Imago Dei Series: Male And Female - Intentional Design - Genesis 1:27

Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

We're just into this series.

On the image of God, Pastor Doug preached the opening sermon.

Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

I want to start by reading two verses for us.

Genesis 1, verses 26 and 27.

Genesis 1:26

Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.

They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

So God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

Seek the Lord's help.

Lord, thank you that all of your creative work was good and very good because you're a good God.

So help us to see your goodness, your authority, your beauty, and loving design for us tonight.

In Jesus' name, amen.

We're going to have 15 messages on the image of God.

And I think if you look down through the series of topics, at least for some people, tonight's title might grab them more than any other title in the whole series.

The title for tonight is Male and Female Intentional Design for Gender and Relationship.

Why would male and female make you move a little more to the edge of your seat?

Well, there's probably a lot of factors, but one reason is because it's a bit controversial in our world.

You can ask a public official what's a man or a woman, and they don't want to answer.

You could ask a four-year-old in preschool who are all the boys and girls in your class, they could point them right out.

But public officials don't want to talk about it.

We're not going to talk tonight about the different cultural factors that have kind of led to where we are in our current culture, but we do want to look at the Bible's foundations for gender and what God Himself says.

So three headings for us tonight as we think about this intentional design of male and female, the importance of gender, the beauty of gender, and the implications of gender.

And we'll consider these again from scripture.

So first is the importance of gender.

Right here in Genesis 1.27, God created man in his own image.

He created him in the image of God.

And what's the first thing after it says he created them in the image of God?

He created them male and female.

So God takes a week to create the world, and on day six, he slows down to create humans and he determines I'm going to have males and females.

Let's just pause right there for a moment.

That is significant.

If God has said, I'm going to design the whole human race to have male and female, who are we to say, I've got some better ideas than God?

I've got a lot of other pronouns that would work better than God's ideas.

This is God's plan.

It's important.

And not only did he design us male and female, he designed us again this way in his image.

So this evening series is not a series about men and women, it's a series about the image of God.

But all that we do to reflect God's image, in one sense, we do as males or as females.

That's very important.

It's an awe-inspiring responsibility and privilege to be made in the image of God.

And some of the things we do require both males and females.

Don't worry, I'm not going to give any elaborate biology lessons tonight.

But this command to be fruitful and multiply, more people made in the image of God.

That takes male and female.

That's important.

So we really can't say, well, the image of God has great dignity and value, and we should highly elevate the image of God and all those who bear the image of God.

Yes, well and good.

But you can't say that.

And then on the other side say, you know, this concept of male and female, it's really more of a burden, and we can kind of do with it what we please.

No, those things go together.

So gender is very important in God's design.

Second.

And we're going to take the most time on the last one, but second, the beauty of gender.

It's not only important, it's a beautiful thing.

Proverbs 30, verses 18 and 19.

Proverbs 30:18

Three things are too wondrous for me, four I can't understand.

The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a snake on a rock, the way of a ship at sea, and the way of a man with a young woman.

You ever ponder the amazing wonder of God's creation?

A bird in the sky?

How does that work?

Ships that humans design that they can actually float on water, that's amazing.

And yet even more amazing, a man and a woman coming together.

It's remarkable.

Let me just defend romantic comedies for one minute.

No, they don't do a great job of sh telling us about suffering in the world.

No, they don't usually do a great job of telling us about um persevering through difficult times.

But they they show us something about how can two totally different people in some ways magically connect and find themselves together.

Well, that's God's plan.

Adam understood the beauty of gender very shortly after creation.

Turn over to Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

You can just look at this.

It should be the next page over if you're not already there.

Genesis 2, starting at verse 19.

The Lord God formed out of the ground every wild animal, every bird of the sky, and brought each to the man to see what he would call it.

And whenever a man, the man called living creature, that was its name.

The man gave names to all the livestock, to the birds of the sky, to every wild animal.

But for the man, no helper was found corresponding to him.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to come over the man and he slept.

God took one of his ribs and closed the flesh at that place.

Then the Lord God made the rib he had taken from the man into a woman and brought her to the man.

And the man said, This one at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

This one will be called woman, for she was taken from man.

