Gender and Sexuality
Part 1. Facing the Gender Dilemma
Charles Price
I am going to read from the very beginning of the Bible – Genesis Chapter 1. I am going to read from Genesis 1:26-28 and a couple of verses in Chapter 2 as well.
Genesis 1 gives us the account of creation, and Gen 1:26 brings us to the creation of human beings.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
Then if you go to Chapter 2 and Verse 7, we now have a more detailed account of the creation of man.
“The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Down to Verse 15:
“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
“And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’
“Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
“So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
“But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
“So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh.
“Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and he brought her to the man.
“The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called “woman” for she was taken out of man.’
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be untied to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
“The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
I want to begin this morning a series on the issue of gender and sexuality. By gender I mean the interplay of male and female in our roles and relationships. And by sexuality, I mean our sexual behavior in our relationships.
And I want to address these issues realistically and honestly, compassionately, but biblically.
The sexual ethic of the western world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. It really has been changing for the last century, but it gained momentum around 50 years ago.
And an ethic that had been built around moral structure and discipline has moved to an ethic characterized primarily by consent and by freedom.
We of course have legal protection against child abuse. We have a legal age of consent below which it is not legally permissible to engage in sexual activity. We have laws against incest, against polygamy, against prostitution and against the non-consensual sexual activity that may take place if one is not a willing partner.
But otherwise, in the context of being consensual, most sexual activity is fine and acceptable culturally within that context.
Now as we consider these issues over several weeks, I want to look into Scripture, which is both authoritative, but also true. You can have authority which may not be true and that really just locks us up into things which are unhelpful.
But we come with the assumption this is both true and authoritative.
But the Bible actually is helpful and at the same time unhelpful in seeking to understand these issues of gender and of sexuality.
The reason why I say it is unhelpful is that when we look back to both the Old Testament and the New Testament Scriptures, it presents no golden age of gender harmony and sexual fidelity and what we might call today traditional family values.
There aren’t great models of this in Scripture. In fact, it is hard to find a good marriage in the whole of Scripture and a good family life. There are a few we don’t know very much about and we might presume they are good.
Ruth and Boaz; we have got a wonderful romance and they get married and the story ends and we are not sure what happened after that.
Elizabeth and Zachariah, the parents of John the Baptist; a little bit we know about them.
Joseph and Mary; the very little bit we know about them, we might say, well they were in a good relationship.
And I am sure there were good relationships, but where we have any details about family life, it is very difficult to find a model of good family life in the Bible.
The New Testament opens in Matthew 1 and Verse 1 with these words:
“A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
And mentioning those two names would immediately commend this book to the Jewish readers to whom Matthew was writing because Abraham and David were some of the heroes and the aristocracy of Jewish history - probably along with Moses who doesn’t get mentioned here. But there is a specific reason why He is the son of Abraham and the son of David.
But these would be some of the aristocracy of Israel. They are men of faith, they are men of courage, they are men of character, but don’t look to any of them as models of sexual behavior.
Abraham is called the “father of faith”. He is a model of trust in God and yet he fathered an illicit child through his wife’s maid. He had three wives altogether, two of them at the same time. He married his third after Sarah, his first wife, died.
But he also had a few concubines. It doesn’t tell us how many, but he had some concubines with him as well.
Now we might say of Abraham, “Well it was culturally acceptable in those days”, but that doesn’t make it right any more than it was would be say, “Well, it’s culturally acceptable in our day to do certain things, so it’s okay.”
There are things that are culturally acceptable that may make it more understandable that people get swept in the current of the culture but they are still wrong.
David is called “a man after God’s own heart.” But he is famous for his adultery with Bathsheba. And not only committing adultery with her but he got her pregnant as a result.
She had a husband and David got Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, sent into the most dangerous place on the battlefront in order to get him killed so that he would never find out that Bathsheba was pregnant with David’s child. His adultery led him to be a murderer and a liar.
And by the way, this is after he wrote the beautiful Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” You would think butter wouldn’t melt in David’s mouth, would you?
Fortunately his repentance is also famous. And Psalm 51 is a wonderful portrayal of a repentant man when he realized his sin against Bathsheba.
But it didn’t seem to tame his sexual appetites even then because he went on to have 8 wives, concurrently. Plus, he had at least 10 concubines, and likely more. (These are women on the side.)
His son Solomon took the biscuit really. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines rounded up to a nice tidy figure – 1000 women available to him.
Now some of his marriages were political arrangements. You know, in those days if you wanted a good relationship with your neighbors, well, he married the daughter of the king of Egypt because that was a useful thing. Then your mother-in-law is the queen of Egypt and you can get around her and the king because you are related now. And the king of Moab’s daughter, and so on.
So there may have been some tactic in all of this. But nevertheless he had all these women around him and he is presented to us as the epitome of wisdom.
He wrote a beautiful romantic love poem; we call it the Song of Solomon.
Yet it tells us in the book of 1 Kings that it was his wives who took him away from God.
Now we are going to consult Solomon several times over the next few weeks because he writes a lot about sexuality, especially in the book of Proverbs.
But it is interesting what he has to say about sexuality is always warning of the dangers of adultery and the dangers of promiscuity and the poison that you suck into your life if you play around with women to whom you are not committed. He writes very graphically about that, probably because he knew.
But you would have thought because he was a product of adultery; you see he was a child born to Bathsheba from David – not the initial pregnancy, when she was still married to Uriah - that baby died. But when Uriah was killed, David took Bathsheba as wife and she conceived another child; it was Solomon.
And you would think Solomon would be sympathetic towards adultery because, “I wouldn’t be here without adultery”, but actually he is extremely strong on the dangers and damage of adultery. And we will look at what he says on other occasions.
Moses, I mentioned, was the other of the big three of the Old Testament (Abraham, Moses and David). And Moses was the law giver. He married a Midianite wife called Zipporah; we know a little bit about her.
But when he began to lead Israel through the wilderness, he married another woman early in the journey. She is described as a Cushite, which would mean she was Ethiopian or Sudanese. And his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam criticized him for taking this wife. Maybe they criticized him because he shouldn’t have taken another wife; maybe they were racist in their criticism because she was not a Jew, not an Israelite; she was from Africa.
But my point is he did take another wife and he gives the law and talks about adultery and sexual faithfulness.
So the Bible isn’t always helpful to us in practice, though I am so glad the Bible tells the truth about its heroes.
But it is helpful to us in its precepts – that is, in its teaching. And it is the teaching of the Word of God to which we must go for our instruction.
And against that background we can look at the real life situations of the day, but this is the grounds on which we understand these issues of gender and these issues of how to live with our sexuality in a way that is not only appropriate but which is fulfilling and satisfying and good as God intended that it would be.
