He Made Them Male and Female
God created male and female, boys and girls, men and women. Our bodies are not opposed to our identities but, rather, give objective and biological clarification to who we are. We are not bodiless image bearers. We are embodied creatures because bodies matter. And bodies matter because God made them.
The first time the words “male” and “female” appear in Scripture is on page one. 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” (Gen. 1:26).
God would make image-bearers, and they would exercise dominion over the creation he had made. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27).
Then God blessed his image-bearers and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28).
God made Adam and Eve as embodied creatures (Gen. 2:7, 22–23), and their embodiment had a sexual design because they were capable of procreation. Their maleness and femaleness were not separate from biology but were clarified by it.
Now, of course, in a Genesis 3 world, not every male will father a child, and not every female will deliver one. Reasons for this abound. Nevertheless, we must notice that in Genesis 1:26–28, maleness and femaleness involve sexual complementarity. Moreover, God had told the man, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (2:18).
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A Review of the Bodies of Others: By Naomi Wolf
Naomi Wolf is a fighter – a freedom fighter. And when we see basic human rights and civil liberties being stolen away from us at an alarming rate, we need all the freedom fighters we can get. Well done Naomi for sounding the alarm. May many millions of readers heed your call to action.
That those who greatly fear the rise of Big Brother statism in response to things like Covid craziness include people like Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and in this case, long-standing leftist and feminist Naomi Wolf shows that this is not just something that those on the right are deeply concerned about. Numerous intelligent and savvy individuals have great fears about what has been unfolding over the past few years.
Wolf has been speaking out about the lockdowns, the mandates, the forced vaccinations and the like for some time now, and she does not hold back in her brand new book. The subtitle tells us of where she is heading: “The New Authoritarians, Covid-19 and the War Against the Human.” Her main concern is the erosion of our freedoms and basic human rights – not to keep us safe, but to grant unprecedented powers to elitist minorities and globalist bodies.
In 20 meaty and well-documented chapters she makes the case for why we all should be very afraid of where things are heading as Statists exploit crises or even make them up in order to further consolidate power and control. Wealthy and powerful elites gain in such scenarios while the masses suffer – greatly.
Although focused primarily on America, Wolf has plenty to say about England, Europe and even Australia. And the facts, figures and stories she shares about the scene in the US should be of help to whoever is reading this book. The overall thrust of it remains the same regardless of what country you are in.
She reminds us that America has had many, and often much worse, outbreaks of infectious diseases in its past, such as the smallpox outbreak of 1775-1782 and the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-1919. Europe too has had such outbreaks. Yet even then freedoms remained intact and total lockdowns never took place.
Never mind that early on many experts were warning against lockdowns and other coercive measures. Says Wolf, “The masking, the enclosure, the isolation, the lack of community, fresh air and exercise, the fear, the cabin fever, the generations piled on top of one another, the alienation engendered by computer screens – they all took their toll. People grew pale, fearful, obsessive, phobic, and sad. And unsurprisingly, many got sick and many died.”
Of course the elites and politicians and ‘health experts’ calling the shots never paid the price for any of this. While we were all locked in our homes (here in Melbourne we were held prisoners for 23 hours a day, with only a 5km travel allowance), the elites were still living the good life.
They were not only getting their cushy salaries paid for by the tax payer, but for the most part they could freely roam about at the beachfront properties. Lockdowns were no biggee for them. Says Wolf: “This somber catastrophe … morphed into a uniform, top-down, almost cozy ‘lifestyle’ that was, as a form of house arrest, tolerable. That is, if you were affluent. What we did not know was that the ‘academic’ studies, the media messaging, and the tools for the cozy lifetime all derived from, and then benefited, the same group.”
And we need to avoid the misnomer “quarantine” – what used to happen to the sick. What happened to us who were mostly healthy were lockdowns?
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Rosaria Butterfield: “I Reject the False Teaching of Revoice/Side B Theology”
After we are justified by God, we can never return to Adam. What does this mean for someone like me who lived as a lesbian for a decade and believed I was gay? It means that homosexuality is part of my biography, not my nature. My nature is securely chained in Christ (Colossians 3:10-20). What does it mean if a Christian falls back into an old sin pattern? It means that he is acting against his true nature. How do we stop acting against our true nature in Christ when our flesh craves our old sin patterns? By going to war with our sin through the power of Christ’s blood.
What Is Truth?
