The Design for Man | Summer in the Systematics: Anthropology (Part 4)

Transcript

JRS 82
THE DESIGN FOR MAN
7/5/2026
SELECTED SCRIPTURES
JESSE RANDOLPH

Tonight, after taking our post-Fourth of July naps, for some of you, we are resuming our Summer in the Systematics series, as we dive back into the topic of Biblical Anthropology. Again, and I’ll do this likely each time I come up here in the evenings in the summer, give us our definition. Kind of the baseline definition we’re working from that Anthropology, Biblical Anthropology is the doctrine of man and specifically man’s relation to God and the world in which God has placed him. So far in our study of Biblical Anthropology, we’ve looked at three topics. The Origin of Man, we looked at The Image of God in Man, and we looked at The Constitution of Man. Those messages including the slides, by the way are, up on the IHCC website if you want to dig into those a little bit deeper. But tonight we are getting into our fourth topic which is The Design for Man. As we’re soon going to see our study of this topic this evening is going to center unapologetically on God’s design for man, being according to two sexes, male and female. Genesis 1:27, we will come back to this text over and over tonight. “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” We are going to go down a couple of different trails and streams of thought here tonight and hit the topic and this text from a few different angles. But fundamentally tonight’s message will continue to hover around that truth, from this text, “male and female He created them.”

So, getting right into it I have a three-point outline for you tonight. I know you have those worksheets with blanks on them. Let’s go ahead and fill those in. Blank one is THE EXPRESSION OF GOD’S DESIGN. We are going to look at the expression of God’s design which surprise is anchored in Genesis 1:27. Then we’re going to spend a lot of our time tonight on THE CORRUPTION OF GOD’S DESIGN. I’m going to really take us through a deeper sociological, historical kind of like Al Mohler briefing style look at the world and the culture today, as we look at the corruption of God’s design, and then last, we’ll look at THE DEFENSE OF GOD’S DESIGN.

So, let’s start with that first one, THE EXPRESSION OF GOD’S DESIGN, where Genesis 1:27, God’s Word reads. “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” We covered the topic as I mentioned earlier of the image of God and what it means to be made in the image of God a few Sundays ago now. I’m not going to rehash that entire study.

But something I do want to point for all of us tonight is that it is not strictly accurate though this language is often used by Christians, to say that man was given the image of God. That sort of language suggests that there could have been a time when man didn’t bear God’s image and that man, having been created, endured some sort of image-less existence for a period of time, however brief, and then was ultimately given God’s image at some successive time. But that’s not the meaning of Genesis 1:27 where it says that “God created man in His own image.” This is not saying that man’s being and the image of God are separate realities. As if at first a human being is a non-image bearer, and then somehow, someway later he comes or she comes to bear the image of God and to carry forth the image of God. That’s technically not right. Rather, the accurate way to think of this is that man is the image of God. Man is created in God’s image, so that the image of God is his essence. Meaning, image-bearing is the first and most basic thing we can say about mankind, that they are image bearers. Think of it this way. Man and woman, they are made of dust, but image is what we are. We were made of dust, but image is what we are.

Now, once we grasp that truth that image of God is what we are, another domino of thought falls which is this. That being made male or female is an integral aspect of what it means to be made in the image of God. The likeness of God, the image of God, you can put it this way or think of it this way, the likeness of God is revealed through male and female individuals.

So, the image of God is directly connected with being either male or female; and that’s not me getting all philosophical up here with word play. That’s straight from the text of God’s Word. Again, look at the connection here separated only in our English Bibles by a semicolon, there is parallelism going on here. “In the image of God, He created him; male and female (there’s the parallel thought) He created them.” These two thoughts run side-by-side like they’re on parallel tracks. What this means, practically, and Biblically, and theologically, is that the whole notion, the whole idea that’s sold out there in our world today, or sold in the culture today, that we get to identify ourselves as who we are. That biological sex realities are mere constructs. All of that sentimental slop that’s being fed to us by psychological and pharmaceutical establishments is decisively rejected not only by the realities of nature, but by the very language of the Word of God.

Take a look at these words from Wayne Grudem. He says, “The fact that God created two distinct persons as male and female, rather than just one man, is part of our being in the image of God.” Even more to the point is theologian Matthew P.W. Roberts who says, “male or female is what we are.” Note that. To be male or female is foundational, it’s intrinsic to our being as God’s image bearers. Meaning again that those who are advocating for the ability to change their gender or to identify as a different gender, or to come up with an entirely new gender; those who are playing that game of identity politics - I identify as, and my pronouns are. What they’re actually advocating for is to eat away and erode humanity’s primary source of identity which is that we are all made in God’s image, which among other things, means that we are either male or female.