Now today I want to start at the beginning. And we cannot have a doctrine of sexuality without a doctrine of gender. And we cannot have a doctrine of gender without going back to the beginning.
And in Genesis 1:27, I read just now, it says,
“God created man in his own image… male and female he created them.”
Now notice that begins with a singular statement:
“God created man in his own image”.
And the word man there means humanity, not the male species, but the human species.
And God created man, a singular unit, the human race, as one thing.
But then it becomes plural because having said,
“God created man in his own image…male and female he created them.”
So there is one humanity made up of two genders – male and female.
Now there are those who think it is too simplistic to speak only of two genders. I understand there are those who have come up with seven genders.
And quite commonly people speak of those who are trans-gender. That is, they do not fit well in their sense of who they are with either category of male or female; they are trans-gender, androgynous.
We speak of those who are cross-gender. That is usually those who are born male or female but through hormonal and surgical intervention, they change their gender, usually a male becoming a female, very occasionally the other way as well. And you may know one or two people in that situation, as I do, otherwise known as gender blenders (the trans-genders) or gender benders (the cross–genders).
Homosexuality is not normally categorized as gender – that is, people who are emotionally and sexually attracted to their own sex – and we will talk about that in a few weeks’ time.
But these are all variations on the two genders which everybody does fit into – male and female.
And in these opening statements of Genesis, they are created and defined first as one – humanity - and then only secondarily as male and female.
So in the beginning, men and women together are equal in creation (“male and female He created them”), equal in consideration – by that I mean they have the exact same status together. God created them in His own image (them – together). And thirdly, equal in commission because
“God blessed them” (in Genesis 1:28) and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
This is a joint responsibility He gives to them both. So they are equal in creation, in consideration and in commission. That’s in Chapter 1.
Then in Chapter 2 in Genesis we have a more detailed version of the creation of man, the male first and then the female second.
And it is interesting and important when we read how it describes this. In Verse 7 of Chapter 2 it says,
“The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Now here he is created from the dust of the ground in common with the animal kingdom, but then He breathes into him the breath of life.
This is not physical life, but spiritual life – the breath of God. The word for breath equally translates “the Spirit of God”. We could read it quite legitimately as a legitimate translation of the original text that “God breathed the Spirit of God into him.”
And we know from other parts of Scripture that is what we are intended to understand, that the Spirit of God inhabits the human soul.
And in this sense man is unique amongst all of God’s creation.
God then put him to work in the Garden of Eden. He was given two responsibilities: to provide and to protect. That is, that he was to look after it, with one provision. The provision was that he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because to eat of that tree would be to die.
Then in Verse 18 God says this:
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now you remember from Chapter 1, I am sure, that on each day of creation God expressed His opinion – God saw what He had made and it was good. “God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. On the sixth day God saw all that He had made and it was very good.”
But now in Chapter 2 and Verse 18, something is not good. “It is not good for man to be alone.”
But what was not good was already declared as being very good. Therefore it was very good that it was not good for man to be alone. Does that make sense?
It wasn’t God saying, “Oh there is something not good. Oh goodness me!”
“It is not good for man to be alone” and that is very good that it is not good for man to be alone.
By the way, your incompleteness, my incompleteness, is very good. If you pride yourself on being self-sufficient, you are priding yourself on something that is not good.
It is not good for man to be alone for three reasons.
He was made a spiritual being; he needed the life of God. That’s why God breathed into him His Spirit. He needed a relationship with God.
He is a spiritual being; he is a social being. He needed fellowship and relationship with other people, other living things. He is a social being.
And thirdly he is a sexual being. As male he needed female. And it is not good for man to be alone because he is created a sexual being.
Now before I go any further let me just acknowledge for a moment that many of us here this morning are single and we are single for various reasons. Some may be because you simply prefer it that way. Many others because we have just never met the person we would like to spend our lives with.
If you are only 18, relax about that – that may come. If you are 40, you will have thought many times, is this the way it is going to be?
Some of you are single because somebody has walked out on you or because your spouse has died.
Some of us may be single because we are not particularly attracted to the opposite sex and we simply live with the fact that we don’t get excited about that.
I am going to spend one morning talking about singleness. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, talks about the advantages of being single. There are also advantages in being married. There are advantages in both, but the advantages of one don’t outweigh the advantages of the other. There are advantages.
And I am going to talk one Sunday on the theme of being single and sexual, and how does the Bible tell us to cope with that? And it’s not easy. But we will look and see what it has to say.
I mention that now because for our purposes this morning we are talking about the beginning, the beginning of gender relationships and that involved it not being good for man to being alone and becoming one flesh with the female – Adam with Eve.
And so it was not good for man to be alone. Here is the solution in Verse 18.
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
Next verse it says that all of the animals were brought before Adam and he named them. Now it looks as though (it doesn’t mean this); it looks as though it means God said, “I’ll find somebody suitable for him. We’ve been going over the animals but the elephant was too big, you know, and the monkey never sat still and the giraffe gave him a stiff neck and the cow was moody, and the dog was the best. And the cat was a bit more boring but at least it sat around and slept and you at least felt you had company, though you really don’t. And rabbits were boring and goldfish were especially boring.”
And so at the end of that it looks as though God said, “Well that’s not enough.”
But actually, actually I mentioned we have spiritual and social and sexual needs. It’s actually lovely to relate to animals socially. A dog can be a very good friend. A cat can be okay.
Our kids had animals, you know, guinea pigs and rabbits and boy we…in fact my daughter Laura won a prize for her guinea pig, who was male, in an agricultural show that we went to because she was able to list all the babies he had fathered – they all had names.
It was a long, long, dozens and dozens and dozens, this little guinea pig. And so she had him in the cage. And the judge came by, was very impressed and so gave her the first prize. And they were walking around with the prize bull and the prize horse and the prize everything else and there’s Laura walking around with the prize guinea pig, you know, the father I think it was 46 guinea piglets (what do you call them?).
But they were great friends to our children and you learn a lot about life from animals too. You learn to deal with mourning and grief and sadness when they die. You learn the facts of life if you have a male and female. Stick them in the same cage; you work out what happens and why.
Spiritual being, social being, but he was also a sexual being. So He put Adam into a deep sleep and took one of his ribs and made a woman from his rib.
Now we ask, “Uh oh, this now is making distinction. Why didn’t He make Eve from the dust of the earth in the way He had made Adam from the dust of the earth? That would demonstrate their equality. But instead He makes her from his rib.
And I suggest to you there is a very important reason for that, because that demonstrates their unity. They were created from one flesh into two separate individuals, separate genders. In fact Adam is so surprised by this; when he woke up, having been in a deep sleep, and there was Eve, he said,
“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
So he immediately recognizes “she is part of me”.
And then God gives an instruction.
“A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
Notice that – one flesh becomes two individuals and those two individuals then become one flesh.
