Category: Culture

White Paper #5: Creation, part 2: Six Facts of Creation

Silva

We are about to meet the 4th challenge we wrote about previously: putting our sexuality in the perspective of the whole Bible.  Any discussion of human sexuality in its proper or improper expressions has to start with Creation. The aim of this post is to teach a positive and thorough (not exhaustive) view of male and female. 

#1: All are made in God’s image: 

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.” 

Each human is made in the image of God, after His likeness.  The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 4 states it this way:

After God had made all other creatures, He created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness and true holiness, after His own image…

The image of God is remained even after the Fall. Genesis 5:1, 9:5:

When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. Male and female He created them and He blessed them and named them Man when they were created…Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.

The point here is not to dig into what defines the image of God. Other writers have aptly worked through that issue. What is germane here is that however we define the image of God in man, each human being has it.

#2: Each is either male or female.

27So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 

To be human is to image God; to image God is to be male and female.  That is, male as male and female as female.  Our sexuality—our maleness and femaleness—is not an accident of nature nor simply biological: sexual identity and function are part of God’s creation; His will for His image bearers.

  • In other words, having been made female (or male), to live consistently as female (or male) is God’s will for female (or male) image-bearers.  

The sex we were given at birth is God’s will for us; it is the means by which He will accomplish His will using us: me as a man, my wife as a woman. Indeed in verse 31, God called male and female, “very good.”  For Adam to live as a man and Eve as a woman was “very good.”

Since our culture has rejected God and the church, it has rejected its origin story.  Now, thanks to evolutionary theory, we are simply the result of mindless, random acts of chance: blobs of matter coalesced into man and woman.  If that is true, then it doesn’t matter what we do with our bodies—we are male and female by accident so…live it up!  And our souls (if they exist) don’t matter, either.  All that matters is that we maximize our happiness because, in the end, who cares.  

God cares because He made us male and female.

#3: God blessed them after He created them male and female.

28And God blessed them. 

Being male and female is the blessed state.  This is important: being male and female in the fallen world is sometimes very hard for people—there is such a thing as “gender dysphoria” and, while very rare, is real.  Helping bring people back to realize celebrating created maleness and femaleness is the blessed state is an act of love and compassion.

Experiencing the blessedness of created maleness and femaleness is behind biblical commands to maintain the distinction between male and female.  One place where this is stated is in Deuteronomy 22:5:

A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.

To obscure the maleness and femaleness by our choice of clothing is to dim the blessedness of what God has created.  This is very popular today among youth—especially young girls.  They now wear clothing that resembles their brothers or fathers.  In a previous post, we linked to that article about Gucci designers: they are committed to putting men in skirts.  To try with clothing—or hormones and surgery—to obscure or hide created maleness and femaleness is not only an abomination it is not the state of blessedness.

Another place is 1 Corinthians 11:14-15

Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair it is a disgrace for him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? 

In that text, Paul is correcting a practice at Corinth that minimized maleness and femaleness—Paul even refers back to creation as the corrective.

What is very important in this point is the principle that God has never wanted men and women to obscure their maleness or femaleness with clothing and, by implication, our actions. Different cultures will define cultural expressions for men and women; these historic traditions had been well established. Nonetheless, the Bible doesn’t give dogmatic instruction on what constitutes male or female clothing simply that however we work out the principle, we cannot purposely obscure or hide the blessed states of maleness and femaleness.

#4: To be male and female is necessary for the work the Lord created us for:

28And God 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.”

This mandate was restated after the Fall with slight modification. Genesis 9:7:

And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.

Our created design was purposeful: God has specific work for us to do that requires we be male and female.  It is especially obvious that to be fruitful and multiply and increase greatly requires the binary male-female.  It is our design in order to image God and it is our design to accomplish God’s purposes for us.

#5: Paul highlights that this being made male and female was designed to display the complementarity between Christ and the church.  That is, the created differences between man and woman and how we are designed to be together—this is illustrated graphically in marital sex–displays the relationship between Christ and the church.  

From the very beginning of creation, God made us in such a way that the glory of the union of Christ and the church could be seen in the union of male and female—husband and wife.  Ephesians 5:32:

This mystery [of marriage] is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

God’s intent with creating male and female was ultimately so that the complementary relationship between Christ and the church could be seen.  Christ would never trade places with the church; the church could never trade places with Christ.  The Person of Christ and the Bride of Christ are not interchangeable: we could not be Him nor He us.

  • In this way alone, we see all sexual deviation from maleness and femaleness is against nature and against redemption.

#6: There can be no interchangeability between male and female.

  • For the accurate imaging of God our Creator, there must be male-as-male and female-as-female.
  • For the experience of the created blessedness, there must be male-as-male and female-as-female.
  • For the work that God has created us to do, there must be male-as-male and female-as-female.
  • For the proper representation of Christ and the church, there must be male-as-male and female-as-female.

