God’s Gifts of Gender and Sex

Big Idea: Gender and sexuality are gifts from God to be cherished and protected.

One of my favorite passages from the book of Proverbs may be surprising to you.

Three things are too wonderful for me; four I do not understand: the way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, the way of a ship on the high seas, and the way of a man with a virgin. (Proverbs 30:18-19)

Okay, that’s a strange choice.

Agur describes four ways that are extraordinary, that go beyond what we’d normally expect. They’re astonishing.

• The way that an eagle soars in the sky — artfully, endlessly — is amazing.
• The way that a snake is able to glide over a rock with no legs and nothing to hang onto is astonishing. Maybe a little more creepy than the eagle, but also amazing.
• The movement of a ship crashing through the waves, defying the depths, was inspiring then as it is now.

The thing that all of these have in common is that they’re all amazing, and yet they just happen when you have the right agents in place. Eagles were designed to fly; snakes were designed to glide; ships were designed to sail.

Agur’s list builds to a surprising crescendo with the final item that amazes him: the way of a man with a virgin. It’s the hardest of the four to understand. The Hebrew term for virgin has a range of meanings, and here probably refers to a young woman who’s sexually ready for marriage. And what he describes is probably a sexual encounter, possibly her first. He’s talking about the wonder of human sexuality. He’s saying that sex is amazing. What amazes him is that something so amazing happens so naturally.

Where am I going with this? Today I want to talk about two of God’s amazing gifts to us: gender and sexuality. And I want to begin by saying that they are amazing gifts. They’re gifts we all get to enjoy, and yet they’re gifts that have been tarnished by sin.

My goal is simple today. As we look at forming a covenant community, a membership, here at Liberty Grace, I want to speak honestly about one of the issues in which our church is most out of step with our culture today. I want to do this for two reasons:

• First, I want to be honest so that there are no surprises.
• Second, I want you to enjoy these gifts of gender and sexuality.

My goal today is to explain these two gifts of gender and sexuality, why we don’t enjoy them as God designed, and how God offers us an opportunity, by his grace, to begin to rediscover and enjoy them as they were meant to be.

Let’s get started by looking at what gender was meant to be.

What Gender and Sex Was Meant to Be

To understand gender and sex, we have to go all the way back to the beginning of the Bible. Genesis 1:27 says:

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

This is the first poetry in the whole Bible, which is significant. The first time that the Bible speaks of our gender, it expresses itself artistically in order to communicate the wonder of what’s taking place. The high point of God’s creativity is found here.

Though you could travel a hundred times the speed of light, past countless yellow-orange stars, to the edge of the galaxy and swoop down to the fiery glow located a few hundred light-years below the plane of the Milky Way, though you could slow to examine the host of hot young stars luminous among the gas and dust, though you could observe, close-up, the protostars poised to burst forth from their dusty cocoons, though you could witness a star’s birth, in all your stellar journeys you would never see anything equal to the birth and wonder of a human being. (Kent Hughes)

And here’s the amazing thing as we look at this: it not only says that we’re created in God’s image — that somehow we’re like God and represent God — but that our genders are part of this.

When God creates a creature in his own image, after his likeness, he doesn’t create a solitary individual, a genderless monad. Instead he creates a complementary pair—male and female. Not one, but two—and not two of the same, even though they are a lot alike…

Male and female God created each of us. And this isn’t something to despise or downplay, but to treasure and delight in. It’s one of God’s glorious gifts to us. (Todd Wilson)

You see this again in Genesis 2, the first time that Adam sees Eve. God creates Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. As Matthew Henry said:

The woman was made of a rib out of the side of Adam; not made out of his head to rule over him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved.

When Adam sees Eve, he can’t believe his eyes. He erupts in joy, and we get the second piece of poetry in the Bible. The first two pieces of poetry in the Bible have to do with the joy of being male and female.

We learn a lot in the first two chapters about gender and sexuality:

• Both man and woman were created in God's image, equal before God in their manhood and womanhood. Both women and men are spiritual equals in God’s sight. There are no gender differences whatsoever in terms of dignity or value.
• One gender alone is not enough to accurately image God. God created both men and women, and together they image him.
• There is both a likeness and a difference between the genders. Genesis 2:18 says, “Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.’” The word helper doesn’t mean lesser; it’s a term that’s also used of God. The term fit, though, is interesting. It means “according to the opposite of him.” In other words, she’s a counterpart — a matching opposite that supplies what’s lacking. Men and women need each other.
• When Adam and Eve are together, it says that they were naked and not ashamed. They were able to be exposed without feeling vulnerable. Our gender and sexuality is created to be a gift to be enjoyed between men and women in the context of safety — complete vulnerability before each other, with no hint of shame.
• All of this is a gift to be celebrated. When this operates as it should, it leads to poetry. It’s beautiful.

Let me try to summarize what we learn about sex and gender from Genesis 1 and 2. Men and women are equal before God but gloriously different. This equality and glorious difference is meant to be something that enables us to flourish and to carry out God’s design for us in the world. Gender and sex are given as gifts to be enjoyed.

What Gender and Sex Has Become

Since gender and sexuality is so key to our humanity and to what it means to bear God’s image, guess what Satan attacks?

