just using those terms in Genesis 1:26-27. He is defining them.
We are told as plainly as possible that Man as male and female is the fullest expression in the creation of that which is God, and that relationship between male and female is the closest expression of the relationship that exists within the Godhead. Reflections of this relationship have been created other places – as in father and son, ruler and subject. But none of them come as close to capturing what is really in God as that of “male and female” in covenant relationship called marriage.
But if the point is not biology, then what is it? How is “male and female” related to the image of God? The next post will explore how we can understand God’s intent – and our gift – in male and female.
