A Biblical View of Gender #1

Today's gender activists invite people to choose their gender. You can choose male or female based on how you feel about yourself and how you feel inside. God embedded binary sexual distinctions in humanity at creation, and nothing has changed since then. When God created Adam and Eve, he gave them identity, and the Bible is clear they didn't have a say in the matter. So from a biblical perspective, how do we address the issue of people who claim to identify as a gender different from their biological one?

Hi, I'm Bill Wright. Today on The Truth Pulpit, Don Green continues teaching God's people God's Word as he begins a series titled The Bible and Transgenderism. Well, Don, how should we minister to someone who might be struggling with gender identity while we still uphold God's truth? Well, Bill, that's the very question that we're hoping to answer on this somewhat lengthy series on transgenderism that we're starting today, and I think it's important to start here. It's important to start with knowing what the truth is, because you need to know what the truth is before you can minister truth to people that are struggling with these issues. And there is such confusion in the culture that we have to kind of step back, open God's Word, and see what it says about sexuality and gender, and then you're in a position to speak from a position of authority that's based on God's Word.

So that's what we're going to do in this series on transgenderism. Open your Bible and stay with us here on The Truth Pulpit. Thanks, Don. And friend, let's join Don Green right now for more insight from God's Word on the Truth Pulpit. Today, I want to address a matter that I believe is just essential for all of us to know, for all of us to have understanding and a perspective on as we walk through this world in which we live. It's not so much that the issue itself is all-encompassing, but the issue is a symptom of what is all-encompassing. But it's a whole matter of transgenderism, and it is a blessed, blessed privilege of mine to be able to teach on this matter from a biblical perspective.

I thank God for the writers, the teachers who have helped me grasp this matter, for the time and for the freedom that I have as a result of being here in this generous church to be able to devote my mind to this matter, and to be able to speak it from a matter that is not motivated by fear of man, but a desire to please God and to honor the truth of His Word, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. This is no news flash, but today, many, if not most, in business or in government, certainly almost unanimously in the Democratic Party, support the idea, among other things, that the phenomenon of transgenderism means that biological males who claim to be females based on their sole assertion of self-identity should be allowed to enter female restrooms, female locker rooms, female dormitories, and play female sports. This is increasingly becoming a thing that people, men born biologically male profess to be transgender and then go in and dominate college athletics that were intended by government legislation established in the 70s to be separated out for women alone. Whatever you think about females playing sports, whatever you think about sports, you ought to be able to look at that and say something's amiss here, and yet I saw a headline, without reading the story, that at least at one level of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, a transgender woman, meaning a biological male claiming to be a woman, was named the athlete of the week for female sports.

Beloved, social implications alone justify the series and the time that we will be giving to this matter in the days to come. Also pressing on me as a pastor is to equip you for life. The whole transgender ideology is violently opposed to Christian truth, and it is their intention to silence us. Indeed, you can look up about the Equality Act that the Democratic Congress has passed, and they intend to silence religious objections to this social force. You are in a position where workplace policies expect you to affirm transgender identity. Loved ones may come to you and want to identify as the opposite sex and use a different name than what their parents gave to them.

Can you imagine? But I named you Susie. I'm Tom now. The last time I laid out for you what I call the sad path to transgenderism, how did we ever get here? There's a lot of philosophical thought and development over the past few centuries that have brought us to this point where humanity has gradually walked more and more away from God's revelation of truth, and has reached a point where it embraces the idea that truth is just a matter of personal subjective opinion so that you can decide for yourself what is true, even to the point that, even to a point that you can now decide whether you're a man or a woman without regard to the physical body that was given to you at birth.

There was that aspect of it. There's also the aspect of the ongoing effects of the sexual revolution of the past several decades that have increasingly pushed society away from a prior moral foundation rooted in the moral law of God so that these so-called restraints of God's law and prohibitions against adultery and fidelity and marriage and all of those things are now held up to derision. Well, today what I want to do is to turn to Scripture to find our way back.

And here's the thing, beloved. There's a method to, I'm not going to call it madness, there's a method to my approach here, is that as you need clarity in these things, it is important to recognize that we start with clarity not by trying to figure out what other people are doing or what other people believe. We find our clarity by going back to the Word of God and seeing what it has to say. And we do that with an expectation that God's Word is going to be sufficient for us, because God's Word claims that about itself. The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness. That the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work. What this means is taking Scripture on its face value is that we have in God's revelation in these 66 and no more books of the Bible, we have everything that is necessary to give us an understanding of how to find our way through this cultural collapse that is happening all around us.

In time, I want to say to you parents of young children, in time I have words to say to you about how to prepare and how to raise your children in the midst of this world. Today we're at a broader level of consideration. What I want to do, first of all, is to start by defining our terms. If you write down points, point number one, defining our terms. And there are a lot of terms that are wrapped up in this whole transgenderism ideology. We're just going to focus on two.

