Male and Female Pt. 1

1:24As Christians, God's Word is our perfect guide and our final authority for. What we believe and how we live as individuals and as families and as a church family. We do not view the Bible through the lens of the world. We view the world through the lens of the Bible. Today's sermon is not about the Bible per se. If you'd like to hear a sermon about the Bible, then I encourage you to go back to the beginning of our Back to the Basics series back in August, the second sermon that we preached called God and His Word, and you'll have a full sermon about the Bible.

2:07But today's sermon is about what it means to be created in the image and likeness of God as male and female. The reason I start with what we believe about the Bible is everything comes back to that. If you consider yourself a Christian, then I assume that you intend to believe and live in light of whatever the Bible teaches on any given subject. If you cannot trust that God's word is absolutely true in one area, why would you think that you could trust it in any other area?

2:50To put a finer point on it, if we can't trust God to tell us the truth about what it means to be a man or a woman, How could we trust the Bible to tell us the truth about how to get to heaven? The authors of Scripture do not state or imply that they are offering a mixture of truth and error that we have to sift through and sort out. They believed and stated that what they were writing was the very Word of God. Jesus Himself affirmed everything written in the Old Testament and then stated that everything that would be written later by the apostles would be the Word of God as it was under the direction and guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

3:41And so, with that foundation, we turn our attention to the subject of hand, which is what it means to be created in the image of God as male and female. Permit me to quote John Piper and Wayne Grudem at length. This is from their book, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, that was published 30 years ago this year. The tendency today is to stress the equality of men and women by minimizing the unique significance of our maleness or femaleness. But this depreciation of male and female personhood is a great loss.

4:21It is taking a tremendous toll on generations of young men and women who do not know what it means to be a man. Or a woman. Confusion over the meaning of sexual personhood today is epidemic. The consequence of this confusion is not a free and happy harmony among gender-free persons relating on the basis of abstract competencies. The consequence rather is more divorce, more homosexuality, more sexual abuse, more promiscuity, more social awkwardness, and more emotional distress and suicide that come with the loss of God-given identity.

5:04A lot of energy is being expended today minimizing the distinctions of manhood and womanhood. But we do not hear very often about what manhood and womanhood should incline us to do. We are adrift in a sea of confusion over sexual roles, and life is not the better for it. Brothers and sisters, Piper and Grudem wrote these words 30 years ago. How is our social experiment going? Would we say that men and women, boys and girls, are healthier and happier today than they were in 1991?

5:53Or would we say that definitively, by almost any and every measure, men and women, boys and girls are not? Happier and healthier today than they were 30 years ago. The radical social experiment that has been going on since the 1960s has not led to the things promised by the leaders of the revolution, namely freedom and flourishing. It has led to the exact opposite. So now we find ourselves eating the rotten fruit of the past 60 years of redefining personhood, redefining what it means to be a man or a woman.

6:31And friends, it is rotten. Passive men who functionally or actually abandon their wives and children, or domineering men who abuse and intimidate them. Intelligent, capable women stretched to the breaking point as they attempt to fulfill their callings as wives and mothers while simultaneously being pushed to work long hours to advance their careers and the agendas of their companies. Young men identifying as women and robbing talented young women of athletic accomplishments. Depression, anxiety, and suicide skyrocketing among children and teenagers who feel confused with nowhere to turn because the adults in their lives are even more confused than they are, or who are legally prevented from intervening to stop. Their own children from having irreversible hormone therapy and invasive surgeries to transition from one gender to another, a practice that has caused so much harm that there is a growing body of research and evidence to suggest that transitioning from one gender to another through hormone therapy or surgery is doing far more harm than good.

7:58Brothers and sisters in Christ, we have a serious problem in our society. But these are not just problems out there, outside of the church. We have a serious problem inside of the church as well. And that's because so many professing believers in Jesus Christ have turned to the world to tell them what it means to be a person, what it means to be male or female. May it not be so among us. May we be people who look to God and His Word for truth, especially something so foundational as what it means to be a person, what it means to be a man or a woman.

8:42My goal this morning is simple. I want to answer two primary questions from Genesis 1 and a few other texts in Scripture. The first is, what does it mean to be created in God's image and likeness? And the second is, why did God create a creative person? Create us male and female. Next week, we're going to tackle the third question, which is how does God intend to live in his world as men and women? And so, we're going to get a lot more practical next week with questions about how do we function in the home and in the church and in society as a whole as men and women.

9:20And if you're interested, this Thursday at 6:30 a.m. at Theology Thursday, I'm going to be talking about homosexuality and transgenderism. And so, if you're interested in those topics, if you're wrestling with those topics, if you've got questions or you know somebody in your life that does, come out this Thursday, 6:30. We'll talk about that. But my intention today is to lay the groundwork for understanding what it means to be created in God's image and likeness as male and female.

