The gay marriage issue relates very much to the gender identity topic
I am attempting to pursue in this blog. Last fall, after the passage
of Proposition 8, I actually felt more concerned than victorious. Few
of the other political outcomes of our last election were determined by the
perspective that won on Prop 8.  Though I tried to celebrate with others, the picture that came to mind for me was the Japanese victory at Pearl Harbor.

Christians will very shortly face the situation where the Good Book
they read will teach a morality that is, to most, baffling at best and
evil if applied to everyone. What is more troubling is that the great majority of
Christians will not have a clear understanding on why their
religion does teach a message that is good, even wonderful, for
everyone.  These posts (The Image of God) are one attempt to give an answer to that.

I wrote a paper after the election regarding the state and need of the
Christian church in the West. Because of its length it can be found
in my blog sidebar, entitled, “A Foundation on Which to Stand”. I
will continue the blog posts on gender and the image of God in the
next few days.

May God grant to the Remnant a heart and mind of grace and truth.

The purpose of this post is to begin the question, what does God see – or want to see – when He looks at “male and female” in Man?  As we already addressed, the terms “male and female” are defined as terms of relationship.  OK.  But what is this relationship supposed to look like?

The first thing we can determine, is that the relationship pictured is complementary in nature.  This can be deduced from several factors.  First, male and female are different.  God could have created two identical beings; He was certainly not constrained by biology to create what He did.  Sexuality is one part of the greater relational picture; God was not forced to work it into the picture for the sake of reproduction.  And, sexual differences related to reproduction are only a small part of the physiological differences between men and women.  Hundreds of differences exist from average body size, percentage of body fat, heart rate, red blood cell count, hormonal differences and even how the brain is wired before birth.  This vast array of physiological differences are all intended by God to create relationship that is asymmetric.  In other words, male and female are supposed to be different, to relate to one another from different places, and so to represent different aspects of what is in God.

Genesis tells us about this complementary intention in another way.  From Genesis 1 we understand the absolute equality of the sexes.   Since both are made in the image of God, both have an intrinsic value, and both are absolutely and equally necessary for God’s representation on earth.  In all my reading and discussions on the issue of equality between the sexes, I have never found someone who can give me a rational basis for gender equality outside of the Biblical basis beginning in Genesis 1.  As far as I know, only those who believe in the Bible have a logical, rational worldview basis for this intrinsic equality.

Genesis 2 and 3 go on to define the diversity within the unity.  Adam is created first.  Adam is given specific instructions related to the garden and is entrusted with the command related to the forbidden fruit.  Though both male and female are to have dominion (1:26), Adam names the animals.  This unique, separate introduction of Adam must indicate a role for “male” in the image of God that is unique.  But perhaps most important in this unique, solitary introduction we find that in accomplishing all these things, and even walking with God Himself, Adam is found to be incomplete.  By design, God Himself cannot complete what Adam needs, for Adam is in the image of God.  Adam must be an “us” and an “our” (Genesis 1:26).  So in the finishing of the Creation the man becomes plural and out of himself comes another – one who is not a separate creation, but is really still him.  Yet not him at all, but clearly a separate person.  Yet not separate, but bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.  “Female” in the image of God was the only thing in all of creation that was not made out of that which was dead.  As Adam looked at Eve for the first time his mind must have been filled with wonder, awe and completeness.  This was “woman” for she was out of man.

To understand God’s purposes, we must not miss this.  Something before had been fundamentally and profoundly “not good”.  Though in face to face fellowship with his Creator, Adam was still alone.  Not even God’s presence could complete the relational picture of God’s image that He had begun.  But God brings a “helper suitable” from Adam’s side.  Asymmetric, complementary, “one flesh” lifelong relationship exists.  Man, the image of God, is now on the earth.   And suddenly, the fullness of the creation becomes “very good”.

Who could miss the parallel with the first two members of the Trinity?  God the Son has been eternally coexistent with the Father.  And both are One; there is only one God.  Yet somehow in that Oneness, the Father is first.  The Nicene Creed attempts to describe it for us – the Son is

eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.

