Is there any one aspect of human life that has affected every other aspect of human life more than being male or female?
While my life is certainly not reducible to being a man, everything about my life is shaped by the fact that I am male, not female.  My wife’s whole life is shaped by being a woman and not a man. Each of my nine children (yes, we wanted to start our own baseball team) are unde­niably and monumentally shaped by being boys or girls. And yet how often do we stop to think that it didn’t have to be this way?
God didn’t have to make two different kinds of human beings. He didn’t have to make us so that men and women, on average, come in different shapes and sizes and grow hair in different places and often think and feel in different ways. God could have propagated the human race in some other way besides the differentiated pair of male and female. He could have made Adam sufficient without an Eve. Or he could have made Eve without an Adam. But God decided to make not one man or one woman, or a group of men or a group of women; he made a man and a woman. The one feature of human existence that shapes life as much or more than any other—our biological sex—was God’s choice.
In an ultimate sense, of course, the world had to be made the way it was, in accordance with the immutable will of God and as a necessary expression of his character. I’m not suggesting God made Adam and Eve by a roll of the dice. Actually, I’m reminding us of the opposite. This whole wonderful, beautiful, complicated business of a two-sexed humanity was God’s idea. “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). The whole human race is, always has been, and will be for the rest of time, comprised of two differentiated and complementary sexes. This perpetual bifurcated ordering of humanity is not by accident or by caprice but by God’s good design.
And why?
What is at stake in God making us male and female? Nothing less than the gospel, that’s all. The mystery of marriage is profound, Paul says, and it refers to Christ and the church (Eph. 5:32). “Mystery” in the New Testament sense refers to something hidden and then revealed. The Bible is saying that God created men and women—two different sexes—so that he might paint a living picture of the differentiated and complementary union of Christ and the church. Ephesians 5 may be about marriage, but we can’t make sense of the underlying logic unless we note God’s intentions in creating marriage as a gospel-shaped union between a differentiated and complementary pair. Any move to abolish all distinctions between men and women is a move (whether intentionally or not) to tear down the building blocks of redemption itself.
Men and women are not interchangeable. The man and the woman—in marriage especially, but in the rest of life as well—complement each other, meaning they are supposed to function according to a divine fitted-ness. This is in keeping with the order­ing of the entire cosmos. Think about the complementary nature of creation itself. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). And that’s not the only pairing in creation. We find other sorts of couples, like the sun and the moon, morn­ing and evening, day and night, the sea and the dry land, and plants and animals, before reaching the climactic couple, a man and a woman. In every pairing, each part belongs with the other, but neither is interchangeable. It makes perfect sense that the com­ing together of heaven and earth in Revelation 21–22 is preceded by the marriage supper of the Lamb in Revelation 19. That God created us male and female has cosmic and enduring significance. From start to finish, the biblical storyline—and design of creation itself—depends upon the distinction between male and female as different from one another yet fitted each for the other.
Sexual difference is the way of God’s wisdom and grace. It was there in the garden, there in the life of ancient Israel, there in the Gospels, there in the early church, will be there at the wedding supper of the Lamb, and was there in the mind of God before any of this began. To be sure, manhood and womanhood is not the message of the gospel. But it is never far from the storyline of redemptive history. The givenness of being male or female is also a gift—a gift to embrace, a natural order of fittedness and func­tion that embodies the way the world is supposed to work and the way we ought to follow Christ in the world. Let us, then, as male and female image bearers, delight in this design and seek to promote—with our lives and with our lips—all that is good and true and beautiful in God making us men and women.
This article is adapted from the opening chapter and closing section of my new book, Men and Women in the Church: A Short, Biblical, Practical Introduction published by Crossway.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

When you consider the prospects for Christians right now, you might think they would be in despair. And you might be right. There is a lot of evidence that things are not going well.
In the newest episode of Life and Books and Everything, Collin, Justin, and I look at several specific phenomena that would cause despair. And then what we can do now to move from that despair and into hope. Plus, there are some great book recommendations!
Timestamps:
Have you heard of Michael Reeves? [0:00 – 3:56]
Life & Football & Everything [3:56 – 7:22]
How’s COVID-19 going? [7:22 – 25:41]
Reasons for Current Earthly Despair [25:41 – 44:54]

Declining Fertility Rate
Declining Church Membership Rate
Cultural Institutions Aligned Against Christianity
The Speed of the Collapse
Race Relations Getting Worse

Now what do we do? [44:54 – 1:01:56]
Books & Everything [1:01:56 – 1:15:29]
Books and Everything:
Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind, by GraceOlmstead
A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War,by James Byrd
Churchill: Walking with Destiny, by Andrew Roberts
Surviving Religion 101, by Michael Kruger
The Life of John Murray, by Iain H. Murray
Survival and Resistance in Evangelical America: Christian Reconstruction in the Pacific Northwest, by Crawford Gribben
The Soul of Abraham Lincoln, by William Eleazar Barton
Gilead, by Marilyn Robinson
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of September 11, 2001, byGarrett M. Graff

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.

