Jesus and "Gender Issues"

Introduction

I wish we didn’t have to talk about what we are going to talk about today. I wish we could move on to the next part of this text and assume that everyone will understand the biblical view of gender and sexuality as opposed to what we hear in the world around us. However, this is not the case. The truth is that what the world is saying about gender and sexuality will come into your life. At work, there will be rainbow flags and pins in the month of June. Your kids at school are being taught about this on a regular basis and unless you are actively combating it, they are going to listen to it by default. Even if you homeschool your kids, they are likely to encounter this through movies, TV, even kids shows, through friends, through the news, and in various other places.

It is also true that, even if we put something in our statement of faith and all say we believe it, if we do not know why we hold to our counter-cultural position. Why is it so important? Why isn’t this something we can agree to disagree on? Isn’t it unloving to deny someone their preference in pronouns or who they want to marry? These are the loaded questions you are going to hear from even professing Christians, and so it is important for us to know why we believe what we believe, why it is important enough to die for, and how Jesus would speak to our situation today.

As a final note, I also wish that I could speak to the adults here without the children, but the fact is that children are the primary targets of the indoctrination that promotes these harmful ideas. Since that is the case, I think the children should stay and parents, you should plan on talking about these issues with them. If you don’t, someone else will.

Male and Female

That we even need to speak about Jesus’ view of gender shows just how far the world has gone away, not only from what is biblical, but what is sensible and reasonable and has been for all of human history. Although it is true that Jesus is not here trying to define gender or speaking to the 21st century western issues, by what he says when addressing marriage and divorce puts Jesus’ thoroughly biblical view of gender on display. But before we look at the biblical view of gender, which should be fairly obvious from the outside looking in, we will look at what exactly the world is telling us about gender and then see how the biblical view corrects these false claims. For the sake of clarity, I am going to refer to the view of gender we get from the Bible as the biblical view, and the view that is largely paraded in the cultural west as the “modern” view.

The World’s Current View of Gender and Sexuality

The modern view of gender and sexual identity is established on a few presuppositions that are often not honestly presented. A presupposition is a foundational belief that forms the basis for your beliefs. Presuppositions are rarely stated out loud, and many debates would be more fruitful if they were. If we start on different foundations of thinking, of course we are going to come to different conclusions. So let us look at the beliefs that form the foundation of the LGBT theory of gender and sexuality.

The first of these presuppositions is that gender and sexual identity are different things. To understand this, we have to first learn how they define certain terms. We are not going to be able to refute and correct ideas that we do not understand.

Gender, they say, is a cultural phenomenon. Sexual identity, on the other hand, is the biological sex that one belongs too (although we will see that biology has little to do with it for them). Sexual expression has to do with who someone is sexually attracted to. So for example, practicing homosexuality is sexual expression, being a male is sexual identity, being non-binary can be either gender or sexual identity or both, and being a girl is gender identity. Sexuality can refer either to identity or expression. If that is confusing to you, don’t worry because it doesn’t really make sense and the lines between these three categories are very blurred at times.

The second presupposition is that gender roles and identities are a social construct. The modern view of gender is a product of third wave feminism, the idea that the only differences between men and women are cultural and not objective fact. This is the cornerstone of the modern view, that men and women are not different at all. This view sprang from a reaction to older view of women that take away their dignity and equality before God. However, instead of focusing on equality of dignity, the modern feminist focused on universal equality. That is, sameness not only in quality but in function. Already, this departs from objective reality as a man cannot give birth to a child and a woman will not typically be able to bench press as much as a man of similar skill and experience. There are also emotional, social, relational, psychological differences that equally express the image of God when united together. Feminism steamrolls these differences down to mere cultural realities that can, and should, be changed if we want them to.

The third presuppositions is that gender and sexuality are determined by the subjective feelings of an individual, not by objective biological and creational fact. The result has been that gender and sexual identity are completely based on a person’s feeling and desire to express themselves. If someone feels like a woman, they are a woman, and vice versa. Their biological reality has nothing to do with it, so they say. The same goes for sexuality, where a person may go further and wish to mutilate their body to reflect their inner feeling of manhood or womanhood which go against how God has made them. Already we see this lie is based on unbelief, that my feeling are more important and more real than God’s plans and purposes.

The next presuppositions is that gender and sexual expressions exist on a fluid spectrum, not a binary reality. This means that, according to the modern view, there is no reason that there should only be two options when it comes to gender. The list is in the thousands if you care to look it up, and since personal feelings are the standard, people have the right to choose which pronouns people use to refer to them, even if they made up those pronouns ten minutes ago. The same goes for sexual expression, where a man might be attracted to women, or to men, or both, or neither, or to men in the morning and women in the evening, whatever the case may be.