White Paper #4: Creation, part 1

Silva

A culture that ignores God replaces Him with something lesser.  Much is lost as a result.  Our enemy in the Garden deceived Eve into thinking she could replace God.  She fell for it, Adam did nothing about it.  This has devastated every culture since.

Let’s review:

  1. What is now driving our culture?  The pursuit of happiness.
  2. Where is our culture now looking for that happiness?  Sexual  brokenness.  
  3. What is the main means our culture uses to ensure it can achieve what it seeks?  The sovereignty of personal “Choice.”  

No longer is faith, hope and love animating our approach to sexuality.  Now, the three guiding tenets of our culture are “happiness,” “brokenness” and “choice.”

God created us to seek our joy in Him.  So in our fallenness that inner drive that should be seeking to accelerate towards God is bent inward instead.  Its main pursuit and preoccupation is happiness found in the things of this world—the broken and fallen things of this world.  While this has always been the bent of man’s heart, now, it is even more a prime motivating factor for how people live. 

Keep in mind also, every other person in my orbit is responsible to participate in my drive for happiness.  Not by simply allowing me to do what I want but cheerleading me as I do it, making obstacles disappear for me, allowing me to be sovereign over the pursuit including how you are a part of it.  

  • This is what makes our cultural moment so tense and volatile: we fear that unless we can get others to validate our pursuit of happiness that we won’t be happy.

Our discussion of human sexuality must begin at creation: Genesis 1-2.  

A main reason why the modern discussion about sexuality is so fractured—why the sexual acronym now officially is LGBTQQIP2SAA which stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit (2S), androgynous and asexual—why this is so fractured is because the culture is looking to answer a fundamental question about humanity apart from any influence of the One who made humanity.

Imagine an aborigine who was scooped up from the Australian outback, taken to LA and given keys to a mansion and a Rolls and then left there.  What’s the likelihood he would know what to do with anything in that house or with that car?  Probably 0%.  Why?  He has no idea what these are—they are foreign to him—he doesn’t know how to use any of them because he has no experience with any of them; he has no instruction manual for them.  And, apart from a long process of education, he would likely end up sleeping in the backyard, eating the squirrels and setting the place on fire—just like he’d do at home.

Let’s begin our study of creation citing statement #2 from the Ad Interim Committee Report on Human Sexuality:

We affirm that God created human beings in his image as male and female (Gen. 1:26-27). Likewise, we recognize the goodness of the human body (Gen. 1:31; John 1:14) and the call to glorify God with our bodies (1 Cor. 6:12-20). As a God of order and design, God opposes the confusion of man as woman and woman as man (1 Cor. 11:14-15). While situations involving such confusion can be heartbreaking and complex, men and women should be helped to live in accordance with their biological sex. 

Nevertheless, we ought to minister compassionately to those who are sincerely confused and disturbed by their internal sense of gender identity (Gal. 3:1; 2 Tim. 2:24-26). We recognize that the effects of the Fall extend to the corruption of our whole nature (WSC 18), which may include how we think of our own gender and sexuality. Moreover, some persons, in rare instances, may possess an objective medical condition in which their anatomical development may be ambiguous or does not match their genetic chromosomal sex. Such persons are also made in the image of God and should live out their biological sex, insofar as it can be known.

White Paper #3: Our Challenges

Silva

Challenges Ahead of the Church

With the Lord’s interaction with the Samaritan woman in mind, the faithful Christian Church faces several challenges.

#1: Address the driving force behind the narrative: pursuing individual happiness.

The modern sexual narrative clearly differs from God’s word in its propositions and practices.  At some point, that must be addressed.  Why?  To win?  No—that’s not why Jesus addressed the Samaritan woman.  We must do it because compassion calls for it: if it is sinful, it is also enslaving.  John 8:34:

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin.

Romans 6:16

Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?

The main reason we cannot just “live and let live” or celebrate sexual diversity is because to live in a way contrary to God’s word isn’t freeing—it is enslaving.  Love demands that we not turn away from those who are sexually broken.

But it is more than sinful: it is sinister.  It co-opts God’s design in us that our souls would be joyful in the Lord.  That principle in us is perverted into the pursuit of physical happiness.  In effect, we must keep in mind that the soul is more important than the body—because as we see in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus: it is.  This will keep us away from potential pitfalls like an over-emphasis on the person’s lifestyle—something the church has historically been rightly blamed for (like when the disciples returned to Jesus at the well they wondered why He spoke to a Samaritan woman.)

  • Sure trans and bi and homosexual is sin and no one who practices these as a lifestyle will be saved (1 Corinthians 6:10—is very clear) but helping someone turn away from brokenness requires more than using the Law.

Remembering the soul is more important than the body will also help us rightly categorize their anger, their insults and their efforts to cancel us.  In other words, those things come out of a sinful, suffering soul that has been challenged. It is sinful and sinister and yet it issues from a soul that is convinced happiness—now—is the highest good and not the greater joy in the pursuit of God now and heaven in the next life.

