In a culture that has lost its way on marriage and gender, one of the best ways we can display the Gospel is by embracing what Scripture teaches about them and living lives that display their beauty to the world.  Christians need to take their cues from Scripture and perform the marriage and gender dance that God designed and prescribes so that the world will see the beauty of God’s design. 

Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.
-Ephesians 5:31-33, ESV
Recently, I observed how the American Church like the Jews of Malachi’s day has lost the fear of God and therefore has a cheapened view of Scripture that has led many American churches to deny what Scripture teaches about who God is, who we are, and how that impacts cultural issues.  One area where this is especially evident is with marriage and gender.  This obviously includes topics like homosexuality and transgenderism, but it also includes a cheapening of marriage in general through an acceptance of our culture’s understanding of no-fault divorce and casual approach to relationships.  But even many churches that do not compromise in these areas struggle with how to interpret the Bible’s teachings on marriage and gender roles.  Generations of feminism have made any view of distinct gender roles ugly to many American Christians, causing them to reject any interpretation of Scripture that would perpetuate what they see as negative historical norms.  If these roles are a result of the Fall, we should seek to leave them behind as we labor to build the Kingdom of God.  But if these roles are part of God’s good Creation before the Fall, we must not abandon them as ugly remnants of sinful patriarchal oppression but instead embrace them as part of God’s beautiful design of who we are that reflects who He is.
But first, I need to address the objection that I as a single man am in no position to write about the topic of marriage. It is true that I lack any experiential qualifications, but that matters little. Saying that only members of a certain demographic are qualified to speak about issues unique to that demographic is a form of ad hominem attack that has no place in healthy debate. In actuality, demographics have little to do with qualifications, and qualifications do not determine the validity of an argument. More importantly, I am writing about what Scripture clearly teaches, not my own opinions. It doesn’t matter what I say but what God says. With that, lets see what God has to say about marriage and gender, starting from the beginning.
Begin at the Beginning
Since the crucial question is whether or not the distinction between genders predated the Fall, we need to go back to the beginning.  We know that all God made was very good (Genesis 1:31), so if we find evidence of the distinction between male and female there, then those distinctions must be very good too.  Here is what we find in Genesis 1:
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. ”
-Genesis 1:26-27, ESV
From this passage, we see that God created mankind as male and female in His own image (verses 26 and 27).  This means that the unity yet distinctness of the persons of the Trinity is reflected by the unity yet distinctness of men and women (more on that here).  Reflecting the ontological equality within the Trinity, men and women are equal in dignity and value.[1]  This is the basis for the high value of women in Christian cultures, and conversely the reason why non-Christian cultures often devalue and mistreat women.[2]  But men and women are also fundamentally different reflecting the economic distinction with the Trinity.  This passage also teaches us that God created mankind as male and female to accomplish a purpose: to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it (verse 28), which is known as the Cultural Mandate.    Just as the persons of the Trinity fulfill different roles, men and women image (reflect and represent) God by fulfilling their distinct roles in the Cultural Mandate.  These differences do not change the equality of men and women in value and dignity.[3]  But this equality is not substitutionary: you cannot substitute one for the other and get the same result.  As I already covered when refuting transgenderism, since there are only three persons in the Trinity and they cannot become one another, there are only two genders: men and women, who cannot become one another.  After the Fall, the distinctions between male and female are sometimes less obvious, but they are still there.  So both the equality in value and distinction in roles of men and women are part of what God made as very good.
Which distinctions predated the Fall?  For this, Genesis 2, gives more detail about how mankind was created on Day 6.  This starts with God forming the man from the dust and breathing life into him (Genesis 2:7) before placing him in the Garden of Eden “to work and keep it” (verse 15), commanding him not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (verse 16).  It is at that point that God declares (before sin) that something is not good: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).  The man cannot keep the Garden or fulfill the Cultural Mandate without help, so God begins the process of creating a helper suitable for the man.  As a quick but important side note, the term “helper” is often used of God (e.g. Exodus 18:4, Deuteronomy 33:26,29, Psalm 33:20, 115:9-10, Hosea 13:9), so it is not denigrating in the slightest.[4]  God brings the animals to the man to name (Genesis 2:19-20a), both to show his authority over them and to prove to him that no animal existed that could provide the help he needed (Genesis 2:20b).[5]  God then created the woman from the man’s rib (verses 21 and 22) and brought her to the man, thus instituting marriage as the lifelong union between one man and one woman (verse 24). Upon seeing the woman for the first time, the man immediately recognizes her as the perfect partner for him and joyously declares: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:23).  From this, we can see that the man was created first and given both a mission and the authority to accomplish that mission.  The woman was then created to help him in that mission, so gender roles are not some distortion of God’s very good creation but part of it.
The Distortion of the Fall
God’s very good design was greatly tarnished by the Fall in Genesis 3.  I cover the Fall more generally elsewhere, but for now recall that the first sin goes far beyond a poor diet choice.  Satan usurped the created order by addressing Eve rather than Adam (Genesis 3:1).  As head of his family, Adam then failed to both reinforce right doctrine to Eve and protect her from spiritual assault, instead standing by passively as Eve was tempted (verse 6b).  As far as we can tell, she engaged with Satan and then ate the fruit without looking to him for spiritual leadership (verses 2 to 6a).  But Adam’s passivity indicates that he too was rebelling against God in his heart and waiting to see if any harm came to her before he ate.  Therefore, he abandoned his calling to protect and provide for his wife, instead risking her well-being for his own pleasure.  As a result, they both sinned and then both immediately realized that their ideal world had been shattered (verse 7).[6]  God then calls out to Adam, showing that He still holds him responsible as head of his family.  Adam tries to blame Eve (even blaming God in the process), and Eve then tries to blame Satan (verses 9 to 13).
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An identity founded upon identifiers is an extremely fragile, vulnerable, and fickle foundation. My marriage, as amazing as it is, cannot be my identity because it will inevitably change. My profession, as much as I love it, will not happen in heaven. My relationships and responsibilities uniquely contribute to my identifiers but make a poor identity. 