Again, Genesis 1:27, “in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” The same essential truth comes out of Genesis 5:1-2, “In the day when God created man, He made him in the likeness of God. He created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created.” So that was a bit under our first heading about THE EXPRESSION OF GOD’S DESIGN. This is a very again Genesis 1:27 centric teaching tonight.

Now, we’re going to spend the lion’s share of our time on this second one where we’re going to look at the CORRUPTION OF GOD’S DESIGN. When I put these Sunday evening summer messages together, of course I go to the Word to study all of the pertinent passages, but then I’ll also accompany that study with all different volumes of systematic theology which help me frame out the Biblical issues so that we can work through the variety of problems under every heading on any given Sunday night.

What is really fascinating and really interesting about our topic for this evening is that as you trace through the works of the different systematic theologies over the past couple of hundred years, and when you get to our topic for this summer, Biblical Anthropology, they follow some version of the trail that we’ve been following in the first few weeks of this study. Meaning, they start with the origin of man and then they get into the image of God in man, and they get to the constitution of man or the composition of man, trichotomy, dichotomy, those sorts of things. But then boom, off the cliff you go to the fall of man. Because right from those topics we’ve looked at already, to the fall of man. They spend no time on the topic that we’re going to be covering tonight. The Design For Man. Namely, God’s design for man to be according to one of two sexes, male or female.
Why is that? Why are the systematic theologies empty on this section on this topic of God’s design for man, being according to two sexes. Why are there no extensive writings from the 1860s, or even the 1960s of God having designed man as being either male or female? The answer is pretty obvious, isn’t it? I think the answer is pretty straight forward. The reality is that 30, or 50, or 100, or 150, or 200 years ago, the fact that God had created man as two sexes was a pretty well-established fact. It was taken for granted. The average church member and the church goer sitting in the early 1800s or the mid-1900s didn’t need to be told much else about the simple reality that God created mankind to be either male or female. Those who lived many centuries or decades ago, they really had no conception of gender, at least as that term is used today, and they certainly had no conception of what it means to be transgender or gender fluid or gender queer. They most definitely didn’t have any idea about what pronouns were except if you were talking about their elementary school grammar textbook.

No. In those in earlier generations they were taking God’s words about male and female He created them, at face value. God’s words no surprise here, they matched up with reality. Those living just a few decades ago could see the words of this text in Genesis 1:27, “male and female He created them.” They could look all around them, whether at church or out in the open market and see what? Males and females. That’s what they would see. And they could line that up directly with the words of the text of Genesis 1:27 that “male and female, He created them.” In other words, objective reality what they saw before them with their very eyes, matched up with what the Word of God said, and it wasn’t a big deal for systematic theologians to write on the topic. Well, that’s certainly not the state of affairs in our world today, is it? Sadly, no. Things have been changing quite rapidly, especially over the past 30 years.

To give you a flavor of what I mean consider a few of these examples. I had to restrain myself not to do more of these knowing that we have a 7:30 p.m. cut time tonight. In January 2021 in the opening session of a congressional prayer time, Democrat congressman named Emanuel Cleaver from Kansas City who also happens to be United Methodist minister, he offered up this prayer before Congress. He said, “May the Lord lift up the light of His countenance upon us and give us peace. Peace in our families, peace across this land, and dare I ask, O Lord, peace even in this chamber. We ask it in the name of the monotheistic God, Brahma, and ‘God’ known by many names by many different faiths.” Then he said this. “Amen and awoman.” Never mind that the word amen derives from a Hebrew word which means “so be it.” Never mind that the word amen has nothing at all to do with sex or gender. But representative Cleaver was committed to pandering to the gender revolutionaries among them and he did so.

Here’s another example. Another story to weave together and point out what’s going on in our day. This is from a 2022 article in the New York Times, which is titled, “Here comes the . . . Broom?” The article lays out how at a couple’s wedding ceremony, the female partner anticipated that she would call herself the bride, but her spouse, who is nonbinary and goes by the pronouns “ze” and “zir,” yes, you heard that right, said “I wanted to deal as little as I possible with being misgendered on my wedding day.” So, the couple instead of calling themselves the bride and the groom, how cute, they came up with broom. I thought not to share that story with you, but I didn’t want you to think I would be sweeping it under…., never mind.