The complementarity of male and female.

I know that's a that's a silver dollar word.

I just mean by that males and females complement each other.

They fit together like a left-footed shoe and a right-footed shoe.

Okay, that complementarity that God has designed of male and female, it matches the complementarity of God's created universe.

Did you notice ever how many pairs there are in the Genesis creation account?

It's not just man and woman.

There's evening and morning, there's day and night, there's sun and moon, there's sky and there's all of these pairs all throughout God's creation account.

People have sometimes associated men with land and women with water.

Land.

Water.

Land.

Water.

So you're looking at me and it's like, come on, Mike, we need some exegesis here.

We're not looking for poetry.

Well, the Bible does give us both of those things in his created world and in scripture.

Women are associated with wells in the Bible.

Water that comes up and gives life.

Eve is called the mother of all the living.

The Bible tells us Adam was formed from the dust of the ground.

It tells us Cain, their firstborn son, worked the ground.

This this kind of puzzle piece fittedness of male and female corresponds to land and water and all these other beautiful things in God's created world.

Something else that's beautiful about gender is that gender is enduring.

This is what one writer says.

She's not a Christian.

She says the startling similarity of gender roles in societies separated by vast distances of time and space does suggest that there's something fundamentally constant in gender that is grounded in concrete facts.

It's not a startling similarity if we believe that God has designed creation this way.

If God's designed that, then it would be natural if you go to different cultures, different civilizations, and they have very similar basic ideas about what's a man, what's a woman, how how do they function in society.

You can suppress God's design, but it keeps coming back.

It's enduring.

And that's a beautiful thing.

The beauty of male and female extends beyond marriage.

You can see it very acutely within marriage, yes.

But from the moment of conception, long before you're ever married, you are male or you're female.

For most all of you here, either you or your spouse is gonna die.

And you won't be married any longer.

You will still be male or female.

As wonderful as marriage is, Jesus says in the resurrection, they're not given in marriage.

Jesus never says we'll cease to be male and female even in the new creation.

Gender is enduring.

And it's beautiful the way that they work together.

When you think about male and female, Doug likes, Pastor Doug likes to use the illustration of dancing partners.

A give and a take is a beautiful thing.

Or you could think of music and singing, a melody and a harmony is a beautiful thing when it fits together.

Importance of gender, beauty of gender.

Let's get into some implications of gender.

I've already touched on some.

You could come up with probably more.

I'm going to give you five for tonight.

Here's the first one.

Since men and women are both in the image of God, we should respect each other rather than revile each other.

I know that's kind of like a will duh, Micah, kind of obviously.

That hasn't always been thought or practiced well.

Even in Christian history, you've got some heavy-hitting theologians, I'll name two, Augustine and Aquinas, who taught that women don't have as much of the image of God as men do.

Now, I I don't think anyone today that I know of would say that.

But if we're not careful, men and women can speak of each other in demeaning ways rather than honoring ways.

You know how men are.

Now, there's a way to say that where you're just playfully acknowledging our differences.

But there is a way to say that where you're flying right in the face of James chapter 3, verse 9.

James 3:9

With the tongue, we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in God's likeness.

Second implication of gender.

Men and women should celebrate both their similarities and their differences.

There's more sameness than difference when it comes to men and women.

I mean, that's true of our bodies in comparison to a bird or a fish.

We're both made in the image of God.

We can both relate to God and to each other in ways that the animals can't.

We're both sinners, we can both be fully redeemed by Christ.

There's a lot of similarities there.

Sometimes Christians can kind of react against the culture in a kind of pendulum swing where we just only ever want to talk about the differences because the culture wants to flatten all those differences.

We don't need to swing all the way to that side.

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus.

No, they're both from planet Earth.

God made them both.

One wasn't evolving from apes, one was evolving from chimps.

We both together share this glorious common humanity.

They're different, and we shouldn't apologize that they're different or try to force them to be different.

Why did men are from Mars and women are from Venus sell so many copies?

Because there's something to that.

There's something to it.

Women, you have God's permission to be women.

Does someone else want to get up and that's fine?

Sometimes I just feel like I'd rather talk to another woman about a certain problem than my husband.