9:45So, let's start with the first question, Genesis 1:26. Take a look there. 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. Friends, what we learn from this first verse is that God created us. We did not create ourselves, and we did not simply come into being by chance.

10:27No, we were created by God. And this is profoundly important because what this means is that we don't get to define who or what we are. God is our creator, and he alone has the right to tell us who we are and what we are. I want you to take a look at Isaiah 29, verse 16. You turn things upside down. Shall the potter be regarded as the clay? That the thing made should say of its maker, he did not make me, or the thing formed, say of him who formed it, he has no understanding?

11:11This is what we've done. We have turned things upside down, and we, the created, have denied that God made us. And that is what we must do. We have to deny that God made us if we're going to then take to ourselves the right to say who and what we are. Because if we were created by God, as the scripture affirms that we were, then he alone has the right to tell us, the creation, who and what we are. We have to begin here with the fact that God created us.

11:46So, how did he create us? Look again at verse 26. He says, Let us make man in our image after our likeness. Now, you notice here the God of God. God is referring to himself as us, which might just be him using the royal we like a king or queen would do. But I think that many Bible students see here a reference to the Trinity, the fact that God is one being who exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. This is significant because from all eternity, God has existed in perfect community. He didn't create us because he was lonely. And what becomes clear here and in Genesis 2 and in the rest of Scripture is that we were not created to live in isolation either. We were created to live in community, just as God has always existed in community. We were created to exist in families, physical families, and also the spiritual family of the church.

12:58And God created us in his own image and after his likeness, as we see both here and in verse 27. And I want to be careful drawing too many distinctions between image and likeness and what it means to be created in God's image versus God's likeness, because I think there's a lot of overlap there. But if Moses intended any distinctions to be observed between image and likeness, then here's what I think he means. I take image to mean that we are God's representatives here on the earth, which is seen in the authority that he gives us. To rule over all creation.

13:33And that may be in view because in ancient times, what kings would do, what queens would do, is they would place images of themselves all throughout their kingdom or all throughout the land. And what that did was that reminded everyone who is in charge, who has authority, who gets to say what the law is and how people will live. That's what that image did. It was a representation of who was in charge and who had authority. And so think about this from Genesis 1. By creating us in his image and likeness, what God is doing is he's placing his image all over the world so that we are all continually reminded that we have been created by God in his image and likeness, that there is a greater authority that we answer to besides ourselves or besides any human ruler or president or king or queen. We answer to God.

14:32And so I take image to mean that we are God's representatives here on the earth. I take likeness to mean that God has created us in such a way that we share many similarities with him, although in a limited way. So God can create things out of nothing. We can't do that, but we can create things out of existing material. So we can create buildings and Business plans. We can create art and poetry and music. We can create medicines. We can create all kinds of things out of existing materials. And in that way, we are like God.

15:13We don't know all things like God does, but we can come to know things. We can grow in our knowledge. Our knowledge of philosophy and theology, of languages, chemistry, math. Some of you can learn math. We share God's characteristics of love and justice and mercy, compassion, freedom, and many more. And so, in all of these and other ways, we are like God. We share those characteristics, although they're on a limited scale because we are created and finite beings. So, being created in God's image and likeness means that we represent Him and that we share many similarities with Him.

15:54And the final thing that I want to point out of what that means from these two verses is that because we were created in the image and likeness of God, every person, male and female, young and old, has inherent worth and dignity. People do not have more worth or dignity because they are smarter, or stronger, or more able, or more attractive, or more useful to society, or because they're inside the womb as opposed to outside the womb. They don't have any more worth or dignity for any of those reasons. All people, men, And women, young and old, all people have inherent worth and dignity because all people were created in God's image and likeness. And here's what you have to understand: we have to understand this in the church, and we have to help people outside of the church understand this.

16:46Unless you trace the idea that all people matter back to God creating us in Genesis chapter 1, you have no grounds whatsoever to say that anybody's life matters. None. You have no grounds to say that abortion is wrong, or euthanasia is wrong, or genocide is wrong, or racism is wrong. Friends, all of those things are wrong, but they're wrong because God created us in His own image and likeness. All people have inherent worth and dignity because we were created in God's image and likeness, not because an angry 24-year-old wrote it in all caps on Twitter.

17:35An angry 24-year-old who probably doesn't realize that apart from God and His Word, nobody can tell anybody whose life matters. Apart from God and His Word, we're just left with 7 billion opinions. So God created us in His own image and likeness, meaning that we represent God and we are like God in many ways, and we all have inherent worth and dignity because of it. It. So now let's move on to the next question, which is a tougher question. Why did God create us male and female? Let's pick up in verse 27.