I’ll give you one more. One which highlights the lunacy and the internal inconsistency which really marks modern day tales on sex and gender. This one centers around Hollins University. Hollins University was founded in 1842 in Roanoke, Virginia as an all-women’s school. But in 2019, in the face of the gender revolution, a policy was enacted at this university by which students who are biologically male, but who identify as female would now be eligible to admission at this school. Now theoretically at least, with these new admission requirements, Hollins University could maintain its status as an all-women’s school. Since it’s all women, whether biologically born as such or whether they identified as such. They would all be women under the current way of thinking of things, attending Hollins University. Well, that’s not the end of the story. Hollins University quickly discovered that this one change wasn’t enough, it’s never enough, to keep up with pace of the ever-changing culture in which we live. What happened next was that one of their female students, she arrived at the conclusion that she could not be boxed in with a definition of womanhood, or malehood, and so she said I’m actually non-binary. I’m neither male nor female. Well, other students began to follow suit, and they also started identifying themselves as non-binary. And now this all-women’s school had a real problem on their hands. a real dilemma. To keep ahead of the curve and to keep ahead of the times, to ensure they continued to receive government funding and social capital and approval from the bureaucrats in Washington, they had to decide, should we admit non-binary students, as well? And if we did start admitting nonbinary students, could we still call ourselves an “all-women’s college”? Or eventually would they have to cave into the pressure of opening their doors to everyone including male students, that is assuming anybody knows what a male is anymore.

Well, the Hollins University administration, they managed to thread the needle on this one. And what they do now is they call themselves a historically women’s college. Not an actual women’s college, but a historically women’s college. Here’s what they say. “Hollins students represent a wide range of gender identities, including AFAB, non-binary, trans-masculine, LGBTQIA+ students, as well as cis-gendered women.”
That last one, if you’re not in the know, cis-gendered women simply means women. I.E. those whose gender identity matches with biological realities. So, the once all-women’s college on that list of people they admit, is now placing actual women at the very end of their list of targeted students. The actual women come at the end of this long list of other prospective students including AFAB, that means Assigned Female at Birth if you haven’t caught up with all the gender terminology these days. I’m an AFAB. Can you imagine the nerve of those doctors. They deliver a baby and then they look between the child’s legs, and they presume that that might be a female. Wild I know.

Well one must ask, at least I have to ask, where are the feminists in all of this? Where has the women’s liberation movement gone in the midst of all of this high-speed culture chaos? Remember, it wasn’t all that long ago, some of you remember because you lived that long that these various waves, multiple waves of feminism were crashing over and washing over the entire world. Woman’s advocates were clamoring loudly for women to buck against traditional male-female categories and what they would call conservative male-female power dynamics. We’re talking all the way back to the women’s suffrage movement. I know none of you have lived that long. That was early 20th century. And you get the equal rights movement and the equal pay movement, and the Title IX movement in sports. And interestingly, all feminist advocacy was rooted in the presupposition that what? That one could actually define a woman. And identify a woman and see, hey that’s a woman. But now all of these old-world feminists, whether they’re the old Susan B. Anthony-types, or the Rosie the Riveter-types, or the marching and bra-burning types, or the I am woman, hear me roar types or the I’m just a girl types. They’ve all just been pushed to the side, as the very concept of womanhood and for that matter, maleness has been all obliterated in our day.

Back to the subject at hand for tonight, the Design For Man, it’s safe to say that we live in times which bear less and less resemblance to the era in which our fathers and mothers were raising us. Actually, you can’t say mothers anymore. You must call them birthing people because mothers is inherently gendered. Did you know that? There are those who say you can’t call a mom, a mom because that’s too feminine. And how dare you associate pregnancy with women. But I digress. Think about that. It wasn’t that long ago that people were taking for granted that what you are, what you present as, what you look like, well that’s what you are. That’s the end of it. But now we live in a world that insists that it knows better. A world which insists that matters of gender and sexuality are more complex than previous generations understood. A world which insists that there’s an actual difference between gender and sex, and one’s gender identity and one’s sex.

That leads to all these nonsensical expressions like a woman being trapped in a man’s body and a man being trapped in a woman’s body. And those are taken now as Gospel truth. Now we live in this world where we are being challenged to ask ourselves silly questions. Like is it really still OK to call a person who puts out fires a fireman? Is it really ok for a woman to get a manicure or are there like real male connotations there. Is that mis-gendering her? Also, we live in a world where it’s expected that you are to recognize that gender identity is complex. It’s not binary. You don’t only have males and females, it’s now considered to be a spectrum, or a continuum. So now you have some guy in a mustache and a miniskirt who is telling you that he’s gender queer and that this is who he really is, and by the way, how dare you call him he; and you’re just supposed to go along with it. You’re just supposed to be tolerant and loving. You’re supposed to respect and support his right to be who he says he needs to be.