You don't have to apologize.

It's good to develop relationships with other women.

Maybe you've been watching too many romantic comedies.

There's not just going to be one person that magically fits all of your needs.

So female friendships are a wonderful thing.

Cultivate those.

Men, you have God's permission to be men.

Not to be uncaring or harsh, but it's okay to be a man.

I had a teacher once, you have to understand it's a very kind man.

One of his jokes was sometimes my wife will say, Listen, I'm a woman.

You have to see things from my perspective.

And I'll tell her, well, I'm sorry, but I can't because God made me to be a man.

Dwell in an understanding way with your wives, right?

It's not an excuse to be harsher on caring, but there's something different about men and women.

Now I haven't talked a lot about what that complementarity looks like, but let's think again about creation.

So there's a lot of similarity, but there's some differences there.

And it's a beautiful thing.

In the creation pattern, God forms a realm, and then he fills that realm.

So day one is light and dark, he forms it and divides it.

Then day four fills it with sun and moon and stars.

Day two, sea and sky formed, and then day five, he fills sea and sky with fish and with birds.

Day three, he makes the land, and then day six, the land is filled with animals and human beings.

That's the Genesis 1 creation story.

Now, Genesis 2 double clicks on the creation of male and female and expands and explains that more.

And when he makes men and women, what does Adam first do?

He's first called to name the animals.

He has to separate them into groups and form them into those groups.

And then Eve is the mother of all the living.

She comes and fills the garden with life, forming and filling.

Men tend to identify, to explore, to subdue.

Women tend to nest, to nurture, to adorn, to beautify.

Adam and Eve have different origins.

Adam's from the ground.

Eve is from a rib.

They have different curses.

Why does God tell Adam the ground is cursed?

Eve wasn't allowed to pick up a shovel?

No.

Why does God tell Eve your relationship with your husband is going to be hard?

Adam didn't have to care about his relationship with his wife?

No.

But men tend to be oriented toward the work of the world.

Land forming.

Women tend to be oriented toward the work of relationships.

And that's a good thing.

You see it everywhere in the world.

Every Sunday morning, we have a confession of sin that is for both men and women.

But men and women can sometimes have different special arenas of temptation.

Let me give you an example.

2 Timothy 2 verse 8.

2 Timothy 2:8

And feel free to write these down if you want to, or you can listen.

This is what Paul says.

Therefore, I want the men in every place to pray, lifting up holy hands without anger or argument.

Also, the women are to dress themselves in modest clothing with decency and good sense, not with elaborate hairstyles, gold, pearls, or expensive apparel.

When's the last time you heard two men get in an argument and it culminated with, well, I've got a better head of hair than you do.

Hands are for strength.

Hair is for beauty.

Men tend to be tempted to use the strength that God has given them rather than to lead in worship and protection and care to dominate other people.

And God has given women this beauty to reflect his own radiant glory, to bring harmony to the world around them.

And women can be tempted instead of using their beauty to point to God's glory, to say, everyone, take a look right here.

Then later on in the same passage, he says, For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God.

Paul's comparing himself to a nursing mother.

He's not saying women can't exhort.

But when he thinks of cherishing and nurturing, his mind naturally goes to mothers.

And when he thinks of exhorting, charging, his mind just naturally goes to fathers.

There's one pastor in Kentucky, Sam Amadi, he says, men and women have different superpowers.

It's a great thing.

It's a good thing that we have men and women.

Third implication of gender.

Gender roles in the home and in the church are not arbitrary.

I'm making a little bit of an assumption here.

I know with this particular audience, I couldn't do this in a lot of places, but I'm making an assumption that most all of you know the Bible repeatedly says that husbands are the head of the wives and wives are called to submit, that in the church, men are called to be leaders, teachers.

Uh wives and women are called to support.

That's in our statement of faith for all of our members to affirm, but more importantly, it's in Scripture itself.

The point I'm making here is it's not just an arbitrary test of obedience.

It's part of the makeup of the design of God's world.

God didn't decide I want to have humans.

I'm going to give them different bodies and then let's just give them different roles and see what happens.

It's not as though after the fall, God said, Boy, we gotta punish them.