18:15So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them. Now, what this verse tells us is that God created human beings in his own image and likeness, and when he did, he created them in two types: male and female. He didn't create human beings in only one type, only men, or only women, or asexual persons. And he didn't create human beings in three or more types. When he created human beings, he created them in his image and likeness as one of two types, male or female.

19:05But here in Genesis 1, there is no statement as to exactly why God did that. We don't find that here. We don't find an explicit statement anywhere in Scripture about why God did this. But I think both here and elsewhere in the Bible, there are clues as to why God did this. So a little earlier, I was noting that God said in Genesis 1:26, let us make man in our image. After our likeness. And I was talking about the fact that that seems to be a reference to the Trinity, that God is one God who's expressed Himself in three persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. Well, if you look here in verse 27, what does Moses write?

19:48So God created man in His own image. In the image of God, He created them, male and female, He created them. So when we take Genesis 1:26 and 127 together, a picture is emerging of God's nature, that He is one God expressing Himself in three persons. In other words, there is a unity and there is diversity in the Godhead. Now, we look at Genesis chapter 2. So, Genesis chapter 1 is this big picture, 30,000-foot view of creation. Genesis 2 zooms in at the creation of male and female. So, let's take a look at Genesis chapter 2. You can look on the screen, verses 20 through 24.

20:37The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam, there was not found a helper fit for him. So, the Lord God caused the deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man, he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

21:18I want to leave that up there for a minute so that you can focus on those last two verses. In verse 23, Adam calls Eve bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. In verse 24, God says, man and woman will be leaving their father and mother and will be united to one another and become one flesh. So, what we see here is there is unity between male and female. Unity because they were created together. The woman was taken from the man, and unity because of the oneness that is found in marriage. That unity is a picture of God's unity. He is one God.

22:01But there's also diversity here in his creation of male and female. Adam and Eve are distinct people. Adam is not Eve, and Eve is not Adam. Adam is male. Eve is female. There is diversity, just like there is in the Trinity. The Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father. There is unity and diversity in the Godhead, and that unity and diversity is pictured in the fact that male and female are distinct and yet unified in both creation and marriage.

22:44So it seems that at least part of the reason that God created us male and female is to reflect his own unity and diversity as one God who has expressed himself in three persons, the Father, Son, and Spirit. And the second reason that God seems to have created us male and female centers around marriage and what it symbolizes. I want you to take a look here at Ephesians 5. This is a lengthy text, but it's all necessary to understand what Paul is saying. Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now, as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 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. No one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother, and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

24:31So, Paul is very honest with us in this passage. He says that in a way that is profoundly mysterious, in a way that we will never fully comprehend in this life, marriage between a man and a woman represents Christ's relationship with his church. The husband represents Christ in his sacrificial, sanctifying love for his wife, the way he loves her and cherishes her and washes her in the water of the word. And the woman represents the church, God's people, in the way that she respectfully submits to her husband. Now, again, Paul calls this a profound mystery. But, friends, it's a mystery whose symbolism is clearly explained to us in Scripture. And thus, it's a mystery that we need to preserve in the ways that we think, in the ways that we talk, in the ways that we live.

25:31Especially the way that we live out the God-ordained institution of marriage. So, while we're never told directly in Scripture, this is why God created human beings as male and female, scripture seems to show us that God created us male and female to reflect the unity and diversity of the Trinity, and so that marriage between a man and a woman could serve as a picture of the gospel, Christ's relationship and his love for his people, the church.

26:01That imagery is blurred or lost when we minimize or seek to eradicate gender distinctions. For then we lose the picture of God's unity and diversity that maleness and femaleness is supposed to represent. And that imagery is blurred or lost when marriage is no longer a one-flesh union between one man and one woman for life. Polygamy, adultery, homosexuality, divorce all blur or lose the image of Christ's sacrificial, committed love for his bride, the church. So, church, that's the foundation. We were created in God's image and likeness, meaning that we are like him in many ways. We represent him on the earth, and we are endowed with inherent worth and dignity. And we were created as male and female. Female to serve as a picture of God's unity and diversity, and to portray the gospel in the form of marriage between one man and one woman for life.

27:11But friends, all of us have gone astray, every one of us. We decided that God did not have the right to tell us who and what we are or how to live in the world that He created for us. Adam and Eve rebelled against God and His good commands, and what they thought would bring them freedom only brought them and all of their descendants into slavery. We see the sad effects of our slavery to sin all around us and truly inside of us as well.

27:48As people move away from the truth that God created us male and female in His image and further away from God's design for marriage, they are not finding more and more freedom. They're finding more and more bondage and becoming more and more disillusioned. Some of us know this firsthand because you have experienced the sadness of divorce in a family's marriage or your own marriage. You've experienced the sadness and the betrayal of adultery. You've experienced the difficulty of wrestling with same-sex attraction, or you know someone that you love and you. Your life who wrestles with same-sex attraction. We are all seeing the brokenness of this world all around us and inside of us all the time. We see what it's doing, and it seems to leave us without hope.