I want to keep it simple. And also I just want to say to those of you, as we have young children in here and your parents, and a lot of what we're saying is just going to go over their heads, and that's great. That'll be a blessing from God that it goes over their heads like this. But even with that said, I want you to know that it is my full intention to be very careful, to be appropriate in what I say, so that there's nothing that will come out of my mouth about this that is inappropriate for children to say, even though it's obviously very delicate. I'm going to try to find my way through that by the help of the blessed Holy Spirit. But we have to use terms to help us understand here.

And if I don't do this, I don't know who's going to do it for you. And that means that I've got to be candid enough for this to be meaningful and not talk in generalities, right? We've got to address this as it really is and not speak in platitudes or generalities. Don't get down and engage this battle face to face, hand to hand combat here.

And so again, I'm just at the point of asking you to support me, to bear with me, and to pray for me as we go through this together. Now, when we use, with that said, when we use the term sex in this series, we are not referring to the God-given gift of intimacy that belongs alone to marriage between a man and a woman. We're not using the term sex in that way.

We're using it in a different way, a more specific way, as it applies to this discussion. So that there is a term, biological sex. Biological sex we'll have to refer to from time to time. And when we use that phrase, biological sex, we're referring to the physical characteristics that distinguish male from female, especially chromosomes and reproductive organs, let's say.

There are biological, physical differences between men and women. Biological sex is the phrase that is used to refer to that reality. The term gender is now, has come to be used to emphasize the social distinctions between the sexes. How men and women present themselves, what their interests are, what their reactions are, things like that. Now gender was historically used as a synonym for biological sex.

Those two terms were used interchangeably. You know, just a few years ago, sex, gender, no one would even think that there was a distinction made, but academic writers have injected a change that activists have picked up on so that now there is a distinction that a wedge has been driven between biological sex and the way that men and women present themselves in life. Sex and gender are no longer strictly synonyms. So that society distinguishes between the anatomy of biological sex and, watch this, the self-identity of a person's gender. In other words, regardless of what my body is like, my gender is how I identify myself. I identify myself as a man, I identify myself as a woman, and that has now been separated in common discussion and can be talked about completely apart from anatomy. So that it has been said that a person with a beard and male anatomy can be a woman.

That's the level of discussion about this, and it shows you that gender identification has been completely separated from any physical characteristics received from their parents in the act of conception. Now, today's message is an introduction. I risk oversimplification.

Like I said, you've got a 700-foot knot here. You've got to start someplace to untangle it and start at a very basic level so that we can all start with a common understanding and progress from there. That's why I'm doing it this way. So, with that distinction in mind, today's gender activists invite people to choose their gender. You can choose male or female based on how you feel about yourself and how you feel inside. Now, I want to say, recognizing that hopefully this will go out in other areas, one other term that I should use is there is a term called gender dysphoria, by which it's a medical, technical term which means that people feel conflict over the fact that the gender identification that they feel inside differs from their bodily anatomy, and so there is this conflict within them that causes them distress because the way that they feel is different from what their body says, and it haunts them. It's difficult for them. And that condition, that mental condition is a real thing, and from those who describe it, it is very, very difficult.

We'll talk about that more down the road. This is not all just made up in somebody's, by an act of will, people have this as a real problem. Well, we need to help them, too, find their way forward.

What do you do when that is your state of mind? Well, beloved, there's more to it than all that I've said here, but we're laying a foundation. And so what we're trying to do here today, what we hope to do today, is to go to God's Word now and to think rightly about sex and gender in a way that brings us out of society's confusion so that we can see and understand for ourselves what Scripture says, regardless of what anyone else thinks about it. We need to know as followers of Christ, as those who uphold God's Word, we need to know what Scripture says about this so that we can think rightly about it regardless of how it applies to anyone out in the world. And in the process, we need to see that fidelity to what Scripture says about these matters is inherent to being a faithful Christian. You cannot compromise with transgenderism and be faithful to Christ.

Those two things are mutually exclusive. And part of it is rooted in the things that I said on Tuesday, that this goes to the very foundation of what truth is and how we determine it. And I'll be addressing that more on this coming Tuesday.

But for today, our goal is more modest. We just want to see what Scripture says about it, and so that will bring us to the second heading in your notes here, what we would call a biblical view of sex and gender. A biblical view of sex and gender. I'm going to make this, I've made this, really basic and I trust easy and clear to follow. There's not going to be any big technical language in this. We're just going to look at God's Word, see what it says in the Old Testament, see what our Lord says, see what is said elsewhere about personal reality, and just kind of address it from that way.

I don't expect this to take very long, because frankly it's not that difficult. And the beauty of Scripture and being a Bible-believing Christian is that there is a clarity and a simplicity that is perfectly appealing to the regenerate mind. And then we'll deal with some other matters toward the end. Let's first of all look at a biblical view of sex and gender starting at creation.

There's going to be three sub-points here. A biblical view of sex and gender, and they all start with C. We're going to look at creation, we're going to look at Christ, and we're going to look at conception. Creation, Christ, and conception.