All right, any meeny miny mo, one gender has to be under the other one's toe.

That's not what's happening here.

Our roles in the home, in the church reflect something of God's beautiful plan that corresponds to our bodies, our makeup, so many things in life.

It's not arbitrary.

There's something else even more significant about that plan of God.

It's not just that it tends to work better in those spheres when people lean into those roles as men and women.

It's pointing us to a picture of Christ in the church.

There's gospel image implications of male and female.

Listen to Ephesians 5.

The husband is head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church.

He's the savior of the body.

Now, unfortunately, we don't, as men, model Christ as we should.

But the opportunity and responsibility is there.

Verse 25 goes on to say, husbands love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.

This is the result of a master architect.

Brides are showing something to all of us about our own eschatological destiny.

I know that was a mouthful.

I said it on purpose to make you think.

We all are called to be the bride of Christ, and that's where we're going.

Number four, fourth of five implications.

Transgenderism distorts God's permanent creation pattern.

Transgenderism distorts God's permanent creation pattern.

Doesn't art vandalism bother you?

You know, art thieves, that should bother you too, but at least they recognize the value of the piece of art.

They're trying to make money off of it by stealing it.

When someone just dumps a bucket of paint on a Rembrandt, they are defacing something that has been cherished and loved as beautiful for generations.

And that should bother us.

When somebody takes a razor blade to gender, they're defacing God's artwork.

They wouldn't, I know, all explicitly intend to do that, but that is what's taking place.

It's a serious thing and it should trouble us.

It's not to say we shouldn't have compassion.

All humans are made in the image of God.

No matter what you do, you can't make yourself unhuman.

Humans remain in the image of God.

People can be suffering from all kinds of confused and conflicted thoughts and feelings.

So absolutely we should have compassion.

But if if compassion is the only note that we ever strike, and if compassion leads to affirmation, we're running the terrible risk of telling someone your own feelings or decisions are more important than what God actually says in his word and about his design.

We don't want to do that.

People today will sometimes try to entirely distinguish sex and gender.

They will say the the body parts you have, the chromosome structure you have, okay, that's one thing that's entirely disconnected from what it means to be male or female.

That concept of male or female is just completely culturally imposed.

And we we acknowledge there are some features of what is sometimes presumed to be male or female that is culturally imposed, that does go beyond scripture.

But but that that claim, well, it's a it's a pretty fantastic and new claim in world history, I'll say that.

But more importantly, it goes against the opening pages of Genesis where God formed man from the dust of the ground, male and female.

That's his design from the very beginning.

Somebody might say, well, okay, but what about people with other body problems?

Don't we try to help them?

If someone's deaf, we give them cochlear implants.

If someone loses a leg, we give them a prosthetic leg.

If someone is born in the wrong body, shouldn't we try to help them?

Those are very different categories.

Deafness, blindness, those are things that came as a result of the fall.

Jesus heals blind people.

Jesus never tries to change someone's gender.

Instead, he actually says God, he affirms that God created them male and female from the very beginning.

So those are totally different categories there.

Yes, there are some people that are born with some measure of body ambiguity.

Unusual chromosome structure, certain parts that are normally male or female could be absent in people or combined in people.

That's sometimes grouped under the general label of intersex.

And we have to acknowledge that yes, in a fallen world there are all kinds of challenges and difficulties.

And there's good news for those who are redeemed in Christ, we're all getting new bodies anyway.

They'll all be perfectly restored.

Whatever was was we were born with or done to us, or it's renewed and it will be renewed in Jesus Christ.

So, yes, we want to have a special compassion for that group of people.

It's a very small group of people, but I think we also all know that's not what transgenderism as a movement is about.

They're not trying to primarily show compassion to this category of intersex people.

They're wanting to assert human autonomy over everything, including their own bodies, including God Himself.

Fifth, last implication of gender.

Men and women need one another.

So I said the first implication was that men and women are made in God's image, they shouldn't revile each other.

The Bible takes us a lot more beyond that.

You know, it's not just like from a distance we tolerate each other.

No, the Bible's design is that men and women should partner together in all kinds of wonderful ways.