This leads to their next fundamental belief, that Trans-gender and non-binary people have the right to expect society to accept their subjective gender and sexual identities. That is, people who decide that their feelings about their gender or sexuality don’t line up with how they were created have the right to demand that we believe their feelings over how God created them. This becomes important because when someone tells you to refer to them by pronouns that do not reflect reality, they are asking you to believe their feelings over God’s revelation. It is not enough that they are allowed to live this way unhindered or to be accepted as people, there must be unanimous agreement that they are right about who they feel that they are. To fall short of this isn’t just rude, it is an act of violence, so they say.

and that is the last foundational belief, that Traditional binary views on gender and sexuality are violent and oppressive and to express such views is akin to violent assault. This is not an exaggeration, this is actually what is taught and believed. This is also why the church is engaged with so much intensity and conflict on this issue. They will blame transgender suicides on the church, even though suicide rates among people who identify as transgender are the same or sometimes higher if they’re feelings are accepted as in places where a more traditional view is held. They will say that to refuse to use someone’s preferred pronouns is akin to dehumanizing them. The fact is, very little violence is experienced by this group today, although in past generations it would be greater, and the group needs to keep up the appearance of persecution because of something called intersectionality. We cannot dive into that monster of a devilish idea, but in short if they are not the persecuted minority, they cannot demand the power that they think runs society. They think that traditional gender roles are a tool to enslave minorities, and that this power needs to be taken by those minorities in order to give themselves justice. This is why there is such a push for diversity that comes along with this idea of intersectionality, which is closely tied to LGBT ideology. If they are not the persecuted minority, they cannot demand power, and so they will redefine violence in order to keep up that appearance.

Unfortunately, Christians give into a similar mindset. Dominion theology runs on the same idea that Christians, as a persecuted minority, should have more power in government and society. However, this is not biblical nor is it reasonable, and our attention should not be to play the game of intersectionality, but to escape it by faith in Christ our King.

A Biblical View of Gender and Sex

Now that we have made it through the lies that underlie the LGBT movement and the way it is pushed into our schools, libraries, governments, and other places of cultural development, let us look at how the Bible frames the reality of gender and sexuality.

First, Gender is objective, not subjective, and is based on creational fact. We see clearly that this was Jesus’ view as he quotes Genesis one, “have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female”. Gender is objective, and it is a beautiful part of creation. God decided that his image could not be adequately reflected in just one man or woman; the two were necessary and when in union with one another they reflect the image of God most clearly and purely. In short, according to Jesus, gender is not a human construct, it is a divine one. To tamper with it is a rebellious action which reflects a heart that is not submissive to God.

Gender and sex are directly correlated and binary. Someone may argue that Jesus is talking about biological sex and not gender, but distinguishing those two concepts is a very modern idea and did not exist in the world in which Jesus walked this earth. The words that follow about marriage being between the one man and his wife confirm this and link the gender roles in the marriage (husband and wife) to the biological sexes of the two (male and female). There is a direct correlation between being a male and a man, or a female and a woman.

Every Person is created by God to reflect the image of God as either a male or a female. This means that men and women are equal in dignity, but are not the same in function or role. While genders show two sides of the image of God, they are equally created to display that image. Again, there is an equality in dignity and image-bearing status. A woman, though she may be temporarily under the authority of her husband or father, sits alone under God’s authority as their equal. On any sports team, all the positions have equal value. Without a goalie or defense, the other team will continually score on you. Without an offense, you will never get any goals on the other team. Both roles are equal and yet different in function. God made men and women, not as competitors but as team players, each interested in the success of the whole family and community. Each playing their part, which is necessary for that end. How much damage has been done by two extremes, the fundamentalist who says that women are to be seen and not heard, and the feminist who say that women must compete with men in order to have any meaning or value. Ironically, both of these positions over-emphasize the masculine roles and put no weight on the glory of femininity.

Now, when we speak of gender roles, we should note that there is an element of them that is indeed a social construct. For example, the idea that pink is a girl colour is a very recent social construct that was likely pushed for marketing purposes. However, at their core there is a basic and objective set of roles which men and women are created to play, though how exactly these play out in practice may differ in different places and times.

Marriage is an institution created by God, not mankind, and can only be made between one man and one woman. Just as gender is not a human invention, but a divine creation, so also marriage is not of human origins and thus we have no right to modify it. In my family, we have the right to change family traditions and the way we do things because, after all, we decided to do them a certain way in the first place. But we have no authority to change Canadian law as individuals, since that law did not come from us but from the government. So also, many human customs and traditions can change. Marriages can look different in different cultures to a degree. Just look at how different an Indian or Chinese wedding is compared to a traditionally Canadian one. However, the elements that God has set in place cannot change, and those are laid out by Christ in this text. A man cannot marry a man, nor a woman marry a woman. Polygamy existed in the OT, but was always against God’s plan and we see God consistently pushing against it throughout the OT. Marriage is one man making a covenant with one woman, to become a family and raise children, to show the image of God each in their own unique way, and to go on this way until one of them departs this world in death. Anything outside of this goes against God’s will and plan and will hurt us in the long run. There is no way around it if we are consistent and faithful with the text of Scripture, homosexual marriages cannot be recognized by the church which bears the Name of the one who made marriage to begin with. To do so is wicked and false.

