Will male-female complementarity exist in the new heavens and new earth? If so, what can we learn about the continued distinctions between men and women in the new creation?

Scriptural data on the contours of the life to come are limited, so we must admit the speculative nature of our question up front. However, we can draw reasonable inferences from what the Bible does say about life in the resurrection, particularly from how the Bible treats masculinity and femininity in creation, after the fall, and in redemption.

Grace Restores Nature

Before considering complementarity in creation, it is necessary to introduce a theological concept on which the logic of this essay depends. According to Dutch Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, a key Reformational principle holds that grace does not destroy nature. What God created in the beginning is natural, and what is natural is good and not undone by God’s redemptive purposes. Rather, grace restores nature. Bavinck explains,

Grace serves, not to take up humans into a supernatural order, but to free them from sin. Grace is opposed not to nature, only to sin. . . . Grace restores nature and takes it to its highest pinnacle, but it does not add to it any new and heterogeneous constituents. (Reformed Dogmatics, 3:577)

Nature (which in this context is another word for God’s original design) is not inherently bad. Nature is good, but it has been corrupted by sin. In fact, sin is a privation and corruption of a created good. God’s gospel mission in Christ is to rid the world of sin and reform and restore nature in the new creation, taking it “to its highest pinnacle.” Importantly, the restoration of the created order includes God’s complementary design for male and female.

Some theological systems treat natural differences — such as those between men and women — as something bad to overcome. But after God created the world and everything in it, he called all that he had made “good,” and then he said it was “very good” after creating the man and the woman equal yet different in his image (Genesis 1:31). With God, we should confess that complementary difference is “very good,” and woe to those who call evil good and good evil (Isaiah 5:20).

Complementarity is creational, good, and part of what God redeems in the gospel.

Complementarity in Creation

Origin stories often provide crucial information for understanding a subject. The early chapters of Genesis are foundational for a properly biblical anthropology, and from these chapters we learn that complementarity — equal value with different callings — is original to and constitutive of humanity.

Genesis 1:26–28 introduces humanity’s form and function, teaching that God made mankind in his image to come in two varieties: male and female. The original Hebrew words for male (zakar) and female (neqebah) in Genesis 1 make subtle etymological references to the natural reproductive differences between men and women. These natural differences (form) ground and point toward their meaning and fulfillment (function) in marriage and procreation.

Jesus taught his disciples this connection between marriage and God’s complementary design in Matthew 19:4–5, where he connects the purpose of marriage in Genesis 2:24 (“Therefore . . .”) with God’s design in Genesis 1:27 (“male and female”):

Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”?

Maleness and femaleness, masculinity and femininity, are inherently complementary, meaning not only that we understand one vis-à-vis the other, but also that each bears witness to and complements the other as they both point toward their fulfillment in marriage. How God created “in the beginning” informs God’s purposes for his creation. And in God’s grand design, we learn that God created marriage itself to be a mysterious sign with meaning in the gospel (Ephesians 5:31–32).

So God’s complementary design has both a natural and a supernatural purpose. The natural purpose of male-female complementarity is marriage and procreation — cornerstones of the natural family, which is the bedrock of human society. The supernatural purpose of complementarity is to display the good news that Jesus has given his life for his bride, the church.

Complementarity After the Fall

When sin entered the world, complementarity was affected but not destroyed. We see this clearly in the curses God pronounces over creation in Genesis 3:16. Procreation continues in a fallen world, but it is more difficult. Marriage likewise continues, but it is also more difficult. Strife and conflict afflict the relationship between husband and wife. The wife tends not to willingly submit to her husband, but she has desires contrary to his leadership — or she resigns herself to being a doormat. And the husband tends not to relate to his wife in love as his equal, but with harsh rule — or he resigns himself to being a pushover.

Either way, God’s original complementary design is defaced by sin, but it is not erased. In a fallen world, we continue to bear God’s image as males and females, and marriage and procreation continue as a common grace for the continuance of the human race and as a picture of God’s ongoing activity in the world.

Complementarity in Redemption

God answers sin in the gospel. Not only has Jesus paid the penalty of sin through his substitutionary death on the cross, but he has begun a redemptive work in creation everywhere the gospel takes root.

It is through complementary procreation and childbearing that redemption is both promised and ultimately realized. In the midst of cursing the world on account of mankind’s sin, God promises to raise up an offspring of the woman who will put down the rebellion instigated by the serpent. In Genesis 3:15, God addresses the serpent within earshot of the man and the woman:

I will put enmity between you and the woman,     and between your offspring and her offspring;he shall bruise your head,     and you shall bruise his heel.