Now how did we get here? How did we get to this place of utter madness, where men aren’t really men, and women aren’t really women, but instead you just get this sort of declare who you are based on how you feel, all while insisting that all those around you embrace unquestioningly the path that you’ve chosen to go down. How did we get here? Well, there are two tracks of thought that we need to go down to answer that question of how we got here. Down one track is a variety of historical, and sociological, and biological, and medical factors which have been at play now for a couple of decades which have really split the notion in two of sex and gender as though they’re different concepts. And then down another track are the Biblical realities which undergird how we’ve gotten to where we’ve landed on this issue. We’re going to spend a little bit of time on both tracks now as we flesh out this second heading on your worksheet, THE CORRUPTION OF GOD’S DESIGN.

So, let’s begin with that first track. The historical, sociological, biological, medical track. How have we become so confused as a culture about matters of sex and gender? Let’s go back to some of the basics. Some of this will feel like biology class. I’ll do my best. I should probably bring an actual science teacher. Historically, the idea of sex was always linked directly with concepts of maleness and femaleness, and the differences between the two, and the reproductive compatibility between the two, between male and female. Because human biology tells us that a person is composed, chromosomally of either two X chromosomes or an X and a Y chromosome. The presence of a Y chromosome determines maleness, and the absence of a Y chromosome determines femaleness.

Well in utero, meaning, in the womb, those chromosomal differences begin to reveal themselves outwardly. An infant with a Y chromosome will develop one set of sexual organs. The infant without a Y chromosome will develop a different sexual set of organs. Then after birth and on through childhood and into puberty and into adulthood, the differences between the two sexes continue to reveal themselves. Differences in physical features, differences in bone length and density, differences in fat distribution, differences in musculature. But the basic point is that sex has always referred to the biological and physiological reality, rooted in our chromosomal composition that we are different. How God made us, as male or female, is what depicts reality. What depicts truth. Put another way, the way God made us, in His image as He formed us in our mother’s womb as either male or female, but as image bearers, that is who we are. That’s who we are. Meaning if you are a man, you will always have male chromosomes and there will never be a moment where you were not a man. And if you are a female, if you are a woman, you will always have female chromosomes. They’ll never go away. You will always be a female. No amount of personal feelings about your identity, no matter how many botched surgical operations you might go through, will ever change that. These are biologically fixed realities which have been affirmed throughout human history, save the last few decades, and they line up directly with what God’s Word says. Again, “male and female He created them.”

Now, historically, a word we hear more now today, gender was historically thought, essentially thought to be synonymous or at least comparable in a lot of ways with sex. Now that word gender was used much more infrequently in the past. But when it was used, it was used with reference like the word sex is, to maleness or to femaleness. For instance, in the study of languages, linguists, even of old, would use that word gender to describe grammatical categories. That noun is masculine. That pronoun is feminine. That’s how we would use that term in that context. Also, the root word for gender is the prefix gen, g-e-n. That highlights just how closely linked the word gender is to the traditional teaching that there are only two sexes and that our maleness and our femaleness is tied ultimately to our ability to procreate. In fact, take a look at this entry from The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Look at how many words come from the prefix gen and note how many of these words are linked to procreation and procreation between two members of the opposite sex, male and female, when they come together. Not all of them do but many of them are reproductive in orientation.

Gender, genealogy, generate, generous, genesis, genetic, gene, genial, genital, genitive, genius, genocide, gens, gentleman, gentlewoman, genuine, and here’s an important one, the suffix, geny as in progeny. What this little review of this entry from this dictionary tells us that historically, the terms sex and gender were used interchangeably. There were two sexes, male and female just as they are today. And when those two sexes came together, they would procreate, creating progeny, leading to the birth of another human who would also be either male or female. Pretty simple stuff. Well though it is indeed really simple, in the 1950s, and the 1960s, and the 1970s, it became much less simple, and much more complex, specifically within the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and a variety of medical fields, where the idea began to be introduced that one’s sex and one’s gender are different, they’re distinct.

Over the last 50 years especially a definitional wedge has been inserted between the concepts of sex and gender. So now what we’re told is that sex refers to the person’s biological traits that are chromosomal composition, while gender refers to their behavioral and cultural expressions of typical male or female traits. Sandra Eder writes, and I really hope this is the only time I will ever be behind this pulpit site a professor from UC Berkley. But that’s what’s going on here. A UC Berkley sociologist, I’m quoting her because she is acknowledging there was a time in history where these concept of sex and gender became bifurcate, split up. She writes, “the term gender was first used in medicine in the 1950s when clinicians introduced a new concept of sex, claiming that experiences rather than biology shape much of what we identify as masculine and feminine behavior or as they called it, gender role.” She is identifying here that distinction in the 1950s between gender and sex. So historically, sex and gender were terms that were used interchangeably to describe reproductive or biological realities. More recently as we see here in certain fields of study, gender has now been declared to be different than sex. It’s more experiential.