The man and the woman, from one being, yet two, united together being one flesh.  Eternal God, One God, yet two Persons in Father and Son.  And out of the relationship of Father and Son proceeds the Third person…

… the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.

And from the loving relationship of the man and the woman proceeds the most amazing of all things – the image of God in their image comes forth.  Of them, yet separate. 

What then can we know of “male and female” as God has made it?   First of all, they are, in Genesis 1, not biological terms related to reproduction, they are relational terms corresponding to realities within God.  Biology and sexuality are merely some of the means by which God expresses the relational.  Second, the relational realities are complementary, not symmetric.  In both the way God created the male and the female (Adam first, Adam instructed, Eve from him, Eve as a helpmate), and in the myriad of created physical differences (physical, emotional, intellectual) between men and women, God is telling us there is something unique in both manhood and womanhood that captures what God is.  These two measures of, 1) what God created in male and female (with created differences) and, 2) how God created male and female (would anyone propose that God created the male giraffe or rabbit first in a similar process?) make clear that God has put something very intentional and very special in not just human beings, but in male and female.  The image of God does not reside in humans generically.  The image of God is in male – and maleness – in relationship with female, and “femaleness”.  Or we could say, the image of God is in masculinity and in femininity, and especially in what exists when the two are in covenant relationship with one another.

Having established that “male and female” are relational terms, and that they are complementary in God’s intent, we will next explore how those complementary relational poles exist within God.

But it is important not to miss the application all this has to the college plaza (see previous post).   Gender is not just the way we experience sex.  Can I say it again?  Gender is not just the way we experience sex!  Gender is a part of our identity that comes from God.  It is not just an incidental part of this physical existence.  It is the way we express what God is.   God has made me in His image.  My gender, male or female, is given to me to make me like Him.  It is not what makes me like the animals.   As men and women we need to be called to live out something that goes beyond our sexuality and that puts our sexuality in a healthy and proper priority.   Gender is a call to identity in masculinity or femininity.   When Biblically understood, it is ennobling.  It is the framework for our humanity.  It is the only truth that allows us to escape the otherwise inevitable degeneration of Romans 1 and put our sexuality in the healthy and beautiful context God intended.

Sex is such a big topic because they are 18-25, most are involved in sexual relationships and they have both a body and a world that tells them the good life is found when sex with someone is working well.  The reality, though, is that it generally doesn’t work well, at least for very long, and there has been a lot of pain from abandonment, date rape, disease, abortion, and simply feeling trapped and used.  Sex and sexuality is the topic that touches the problem they think they need to solve and there is a fascination with a preacher who says this magical energy of life – sex – is in most of their cases, a sin that will hurt them.  They listen with a tenuous fascination.  The preacher is clearly outside the bounds of politically correct postmodernism, making him a little frightening.  But he is kept safe by a group-think that agrees to label him “crazy”.  And there is nowhere else most of them can go to hear someone acknowledge both God and sex as real and relevant and talk about their connection to one another.

Fortunately, Tom is one of the most gracious, engaging and respectful people I know.  His preaching really is a gift to the places he goes, because he shares God’s word and God’s truth with humility, clarity and power.  There is also humor and respect.  Unfortunately, one only has to look at campus preachers on Youtube to know these qualities are all too rare.

Even more unfortunately, these young (and old) people are lost in the labyrinth of what may be our culture’s greatest lie – that “male and female” are little more than one of the options for experiencing sex.

I must say “one of the options” because the progression described in Romans 1 is already far advanced in western culture.  When the creative role and purposes of the God of the Bible are barred from a worldview, an inevitable process begins.  Without the divine truth regarding gender identity to orient our understanding, the power of sexual drive and experience begins to be definitive over more and more of life.  This inevitably erases every competing concept, until finally sexual experience itself, in any form, becomes the measure of value.  However, since we are beings created in God’s image and sex has been designed as a very powerful aspect of our humanity meant to accomplish a purpose very different from recreation, this wayward cultural value doesn’t work.  It brings a great deal of harm, pain and inevitably the destruction of our relationships and our humanity itself.  Sex outside of God’s designed purposes becomes central and destroys our humanity.  Instead of becoming an expression of male and female it replaces what those are and then erases them.

To be continued in Image of God Part 2

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.