1 Corinthians 11, Paul's does write about some differences with men and women, but he says this at one point.

In the Lord, a woman is not independent of man, and man is not independent of woman.

For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman, and all things come from God.

God in his wisdom created males and females, and he designed them to be together.

One writer says, it is always in relation to their opposite that man and woman are what they are in themselves.

Chew on that a little bit.

Or this is what Alistair Roberts says.

It's not about difference from each other, but difference for each other.

And I'm using the plural here intentionally.

Again, you see it very acutely within a marriage, but God has designed for there to be whole societies of men and women.

Sometimes in science fiction books or a movie, there'll be like this undiscovered tribe of people that's only one gender.

You know what I mean?

It's always women for some reason, though.

I don't know why that is.

If you have the the Amazon or the distant space, it's always a tribe of women for some reason.

But if there was, if there was a tribe ever of only men or women, obviously they wouldn't last very long.

But it wouldn't be very good.

You might think it'd be no, it wouldn't be great.

It wouldn't be very good the way that God designed things.

The vision of male and female, it begins in the home.

When children are born, ideally, they are socialized to love and respect and honor a father and a mother.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out that way, but that's the ideal.

And then as they grow up, they're introduced to a whole society of men and women.

So again, this swells even beyond the wonderful incubator of a home out into the world, this glory of men and women and their independence.

Think about our Lord Jesus Christ.

His closest companions were the twelve disciples, were twelve men.

But read to the gospels.

He had all kinds of wonderful, affectionate friendships with women.

Some of those women were the ones that were able to announce the resurrection.

What a privilege.

Or consider the Apostle Paul.

It seems like he traveled mostly with men.

That's what we read about.

Barnabas, Luke, Mark.

But then you read Romans 16, you think, wow, Paul had wonderful relationships with godly women, and he honored them in so many ways.

So he didn't just write woman's not independent of man or man.

He lived that out.

And we as a church, churches of the Lord Jesus Christ, have an opportunity to showcase the splendor of a family of God, of brothers and sisters living and partnering together in harmony and joy.

That can be an incredible testimony to a world that's confused.

We're not in our church trying like a corporation to be like this androgynous bunch of robots.

No, it's healthy masculinity, healthy femininity is a good thing in a church.

And the world can look at that and say, that's so beautiful.

I I I need to understand why that is and what brings them together and how they relate to one another so well.

I was talking to a friend of mine once who was a fellow member of a church with me.

And he said, Yeah, when I come on Sunday, I don't really talk to the any women.

And I said, why not?

He said, Well, I don't really have anything in common with them.

And I said, What about Jesus?

I mean, that that is why we're gathering here, right?

We're not gathering primarily for hunting hobbies or you know, whatever else it might be.

We're gathering because we have the same Savior.

And we have a partnership and role to play together using our corresponding gifts, talents, abilities to glorify our Savior's name.

Gender is important.

God sets it out from the earliest pages of Scripture as one of the first indicators for how we reflect his image well in the world.

It's a beautiful thing.

And as we ponder it and ponder it and ponder it, I think we can see more and more and more of the profound beauty of it.

Pastor Doug has a nice refrain for male and female, so I'll close with his refrain here.

This is his summary refrain.

Distinct by design by equal in dignity, united for God's glory.

Let's pray.

Lord, we confess there are many mysterious things in the world.

And we don't ever we don't understand everything about men and women.

But we are grateful that you've made us to be male and female.

We're grateful that we can serve one another in love.

We pray, Lord, for all the relationships in this church, especially the marriages, but even beyond the marriages, how we can love each other as brothers and sisters, that those within our body would be compelled first by your word.

We don't let the world set our agenda for what's important or what's not important.

Your word does that.

And yet we want to showcase to the world a world full of confusion, uncertainty, fear.

We want to showcase to them something glorious and splendid.

From the beginning, very good.

We want to showcase even a redeemed humanity where we lay down our weapons, we don't clamor for power or snipe at one another, but the body builds itself up in love because Christ the head is making us his glorious bride.

Thank you for your work, O Lord, in us.

And even as we sing, may the beauty of our blended and different voices remind us of your wonderful, masterful architectural design.

In Jesus' name, amen.