And therefore a doctrine of marriage and of gender relationships here in marriage is that this is a reunion of two persons into one, made one flesh – male and female – two equal parts of one whole. And as one flesh they will procreate, they will create new life. And those new lives will themselves be united to another person and they will become another unit. And so the building block of society is the man leaves his father and mother and he cleaves to his wife. They become one flesh. They procreate.
The first command, by the way, is “be fruitful and multiply”. The first command God gave to them was have sex, produce babies. And as you produce children, they in turn will leave their father and mother and this becomes the way in which society and the human race was to function. This was to be the bedrock of human society.
Now let me take you back to Verse 18 because there is a kind of awkward word here.
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
Now the awkward word there is the word “helper”. Eve is called his “helper”. Some have used this word to argue for a subordinate position. You know, “Adam is the man, supreme; Eve is his helper, supportive, like his PA.”
But that is a misreading of the significance of this word “helper”. This word is used 8 times in the Old Testament. Six times is it used of God. It is used here of Eve and then, for instance, in Exodus 18:4 Moses named his second son Eliezer,
“…for he said, ‘My father’s God was my helper.”
“I will give him a name that declares God is my helper.”
Deuteronomy 33:29 says,
“The LORD is your shield and your helper.”
Psalm 10:14, speaking to God,
“You are the helper of the fatherless.”
Psalm 27:9, again speaking to God,
“You have been my helper.”
Psalm 118:7:
“The LORD is with me; he is my helper.”
Hosea 13:9 God says,
“You are destroyed, O Israel, because you are against me, against your helper.”
Now what is the meaning of God being our helper? Does that put God into some subordinate role? Well of course not.
What that speaks of is the indispensability of God to human beings. “You are my helper; without You I do not have the resources, I do not have the ability, I do not have the enabling.”
This word helper is a very high word that means to be indispensable and to be interdependent, the one on the other. To be made one flesh is to become indispensable, not discardable, but indispensable, the one to the other and interdependent, where Adam, given his commission to provide and to protect, creates the environment in which she is nourished and flourishes.
One of the things a wife needs to know most about her husband is that he will protect her and provide for her. But if that sense of protection is undermined, everything else is undermined. But they are indispensable and interdependent to each other.
This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. There are facets to what that means, but God, the Deity, who is Trinity, one God but Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s why in the beginning, “Let us make man in our image” says God.
Not, “Let Me make man in My image”. There is a plurality to this image and that plurality is one of interdependence upon one another.
It is through the Son that the Father makes Himself known. It is the only way a person can come to the Father is through the Son. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father at the request of the Son. (These are all things from Scripture.) The Spirit brings glory to the Son. They are individual within the Trinity, yet they are one, they are indispensable to one another, they are interdependent upon one another.
“Let us”, this interdependent unit of relationship – “Let us make man in our image” – the man there being humanity, where they too are not adequate on their own and are interdependent and indispensable one to another.
Paul takes this further when he talks about husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church. He says this is what it means; it’s what Jesus Christ does with His church.
And then he gives four things in Ephesians 5 (we may look at this on another occasion) where he says loving her as his own body – that’s no selfishness – loving her as your own body.
Loving her sacrificially as Christ loved the church. That’s a good question for us husbands – what sacrificially do I do to make way for my wife? Or am I the fixed point and she’s the adjustable one?
“Giving himself up for her” is how Paul goes on to say that. Feeding and caring for her. In other words providing, feeding and protecting; caring - providing and protecting for her.
And so as helper this is actually a beautiful word that speaks of their indispensability to one another and their interdependence upon one another.
Now if we could stay in Genesis Chapter 2, everything in the Garden would be lovely. But in Genesis Chapter 3 something in the Garden turns ugly.
And what happens in Genesis Chapter 3 is that when sin entered and the fall took place, there came a destructive effect on the relationship of men to women.
In Genesis 3:12, when they ate of the tree God asked Adam what happened and do you see what Adam said? Genesis 3:12:
“The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’”
So what did Adam say? “Don’t ask me. She, who You gave me; if it’s not her fault, it’s Yours for giving her to me in the first place.”
This is Adam – “She gave me. No, no, I ate because, you know, what could I do?”
Now this was unjustifiable for two reasons. Adam had been told that he must not eat of the tree. God did not tell Eve that, though Adam had told Eve that. We know that early in Chapter 3 that she knew that.
But it was Adam God told that to. His task was to provide for her and to protect. And he stood by passively. He was present in the Garden but passive and then he became a participant and took and ate of the fruit himself.
And then he has the audacity to say, “It’s not my fault; she took it.”
The second reason why this was unjustifiable on Adam’s part is because Eve had been deceived by Satan. God had given to Adam that responsibility to not eat of that tree. Eve had been deceived.
Now if you look at the dialogue between them he fiddled around and told her half-truths and part truths and blatant lies and then a little bit of the truth mixed with it to make it sound as though he is talking sense. And she was deceived.
Now I am not excusing Eve at all. But Adam refuses to take his responsibility and he abuses her by blaming her and her alone and passing his guilt on to her.
John Piper writes of this. “Here you have the beginning of all domestic violence, of all wife abuse, of all sexual slurs, of all rape, of all the ways of men belittling women whom God created equally in His own image.”
And the result of this is going to be that man, or the male, is going to take the position of domination of the female. God tells Eve that in Genesis 3:16. He pronounces a curse on the serpent, a curse on Adam and a curse on Eve.
This is what He says to Eve. And the curse, by the way, is simply, “This is the fruit of your sin.” It is not that He superimposed something that wasn’t there. He is simply exposing it and saying, “This is what is there as a result of what has taken place.
He says in Verse 16,
“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
That is going to be the result.
In other words, you have now become vulnerable to your husband and this is going to become the pattern of fallen and broken humanity where the law of the jungle is going to operate and in his sin, man is going to dominate women and she is going to acquiesce to that because she has been broken.
Now this is not their role in Genesis 1 and 2. They begin individually with the same dignity, created together as one humanity and then becoming two individuals from one flesh in order that they might now be united as two individuals as one flesh, but two individual people now but made one.
And that is a lot deeper than simply a sexual oneness of course. But they take together an identity and a mutual love and a mutual respect and a mutual trust and a mutual provision and a mutual protection, the one of the other.
That’s what you find in Genesis 1 and 2, or Genesis 2 in particular. But now in Genesis 3 they will not flourish in that way. Instead the woman will be in danger of being abused emotionally, physically, verbally and sexually. And the rest of the story simply reiterates that.
Now I am speaking in general terms but this is the general picture and we can see it in the history of the human race.
However, if the Bible stopped at Genesis Chapter 3 we would of course, of all people be the most miserable.