Emile Ratelband wants to be identified as a forty-nine-year-old male. The problem is that he was born sixty-nine years ago. Emile not only wants to personally define his identity so he can have more prospects on dating apps like Tinder, he is also taking it a step further and asking the Netherlands to legally change his birthday. As ridiculous as this may seem, it may be considered a logical outcome of a world that now views identity as self-declared and self-developed.
The question of identity is not limited to age however—sexual and gender identity are currently hot-button issues at the forefront of our conversations.  As we consider this cultural shift in our thinking, we must confront our own questions in relation to identity: Does God have anything to say about personal identity? Who am I? What’s my deepest personal identity?
Not only does God care about your identity far more than you can hope or imagine, but he has gone through the greatest pain to give his children an entirely different identity. Despite our disobedience, Christians have the distinct honor of being a people belonging to God, hidden with Christ in God (1 Pet. 2:9; Col. 3:1–4).
Unfortunately, the gospel narrative isn’t the only storyline being told about personal identity. Culture is telling—nay, shouting—a narrative of false identity. As the light of the world (Matt. 5:14) it’s vital that people know the difference. When I sit down for coffee with neighbors and even members at our church, I use the following three widely believed fallacies to help point them to the freedom of the gospel narrative regarding identity.
Fallacy #1: Your personal identity comes from within. The world says that your identity is based on mainly one person: you. You define you. You declare who you are. The mantra of our day could be summed up in a line from William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” Emile Ratelband’s desire to officially become a forty-nine-year-old is the natural outworking of the hyper individual and false sense of freedom of our day. “Nowadays, we are all free people and we have a free will to change things,” Ratelband declared, “So I want to change my age. I feel I am about forty to forty-five.”
The challenge is that self can never carry the weight of self. You were not made to be enough for you. While we most assuredly experience external brokenness, the greatest cause of most of the brokenness we experience is ourselves. You have wronged yourself, lied to yourself, and led yourself astray more than anyone else.
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As we survey life under the sun, we may wonder what basis there is for the human pursuit of meaning. How do we know there is purpose in life and to life? How do we know we matter? We know we matter because of Genesis 1:1. We know there is meaning because Genesis 1:1 grounds all meaning. The truth of this verse is the reason for humanity’s search for purpose in life. If Genesis 1:1 isn’t true, there is no ultimate purpose to life in this world. If Genesis 1:1 isn’t true, your sense of what matters and why is no more reliable than anyone else’s sense of what matters and why.

Everyone you meet is living according to some story. There is some kind of meaning they’re pursuing. They have an answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing, even if that answer is inadequate. They have thought about whether there is anything beyond death.
While everyone is living according to some story, their formulation of it might be rather haphazard. They may have no good basis for the things they’re assuming are true. They could be living according to a story that lacks any sound objective grounding for its components and claims.
Maybe their views about relationships are gleaned from Hollywood movies or best-selling fiction. Maybe their understanding about human nature has been shaped more by pop psychology than by anything else. Maybe their sense of meaning and purpose depends more on their personal intuition than on anything they could really assert and defend with confidence.
The Christian’s story is the Bible’s epic narrative. The biblical authors are calling us to reckon with the reality of God and his work in his world. They teach us why there is something rather than nothing. They teach us where meaning is found in this life and what lies ahead in the life to come. They tell us what has gone wrong in the world and what God has done about it.
The biblical authors tell us the true story of the world. How does this story begin? Starting a great story isn’t easy, but first words matter. Formulating the right opening words is key to hooking the reader.
Think of some opening lines in famous books. Moby Dick, from Melville, begins with three words: “Call me Ishmael.”
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