28:48But, friends, there is good news: Jesus came to make all things new, to deal with our sin and its consequences, and to restore the blurred and distorted image of God in us. I want you to look at Romans chapter 8 on the screen and just take so much hope from these verses. For those whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his son in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.

29:26And those whom he predestined, he also called, and those whom he called, he also justified, and those whom he justified, he also glorified. Church, God predestined us to be conformed to the image of his son. He chose us before the foundation of the world, not only to save us from our sin, but to deliver us from our sin's consequences that we have brought on ourselves and that we've brought on this world. Our sin has distorted and marred the image of God in us. But he sent Jesus to live a perfect life, to die in our place on the cross for our sins, and to rise again so that we could be conformed to his image, the perfect human being.

30:16And we know this will happen. We are certain that God will keep his word because he says that those God predestined, he also called to follow him. And those who follow him, he also called and declared righteous through faith in Christ. And those whom he declared righteous, he also glorified. And friends, this word glorified is referring to what we have to look forward to. When Jesus returns, we are not going to heaven as bodiless, genderless spirits.

30:56No, just like Jesus, we are going to the new heavens and the new earth, raised in perfect male and female bodies that are no longer subject to sin or sickness or death forever. Every tear will be wiped away. There will be no more headaches, no more depression, no more joint pain, no more wheelchairs, no more anxiety. No more COVID, no more cancer, all of it wiped away forever. We will finally be free, really and truly, completely free from all of sin's effects in our lives and the lives of those around us. We will finally be truly human.

31:51But, friends, only those who respond to God's call to receive Jesus and His work by faith have that to look forward to. God is perfectly just, and He will not allow anyone's sins to go unpunished. Not Hitler's and not yours. You must recognize that you have sinned against God and others, and that your sin must be justly punished. This is not a call to admit that you're not perfect. Every human being on earth will admit that they're not perfect. This is a call to admit that you have rebelled against the God who created you. You have placed yourself on his throne and you have said, I will live in the way that I think is best, not under your good rule and authority. It's a call to admit that, to confess that is sin, to turn away from it and to receive Jesus Christ, who willingly laid down his life for you and took it up again so that you could be declared righteous and forgiven and adopted into the family of God forever.

33:02And so, friends, you can take your own punishment in the form of the eternal wrath of God in hell. But Jesus Christ willingly laid down his life for you so that you wouldn't have to do that. He came to deliver you from sin's consequences in the future, but also to bring you eternal and abundant life that starts today. And so, if you're in that place where you've been wrestling for a long time with brokenness in this area of sexuality and gender, if you've been in this place where you have these desires that you don't know what to do with and you're not sure how to define, you have this confusion that's going on inside of you, then I want you to know that there's hope and freedom in Christ. Not that those things will magically and instantaneously go away, but that you have a God and Savior who didn't tell you, clean yourself up first, get rid of that stuff first, and then come to me. But he says, Come to me now, as you are, and I will receive you. Come to me now, and I will give you the abundant life that you long for. Come to me now, and I will give you the hope that you long for.

34:10And so, friends, wherever you find yourself today, come to Jesus Christ. He alone can forgive you and justify you. He alone can give you what you're looking for. He alone can turn you from a life of endless searching for meaning and identity and tell you who you are. Created to be. Let's pray. Father, we have made a mess of your world. Starting with our first parents, we told you that we knew best and that we would do it our way.

35:17And all of the brokenness and hurt and confusion and sadness in the world today can be traced back to Adam and Eve's sin and all of our sin. And so, God, we come to you this morning humble, saying that we are sorry for our part in the sin and brokenness in the world, and that we want you to renew our minds, renew our hearts. Help us to see the world as you see the world. Help us to work and pray and believe and trust.

36:06Toward the end, that you are making all things new. And that starts with us. That starts now. That doesn't start later on. God, we want to be faithful representatives of you and the world. So, as we deal with our own sin and our own failures and brokenness, and as we talk to others about their sin, their failures, their brokenness, give us an incredible supernatural amount of grace that we can relate to each other as fellow human beings, fellow strugglers who all need the saving and transforming grace of Jesus Christ.

36:50Forgive us for the ways that our pride has led us to talk about these and other issues in a way that would suggest that we are better, that we have things figured out, that we are holier than we are. When we too, though we are saints, are still strugglers with the flesh, strugglers with the old man. God, we thank you for your word, and we thank you that you have not left us to stumble around in the darkness of this world.

37:23Come, Lord Jesus, and make all things new. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. Thank you for listening to the sermon audio from New Life Baptist Church in College Station, Texas. For more information or to support our ministry, visit us online at newlifecs.net.