Our gender (male and female) and the union of our genders (our sexuality) is at the very heart of our representation of God’s image. Why, then, should it surprise us that Satan’s number-one target in the twenty-first century is both our gender and our sexuality? (Michael Todd Wilson)

It should be obvious that what I’ve described — an equality and yet a beautiful difference — isn’t our reality today. One of the consequences of sin is described in Genesis 3:16:

To the woman he said…
“Your desire shall be contrary to your husband,
but he shall rule over you.”

What does this mean?

Instead of the relationship between the genders being something beautiful and life-giving, it became a source of conflict and even oppression. As a result of sin, God says that the relationship between men and women is now a struggle and conflict. She will desire to control him, but he will dominate her instead. It’s a breakdown of the kind of complementarity that our hearts long for. Instead of men leading through service that’s sacrificial, loving, and kind, they tend to be domineering and sometimes even abusive. Instead of women flourishing, they long for a breakdown of the kind of complementarity that this passage talks about. Relationships become a battleground rather than a source of life and joy.

The same thing applies to sexuality. Satan loves to take God’s good gifts and corrupt them. So we begin to see this in the early chapters of Genesis. Men begin to use sex selfishly, and women are exploited. Every single person experiences sexual brokenness at some level. Our desires are disordered. Satan has taken one of God’s great gifts and weaponized it against us. Just read the news these days. What was meant to be one of God’s greatest gifts has been used against us.

The Way Back

So what’s the way back? Two things. Let’s look at the way back when it comes to gender, and then the way back when it comes to sex.

Gender

The way back with gender is to recover the equality and yet glorious difference between men and women — something that’s not found in either traditional or modern views of gender.

Let’s be clear. Both man and woman were created in God's image, equal before God in their manhood and womanhood. Both women and men are spiritual equals in God’s sight. There are no gender differences whatsoever in terms of dignity or value. Galatians affirms this: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Women are co-heirs (1 Peter 3:7). So chauvinism is clearly and completely rejected. It has no place among Christians. It cannot be tolerated.

And yet there are glorious differences reflected in the fact that men and women were designed to be counterparts — the same but opposite. So just as chauvinism is rejected, so are views that don’t reflect this beautiful interplay.

This shows up in two domains in the Bible: family and church. Here’s what it looks like.

Men are called to lead. Now, the reason that sounds scary is because, since the Fall, men tend to lead in selfish, unhealthy ways. So the model of leadership is given in Ephesians 5, speaking in particular of marriage:

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.

Here’s how men are to lead: they’re to lead in sacrifice. The whole purpose of their leadership is so that they can lay down their lives for the good of their wives. The same thing applies in church. Men are called to lead there too, but Jesus tells us the kind of leadership that he expects:

But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Mark 10:43-45)

You want to see what leadership looks like? Look at the cross. Look at Jesus who did not use his position as God for himself, but who gave his very life so that we could live. That’s what we’re called to. It’s a remarkable picture. Look to Jesus. Enjoy what he’s done. And men, follow his example. Lay down your lives in service.

Husbands and leaders within the church are called to lead. But they’re not called to lead like the world leads. They’re called to lead like Jesus leads — by serving and sacrificing.

And then women are called to recover their part of the dance as well as fully equal before God and yet gloriously different. I’m talking about strong women who use their spiritual gifts, who speak their minds, who refuse to be doormats, and yet who voluntarily embrace and celebrate the fact that men and women are different, and who encourage men to take the lead in laying down their lives for the good of others.

We’ve never seen this. We’ve seen corruptions of this, but we’ve never seen the real thing. But this is what the New Testament describes for us in both marriage and the church — men leading like Jesus in sacrifice, and strong women embracing the differences in gender and thriving as men serve them.

A verse in the Old Testament written about King David’s leadership describes, I think, what this kind of relationship could look like:

When one rules justly over men,
ruling in the fear of God,
he dawns on them like the morning light,
like the sun shining forth on a cloudless morning,
like rain that makes grass to sprout from the earth.
(2 Samuel 23:3–4)

When this kind of leadership happens, God breaks through like a morning light, and people thrive. This can only happen with God’s help, and it’s what he calls us to.

Sex

That’s gender. You think that would be enough to deal with, but we need to finish off with a recovery of our sexuality through the gospel.

We all want sex on our own terms. We want the freedom to do whatever we’d like as long as nobody gets hurt. It’s actually part of a bigger theme: we want the freedom to live as we’d like without any constraints.

Scripture offers us a different picture: freedom, but freedom within constraints. You see, true freedom comes from the right kind of constraints. If you want the freedom to be healthy, that comes from the constraints of making healthy choices. If you want the freedom of love, that comes by embracing the constraints of mutuality and serving the other.

If we want the freedom of enjoying sex, it means embracing the constraints that God has put around sexuality. God has given them to us not as a restriction to take away our freedom, but as a way for us to thrive.

Here’s the thing: Wouldn’t you like to meet the person who invented sex? Wouldn’t you like to meet the person who designed orgasms? Do you think he would know a thing or two about how sex works, and how we can best enjoy it? That’s what the Bible offers. More than that, it’s what it calls us to. “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20).

Gender and sexuality are gifts from God to be cherished and protected. As a church, we’re called to rediscover what God meant them to be, and to enjoy the freedom that comes by living according to his design.