That's what's just ahead for us in what we are about to see. So let's start with creation and recognize and acknowledge this, that according to the Bible, God created man and established an order to his existence. And that order included a dual concept of sex, of biological sex. There was an order to what God created. Look at Genesis chapter 1 beginning in verse 26 as we gladly turn to Scripture now. In Genesis chapter 1 verse 26, at the culmination of the account of creation, it says that God said, Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him. Here it is, male and female he created them. Humanity with two sexes. Not three, not 117 as proclaimed by some websites. Two. One, two.

Male, female. There are two, according to God's design. Go on into Genesis chapter 2. Genesis chapter 2 verse 7. It says that the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being.

Stop there for a moment, beloved, I want you to understand something really fundamental and basic here that is woven through this entire discussion. God created mankind and that means this. God assigned identity to man in creation. He assigned identity to humanity in his creative act. In the first six days of creation, God assigned to humanity what it would be like.

It was his sovereign pleasure that it would be two and no more. I suppose that God could have done it differently in one sense, but he didn't. He created two and God by sovereign prerogative, by creative prerogative, said humanity will be like this, male and female. And he assigned, first of all, to the man who became known as Adam, his existence having formed him from the dust of the ground. Genesis chapter 2 verse 7. Go on over to verse 21. You know that Adam was alone, didn't have a helper suitable for him. God had mercy on him and did something to help him.

Verse 21. The Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept. Then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. And the Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man.

Stop there. Same thing. God created the woman and assigned her identity to her. He made her into the female half of humanity.

This was his assignment. This was God by sovereign will, sovereign directive, sovereign prerogative, because it pleased God to make humanity male and female so that from our very first parents, they received their identity from God. They didn't choose it. It was given to them.

It was assigned to them by no one less than the Creator Himself. Verse 23. The man said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. Notice the dual nature here. His father and his mother. It's assumed from the beginning. They become one flesh.

The man and his wife were both naked and not ashamed. They were given this identity and there were two. Two and no more. Not three.

Not multiplied. And beloved, what I want you to see is this, is that it was part of the original creation that God Himself called good. This is the foundation of humanity.

Received identity from God. He sovereignly appointing what the man would be like and what the woman would be like and then tells him to go forth and multiply and fill the earth. Now, this is affirmed even after the fall of Adam. Look at Genesis chapter 5. Genesis chapter 5 verses 1 and 2. This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God.

Notice here in your English text here. The subject is God. The verb is created. The direct object is man. God acted in a way that produced man. Man's origin is found in God.

His identity is found in what God gave to him. He did not create Himself. He did not make Himself. Man cannot make something out of nothing.

And he certainly can't produce himself. Just as, watch this, just as none of you made yourself come into existence, right? Your parents are responsible for your physical existence. Your existence is derivative of the actions of someone else. Well, take that as a collective indication of humanity. Humanity exists because of creative action of God. Mankind did not create himself. Verse 2, what did God do when He created man? Verse 2, He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them man in the day when they were created.

Male and female. Genesis 1, Genesis 2, Genesis 5. This is the foundation of everything that follows. And yeah, beloved, it's not simply humanity that this male and female distinction is impressed upon. Look at Genesis chapter 6, verse 19. As God is giving instructions to Noah about the animals to come into the ark, Genesis 6, verse 19, of every living thing of all flesh, you shall bring two of every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you.

They shall be male and female. So you have it in mankind. You have it in the animal kingdom. God assigning this duality of sex, of biological sex, to His creation.

And so let's just summarize this point. That's all I'm going to say about creation here. God gave existence to man, speaking of humanity. God gave humanity its existence. Man did not create himself. As God gave existence to man, He gave identity to man, male and female. Man did not choose his identity. God did not lay out a menu of options to Adam and say, Adam, what would you like to be? Here are a hundred different choices.

Tell me what you would like, and you can become the master of your own destiny this way. Adam had no choice in the matter. God just made him man.

It was a sovereign will. Same for Eve. And beloved, that fundamental reality of God assigning identity through His work is unchanged today. When we view sex and gender through the lens of Scripture, starting with creation, we can see God's perfect plan in creating humanity as only male or female, and that's not based upon our choice or our feelings.

We certainly can't alter His perfect plan for creation. And there's more to unpack about this topic, so join us next time for more of our current series titled The Bible and Transgenderism right here on The Truth Pulpit. But for now, Don's back here in studio with some closing thoughts. Well, Bill, this whole matter of transgenderism is something that just breaks my heart.

The world says it's a matter of freedom and self-identity, but the truth is that it's a matter of false advertising and many lives and families are being torn apart by it. It's hard to find clear answers, my friend, and that's why we're offering the complete pulpit series for free at our website. thetruthpulpit.com Thanks, Don. And now for our teacher, I'm Bill Wright. Looking forward to having you back with us next time as Don continues teaching God's people God's Word from the Truth Pulpit.