But to the serpent God said this: “You are going to bruise the heel of the woman, you are going to damage her, but the seed of the woman is going to crush your head and it’s going to be fatal.”
And in 1 John 3:8 we read this:
“For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” (That he might crush the head of the devil).
And He does so firstly in reconciling us to God. That is of course the first note of the gospel. But then He does so in reconciling us to each other. Our salvation is about being reconciled to God. Our sanctification, by and large, is about how we live in the world and our relationships in the world.
And the gospel restores the oneness of the male and female that has been destroyed here in the Garden of Eden. So in Galatians 3:27 Paul says,
“For all of you who were baptized into Christ…”
That’s the first point of reconciliation. You are in Christ.
“…you have clothed yourselves with Christ.”
You are now united with Him.
“There is to you neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
And because you have been reconciled to God and made one in Christ, the brokenness of our relationships now has the possibility of being restored. And these relationships are restored racially. There is no Jew, nor Greek; you are all one.
They are restored socially and economically. There is no slave nor free. In Christ you are level.
And genderly (if there is such a word – I don’t think there is) there is neither male nor female.
Those distinctions are distinctions for celebration, not distinctions for exploitation, as they became in Genesis 3. Of course we are different, male and female. Of course we bring different things to each other. But we rejoice in one another and we celebrate, not exploit.
And interesting, where the gospel has spread through history around the world, where the gospel has brought about the undercurrent of culture (and that is still true in the western world even though we are moving away from it, and there will be consequences to that) but wherever the gospel has formed any sense of undercurrent of the contemporary culture, women are freer than where the gospel has not gone. Women have dignity they do not have where the gospel has not gone.
Because the purpose of the Son of God was to destroy the works of the devil, and this is one of his works.
And if the fall broke the gender relationship as God intended it, and if the fall broke much of our sexuality as God intended it, part of the salvation and sanctification process is restoring relationships in marriage, in family, in society. Which is why Paul says if you are going to be an elder in a church, you have a good marriage, because that is a mark of your sanctification.
Now I know there are all kinds of reasons why marriages break up. We will talk about that on another occasion. We will talk about that.
But this is where it works out. You can have a head full of the Bible; you can quote it every day of your life, but if you do not treat your wife well, it means nothing. This is where it works out.
My time is gone. Let me finish with a story. A few years ago I received an invitation to go and speak at a conference that was supposed to be held in Belgium in Europe.
And it was a conference of gay Christians from all over Europe. They were all connected in some way with national bodies, a bit like Exodus here in Toronto in Canada.
And they had this umbrella organization and they were bringing them all together for a conference to be held in a monastery in Belgium.
Would I come and speak? It would begin on a Monday night and finish on a Friday morning. And I wrote back and said, “I appreciate your invitation but I don’t think I have the expertise to address a group like this.”
And they wrote back to me and said, “We don’t need to talk about sexual issues at all. That is not why we are inviting you.” They said one of their groups in Amsterdam had been using one of my books, “Christ for Real”, which is published in Dutch as well.
They had been using that as a basis of the Bible study and they had recommended that I be invited to come and teach the principles of that book at this conference.
And I said I would love to do that. What it means to be in Christ, what it means for Christ to be in us, what it means to live under the lordship of Christ and the enabling of the Holy Spirit, what it means to live in true repentance – all that is what that book is about.
And I went and it was a very wonderful experience for me on many grounds. I learned so much. They came from all over Europe, from Latvia in the east, Ireland in the west, from Norway in the north, to Spain in the south and everywhere in between. 80% were male; 20% were female, roughly.
On the first night the leader of the conference, a Dutch guy, got up, welcomed people, and then he said this (and I am paraphrasing from memory – I wrote some notes at the time of what he said).
He said, “We are all here together because we share something in common. We are broken people.” Now he said, “We share that in common with the whole of the human race, but we are broken in a particular way; we are broken sexually.
“But brokenness is a gift from God. It is in our brokenness that we meet with God. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. ‘A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.’ God has nothing for the all-together people but He has everything for the broken people. We want to live holy lives,” he said. “We want to live fruitful lives. Yet we are living with a conflict, with a struggle. We are living in a battle. Some of you are doing well. Some of you are doing terribly. Some of you know victory. Some of you know defeat, utter defeat, utter defeat. But let’s at the outset of this conference say, ‘God, my broken sexuality is Yours’ and let’s see what He will do.”
Most of us here this morning are broken sexually in some way, in relationships. We come from backgrounds. Maybe our parents split up. Maybe our own marriages have run into difficulty and maybe we are divorced, separated. Maybe our kids are living a way sexually that we would never have wanted them to. Maybe we are caught up and attracted to our own sex, and do I just run with that, or is there some other way?
Some of us here are victims of abuse. Some of us may have ourselves been abusers of others. Some of us are perhaps very frustrated sexually. Some of us are caught up in habits and thoughts and practices that our conscience screams against.
Some of us here will be captivated by pornography and you have lost the ability to switch it off.
We are going to address all these issues in the next few weeks in some way or another.
I want to finish with an invitation of Jesus. Matthew 11:28:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
Not “Come to Me if you have sorted these things out – come to Me in your burdens, in your weariness and I will give you rest.”
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”
That is not a flash bang thing; that is a process taking His yoke, learning – learning from Him.
“…for I am gentle…”
That’s His guarantee for the way He will treat you.
“I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
“For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
In other words, He says, “Come to Me. I don’t care what your burden is. I can give you hope. It involves some work, learning, taking My yoke, but I will be gentle with you. I am humble at heart and you will find rest.”
My prayer, as I felt it on my heart to speak about this issue, that we don’t just churn things up, we don’t just send people home feeling wretched or guilty or, “well, what do I do about it?”
We want in the course of these next weeks to provide ways in which we can help people too, and help you.
But we have to understand the biblical doctrine of gender and the biblical doctrine of sexuality and we need to come from the position, “this is the Word of God. This therefore is true. This therefore is good. This therefore is possible.” And we will find rest for our souls.
Let’s pray.
Father we thank You this morning that You understand everything about us. Nothing shocks You. No secret locked away in the dark recesses of our hearts shocks You and You love us. You love us enough to not leave us there. As Your Word says, if someone is overcome in a sin, restore them gently. We want to restore one another gently, with clarity, but with compassion.
And we pray that some hearts here this morning in these areas we have talked about, in some marriages where maybe there is tension, where maybe there is exploitation the one by the other, we pray, Lord Jesus, that You will turn our hearts towards home, because to be at home is to be one. And I pray You will bring healing and a new vision of what we can be as completed people in You, holy, acceptable and fruitful.
Part 1. Facing the Gender Dilemma
Charles Price
I am going to read from the very beginning of the Bible – Genesis Chapter 1. I am going to read from Genesis 1:26-28 and a couple of verses in Chapter 2 as well.