The Bible is Truth, both in word and in substance. When one passage of scripture may seem unclear to us, we interpret it in light of the clarity of God’s unified Biblical witness.[1] There are no problem passages in scripture.
In His image, God created human beings ontologically as men or women. Our sexual difference is part of our origin and eternity. We bear the image of God in purposeful pattern.
“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them’. Then God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’” Genesis 1:26-28
This magisterial passage, known as the Creation Ordinance, reveals that God established men and women for the normative and godly calling of biblical marriage. God planted the seed of the gospel in the Garden of Eden. Scripturally speaking, heterosexuality is natural, and homosexuality is unnatural.[2] When the Apostle Paul revisits the Creation Ordinance in 1 Timothy and Romans 1, he states that homosexuality is “contrary to sound doctrine” (1 Tim. 1:10) and denies the being of God (Romans 1:25-27).
When Eve obeyed the serpent over God, all of humanity was plunged into sin, a sin recorded as Adam’s (Genesis 3). Adam’s sin, imputed to all of mankind, created a cosmological crisis. Puritan Thomas Goodwin depicts this crisis in the form of two giants: one is Adam, and the other is Christ.
Goodwin’s word picture looks like this: chained to Adam’s belt are all men and women born after him. God in mercy removes the chains of his chosen ones from Adam and locks them onto Christ. God’s mercy has a name: justification (Romans 3: 24-25). Justification is “an act of God’s free grace, wherein he pardons all our sins, and accepts us as righteous in his sight, only for the righteousness of Christ imputed to us, and received by faith alone.”[3] In justification, God secures every saved person’s chain to Christ, guaranteeing a new nature and future. From our posture of justified men and women, chained firmly to Christ, we begin the lifelong journey of sanctification (Ephesians 4:23-24): “a work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness.”[4]
Read More[1] “The infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is Scripture itself: and therefore, when there is a question about the full and true sense of any Scripture (which is not manifold but one) it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly,” Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 1.9. The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, ed. Joel Beeke. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Books, 2014: 2029.
[2] See Rosaria Butterfield, Openness Unhindered, chapter 4, “Sexual Orientation: Freud’s 19th Century Category Mistake,” (Pittsburgh: Crown and Covenant Publications, 2015); 93-112. While sexual orientation as a category of personhood is a Freudian addition, heterosexuality and homosexuality are not equally problematic examples. Heterosexuality is always the biblical pattern, although its application may be sinful, as in the case of adultery. Homosexuality is always the unbiblical pattern and cannot be “sanctified” without being obliterated. Calling people to celibacy and rejecting the idea of sanctified change that allows either for heterosexual marriage or content singleness is unchristian. In addition to being sinful, homosexuality is pagan. For more on this, see Peter Jones, The Other Worldview. Bellingham, WA: Kirkdale Press, 2015. When current self-described “gay Christians” feel “othered” by biblical Christians, there is wisdom in this recognition. Gay Christianity is another—a separate and a different—religion.
[3] Question 33 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is Justification?” The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, ed. By Dr. Joel Beeke. Grand Rapids, MI: Reformation Heritage Press, 2014: 2055.
[4] Question 35 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “What is Sanctification?” The Reformation Heritage KJV Study Bible, 2056.
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Marriage and the Trinity
God made marriage to reflect the holy, eternal, loving, intimate, joyful, and sacrificial love He has always cherished among the members of the Godhead. In that sense, marriage is not about you but is certainly for you. God has invited you to participate in and imitate His triune love. Perhaps this is why Scripture calls marriage the “mystery of the Gospel” because, unlike any other human relationship or institution, it most clearly and most beautifully pictures the divine.
Recently I remembered why I had stopped noticing the sounds of war during my deployment in Operation Iraqi Freedom. When we first entered the country, every cell in my body was on heightened alert. My adrenaline was constantly pumping. Every staccatoed rat-tat-tat from a distant AK-47 was enough to make my hair stand on end. Every civilian standing in the crowd could be a suicide bomber. Every vehicle could deliver the IED that would send me home looking forever like Lieutenant Dan. And with every mortar round fired, the reality of going home in a box and my mother receiving a triangle-folded American flag pressed upon my mind. Yet, as the deployment wore on, these sounds melded into a strange kind of normalcy for me.