The church is divided as never before.
Okay, that may be an overstatement. But I think most Christians would agree that, from personal conversations and from social media scrolling, it certainly feels like the divisions are as bad as ever, and only getting worse. The church has been divided over doctrine before—sometimes for bad reasons, often for good reasons. That is to be expected. What seems new in our day is how Bible-believing Christians who share almost all the same doctrine on paper are massively and increasingly divided over non-doctrinal matters, torn apart by issues the Bible does not directly address.
Think of the three most contentious issues in the church over the past year: racial tensions, Covid restrictions, and the presidential election. On each of these matters, Christians have disagreed not just on interpretation or strategy or where the slopes are most slippery. We have fundamentally disagreed on the facts themselves, and because we disagree on the facts we disagree even more profoundly on the appropriate response.
Is America deeply and pervasively racist? Are people of color routinely and disproportionately in danger of being killed by police officers? Is virtually every aspect of our society hostile to the presence of black and brown bodies? If you answer yes to all these questions—that is, if you believe the facts warrant all these conclusions—then how can you not be engaged in (peaceful) protest? For the church to ignore injustice on this level is to be guilty of indifference at best and moral turpitude at worst. But if our society and our policing is not fundamentally racist, then much of the social justice movement is motivated by false premises.
What about Covid? If the facts tell us that this is a once-in-a-century pandemic, that we are facing 300,000 excess deaths, and that masks are a simple and effective way to limit the spread of the virus, then extreme care and caution are important ways we can love our neighbors as ourselves. If, on the other hand, coronavirus is hardly more dangerous than the seasonal flu, then the worldwide restrictions look rather onerous, if not outright nefarious.
And what about the election? Setting aside the question of whom to vote for, we are now divided over who people actually did vote for. If the election was stolen, perversely overriding the will of most Americans in an act of unconscionable thievery, then we should be marching (peacefully) until we are blue in the face. But if the facts do not support that conclusion, then we help no one by pretending that the loser of the election actually won.
In each set of issues, you can see why the stakes are so high and why the emotions run even higher. If things are as dire as some purport (on race, with Covid, and with a disputed election), then to do nothing displays a cowardly and colossal failure of nerve. But if, in each situation, things are much less dangerous and less insidious than the doomsdayers say, then taking a full-body chill pill would be the better part of valor.
So what are Christians to do?
First, let us be humble, understanding that few of us are experts on these issues. A little epistemic humility—in our hearts and toward others—can go a long way.
Second, let us be measured. This doesn’t mean our default has to be the status quo, but it does mean we should keep our passions in proportion. We should be religiously dogmatic about our religious dogma and not much else.
Third, let us reason together. It is the profound irony of our age: never has there been more information at our fingertips, and never has it been harder to know what information to trust. In most things, whether we realize it or not, we have no choice but to rely upon the expertise of others. We simply don’t have the time or ability to properly investigate every disputed claim. That means it is more important than ever before that we are discerning about the voices we listen to.
And how can we be discerning? 
Read widely—not just from different voices online but from different voices across the centuries. Reading Calvin or Augustine won’t tell you what to think about Covid, but they will help you think better.
Listen to those who know you best and love you most. Of course, parents and pastors and friends can be wrong too, but there is something unhealthy about putting ourselves under the influence of distant personalities while neglecting those who will have to give an account for their care over us.
Where possible, look at the fruit of someone’s life. To be sure, bad people can make good arguments. But in general, if you are honest with other people, honest with yourself, and honest with God, you tend to be honest with facts and ideas. The opposite is also true.
Run through a series of diagnostic questions in your mind. Questions like:

Does the argument I’m reading deal in trade-offs or only in the categories of all-good/all-evil?
Are the terms and definitions clearly defined?
Can the person fairly state the argument he is arguing against? 
Is he willing to acknowledge any fair points on the other side? 
Does the person I’m listening to seem unhinged and unstable?
Is the argument full of emotive reasoning and ad hominem attack?
Does the force of the argument rely on hard words and high passions or on rational arguments and sound evidence?
Does this person have a track record of being fair, accurate, and well-researched?
Does this person have any credentials or experience that would make him worth listening to?
Does the argument make sweeping claims based on personal anecdotes?
Does the argument require me to believe what is non-falsifiable?
Does the argument require a level of highly elaborate clandestine scheming such that only the most disciplined, organized, and intelligent people in the world could pull it off?
Does the argument confuse correlation with causation?
Is the person a jerk on Twitter, constantly self-congratulatory on Twitter, seeking victim status on Twitter, or otherwise living online in a way that seems imbalanced?

Are these questions a magic elixir that will solve all our disagreements? Of course not. But perhaps they can nudge us in the right direction. I’m sure I’m getting things wrong. In fact, I hope on these non-biblical matters in particular that I’m always open to being corrected and learning something new.
For my part, while I believe there are many ways that the relationship between African Americans and police officers can improve, I don’t think the evidence suggests that racist cops are disproportionately killing unarmed black people. I don’t think Covid is deadly for the vast majority of people but it is very dangerous for some. And while I am sure there were irregularities in November’s election, I don’t think there is evidence of voter fraud so widespread that it could have changed the presidential outcome.
I hesitate to share these convictions because that’s not what I want this post to be about, but neither do I want to pretend that any of us can so rise above the fray that we don’t have to reach any of our own conclusions. My larger and more important point, however, is to urge us as Christians to lead the way in thinking carefully, and in carefully engaging those who think differently–especially on these disputed factual matters that can’t be answered (as I would prefer) by reading our Bibles alone or by quoting from Turretin.

Kevin DeYoung (PhD, University of Leicester) is senior pastor of Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, Council member of The Gospel Coalition, and associate professor of systematic theology at Reformed Theological Seminary (Charlotte). He has written numerous books, including Just Do Something. Kevin and his wife, Trisha, have nine children: Ian, Jacob, Elizabeth, Paul, Mary, Benjamin, Tabitha, Andrew, and Susannah.