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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John writes this gospel for us, so that we believe and continue to believe and know real life in his name. After all, this “faith,” Jude tells us, was delivered to the “saints” (Jude 1:3). So, do not rest on your believing as a past action. Continue to read the gospel story. Reflect. Rehearse. Marvel. Wonder. And believe.

Why does John place the story of “doubting Thomas” at the climax of his gospel? Because John’s whole purpose is to call people to believe in Jesus of Nazareth—his claims about himself, his ministry, his death for sin, and especially his resurrection from the dead—even though they have never seen him.
In fact, out of about 250 times the New Testament uses the verb “believe” (pisteuō), nearly 100 of them occur in John’s gospel alone. And what is even more interesting is that John never uses the noun form, “belief” or “faith” (pistis). For John, belief is always an active idea, a verbal idea.
But John is not merely interested in instilling belief in those who have not yet embraced the good news. He is just as interested in strengthening the belief of those who are already followers of Jesus as well.
We can see this emphasis in the Gospel of John through the way John emphasizes the faith of Jesus’s own disciples at the beginning of the gospel and later toward the end and climax of the gospel. The first person in the Gospel of John who believes is Jesus’s disciple Nathanael.
Nathanael answered him, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Jesus answered him, “Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these” (John 1:49–50).
The next time believing is mentioned it is Jesus’s disciples who believe after the miracle of the water turned to wine.
This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him (John 2:11).
Later, in John 2, after Jesus cleanses the temple and declares, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19), John forecasts the fact that Jesus’s disciples would later remember that he had said those words and believe:
When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken (John 2:22).
After this passage, however, John’s Gospel turns away from the issue of the disciples believing, and gives attention solely to others believing—Nicodemus (John 3), the woman at the well (John 4), the Pharisees (John 5), the 5000 (John 6), the people at the Feast of Tabernacles (John 7), the man born blind (John 9), Martha at Lazarus’s tomb (John 11), to name a few.
But after the people of Israel in general refuse to believe in him (John 12:37), John turns our attention once again to Jesus’s own disciples. Often in the private conversation that Jesus has with his disciples in John 13–16 the subject turns to their believing in him (e.g., John 14:1, 10–12; 16:25–33). Twice Jesus tells his disciples what is about to happen to him in his passion “so that” when it does happen they will remember what he told them and believe (John 13:19; 14:29).

Jesus showed Himself trustworthy by gaining the victory over sin when we were the transgressors. Through His resurrection, justifying work, and exaltation, Christ is worthy of our trust and confidence. When the apostle Peter read Isaiah 53 and saw what Jesus had done for His people, his response was to see Jesus’ suffering as a model of His faithfulness, so that no matter what we are experiencing or facing, we can trust ourselves to Him. 

Trusting others presents massive challenges in our fallen world. Everyone has been corrupted by sin, and therefore fails to be fully faithful or trustworthy. As Proverbs 20:6 says, “Many a man proclaims his own loyalty, but who can find a trustworthy man?”
While humans prove to be both distrustful and untrustworthy, God presents Himself as the One we can supremely trust for everything in this life and beyond the grave. We see an intentional emphasis in Scripture on the trustworthiness of God, but Scripture does not command us to have a blind faith. The Lord instructs us to trust Him, and then He demonstrates He is worthy of our trust. God never speaks, then fails to act. He always proves Himself faithful.
Despite this truth, we often struggle to trust God, which manifests itself when we give in to sin in times of various trials and temptations. So how do we grow our trust of our Lord and His power over our sin?
We find a helpful answer to this question in Isaiah 53. Here, God reveals His Suffering Servant, the Lord Jesus as eminently trustworthy. Whether we suffer because of trials or temptations, Jesus can be trusted to see us through and bring God’s covenant promises to fruition.
There are four ways Isaiah shows Jesus’ trustworthiness in this passage.
First, Jesus humbled Himself when we were proud.
At the start of this chapter, Isaiah laments Israel’s unbelief. Just before, in Isaiah 52, we learn that the Gentiles would marvel at the exalted Servant. Yet when the scene flips to Isaiah 53, regardless of the magnificent salvific promises of the previous passage, we observe the ongoing disbelief of people who have had a front-row seat to God’s work. What makes God’s promises so difficult to trust? Isaiah answers by showing us the Servant’s humility alongside the pride of sinners who reject God’s word.
Isaiah gives a description of the Servant’s humility, using agricultural pictures to convey Jesus’ outward appearance as useless and unfruitful. The Servant came in the humblest of ways, and His circumstances and appearance made Him look dispensable. Peoplewould have contempt for God’s Messiah and suffering Servant.
Thus, we see both the humiliation of the Servant and the pride of man. God in human flesh descends to us, and we despise Him because He does not meet our ideals. God, however, sees us in our pride, knows how we will respond, and still comes to save us from sin.
Jesus proves Himself trustworthy in His willing humiliation for prideful sinners. Isaiah includes himself in those who thought little of the Servant, saying, “We did not esteem Him.” We must include ourselves in that we. Apart from God’s grace, we rejected Him. Christ, though, condescended to save us, showing He is trustworthy.
Second, Jesus was faithful when we were not.
Isaiah paints a rather ugly picture of us.
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