Genesis 1 gives us the account of creation, and Gen 1:26 brings us to the creation of human beings.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
“God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
Then if you go to Chapter 2 and Verse 7, we now have a more detailed account of the creation of man.
“The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Down to Verse 15:
“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
“And the LORD God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’
“Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
“So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.
“But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
“So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh.
“Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man and he brought her to the man.
“The man said, ‘This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called “woman” for she was taken out of man.’
“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be untied to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
“The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”
I want to begin this morning a series on the issue of gender and sexuality. By gender I mean the interplay of male and female in our roles and relationships. And by sexuality, I mean our sexual behavior in our relationships.
And I want to address these issues realistically and honestly, compassionately, but biblically.
The sexual ethic of the western world has changed dramatically in the last 50 years. It really has been changing for the last century, but it gained momentum around 50 years ago.
And an ethic that had been built around moral structure and discipline has moved to an ethic characterized primarily by consent and by freedom.
We of course have legal protection against child abuse. We have a legal age of consent below which it is not legally permissible to engage in sexual activity. We have laws against incest, against polygamy, against prostitution and against the non-consensual sexual activity that may take place if one is not a willing partner.
But otherwise, in the context of being consensual, most sexual activity is fine and acceptable culturally within that context.
Now as we consider these issues over several weeks, I want to look into Scripture, which is both authoritative, but also true. You can have authority which may not be true and that really just locks us up into things which are unhelpful.
But we come with the assumption this is both true and authoritative.
But the Bible actually is helpful and at the same time unhelpful in seeking to understand these issues of gender and of sexuality.
The reason why I say it is unhelpful is that when we look back to both the Old Testament and the New Testament Scriptures, it presents no golden age of gender harmony and sexual fidelity and what we might call today traditional family values.
There aren’t great models of this in Scripture. In fact, it is hard to find a good marriage in the whole of Scripture and a good family life. There are a few we don’t know very much about and we might presume they are good.
Ruth and Boaz; we have got a wonderful romance and they get married and the story ends and we are not sure what happened after that.
Elizabeth and Zachariah, the parents of John the Baptist; a little bit we know about them.
Joseph and Mary; the very little bit we know about them, we might say, well they were in a good relationship.
And I am sure there were good relationships, but where we have any details about family life, it is very difficult to find a model of good family life in the Bible.
The New Testament opens in Matthew 1 and Verse 1 with these words:
“A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham.”
And mentioning those two names would immediately commend this book to the Jewish readers to whom Matthew was writing because Abraham and David were some of the heroes and the aristocracy of Jewish history - probably along with Moses who doesn’t get mentioned here. But there is a specific reason why He is the son of Abraham and the son of David.
But these would be some of the aristocracy of Israel. They are men of faith, they are men of courage, they are men of character, but don’t look to any of them as models of sexual behavior.
Abraham is called the “father of faith”. He is a model of trust in God and yet he fathered an illicit child through his wife’s maid. He had three wives altogether, two of them at the same time. He married his third after Sarah, his first wife, died.
But he also had a few concubines. It doesn’t tell us how many, but he had some concubines with him as well.
Now we might say of Abraham, “Well it was culturally acceptable in those days”, but that doesn’t make it right any more than it was would be say, “Well, it’s culturally acceptable in our day to do certain things, so it’s okay.”
There are things that are culturally acceptable that may make it more understandable that people get swept in the current of the culture but they are still wrong.
David is called “a man after God’s own heart.” But he is famous for his adultery with Bathsheba. And not only committing adultery with her but he got her pregnant as a result.
She had a husband and David got Uriah, Bathsheba’s husband, sent into the most dangerous place on the battlefront in order to get him killed so that he would never find out that Bathsheba was pregnant with David’s child. His adultery led him to be a murderer and a liar.
And by the way, this is after he wrote the beautiful Psalm 23, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.” You would think butter wouldn’t melt in David’s mouth, would you?
Fortunately his repentance is also famous. And Psalm 51 is a wonderful portrayal of a repentant man when he realized his sin against Bathsheba.
But it didn’t seem to tame his sexual appetites even then because he went on to have 8 wives, concurrently. Plus, he had at least 10 concubines, and likely more. (These are women on the side.)
His son Solomon took the biscuit really. He had 700 wives and 300 concubines rounded up to a nice tidy figure – 1000 women available to him.
Now some of his marriages were political arrangements. You know, in those days if you wanted a good relationship with your neighbors, well, he married the daughter of the king of Egypt because that was a useful thing. Then your mother-in-law is the queen of Egypt and you can get around her and the king because you are related now. And the king of Moab’s daughter, and so on.
So there may have been some tactic in all of this. But nevertheless he had all these women around him and he is presented to us as the epitome of wisdom.
He wrote a beautiful romantic love poem; we call it the Song of Solomon.
Yet it tells us in the book of 1 Kings that it was his wives who took him away from God.
Now we are going to consult Solomon several times over the next few weeks because he writes a lot about sexuality, especially in the book of Proverbs.
But it is interesting what he has to say about sexuality is always warning of the dangers of adultery and the dangers of promiscuity and the poison that you suck into your life if you play around with women to whom you are not committed. He writes very graphically about that, probably because he knew.
But you would have thought because he was a product of adultery; you see he was a child born to Bathsheba from David – not the initial pregnancy, when she was still married to Uriah - that baby died. But when Uriah was killed, David took Bathsheba as wife and she conceived another child; it was Solomon.
And you would think Solomon would be sympathetic towards adultery because, “I wouldn’t be here without adultery”, but actually he is extremely strong on the dangers and damage of adultery. And we will look at what he says on other occasions.
Moses, I mentioned, was the other of the big three of the Old Testament (Abraham, Moses and David). And Moses was the law giver. He married a Midianite wife called Zipporah; we know a little bit about her.
But when he began to lead Israel through the wilderness, he married another woman early in the journey. She is described as a Cushite, which would mean she was Ethiopian or Sudanese. And his brother Aaron and his sister Miriam criticized him for taking this wife. Maybe they criticized him because he shouldn’t have taken another wife; maybe they were racist in their criticism because she was not a Jew, not an Israelite; she was from Africa.
But my point is he did take another wife and he gives the law and talks about adultery and sexual faithfulness.
So the Bible isn’t always helpful to us in practice, though I am so glad the Bible tells the truth about its heroes.
But it is helpful to us in its precepts – that is, in its teaching. And it is the teaching of the Word of God to which we must go for our instruction.
And against that background we can look at the real life situations of the day, but this is the grounds on which we understand these issues of gender and these issues of how to live with our sexuality in a way that is not only appropriate but which is fulfilling and satisfying and good as God intended that it would be.