For instance, every morning around 3 AM, the reverberating rumbles of incoming mortar rounds would agitate the little mud brick house we lived in. Those first nights in theater, I awoke in a great alarm from every blast, alert and ready for combat, frantically putting on my equipment for readiness and protection. But, once I realized that Iraqis with Mortar rounds could not hit the proverbial sand when falling off the fictional camel, I eventually learned to sleep right through the explosions as if nothing strange was happening around me.
The thunderous eruptions, once jarring to me, became the ethereal drum tap in the desert’s lullaby. Time, like an ancient spell, wove its enchantment upon my senses, leaving me unconscious of my surroundings, which is what I believe has happened to the modern church.
In his timeless malice, Satan has assailed the sacred bond of marriage for so long that the sounds and signs of warfare upon her have faded into the cacophony of noises we have become accustomed to. While we have grown numb to the relentless onslaught at the devil’s hand, divorce, infidelity, and broken homes have become the tapestry woven into the threads of our society.
For this reason, it is incumbent upon us to wake from our slumber, recognize the war, and cling to the weapons of warfare our compassionate General has assigned us. For all who call themselves Christians, it is time to rekindle our love for the hallowed Word. As followers of Christ, we must valiantly thwart the adversary’s advances on marriage in general, and our marriages in particular, by embracing God’s designs for us, our marriages, our children, and our homes that are revealed in Holy Scripture.
Today, we begin our series on marriage by traveling back to the genesis of it, seeking solace in the profound wisdom spoken by our God in His Word. In this collection of essays on the topic of marriage, we will lean into what Scripture teaches and glean from our Maker’s timeless intention for marriage that will ever illuminate our path. Today, we begin by speaking about the design of marriage from the first Biblical text on marriage found in Genesis 1:26-28.
The Text26 Then 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.” 27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” – Genesis 1:26-28
The Trinitarian Design of Marriage
The Bible describes the creation of man in marital language. For instance, God did not merely create two distinctly gendered individuals, calling them “very good” in their disconnectedness, but a pair of people who would become one flesh together. In the same way that shoes come in twos and socks come in pairs, God made man as a male and female unit that would join together to become one very glorious thing, which of course, was the “very good” part.
In this, we must also notice that the creation of man was a trinitarian event. God does not create the first domestic community without blueprints. Instead, he patterns it off the divine community that has existed forever. At the height of the creation enterprise, God speaks, saying, “Let Us make mankind in Our image” When God does this, it not only serves as proof for the triunity within the Godhead but the kind of intimacy God intends to be present in the marriage.
The Trinitarian Community
For all eternity, members of the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit exist in perfect harmony and self-giving love, an exquisite dance of divine affection. This celestial community lives in exquisite blissful intimacy, lavishly pouring out fragrant love upon one another, heralding each other’s praises in melodious harmonies that echoed across the unformed realms, holding nothing back from one another across eons of affectionate fellowship.
In the embrace of the Father, love emanates as an eternal wellspring, an outpouring of perfect affection towards the Son and the Spirit. The Father’s love, boundless and unchanging, encapsulates the essence of nurturing care and tender compassion. It is a love that delights in the Son’s obedience and wholeheartedly affirms His eternal Sonship, a love that seeks to glorify and honor the Son above all.
The Son, in response, reciprocates this love with perfect devotion and filial obedience. His passion for the Father is marked by complete surrender and an unwavering desire to fulfill the Father’s will. It is a love that willingly steps into the realm of humanity, taking upon Himself the weight of the world’s sin, offering Himself as the perfect sacrifice—a demonstration of love that knows no bounds.
The Holy Spirit, the breath and life within the Trinity, embodies the love that flows between the Father and the Son. It is a love that unites, empowers, and guides. The Spirit’s love is like a gentle wind, constantly moving and animating the divine dance. It is a love that testifies to the unity and oneness of the Godhead, bringing forth the fruit of love in the hearts of believers.
Together, the love within the Trinity is a symphony of self-giving, perfect love. It is a love that transcends time and space, existing in timeless eternity. It is a love that invites us to behold the divine dance and participate in its harmonious rhythms. Through the love of the Trinity, we catch a glimpse of the infinite depth of love and are invited to enter into a transformative relationship with the Triune God, where we, too, can experience the boundless love that unites Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This, of course, is best pictured in human marriage.
As many scholars and authors attest, when our triune God patterned man according to His image, He was undoubtedly creating individuals with a rational and creative capacity to think, feel, love, and do.
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