  • It is looking for happiness in brokenness and it will fail in this life and be condemned in the next.

#2: Breaking down echo-chambers.

The modern culture can be compared to a mason jar filled with glass marbles.  Each marble is next to but not in the next.  Rub them hard enough together and they won’t join (like Play-Doh)—they will shatter.  Our culture has become like that mason jar: each marble is a person who curates his life including in it only those voices and influences that make him happy.

This is especially obvious on social media.  Indeed social media has been training our culture to make echo chambers.  TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snap Chat—not a single one of the most popular social media apps makes our community for us.  This is also true for music and video streaming services.  These each require us to make our own community—that’s part of why they have become so popular. It makes sense then if I’m looking for influences that will make me happy I will include only those and actively exclude those that don’t. Hence, I am sovereign over my marble—I am the god of my life.

There are a number of problems with this (obviously).  One of the largest is this cannot cope with reality.  God hasn’t wired this world or His providence so that we can act like gods over our lives.  No one can do this.  This is why, as a culture, we have never been angrier.  We have never so lacked the ability to disagree.  We haven’t had so much difficulty just speaking to each other.  We can’t have conversations in which we disagree without the threat of getting canceled, ignored or marginalized. 

  • People will not be coaxed out of the so-called “safety” of their echo chambers.

The one way to break down the echo chamber is the gospel.  The gospel shatters my small marble that I am protecting with huge emotion with a message that tells me what’s in my marble is actually garbage—and real beautiful and free life is found somewhere else.  Of course we know this is the path to freedom but it is destructive before that.  

#3: (AIC, 35) Addressing the modern identity narrative: identity, freedom and power.

Identity. Christian teaching about sexuality no longer makes sense because the modern view is that “…sexuality is crucial for the expression of identity.”  Our sexuality is the pathway to unlocking our true and deep feelings and desires—to be authentically “me.”  “I am truly who I am when I am having sex with whomever I choose or I’m expressing whatever sexuality makes me happy.”

  • “…identity is now found in one’s desires, while in the past it was found in one’s duties and relationships with God, family and community.”

“Be true to yourself” and “live your own truth” or “no one can tell you who you are but you” are the repeated mantras and they are everywhere. The modern self is based on feelings and there is nothing rock solid or unchanging about feelings—feelings can change depending on what we eat. This is all very fragile, isn’t it?  My choice and my feelings are supreme and it is up to me to pursue what makes me happy. And everyone needs to get on board with making me happy.  

Freedom and power. Believe it or not, it is no surprise that this is also Critical Race Theory’s ascending hour.  CRT supercharges all of this: the CRT lens says the world is made of the oppressed (who are unhappy) and the oppressors. In a culture committed to personal happiness, of course it makes sense that those who stand in the way of this pursuit are actually “oppressors.” The sexual traditions and teaching from ancient texts are repressive and constraining: they are oppressing our ability to express ourselves sexually so they must be ignored

Is it any surprise the millennials and younger generation consider themselves religious  “Nones” or no religion? “The meaning of life is to determine who you are and to throw off the shackles of an oppressive society that refuses to accept and include you.” Isn’t this the message of the Oscars, The Little Mermaid, Frozen, Mulan, Million Dollar Baby, RuPaul, Caitlyn Jenner, Lia Thomas and “Be all you can be”?  

There is a power element here as well.  This we see in categories like “micro-aggressions” and safe spaces, statue removal and approved censorship. For the so-called “oppressed” their use of language trumps all others—try refusing to call a person by his chosen pronouns: there have been educators fired for that!   Our culture is now giving power over to those who are consumed with personal happiness uninformed by reason, wisdom or religion.  The young now dictate to the old.  It is a Machiavellian culture modeled after the Lord of the Flies.

#4: Rooting the church’s teaching in its full theology rather than simply its ethics: placing human sexuality in the broader framework of the Bible.

Historically, the church has had mainly one sexual message: No sex outside of a marriage between a man and a woman. While that is a true representation of biblical teaching, it minimizes all the rest of the Bible’s teaching on sex and sexuality. This was pointed out in an article written by a woman struggling with homosexuality written to her pastor: “Seven Things I Wish My Pastor Knew about my Sexuality.”

From the AIC, 40:

Christian theology answers that sex is part of the image of God–it must image God and in particular, His redeeming love. Sex is not about enhancing one’s power but about mutually giving up power to one another in love, as Christ did for us. The Christian answer to “Why must sex be within heterosexual marriage?” gets us into the very heart of the gospel. We should not, then, present the sex ethic without rooting it in the Bible’s doctrines of God, of creation and of redemption….So what is sex for? It is a signpost pointing to God’s design of saving love, and it is a means for experiencing something of that same pattern of love at the horizontal level between two human beings that we know at the vertical level in Christ.

This is our missionary moment.