Now today I want to start at the beginning. And we cannot have a doctrine of sexuality without a doctrine of gender. And we cannot have a doctrine of gender without going back to the beginning.
And in Genesis 1:27, I read just now, it says,
“God created man in his own image… male and female he created them.”
Now notice that begins with a singular statement:
“God created man in his own image”.
And the word man there means humanity, not the male species, but the human species.
And God created man, a singular unit, the human race, as one thing.
But then it becomes plural because having said,
“God created man in his own image…male and female he created them.”
So there is one humanity made up of two genders – male and female.
Now there are those who think it is too simplistic to speak only of two genders. I understand there are those who have come up with seven genders.
And quite commonly people speak of those who are trans-gender. That is, they do not fit well in their sense of who they are with either category of male or female; they are trans-gender, androgynous.
We speak of those who are cross-gender. That is usually those who are born male or female but through hormonal and surgical intervention, they change their gender, usually a male becoming a female, very occasionally the other way as well. And you may know one or two people in that situation, as I do, otherwise known as gender blenders (the trans-genders) or gender benders (the cross–genders).
Homosexuality is not normally categorized as gender – that is, people who are emotionally and sexually attracted to their own sex – and we will talk about that in a few weeks’ time.
But these are all variations on the two genders which everybody does fit into – male and female.
And in these opening statements of Genesis, they are created and defined first as one – humanity - and then only secondarily as male and female.
So in the beginning, men and women together are equal in creation (“male and female He created them”), equal in consideration – by that I mean they have the exact same status together. God created them in His own image (them – together). And thirdly, equal in commission because
“God blessed them” (in Genesis 1:28) and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.’”
This is a joint responsibility He gives to them both. So they are equal in creation, in consideration and in commission. That’s in Chapter 1.
Then in Chapter 2 in Genesis we have a more detailed version of the creation of man, the male first and then the female second.
And it is interesting and important when we read how it describes this. In Verse 7 of Chapter 2 it says,
“The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”
Now here he is created from the dust of the ground in common with the animal kingdom, but then He breathes into him the breath of life.
This is not physical life, but spiritual life – the breath of God. The word for breath equally translates “the Spirit of God”. We could read it quite legitimately as a legitimate translation of the original text that “God breathed the Spirit of God into him.”
And we know from other parts of Scripture that is what we are intended to understand, that the Spirit of God inhabits the human soul.
And in this sense man is unique amongst all of God’s creation.
God then put him to work in the Garden of Eden. He was given two responsibilities: to provide and to protect. That is, that he was to look after it, with one provision. The provision was that he must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because to eat of that tree would be to die.
Then in Verse 18 God says this:
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now you remember from Chapter 1, I am sure, that on each day of creation God expressed His opinion – God saw what He had made and it was good. “God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. God saw that it was good. On the sixth day God saw all that He had made and it was very good.”
But now in Chapter 2 and Verse 18, something is not good. “It is not good for man to be alone.”
But what was not good was already declared as being very good. Therefore it was very good that it was not good for man to be alone. Does that make sense?
It wasn’t God saying, “Oh there is something not good. Oh goodness me!”
“It is not good for man to be alone” and that is very good that it is not good for man to be alone.
By the way, your incompleteness, my incompleteness, is very good. If you pride yourself on being self-sufficient, you are priding yourself on something that is not good.
It is not good for man to be alone for three reasons.
He was made a spiritual being; he needed the life of God. That’s why God breathed into him His Spirit. He needed a relationship with God.
He is a spiritual being; he is a social being. He needed fellowship and relationship with other people, other living things. He is a social being.
And thirdly he is a sexual being. As male he needed female. And it is not good for man to be alone because he is created a sexual being.
Now before I go any further let me just acknowledge for a moment that many of us here this morning are single and we are single for various reasons. Some may be because you simply prefer it that way. Many others because we have just never met the person we would like to spend our lives with.
If you are only 18, relax about that – that may come. If you are 40, you will have thought many times, is this the way it is going to be?
Some of you are single because somebody has walked out on you or because your spouse has died.
Some of us may be single because we are not particularly attracted to the opposite sex and we simply live with the fact that we don’t get excited about that.
I am going to spend one morning talking about singleness. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 7, talks about the advantages of being single. There are also advantages in being married. There are advantages in both, but the advantages of one don’t outweigh the advantages of the other. There are advantages.
And I am going to talk one Sunday on the theme of being single and sexual, and how does the Bible tell us to cope with that? And it’s not easy. But we will look and see what it has to say.
I mention that now because for our purposes this morning we are talking about the beginning, the beginning of gender relationships and that involved it not being good for man to being alone and becoming one flesh with the female – Adam with Eve.
And so it was not good for man to be alone. Here is the solution in Verse 18.
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
Next verse it says that all of the animals were brought before Adam and he named them. Now it looks as though (it doesn’t mean this); it looks as though it means God said, “I’ll find somebody suitable for him. We’ve been going over the animals but the elephant was too big, you know, and the monkey never sat still and the giraffe gave him a stiff neck and the cow was moody, and the dog was the best. And the cat was a bit more boring but at least it sat around and slept and you at least felt you had company, though you really don’t. And rabbits were boring and goldfish were especially boring.”
And so at the end of that it looks as though God said, “Well that’s not enough.”
But actually, actually I mentioned we have spiritual and social and sexual needs. It’s actually lovely to relate to animals socially. A dog can be a very good friend. A cat can be okay.
Our kids had animals, you know, guinea pigs and rabbits and boy we…in fact my daughter Laura won a prize for her guinea pig, who was male, in an agricultural show that we went to because she was able to list all the babies he had fathered – they all had names.
It was a long, long, dozens and dozens and dozens, this little guinea pig. And so she had him in the cage. And the judge came by, was very impressed and so gave her the first prize. And they were walking around with the prize bull and the prize horse and the prize everything else and there’s Laura walking around with the prize guinea pig, you know, the father I think it was 46 guinea piglets (what do you call them?).
But they were great friends to our children and you learn a lot about life from animals too. You learn to deal with mourning and grief and sadness when they die. You learn the facts of life if you have a male and female. Stick them in the same cage; you work out what happens and why.
Spiritual being, social being, but he was also a sexual being. So He put Adam into a deep sleep and took one of his ribs and made a woman from his rib.
Now we ask, “Uh oh, this now is making distinction. Why didn’t He make Eve from the dust of the earth in the way He had made Adam from the dust of the earth? That would demonstrate their equality. But instead He makes her from his rib.
And I suggest to you there is a very important reason for that, because that demonstrates their unity. They were created from one flesh into two separate individuals, separate genders. In fact Adam is so surprised by this; when he woke up, having been in a deep sleep, and there was Eve, he said,
“This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”
So he immediately recognizes “she is part of me”.
And then God gives an instruction.
“A man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.”