As the biblical genealogies testify, generations of complementary relations between men and women brought this promise to the brink of fulfillment. Then, through the supernatural conception by a betrothed-and-then-married virgin, the promise was finally realized. Jesus is begotten of his heavenly Father and an earthly mother — the God-man come to earth to redeem his bride, the church. Complementarity permeates the gospel.

The New Testament affirms the continued goodness of complementary differences, particularly in marriage and procreation. The apostles exhort all Christians everywhere to faith and good works, affirming male-female equality of value in their redeemed standing before God (Galatians 3:28). But the apostles also give the New Testament churches differing, enduring, sex-specific instructions, including to the unmarried, in places like Titus 2 and in the household codes in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and 1 Peter 3. Grace does not erase nature but restores it — including our complementary natures and callings.

For instance, in 1 Timothy 2:11–15, Paul instructs women to act differently from men in the covenant community. Just as Adam was created as the covenant head of his wife, men are called to covenant leadership in marriage and in the church, and women are called to embrace their God-given design under the leadership of qualified men in the covenant community. In 1 Timothy 2:15, Paul mentions the archetypically feminine act, childbearing, for women to embrace in faith, love, holiness, and self-control. Many commentators see a reference in this verse to the unique role women played in the history of redemption to bring about the birth of the Savior. It was through childbirth, after all, that Jesus came into the world to bring salvation. Men are instructed to embrace their masculinity and women to embrace their femininity in the eternal life they have in Christ.

We can see how the gospel answers sin and restores nature also in the instructions Paul gives husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:22–33. The sex-specific commands for husbands and wives in this passage directly answer the propensities toward sin listed in the curses of Genesis 3:16. As the redeemed, husbands are commanded to love their wives as Christ loves the church rather than to rule harshly over them. Wives are commanded to submit to their own husbands rather than to nurse desires contrary to their leadership.

This sampling of passages makes it clear that even as we are made more into the image of Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18; Romans 8:29; Colossians 3:10; Ephesians 4:24), we embrace our masculinity and femininity as the God-given way we image him (Genesis 1:27).

Complementarity in the New Creation

The resurrection of Jesus offers an important clue for life in the new creation. The Bible teaches that Jesus rose from the dead as the “firstfruits” of the new creation (1 Corinthians 15:20, 23). Firstfruits portend not only that more will follow, but also what will follow.

When Jesus rose from the dead, he demonstrated continuity between his bodily existence before and after his death. Jesus was born into the world as a human male, lived a perfect life as a human male, died as a human male, and was resurrected as a human male. Francis Turretin rightly connects Christ’s resurrection to the resurrection believers should anticipate:

When he rose, Christ received the same body he had before and the same flesh which he had assumed and in which he died, for what he once took he never laid aside (Psalm 16:10; John 2:19; Acts 2:31). Hence he significantly says, “It is I myself” (Luke 24:39). Such ought to be our resurrection. Our bodies ought to be no other than those which were deposited in the earth. (Institutes of Elenctic Theology, 3:572–73)

At the resurrection, all the redeemed will be raised with bodies in the same way that Jesus was raised. Men and women will be reconstituted with imperishable male bodies and female bodies, respectively. In this way, we can affirm that maleness and femaleness, which imply masculinity and femininity, will persist in the new creation.

But what will this masculinity and femininity look like? We find another clue to life in the resurrection from Jesus in Matthew 22. This passage is a hotspot for speculation, and for good reason. In this passage, Jesus answers the Sadducees’ attempt to stump him with a question about a woman who was successively married to seven brothers. To which of the seven brothers would this woman be married in the resurrection? But Jesus is not stumped:

You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God. For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven. And as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob”? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. (Matthew 22:29–32)

Jesus’s reply contains two pieces of information about life in the resurrection: we will not marry or be given in marriage, and we will be like the angels. Mainstream Christian orthodoxy has concluded from Jesus’s teaching that there will no longer be marriage in the new creation. But if marriage and procreation cease, then will maleness and femaleness cease?

