Examing What the Bible Says About Gender

Last week I mentioned that early this summer our Sunday sermons examined what the Bible has to say about gender. This is a sensitive subject, able to invoke passionate and emotional responses. Ninety-five percent of women and 90% of men at some time in their lives are troubled about body image, fearing they do not measure up to cultural molds. Among those who wrestle with gender identity, 98% of boys and 88% of girls accept their biological sex after puberty.

In last week’s article I mentioned our goal is to attempt to understand what Bible passages meant in their original context and to be loyal to objective truth communicated from God. But we all fall short of obeying the Scriptures and therefore, since we have all offended their Author, we hold to what we find with humility, sympathizing with the specific battles each person around us wages to come into conformity with what the Bible says. These battles can be filled with pain, tears or depression. Every Christian is called to represent Christ’s compassion for embattled persons.

The human body is made up of five organs and thirteen systems. It is a finely tuned, intricate system bearing immense evidence of intentional design. Every component fits with others in the system and corresponds to the programming residing in one’s DNA. Genesis 1:27 describes with simplicity the origin of humans – “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

The Bible says that God intentionally created two distinct sexes, females with XX sex chromosomes and males with XY. I am not familiar with a single Bible passage that indicates God regards gender and biological sex as two separate things. Jesus affirmed this very verse. The New Testament passages which give direction about the roles of husbands and wives never separate gender from biological sex. When Genesis 2:7 says that God formed Adam from the ground, the Hebrew verb there is used by the prophet Isaiah of a potter intentionally designing something out of clay – in Adam’s case as male.

For the person caught in troubling gender confusion, the battle comes down to basically one of two options – the objective position which relies on Scripture (one has to investigate whether the Bible is truth) OR the subjective path of following one’s feelings, elevating them to supersede the design model contained in the Scriptures. There’s another component that is important to grasp before a person battling gender dysphoria declares a verdict. Among other verses, Titus 3:3 says that every single person on earth is born enslaved to our own flawed ideas of pleasure. This makes it dangerous to live by the motto of being true to oneself. The whole reason Christ came was to die to deliver us from such slavery. So before turning away from the design model represented in the Bible which equates biological sex with gender, one must be willing to trust personal impulses as superior to God’s revelation.