Notice that – one flesh becomes two individuals and those two individuals then become one flesh.
And therefore a doctrine of marriage and of gender relationships here in marriage is that this is a reunion of two persons into one, made one flesh – male and female – two equal parts of one whole. And as one flesh they will procreate, they will create new life. And those new lives will themselves be united to another person and they will become another unit. And so the building block of society is the man leaves his father and mother and he cleaves to his wife. They become one flesh. They procreate.
The first command, by the way, is “be fruitful and multiply”. The first command God gave to them was have sex, produce babies. And as you produce children, they in turn will leave their father and mother and this becomes the way in which society and the human race was to function. This was to be the bedrock of human society.
Now let me take you back to Verse 18 because there is a kind of awkward word here.
“The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’”
Now the awkward word there is the word “helper”. Eve is called his “helper”. Some have used this word to argue for a subordinate position. You know, “Adam is the man, supreme; Eve is his helper, supportive, like his PA.”
But that is a misreading of the significance of this word “helper”. This word is used 8 times in the Old Testament. Six times is it used of God. It is used here of Eve and then, for instance, in Exodus 18:4 Moses named his second son Eliezer,
“…for he said, ‘My father’s God was my helper.”
“I will give him a name that declares God is my helper.”
Deuteronomy 33:29 says,
“The LORD is your shield and your helper.”
Psalm 10:14, speaking to God,
“You are the helper of the fatherless.”
Psalm 27:9, again speaking to God,
“You have been my helper.”
Psalm 118:7:
“The LORD is with me; he is my helper.”
Hosea 13:9 God says,
“You are destroyed, O Israel, because you are against me, against your helper.”
Now what is the meaning of God being our helper? Does that put God into some subordinate role? Well of course not.
What that speaks of is the indispensability of God to human beings. “You are my helper; without You I do not have the resources, I do not have the ability, I do not have the enabling.”
This word helper is a very high word that means to be indispensable and to be interdependent, the one on the other. To be made one flesh is to become indispensable, not discardable, but indispensable, the one to the other and interdependent, where Adam, given his commission to provide and to protect, creates the environment in which she is nourished and flourishes.
One of the things a wife needs to know most about her husband is that he will protect her and provide for her. But if that sense of protection is undermined, everything else is undermined. But they are indispensable and interdependent to each other.
This is part of what it means to be made in the image of God. There are facets to what that means, but God, the Deity, who is Trinity, one God but Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That’s why in the beginning, “Let us make man in our image” says God.
Not, “Let Me make man in My image”. There is a plurality to this image and that plurality is one of interdependence upon one another.
It is through the Son that the Father makes Himself known. It is the only way a person can come to the Father is through the Son. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father at the request of the Son. (These are all things from Scripture.) The Spirit brings glory to the Son. They are individual within the Trinity, yet they are one, they are indispensable to one another, they are interdependent upon one another.
“Let us”, this interdependent unit of relationship – “Let us make man in our image” – the man there being humanity, where they too are not adequate on their own and are interdependent and indispensable one to another.
Paul takes this further when he talks about husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church. He says this is what it means; it’s what Jesus Christ does with His church.
And then he gives four things in Ephesians 5 (we may look at this on another occasion) where he says loving her as his own body – that’s no selfishness – loving her as your own body.
Loving her sacrificially as Christ loved the church. That’s a good question for us husbands – what sacrificially do I do to make way for my wife? Or am I the fixed point and she’s the adjustable one?
“Giving himself up for her” is how Paul goes on to say that. Feeding and caring for her. In other words providing, feeding and protecting; caring - providing and protecting for her.
And so as helper this is actually a beautiful word that speaks of their indispensability to one another and their interdependence upon one another.
Now if we could stay in Genesis Chapter 2, everything in the Garden would be lovely. But in Genesis Chapter 3 something in the Garden turns ugly.
And what happens in Genesis Chapter 3 is that when sin entered and the fall took place, there came a destructive effect on the relationship of men to women.
In Genesis 3:12, when they ate of the tree God asked Adam what happened and do you see what Adam said? Genesis 3:12:
“The man said, ‘The woman you put here with me – she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.’”
So what did Adam say? “Don’t ask me. She, who You gave me; if it’s not her fault, it’s Yours for giving her to me in the first place.”
This is Adam – “She gave me. No, no, I ate because, you know, what could I do?”
Now this was unjustifiable for two reasons. Adam had been told that he must not eat of the tree. God did not tell Eve that, though Adam had told Eve that. We know that early in Chapter 3 that she knew that.
But it was Adam God told that to. His task was to provide for her and to protect. And he stood by passively. He was present in the Garden but passive and then he became a participant and took and ate of the fruit himself.
And then he has the audacity to say, “It’s not my fault; she took it.”
The second reason why this was unjustifiable on Adam’s part is because Eve had been deceived by Satan. God had given to Adam that responsibility to not eat of that tree. Eve had been deceived.
Now if you look at the dialogue between them he fiddled around and told her half-truths and part truths and blatant lies and then a little bit of the truth mixed with it to make it sound as though he is talking sense. And she was deceived.
Now I am not excusing Eve at all. But Adam refuses to take his responsibility and he abuses her by blaming her and her alone and passing his guilt on to her.
John Piper writes of this. “Here you have the beginning of all domestic violence, of all wife abuse, of all sexual slurs, of all rape, of all the ways of men belittling women whom God created equally in His own image.”
And the result of this is going to be that man, or the male, is going to take the position of domination of the female. God tells Eve that in Genesis 3:16. He pronounces a curse on the serpent, a curse on Adam and a curse on Eve.
This is what He says to Eve. And the curse, by the way, is simply, “This is the fruit of your sin.” It is not that He superimposed something that wasn’t there. He is simply exposing it and saying, “This is what is there as a result of what has taken place.
He says in Verse 16,
“Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
That is going to be the result.
In other words, you have now become vulnerable to your husband and this is going to become the pattern of fallen and broken humanity where the law of the jungle is going to operate and in his sin, man is going to dominate women and she is going to acquiesce to that because she has been broken.
Now this is not their role in Genesis 1 and 2. They begin individually with the same dignity, created together as one humanity and then becoming two individuals from one flesh in order that they might now be united as two individuals as one flesh, but two individual people now but made one.
And that is a lot deeper than simply a sexual oneness of course. But they take together an identity and a mutual love and a mutual respect and a mutual trust and a mutual provision and a mutual protection, the one of the other.
That’s what you find in Genesis 1 and 2, or Genesis 2 in particular. But now in Genesis 3 they will not flourish in that way. Instead the woman will be in danger of being abused emotionally, physically, verbally and sexually. And the rest of the story simply reiterates that.
Now I am speaking in general terms but this is the general picture and we can see it in the history of the human race.
