We're in the middle of a Saturday series on what it means to be human, taken from an old Briefing article written in 2001. After canvassing various secular options in the first, Peter Jensen last week began his biblical overview by challenging us to think about humanity as essentially one race. This week, we move on to think about what it means that we are two sexes.

Two sexes

The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

The man said: “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, for she was taken out of man”. For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. (Gen 2:18-25).

The Bible, affirming our oneness as humanity, is yet against individualism. It defeats any suggestion that we are identical with each other in every important way, merely a loosely connected bunch of individuals. In fact the Bible could be written for this very age, in which the personal freedom of people has run rampant. According to current society, we have ‘partners’, and the choice of whether it may be a male or female is morally indifferent. But the Bible tells us that we do not just have partners, we have husbands and wives. Our race is differentiated into two sexes, and that is something fundamental to being human. Without understanding that there are two distinct sexes, we will not understand how to be fully human.

It is a matter of understanding complementary union. Woman comes from man—she is not an animal. She is his equal, bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. In sinfulness men with their (usually) superior physical strength have abused women and treated them like animals—but God did not make another animal for Adam. He made a woman, the same substance as man.

Yet woman is different from man, fulfilling God's intention that he should not be alone, but have a helper fit for him. She bears the honoured title of 'mother of all living'. Indeed, in the fullness of time, the Saviour of the human race is born of a woman, but without a man. The woman is named by the man and answers to him, in correspondence to him; in marriage they are united, as no animal or other part of the creation can be united with us. This is the beginning of kinship and family, something which is possible because the man and the woman are the same and yet different.

There is therefore an order in the relationship, corresponding to the order between Christ and God, and between the Church and Christ, which should be acknowledged and delighted in. Christianity does not stand for individualism or for collectivism; it stands for community. In one sense we are all ‘female’ to God for we are his ‘bride’, and we delight in that. God's order should not be objected to; it should be enjoyed and explored.

The Bible stands in total opposition to sexual looseness; it sees the uniting of the bodies of two people, male and female—not male to male, not female to female, not human to animal—to be a unity of persons with profound consequences. A person with many partners has made himself cheap, and less than human. When sex is treated like a workout in the gym we are doing damage to our souls. A man who has had many partners cannot forget those partners. Even when he wishes to love one woman deeply and truly, he will find that the others who have been in his bed still exist powerfully in his mind. Promiscuity is profoundly inhuman. It destroys us. It is a matter of deep regret that it is so common, and promoted as the natural lifestyle. It is not natural for us at all; it is a perversion of our nature.

The intrusion of sin has, from the very beginning, disturbed and distorted this relationship. Our society tries to find solutions to the distortion, but looks in all the wrong places. The intense interest in male and female relationships in the last few decades has not lead to human happiness or fulfilment, and it never will—because it rejects God's law. The cult of ‘living together’ has not encouraged human well being. A government that was truly interested in the good health of its society would never encourage it or endorse it. It's bad for you. The way of God remains the way of blessing, despite the capacity of sin to ruin the good and frustrate our best intentions.

(Read the full article online.)

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