Finally, the Bible shows us that we live in a fallen world filled with lies, and it is possible to suffer under real feeling that do not correlate with reality. Just as Christ recognized that there are times when divorce is the only option, so there are times when our feelings about gender and sex do not aleign with God’s will. This is a reality that even the modern psychological world realizes in every way except in this area. When someone is being treated for something like Borderline Personality Disorder and they have very intense feelings of self-hatred, they will be taught how to accept a feeling as a real feeling but disconnect that feeling from reality. You can feel a certain way, accept that you do really feel that way, but also recognize that the feeling is not in line with what you know is true. However, when it comes to people struggling with feelings about various sexual and gender identities, all of a sudden they refuse to treat them this way. For all the LGBT community says about love and acceptance, the world does not love people who are suffering from deviant feelings about their gender and sexuality. They are the only people with deviant feelings that are unsubstantiated by reality that they will encourage in their harmful fantasy rather than treat them in how to see the truth. Truth is healing when coupled with love and kindness, but allowing someone to continue in self-deception is a hateful thing. Compassionately showing someone truth is true love. Christians were wrong to look hatefully upon these people at times when they have done so. They should taken pity instead. There are people that are suffering from a feeling about their sex and gender that is disconnected from reality, and many of those people will end their life over it. It is real suffering based on lies. This leaves us who believe the Bible as the only people who can truly love these people. The world, in a backhanded way, degrades them. It is as if a therapist were to say to a suicidal person, “you are right, you are a horrible person and don’t deserve to live. You feel like your life has no value, and you are correct.” Sadly, even this is becoming a reality as medically assisted suicide is legal and growing in Canada. And yet, every licensed therapist in this country is expected by our government to lie and tell a teenager who feels like the opposite gender that their feelings are in line with reality, even though they are not, and that they should mutilate their body to conform to that twisted falsehood. That is hateful, despicable, and murderous since it often speeds their way to ending their own life. Do not believe the people who wave rainbow flags and say “love is love”, whatever that means. They do not know the meaning of the word! Love is truth with compassion. Love is self-sacrifice. Love is Jesus Christ who died for someone who mutilated their body and, in despair, has nowhere to go but death. Jesus died for them, and we have the responsibility to love these people the way Jesus did, not by reinforcing the lie, but by helping them discover the truth in Christ through the gospel.

Conclusion

There are so many questions that have to be hashed out when it comes to this. To what extent to we remove ourselves from the LGBT ideology that has worked its way throughout society, whether it is the arts, educations, entertainment, or government. We cannot remove ourselves from the world, and even if we could we are not commanded to. In John 17:15 Jesus prays,

John 17:15 NIV 2011

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.

but in 2 Corinthians 6:14-16

2 Corinthians 6:14–16 ESV

Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

2 Corinthians 7:1 ESV

Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God.

This is about finding the balance between remaining in the world and yet making sure the world is not in us and that we are removed from the impurity of the world. What does this look like?

It means you cannot avoid buying things from a company that supports these lies, or even working for one, but you can refuse to wear a pride pin at work. It means you have worldly friends who believe in this or even identify as some form of LGBT identity, and yet you respectfully refuse to use improper pronouns. There are some Christians that think we should use their preferred pronouns, and I respectfully disagree. If I call a man “she” or “her”, not only am I lying but I am also propagating a lie that will destroy that person, body and soul. It is not loving them to do so, even if they find it offensive if I don’t.

But above all this, let us remember why we are in the world. We are here to preach the Gospel and show the love of Christ. The love of Christ does not conform to the lies of the world but it does mean compassion, mercy, patience, and grace. It means speaking the truth with empathy and respect. We hate LGBT dogma primarily because we love Christ, but also because we love the people that it lies to. There are many people hurting in their sin, it destroys them but they do not know anything else. They do not know the healing, the love, the compassion, and the freedom that is in Christ. He died for sinners such as us, and so surely he died for sinner like them.

Let us remember the wounds that Christ received and the death that Christ died at the hands of sinful men for whom he prayed “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Whatever we suffer to stand on truth, we will. We must! If there is a sacrifice to make, we are obligated to take up our cross and follow Christ who spoke nothing but truth. But in such truth-speaking, let it be with the heart of love. May this demonic doctrine be soundly defeated, and it will be, by the humble love and truth of Christ at work through us.