This conclusion does not necessarily follow, in part because of the theological logic of resurrection (presented above) and in part because of Jesus’s own words. Indeed, the words Jesus uses in Matthew 22:30 appear to affirm the continuance of differences between the two sexes. The words “marry” and “given in marriage” refer to the uniquely male and female roles in marriage. In other words, the activity will cease, but not the differentiated identities. As Augustine observes,

In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven (Matthew 22:30). They shall be equal to the angels in immortality and happiness, not in flesh, nor in resurrection, which the angels did not need, because they could not die. The Lord then denied that there would be in the resurrection, not women, but marriages; and he uttered this denial in circumstances in which the question mooted would have been more easily and speedily solved by denying that the female sex would exist, if this had in truth been foreknown by him. But, indeed, he even affirmed that the sex should exist by saying, They shall not be given in marriage, which can only apply to females; Neither shall they marry, which applies to males. There shall therefore be those who are in this world accustomed to marry and be given in marriage, only they shall there make no such marriages. (City of God, XXII.17)

In this way, Jesus does not mean to indicate that we will be “like angels” in that we will be non-physical or disembodied. We will have resurrected bodies, which means we will be sexed as Jesus is in his resurrected male body. But we will be “like angels” in that we will be immortal, as Augustine affirms, and we will no longer procreate. The pleasures promised to Christians (Psalm 16:11), both male and female, transcend the mere physical, instead promising spiritual unity with God himself as we enjoy his goodness forever in his presence (Revelation 21).

In sum, masculinity and femininity continue in the new creation because God created us male and female — equal in value yet different in our callings — in the beginning, pronouncing it “very good.” Masculinity and femininity are not erased by the fall but are being redeemed in the gospel. We who are united to Christ by faith will be raised with sexed bodies like his, male or female, which means masculinity and femininity will persist in the new heavens and the new earth. Male-female complementarity originated in the garden, persists in spite of the fall, is redeemed in Christ, and will be fully restored in the new creation.

Male and Female Forever

If we have adequately established that masculinity and femininity will persist in the new heavens and new earth, we may now explore what this might look like. If marriage and procreation are no more, what will masculinity and femininity look like? How will they be distinguished? And for what purpose?

The differences between masculinity and femininity will persist, first and foremost, in our embodied differences. Men and women have similar yet different forms that lend themselves to different but overlapping modes of subsistence. While no longer directed at marriage and procreation, masculinity and femininity will retain their original function in imaging and reflecting the glory of God. And because we are not God, no one of us can image or reflect his glory independently. Male and female together are required to image God sufficiently.

God-created differentiation will continue in the new creation. The new heavens will be distinct from the new earth; angels and cherubim will be distinct from seraphim; trees will be distinct from rivers, and these created realities will be distinct from the men and women who will walk among them, embodied and differentiated as either male or female. Each aspect of God’s new creation will proclaim something about its Creator (Romans 1:20). Because no one created being is equal to God, which includes each of us as male or female, we will continue to experience and benefit from differentiated createdness, which will bear testimony to and give glory to God.

Second, bodily continuity between this age and the age to come points toward spiritual continuity. Masculinity in this age is typified by strength and initiative and leadership. We have reason to think that in the new heavens and new earth, masculinity will continue to typify such. Femininity in this age is typified by beauty and receptivity and nurture, and this also is likely to continue in the age to come. Importantly, one typified attribute is not better than another. Just the opposite: every attribute is good and necessary, as it is created by and participates in God himself. But they are differentiated, and this differentiation will continue in the new creation because maleness and femaleness will continue.

Admittedly, though, we have arrived with C.S. Lewis’s character Ransom at the brink of futility and wonder as we try to fully account for the beauty of complementary difference:

But whence came this curious difference between them? He found that he could point to no single feature wherein the difference resided, yet it was impossible to ignore. One could try — Ransom has tried a hundred times — to put it into words. He has said that Malacandra was like rhythm and Perelandra like melody. He has said that Malacandra affected him like a quantitative, Perelandra like an accentual, metre. . . . What Ransom saw at that moment was the real meaning of gender. (Perelandra, 171)

Complementarity participates in true reality, because it reflects God’s design. Instead of trying to define the scope of masculinity and femininity in the age to come, we should content ourselves with affirming complementary continuity, which means affirming the goodness of male-female difference, while celebrating and anticipating continued complementarity in God’s (re)created order.

God’s creation is beautifully diverse, like a multifaceted diamond, in order to catch and reflect the eternal divine Light (1 John 1:5). It will be similar in the new creation, which is described in similar terms as the first creation (“new heavens and new earth,” Revelation 21:1; “the heavens and the earth,” Genesis 1:1). We serve a God whose Trinitarian love is reflected in and refracted through all of creation, including redeemed humanity. Male-female complementarity is part of God’s original design, and this complementarity will be beautifully restored with the rest of creation, which eagerly awaits God’s redemption (Romans 8:23).