Now unfortunately the word smithery hasn’t really stopped there. Because one’s sex and one’s gender were divorced from each other, and once gender became its own concept, its own construct, well then next came the whole idea of gender identity, which is defined as how one perceives or how one experiences oneself as either male or female or in some cases, they’d say neither. This concept of gender identity is a hyper-loaded term, not only because is it founded on the presupposition that one’s very identity as a human is wrapped up in how one identifies one’s gender, but also because it assumes that it is permissible and it’s rational to ask the question, “do you feel male or do you feel female?”

I mean, all of us as we know that the Word teaches us this and our own hearts reveal it to us, all of us are quite fickle about our feelings. Our feelings change all the time. Our feelings can change with appetites and moods and medications and all the other varieties that are out there. So is a person’s gender identity, who they feel they are today, what they feel themselves to be today, really supposed to dictate whether they should have some radical, life-altering surgical operation? Or whether they should be permitted to use a different public restroom? What if their feelings change tomorrow? What if their feelings change in three weeks or in five years? Do they get one of these gender mulligans? The stakes are high. Especially when you talk about this is happening more and more today, the actual mutilation of one’s body.

Well, because the heart is an idol factory as John Calvin once famously said, and because man in his flesh, knows no end to coming up with bad ideas and worse ideas and even more terrible ideas, surely, you’ve heard by now that the gender revolutionaries of our day have no longer limited the idea of gender to just two sexes male or female or male and female.
Hardly. The list is far more expansive. Today, you can be and I’m sorry to have to read this to you in church on a Sunday night. You can be “AFAB, assigned female at birth. You can be Agender, Aliagender, AMAB, assigned male at birth. Aporagender. Bigender. Cisgender. Cisnormative. Demigender. Feminine-of-center. Feminine presenting. Gender apathetic. Gender expansive. Gender-nonconforming. Gender-questioning. Gender-variant. Genderfluid. Genderqueer. Gendervoid. Intergender. Masculine-of-center. Masculine-presenting. Misgender. Male-to-female. Multi-gender. Nonbinary. Novigender. Omnigender. Pangender. Polygender. Third Gender. Transgender. Transfeminine. Transmasculine. Trigender. And of course, Two-spirit.” I haven’t even given you all of the different pronouns which are supposed to go along with those various ideas and expressions of gender.

I’ve given you a lot of dark stuff here tonight. This is all heavy stuff. I’ve quoted and summarized for you a number of examples of what ultimately is man’s folly, man’s wicked means to bring about his own wicked ends, because all he knows in his heart is wickedness. As Paul tells us in Romans 3:18, “There is no fear of God in their eyes.” Just to keep it before us, I want to bring it back again, I want this to be like Scriptural smelling salt to kind of wake us up from all the gender lists and things like that. And just to remember this is the standard in the midst of all the madness that’s around us, “male and female He created them.”

We’ve gone down that historical, sociological, medical, biological, track of how we got here, and how we’ve become so confused culturally about matters of sex and gender. Now I want to take us down this other track, a very important track. And of course, in a church like ours where we consider the Biblical realities, which underlie how we’ve gotten to where we are today on these matters of sex and gender. From a Biblical frame of reference, how in the world did we get here? Well at the root of all the things that we see in today’s gender revolution as it is unfolding and even playing out before us still; at the root of it all is self-worship, idolatry, pride. Which is the exact opposite of what anyone’s posture ought to be as we make our way through this world.

As image bearers, as those who have been made in the image of God, we were made to worship God. Woven into the very fabric of our being is our God-given purpose of worshiping the God whose image we are. John Calvin says, “Praise and outward homage and adoration are the very expression by a dependent creature of the relation in which as a creature he stands to God, the very end for which he was created and exists.” Hughes Oliphant Old, I’m assuming this guy is from Mississippi, says “We worship God because God created us to worship Him. Worship is at the center of our existence, at the heart of our reason for being.” Augustine of Hippo who got a lot wrong, but he got some things right said, “Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”

Well, it’s not merely the words of mere men which speak to this purpose God has given us to worship Him. It’s stated all over the Scriptures as well. Psalm 29:2, “Ascribe to Yahweh the glory of His name; worship Yahweh in the splendor of holiness.” Psalm 95:6, “Come, let us worship and bow down, let us kneel before Yahweh our Maker.” We as God’s creation and as His image-bearers, have been made to worship Him.