However, if the Bible stopped at Genesis Chapter 3 we would of course, of all people be the most miserable.
But to the serpent God said this: “You are going to bruise the heel of the woman, you are going to damage her, but the seed of the woman is going to crush your head and it’s going to be fatal.”
And in 1 John 3:8 we read this:
“For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” (That he might crush the head of the devil).
And He does so firstly in reconciling us to God. That is of course the first note of the gospel. But then He does so in reconciling us to each other. Our salvation is about being reconciled to God. Our sanctification, by and large, is about how we live in the world and our relationships in the world.
And the gospel restores the oneness of the male and female that has been destroyed here in the Garden of Eden. So in Galatians 3:27 Paul says,
“For all of you who were baptized into Christ…”
That’s the first point of reconciliation. You are in Christ.
“…you have clothed yourselves with Christ.”
You are now united with Him.
“There is to you neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
And because you have been reconciled to God and made one in Christ, the brokenness of our relationships now has the possibility of being restored. And these relationships are restored racially. There is no Jew, nor Greek; you are all one.
They are restored socially and economically. There is no slave nor free. In Christ you are level.
And genderly (if there is such a word – I don’t think there is) there is neither male nor female.
Those distinctions are distinctions for celebration, not distinctions for exploitation, as they became in Genesis 3. Of course we are different, male and female. Of course we bring different things to each other. But we rejoice in one another and we celebrate, not exploit.
And interesting, where the gospel has spread through history around the world, where the gospel has brought about the undercurrent of culture (and that is still true in the western world even though we are moving away from it, and there will be consequences to that) but wherever the gospel has formed any sense of undercurrent of the contemporary culture, women are freer than where the gospel has not gone. Women have dignity they do not have where the gospel has not gone.
Because the purpose of the Son of God was to destroy the works of the devil, and this is one of his works.
And if the fall broke the gender relationship as God intended it, and if the fall broke much of our sexuality as God intended it, part of the salvation and sanctification process is restoring relationships in marriage, in family, in society. Which is why Paul says if you are going to be an elder in a church, you have a good marriage, because that is a mark of your sanctification.
Now I know there are all kinds of reasons why marriages break up. We will talk about that on another occasion. We will talk about that.
But this is where it works out. You can have a head full of the Bible; you can quote it every day of your life, but if you do not treat your wife well, it means nothing. This is where it works out.
My time is gone. Let me finish with a story. A few years ago I received an invitation to go and speak at a conference that was supposed to be held in Belgium in Europe.
And it was a conference of gay Christians from all over Europe. They were all connected in some way with national bodies, a bit like Exodus here in Toronto in Canada.
And they had this umbrella organization and they were bringing them all together for a conference to be held in a monastery in Belgium.
Would I come and speak? It would begin on a Monday night and finish on a Friday morning. And I wrote back and said, “I appreciate your invitation but I don’t think I have the expertise to address a group like this.”
And they wrote back to me and said, “We don’t need to talk about sexual issues at all. That is not why we are inviting you.” They said one of their groups in Amsterdam had been using one of my books, “Christ for Real”, which is published in Dutch as well.
They had been using that as a basis of the Bible study and they had recommended that I be invited to come and teach the principles of that book at this conference.
And I said I would love to do that. What it means to be in Christ, what it means for Christ to be in us, what it means to live under the lordship of Christ and the enabling of the Holy Spirit, what it means to live in true repentance – all that is what that book is about.
And I went and it was a very wonderful experience for me on many grounds. I learned so much. They came from all over Europe, from Latvia in the east, Ireland in the west, from Norway in the north, to Spain in the south and everywhere in between. 80% were male; 20% were female, roughly.
On the first night the leader of the conference, a Dutch guy, got up, welcomed people, and then he said this (and I am paraphrasing from memory – I wrote some notes at the time of what he said).
He said, “We are all here together because we share something in common. We are broken people.” Now he said, “We share that in common with the whole of the human race, but we are broken in a particular way; we are broken sexually.
“But brokenness is a gift from God. It is in our brokenness that we meet with God. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. ‘A broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.’ God has nothing for the all-together people but He has everything for the broken people. We want to live holy lives,” he said. “We want to live fruitful lives. Yet we are living with a conflict, with a struggle. We are living in a battle. Some of you are doing well. Some of you are doing terribly. Some of you know victory. Some of you know defeat, utter defeat, utter defeat. But let’s at the outset of this conference say, ‘God, my broken sexuality is Yours’ and let’s see what He will do.”
Most of us here this morning are broken sexually in some way, in relationships. We come from backgrounds. Maybe our parents split up. Maybe our own marriages have run into difficulty and maybe we are divorced, separated. Maybe our kids are living a way sexually that we would never have wanted them to. Maybe we are caught up and attracted to our own sex, and do I just run with that, or is there some other way?
Some of us here are victims of abuse. Some of us may have ourselves been abusers of others. Some of us are perhaps very frustrated sexually. Some of us are caught up in habits and thoughts and practices that our conscience screams against.
Some of us here will be captivated by pornography and you have lost the ability to switch it off.
We are going to address all these issues in the next few weeks in some way or another.
I want to finish with an invitation of Jesus. Matthew 11:28:
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
Not “Come to Me if you have sorted these things out – come to Me in your burdens, in your weariness and I will give you rest.”
“Take my yoke upon you and learn from me.”
That is not a flash bang thing; that is a process taking His yoke, learning – learning from Him.
“…for I am gentle…”
That’s His guarantee for the way He will treat you.
“I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
“For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
In other words, He says, “Come to Me. I don’t care what your burden is. I can give you hope. It involves some work, learning, taking My yoke, but I will be gentle with you. I am humble at heart and you will find rest.”
My prayer, as I felt it on my heart to speak about this issue, that we don’t just churn things up, we don’t just send people home feeling wretched or guilty or, “well, what do I do about it?”
We want in the course of these next weeks to provide ways in which we can help people too, and help you.
But we have to understand the biblical doctrine of gender and the biblical doctrine of sexuality and we need to come from the position, “this is the Word of God. This therefore is true. This therefore is good. This therefore is possible.” And we will find rest for our souls.
Let’s pray.
Father we thank You this morning that You understand everything about us. Nothing shocks You. No secret locked away in the dark recesses of our hearts shocks You and You love us. You love us enough to not leave us there. As Your Word says, if someone is overcome in a sin, restore them gently. We want to restore one another gently, with clarity, but with compassion.
And we pray that some hearts here this morning in these areas we have talked about, in some marriages where maybe there is tension, where maybe there is exploitation the one by the other, we pray, Lord Jesus, that You will turn our hearts towards home, because to be at home is to be one. And I pray You will bring healing and a new vision of what we can be as completed people in You, holy, acceptable and fruitful.