Male-female complementarity will exist in the new heavens and the new earth, and so will masculinity and femininity. As for their eternal complementary purposes, Lord willing, we will have an eternity to appreciate them, and through them the strength and beauty of our God.

My wife and I knew we were different when we got married, even though public school hadn’t helped us much on that front. Our 1990s and early 2000s society tried to take the edge off our sense of difference, but still we knew.

Clearly our bodies, as male and female, were different. And our instincts, while complementary, plainly differed. Of course, we had differing life experiences and families of origin, and so we exhibited the typical variances between any two humans. But the main differences, the ones that mattered most, and had the most potential, corresponded to one simple yet complex reality: I am a man, and she is a woman. We knew this.

However, looking back now, twenty years later, I’m not sure we yet knew how different we were — on the outside, yes, but even more on the inside, the things you can’t see at a glance. We were not yet deeply aware of the complementary differences God had sown deep into our masculine and feminine souls.

We Know Deep Down

Two decades of adult life have taught us much about God’s powerful dynamic in our human similarities and our male-female differences. As co-heirs in Christ, we stand, side by side, on equal footing before God and at the foot of the cross. Together, as man and wife, we are created, fallen, and redeemed. Oh, what glorious equalities we share as humans and Christians!

And we are clearly different — profoundly different — as male and female, as husband and wife, as head and helper. These differences are features, not bugs. They are not drawbacks to be covered over or collapsed into each other. There is the majesty of the sun and the splendor of the moon. One glory of day, another of night. We need both. Neither is better than the other; both are essential. And these differences — glorious complementary differences — go far beyond emotional intuition, native aggressiveness, how much sleep we need, and how long we can bear up under trying circumstances.

People know that men and women are different. All of us know. Sure, sinners suppress the truth (Romans 1:18–23). Doubtless, many have been deeply deceived, perhaps even choosing the deception one moment at a time for years on end. But we all know. Being male or female, like being made in God’s image, is basic enough, foundational enough, plain enough to the very nature of our world and our own human lives, that we know.

Still, as societal confusion and controversy continue to blur the sense of our God-given complementary differences as men and women, it can be helpful to point out, with the objectivity of Scripture, the traces of what’s been clear from the beginning.

God’s Creative Order

Genesis chapter 2 zooms in on day 6, that climactic day of the creation week, and we learn about how God made man, and find a two-stage sequence: God first forms the man from the ground, then distinctly, at a later time, he builds the woman from the man.

God chooses to create with a plain order. He calls our race “man.” He forms the man first and orients him toward the ground from which he came, to work the garden and keep it (2:15). And God gives him the ground rules:

“You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (2:16–17)

At this point, then, God introduces man’s need for a “helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18) — and God apparently takes his time. Not only does this create anticipation in the man for this helper; it also teaches a lesson. Then God forms the woman second, orienting her toward the man from which she came (2:22), to help him in God’s calling. The man names her Woman (2:23). They stand equal before God as human (Genesis 1:27–28). And God orders them in marriage as head and helper (2:20).

In 1 Timothy 2:13, the apostle Paul points to this ordered sequence in Genesis 2 as the first half of his reason for why mature Christian men are to be the pastor-elders and authoritatively teach the gathered church: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve.” God created these equals with an order. They are not the same but different — and these differences are God-designed complements.

Here an exhaustive list of the differences between the man and the woman (and men and women in general) is not necessary or relevant. God has his reasons for these differences — many of which are obvious, many that become plainer the longer we live, and many that remain subconscious for most in this life. But God’s design is intentional, and his order endures. And when we follow his order, we find that a lifetime of happy, even thrilling, discoveries await us. When you walk in light of the truth, lights go on everywhere. But that’s only part of the story.

Disorder in the Fall

Paul gives the second half of his answer (for why pastor-elders should be qualified men) in 1 Timothy 2:14: “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.” Now sin and Genesis 3 come into view.

Paul’s full explanation includes not just the order of creation, but also the (dis)order of the fall. God laid down an order; the serpent subverted it. The word deceive draws in the language of Genesis 3:13, where the woman says, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.” Paul’s point is not that women are more gullible than men, or more prone to deception. The point is the order: The serpent did not deceive the man. He went to the woman. Satan intentionally undermined God’s order, and the fall was the direct result.

Yet even though the fall of man (and woman) brought God’s righteous curse upon the world, it did not overturn his order. After Adam too has eaten, God comes knocking and asks for the man (3:9), not for his wife, who handed him the fruit (3:6). God again operates according to his order, not according to the serpent’s scheme.