But here’s the problem and here’s the issue. Because of sin, mankind now worships all of the wrong things. Man is no less a worshiper than he was in his unfallen condition. Contrary to the views of modernity and postmodernity which says that man has outgrown religion or man has outgrown worship or man is now irreligious, nonreligious. Man is very much religious today. Man is every bit the worshiper today that he was even before the fall. But he’s now in a state of sin. He’s an idolater and so he worships the wrong things. That’s all that Paul is picking up here in Romans 1:21-23 he says, “For even though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the likeness of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” Paul here is describing idolatry to a tee. Idolatry is the inversion of what was supposed to be. Rather than the image of God worshiping his Creator, the idolater is the image-maker who worships the image, the idol that he himself has created.

For some, those idols are physical like here again in Romans 1, the image of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. But for others, the idols are of the heart. In either case, what’s being erected is a fabricated deity, a false god, whose worship requirements match up a lot better conveniently with the worshiper’s own preferences as opposed to what God actually requires. By that I mean this. It is much easier to worship the god of gluttony, than it is to worship the God who calls you to be self-controlled. It’s much easier to worship the god of ease and the god of comfort, than it is to worship the actual God who calls you to be disciplined. It’s much easier to worship the god of the wandering eye, than it is to worship the God who calls on you to flee from sexual immorality. Now, here’s the thing about idols and idolatry and that perverted cycle of sin and Satanic influence from which it all comes. Though we might think that we are master over our idols since, after all, we formed those idols either with a chisel or in our hearts. The reality is that we begin to image them. We make the idols but then we start looking like the idols. That’s the testimony of Scripture. Psalm 115:4-7. The Psalmist says here “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of man’s hands. They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not see; they have ears, but they do not hear; they have noses, but they do not smell; as for their hands, they do not feel; as for their feet, they do not walk; they do not make a sound with their throat.” Now look at this expression in verse 8, “Those who make them will become like them, everyone who trusts in them.”

G.K. Beale said it helpfully and succinctly when he says, “We become what we worship.” Theologian Richard Lints expands on this by saying “Worship fashioned the worshipper into an imprint of the object worshipped. Worship of the one true and living God brought life in all its purpose, dignity and security as a consequence. Worship of the false gods refashioned worshippers in the image of the inanimate creation.” Our idols, in other words, are masters over us. They become the things that enslave us. And so, for all members of fallen humanity, there’s this basic identity conflict, this identity crisis that’s in play. We have a true identity, a real identity of having been made in the image of God, the God that we’ve been called to worship. But then we deny that identity. We suppress the truth of that identity. Romans 1. Instead, we adopt a false identity which is centered around worshiping our false idols, which we are committed to clinging to fiercely, even though it takes us further and further away from our true identity as God’s creation, His image-bearers.

I’ve taken us a bit on a rabbit trail here. How does this all tie back into our topic for tonight? And namely, Biblical Anthropology and God’s design for man as being either male or female? Well, the tie-in is this. The idol which sits most prominently on the throne of every human heart is the idol of self. Now that idol has always been there. Going all the way back. But that idol has been fanned into flame in certain generations by certain ways of thinking and certain streams of thought. That idol has gained special prominence especially in the post Enlightenment period. The so-called Age of Reason.

Note how Immanual Kant, he was an enlightenment philosopher and thinker, advanced this particular form of idolatry. The self. He wrote that “Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity. (He’s speaking of religion in this context) Immaturity is the incapacity to use one’s intelligence without the guidance of another. Such immaturity is self-caused if not caused by lack of intelligence, but by lack of determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another. Dare to know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” Then he says, “The public use of a man’s reason must be free at all times, and this alone can bring enlightenment among men.” Now you might see these words and just on first read look at those words and think what’s the big deal? Shouldn’t we think and shouldn’t we think freely and shouldn’t we be able to think for ourselves? Careful, let’s not allow our distinctly American views of freedom and free-spiritedness, override the reality that first and foremost, we were made to be worshipers, worshipers of God before there was a 250th anniversary of the United States of America. What Kant is really saying here and what every generation after him has said ever since, is that we ought to be free to think, that’s what he’s saying, however we want to think. Even if that means being free from God and even if that means being free from having to conform our thoughts to what God has given us in His Word. No longer then, according to this way of thinking, is God and His glory the aim of our existence or our study or our hope. Instead, what’s placed on the highest pedestal of our hearts, the supreme idol before which we bow, is our freedom to think how we want to think. Our freedom to conceive of ourselves and our purpose in life, however we’d like to do so.