Even through the curse itself, God’s order persists. His curse directed toward the man relates to the ground and his labor. It will take his sweat and overcoming many barriers to be fruitful. Meanwhile, the curse directed toward the woman relates to childbearing and childrearing, to the domestic sphere and the labor of multiplying the race to fulfill God’s mandate. Greater still, the curse will include the sinful desire in woman to control the man, and that he will, in turn, be sinfully domineering toward her (this is the meaning of “desire” and “rule over” in Genesis 3:16; compare with Genesis 4:7). Sin always seeks to destroy God’s order.

Order Restored and Glorified

Remarkably, when we rush forward to the coming redemption — to God himself coming to rescue his people in Christ — his created order is not abandoned in the church age but endures. Not only is the original order restored through Christ’s redemptive work in the church, but now it is glorified, exalted to a new register through life in Christ by his indwelling Spirit.

As man and wife stood before God as equals in Eden, so we stand together, side by side, at Calvary and in the congregation of the church. Among those who have “put on Christ” through faith, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Men and women stand together before Christ, as co-heirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7) — glorious equals. Neither man nor woman has any inside track with Jesus.

Yet that does not mean that our God-designed differences go away in Christ. Rather, they are rescued, restored, and glorified. “The husband is the head of the wife,” as he always has been, yet now, he finds his model in Christ: “. . . even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior” (Ephesians 5:23). Whereas sin may lead a husband to lord his authority over his wife, husbands in Christ love their wives and are not harsh with them (Colossians 3:19). As household head, a man owes his wife a special kind of care. Wives, in Christ, take the part of the church: “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands” (Ephesians 5:24; Colossians 3:18).

This brings us back to Paul’s authoritative commentary on Genesis 2–3 for the church age. A team of mature Christian men serve the whole congregation as its pastor-teachers, according to God’s order in creation, now restored in Christ. And the glorious dance of our equality as humans and our differences as men and women, now rescued in Christ, not only gives order to our households and God’s household but also gives life and energy, beauty and power, to all of life, wherever we go and grow as those who image Christ in his world.

As my wife and I, and countless others, have discovered, our differences as man and woman are not less than they appear; they are even deeper. And that’s good. The more we are the same, the less rich an arrangement marriage is. But the more complementary we are, the more marriage becomes a strong and beautiful dance for making much of our God and his Son.

What’s the Difference?

This month at Desiring God, we are celebrating afresh the beauty and power of God’s design for men and women. We believe that sexual complementarity influences every realm of our lives — and we’re happy about how God chose to do it. Thin, narrow, and minimalist are not the adjectives for our complementarity at Desiring God. We love the God-designed differences in men and women, from the beginning, found in our households, celebrated in our churches, and displayed as a diamond next to the dull monotony of the world. We are thick, broad, and maximalist. We don’t stomach God’s design. We delight in it and hope you will too.

To that end, we’ve developed a new series of articles under the banner “What’s the Difference?” In this series, we’ll move through a sequence from our households, to our churches, to society, as we seek to celebrate God’s good design by pointing out what’s the difference — or more precisely, what are some of the countless differences we discern in our world and in ourselves and in Scripture.

Audio Transcript

How do I follow God’s lead in my daily decisions? I know he’s my shepherd. He’s leading me. I think so. But how do I know if I am following him?

That’s such an important question we all must answer for ourselves, and it was a question taken up by a very young Pastor John Piper, in his very first summer as a pastor. In fact, just a few weeks into his pastorate, Pastor John preached through some of his favorite Psalms. One of them being, of course, Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1–3).

I was 22 before I first saw one of the lines in this psalm. Now I’d seen it, but there is seeing and then there is seeing, right? Verse 3, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” I’d never seen “for his namesake” until I went to seminary. Well, yes, I’d seen it. I’d read the words, but you can read over phrases in the Bible a hundred times and they never hit you for what they mean.

Open My Eyes to See

I went to visit Mrs. Bromgren just before her surgery on Wednesday. She was getting her eye operated on, and it was all bandaged over, and I read to her this verse from Psalm 119:18,

Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may live and observe thy word, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.

And I said, “Isn’t it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible? But isn’t it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us? The apostle Paul calls them the eyes of the heart, and he prays in Ephesians 1 that the eyes of the heart might be enlightened. I think that’s what Psalm 119 is talking about: ‘May the eyes be open that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’”

Well, I hadn’t seen that phrase there in Psalm 23 as wondrous. I’d been as deaf to that theme as you could imagine, but there it was, “he leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” The thought that God might have been causing me to do right ever since I was a little boy for his sake just never dawned on me. I just read right over that phrase. It never struck me, though I’d read it hundreds of times.

So I want to zero in on that phrase for a few minutes, but before we get there, we better look at the phrase before it, namely, “he leads me in paths of righteousness,” and ask how God does this.

How Does God Light Our Paths?

The picture, of course, here is a shepherd leading sheep along with his crook, or maybe with his call. “The sheep know my name, and they follow me.” But when we get out of the metaphor of sheep and shepherd into our own experience in our day and ask, “How does God lead in paths of righteousness,” we need to ponder a little bit and poke around in the Scriptures to see how he does it.

“In my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road.”

Now, in my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road. I’ve never seen a cloud of fire or pillar of cloud like they had in the wilderness. That’s not part of my experience, nor have I ever heard an audible word that I know was God speaking. A lot of people talk in that language, and maybe I’m just callous, but that’s never been part of my experience to see God in some clear manifestation showing me it’s this way and not that way, or to hear a voice like my teacher at Wheaton said he heard one day while he was shaving in front of the mirror, “Go to Wheaton from Boston.” He was in Boston. “Go to Wheaton.”

God can do that if he wants. He’s just never done it for me, and he doesn’t do it for most people most of the time. The way he leads us is apparently differently, and I think we can get a clue from what David would say in Psalm 119:105. There, he says, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” And in that same psalm, verse 9, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to thy word.”

So one answer to the question, “How does God lead his people in paths of righteousness” is: he has revealed a lot about those paths of righteousness. He’s described what sort of paths are righteous paths and told us to walk in them so that we can read and obey. Surely, David did that often because he talked about meditating on the word day and night.

Why the Bible Is Not Enough

But now, that answer is only half the answer, isn’t it? By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track. No matter how wonderful the Bible is, and how we would be utterly lost without it, it is not enough by itself and for two reasons.

“By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track.”

One, we make lots of decisions in life which are not prescribed for us in the Bible — hundreds of little decisions every day and some big ones in which we look in the Bible and there are no sentences about that. How many children to have, where to send your child to school, where to go to work, this, that, just hundreds of little things that we have to decide every day, and we don’t want to bracket those and say, “Well, that’s not part of Christianity. I’ll just make those decisions anyway I please, and then Christianity is something else.” God has to do with all those decisions. But the Bible doesn’t give explicit guidance for every one of those little decisions and, therefore, something more has to be said if we’re to walk in right paths in those decisions, as well as the ones where the Bible is perfectly explicit.

The second reason that the Bible, by itself, is not enough to guide us in those paths of righteousness is this: a path of righteousness is doing the right thing with a right attitude or a right motivation. It’s not just a bodily action. It’s having a right attitude towards your wife as well. But, reading words on a page doesn’t always change attitudes.

You can read over what you ought to feel like in the Bible a hundred times and maybe your attitude is just the same. Something else has to come into play, and I think that’s why David said, “God leads us in paths of righteousness,” and why Paul said, “All who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God.” We need not only revelation coming to us from outside, namely the Bible, we need transformation coming to us inside from the Holy Spirit. The word and the Spirit together are the leadership that we need.

Renewed in the Mind of Christ

Paul says in Romans 12:2 this very familiar word, “Don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — why? — “so that you can prove — or better, approve of — “the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.” In other words, you’ve got to have something happen up here on the inside, some changed attitudes, some changed feelings, or when little decisions present alternatives, you won’t know how to prove which one of those is the will of God.

So the Bible is the input into that new mind, and the Spirit takes the word and begins to shape our thinking, mold our emotions, so that even when there’s no explicit command in Scripture for this decision you’re facing, you weigh all the alternatives and you’re weighing those alternatives with the mind of Christ. Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ.” And then when you make the decision, you look back and you don’t say, “My, what a smart fellow was I,” but rather, you say, “Thank you for your word that informed the principles of my life, and thank you for the Spirit that shaped my emotions and my priorities so that I made this decision your way,” and God then gets the credit for the leadership, which means personally, for me, that I have been driven basically for all of life to meditate day and night on the word and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit would work on me.

You can’t over-intellectualize the Bible. You can’t over-spiritualize your private experience with God. It’s both/and, not either/or. It has been in my experience, and I haven’t found the two in conflict but tremendous complements for guidance in life.