Now this idea of post enlightenment, freedom and liberty is something we are direct beneficiaries of, living here today, sitting here today, having celebrated what we celebrated yesterday. The 250th anniversary of our nation’s freedom was celebrated yesterday. Our independence. Our independence from England was at the heart of course of the revolution, our separation from England. We know as we read some of the founding documents, specifically the Declaration of Independence, baked into that is the language that we are entitled to life and to liberty and the pursuit of what? Happiness. Those words have been etched forever into our national consciousness as Americans, once that pen was put to parchment in that declaration in 1776, it became part of our culture. Now those words were derived from political philosophers like John Locke, but those words, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not taken as universal truths even when they were written. Here’s Tom Holland, not Spider-Man, but the historian, he says, “That all men had been created equal, and endowed with an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, were not remotely self-evident truths.” Meaning at the time of the Declaration of Independence.

Well of course here in America those words were described in that document as self-evident, and they were forged into our founding documents and into our national consciousness. In the 250 years since, those ideas of independence and individualism and freedom and a close cousin of all those terms is self. They’ve all blended together in how we talk about things and how we think about things. John Stuart Mill is a political philosopher, and he wrote a work in 1859, titled “On Liberty,” and he said, “one of the principal ingredients of human happiness, and quite the chief ingredient of individual and social progress is the free development of individuality as one of the leading essentials of well-being.” He is contributing to this idea of promotion of the self and the good that the self can do for oneself. In the late 1880s, a poet named Robert Browning said, this sounds very 2026 to me, “Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise from outward things, whate’er you may believe. There is an inmost center in us all, where truth abides in fulness.” Now, do not get me wrong. I’m of course not against the ideas of American independence. I am pro Fourth of July. I’m very grateful for the privileges that we have in this wonderful country that we have been placed in. What I’m trying to do here is show how that the history of American ideals of independence and freedom, they stemmed from a post-Enlightenment way of thinking which really was all about idolizing the self and one’s freedom to be autonomous and independent.

In past generations like between the founding of the American Republic and today, that freedom of self has been expressed in a number of different ways. In our nation and the American experiment, it’s been the freedom of the people to be self-governed. In capitalistic circles it’s been the freedom of the individual to make money and pursue happiness and wealth. In the libertarian realm it’s been the freedom to be free from governmental intrusion. Among Marxists and socialists even it’s been the freedom to be out from under economic and class oppression. And in the world of Disney-fied entertainment it’s the freedom to follow one’s dreams as you look upon a star.

Well today in more recent times, the idolatry of self and this idolatry of freedom of self, has taken on a new form, a different form in the freedom to define oneself. What one is and what one is not. Matthew P.W. Roberts is helpful. He says “With the emergence of the Free Self as the most prominent idol of the west, the identity-defining effect has taken a somewhat different form. Now the deity is the freedom of the individual to follow his or her own desires, to construct his or her own person. This is what makes a person (according to the way of thinking today) truly human. Therefore, what I want to do, my desires and passions, becomes not merely an important part of my experience but definitive of my very person.” In our times the notion of self has in many circles replaced God. And there’s no place really today where this notion of self and self-expression and self-worship, has taken on more prominence, than the topic we’ve been studying tonight, in this realm of sex and gender.

When God made us in His image as we’ve already covered, He made us to be male or female. So, when a man declares today that he is actually a female trapped in a male’s body, or when a woman identifies herself as a man, ultimately what either is doing is engaging in an act of idolatry. They are worshiping self. They are elevating self. They are elevating their views of how they feel perceived themselves or think about themselves. Their perception of what they believe to be true about themselves, about what God has already declared them to be. When a person, made in the image of God and born as a biological male, identifies as a female, well that’s idolatry. It’s sin. And that’s because such a person is saying that his own inward desires, or thoughts, or views, or feelings about himself actually define who he is. When God has already defined him as who he is as one of God’s image-bearers, as one whom God has made to worship Him. Man wasn’t made to declare back to God how God ought to have created him or made him. Man was made to praise God in the very form that God actually made him. So, when somebody insists that they are being misgendered or that they’re transgender or what have you, they’re not making an ontological truth claim. Meaning, they aren’t making a statement which lines up with divinely ordered reality. No. What they’re doing actually is articulating a religious belief, albeit a false one, the way that any false worshiper might articulate their stanchly held religious belief.

Think of it this way. A Muslim will certainly hold to certain truth claims, to certain religious beliefs. Now those religious beliefs are out of step with what the true God, the God of the Bible, has revealed to be true. Their beliefs are wrong, but they have faith. They believe. Now their truth isn’t truth. It’s not truth at all. It’s wrong. And so it is with this example of those who corrupt God’s design for man. For those who deny that God made man in His image, to be male and female. For those who claim that their God-given sex as male or female, is somehow in misalignment with their own perception of their gender identity. Their belief that they have been mis-gendered is no different than a Muslim who believes that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet. It’s false worship. Both are wrong. Both are idolatresses. Both are directing worshipful thoughts and beliefs toward a misdirected object. They are not giving God the glory He is due. Both are wrong. Both groups, the Muslim and the man masquerading as a woman. They have done exactly what Paul is describing here in Romans 1:25, “They’ve exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever.” So, for those who have been sucked into and swept away by the so-called gender revolution, this ultimately isn’t about male or female, or transitioning, or surgery, or hormonal treatments, or how Christians are just so intolerant and unloving toward them. No, those who have been drawn into this form of moral insanity and Biblical infidelity, what they are is ultimately, they are unrepentant worshipers of self. Those who placing the sovereignty of the individual over the sovereignty of God.

With that we want to get into our third topic this evening and it will be short. THE DEFENSE OF GOD’S DESIGN. The reality is for those who have given in to this modern-day rejection of God’s design for the two sexes, those who are the side of pro gender insanity, they have the cultural winds at their backs today. They have governmental authorities even behind them. In fact, I read a report this weekend about a case in Scotland where “activists (it said) were promoting the view that a transwoman is not a woman, were accused of breaking the law because of their positions, their statements that a transwoman is not actually a woman. I read another account of a student in New York who was training to be a teacher, but they were suspended and disallowed from finishing their mandatory teaching curriculum because they had posted an Instagram video where they said, “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman.”

There is a real threat and real fear today that’s more and more rooted in reality, that those who speak up for God’s design will face consequences. Because they choose not to worship at the temple of transgenderism and accept the absurdities of that movement because they have denied the autonomy of self and the right of every person to declare who they believe they are or who they want to be, they’re going to be targeted. What is our response to be? What are we going to do?

I have a couple of ideas here I’m going to throw your way. One is to be committed as a way of being committed to defending God’s design. Ask questions. That presumes you’re engaging with those who are sucked into this sort of way of thinking. Ask questions that will challenge them to think about the ideology to which they are clinging so tightly. As a question like would a woman be able to have children with a man who was born a biological woman? How would that work? Tell me. Tell me more. Would it be considered normal or wise or proper for a man who believes that his right arm is improperly attached to his body to go to his doctor, otherwise-healthy man, and say please cut this off. Would it be considered right or normal or wise for a 49-year-old grown man who thinks of himself as a six-year-old girl and then go ahead and sign up for a young girls’ soccer team? So why is this different than this whole idea of being misgendered and your so-called gender identity not matching up with your physical biology. I mean these are hard questions to ask and they’ll offend no doubt. But I appreciate what Erwin Lutzer has said. He said, “It is better to be accused of being harsh than it is to tell lies with hushed tones of compassion, love, care, and thoughtfulness.” Ask questions. And you don’t just ask questions. Here’s the other piece of this and then we’ll close. Questions only get us so far in our dialog with those who are stuck in this world view. At some point you need to start laying down some propositional truths. That leads to this concluding set of thoughts which is that though these individuals who identify as transgender or misgendered are massively confused. They are also deceived and they’re depraved and they’re sinfully elevating the self.

But we also need to remember that they are still souls. They are still image-bearers. It is no solution to simply throw up our arms and ignore them or to mock them or to ridicule them. No, as with any sinner we are called to help the sinner to see the depths of the satanic deception that they are under. For this group in particular our job is to help them see that the solution to this identity crisis that they’re having, is actually not about sex or gender at all, but it’s about their sin and their identity with their sin. Remember that those who walk in darkness are unable to see things as they actually are. In fact, they cannot see things as they actually are. Proverbs 4:19, “The way of the wicked is like thick darkness; they do not know over what they stumble.” They’re fumbling their way through this world. Paul says in Romans 3:16, “destruction and misery are in their paths.” Then he says in Romans 3:17, “the path of peace they have not known.”

So where are these folk supposed to find peace? Well, the answer for them as it is for anyone is by coming to faith in Jesus Christ by repenting and believing in the Gospel. Romans 5:8 here does not say as I read it, that Christ came to save people who had everything figured out and had all issues of identity sorted out. It says He came to save sinners. And men today who believe that they’ve been misgendered, women today who believe they’re genderless, men or women who have mangled their bodies in accordance with their mangled way of thinking, none of them would be outside the reach of this God who demonstrates His love toward sinners and showing that love through what Christ did for us. Remember folks, the Gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. That includes those who today have been sucked into this tornado of transgenderism.

So as long as there is still breath in their lungs, they have hope. We as followers of Christ are the messengers, the deliverers of that message of hope. And the question is, are we going to be faithful now in presenting that message of hope.

We’ve covered a lot tonight. I’m out of time. I hope this has been helpful. I hope it’s been clarifying. Next Sunday night we’re going to get into the worth of man or the value of man, and we’ll actually get into topics like abortion, end of life, and topics such as those. I hope that’s helpful. Let’s pray.