Only the Creator has the Right to Define Gender
As the Christian worldview continues to evaporate in American culture, rank and file Americans are alienating themselves from the reality of the one true God. This widening chasm between personal belief/practice and spiritual reality is reflected in court decisions and political trends. Incredibly, this devolution strikes at the very heart of the nation’s origins and its ability to perpetuate itself. The Creator alluded to in America’s founding documents and the organic writings of most of the Founders and Framers is swiftly being brushed aside and marginalized in daily life.
The only legitimate way to evaluate and regulate human behavior is to look to the Creator. He is the One Who, in the words of the Founders of the American Republic, “created” all men, “endowed” them with life, provides them with “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” and Who functions as “the Supreme Judge of the world.”1 If human opinion becomes the standard for judging ethical behavior, nothing but confusion, contradiction, and inconsistency can result.
The latest glaring evidence of this sad circumstance is seen in the national “discussion” about whether men and women can change their gender—the result of a long, sinister trek that began with the skyrocketing divorce rates in the 1960s, the feminist movement that followed quickly thereafter, the gradual acceptance of homosexuality, culminating in the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2015.2 Powerful forces in American society—politicians, the Supreme Court, public school educators, and many more brazenly flaunt the definitions of marriage and gender that have prevailed throughout western civilization, and most certainly in America, from the beginning. These definitions did not originate with humans or nations. They came directly from the Creator of humanity and the Universe.
When God spoke the Creation into existence, His culminating act was to create the first human beings, decisively declaring the creation of only two genders: He further forthrightly declared: “God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). There was no confusion about which was which. The DNA in every cell in the bodies of those first two human beings marked and defined their gender. When God further declared, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24), He clarified for all people for all time the question of gender. A “father” was/is a male, a “mother” was/is a female, even as the Hebrew word rendered “wife” is the normal word for “woman.”3 Jesus Christ reaffirmed the same thing (Matthew 19:4-6). One man for one woman has been the bedrock of civilization for 6,000 years, with exceptions confined to an immoral and depraved minority. Yet, now, a nation noted throughout the world for over two centuries as a bastion of Christianity has stunned humanity with an unprecedented leap into the quagmire of moral corruption and unrestrained devotion to sexual insanity.4
This unhappy state of affairs most certainly saddens those who yet retain a sense of Christian morality. Yet those who still believe in the God of the Bible are undaunted and unmoved by the frenzied intimidation and bullying that characterizes those who embrace immorality. For you see, only the Creator has the right to define gender, lawful marriage—and all other human behavior. Those who reject His will inevitably will suffer the consequences of their spurning of the Creator’s prescription for happiness and contentment in this life, and eternal security in the life to come.
Consider the similarity between our day and the social setting depicted for the Thessalonians, which speaks of the
unrighteous deception among those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this reason God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie, that they all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12).
It gives Christians no comfort to be reminded of Jesus’ warning on those who have plunged themselves into wholesale depravity: “Woe to you who laugh now, for you shall mourn and weep” (Luke 6:25). The warning issued to Jeremiah’s contemporaries trumpets an eerie warning:
“Were they ashamed when they had committed abomination? No! They were not at all ashamed; nor did they know how to blush. Therefore they shall fall among those who fall; at the time I punish them, they shall be cast down,” says the LORD (Jeremiah 6:15).
Whatever people believe, say, or do, the fact remains that politicians do not decide truth, morality is defined by the Supreme Being, and some manmade Supreme Court is not the Supreme Court. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah discovered—there will be a day of reckoning. “Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities around them in a similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire” (Jude 7). God still declares: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them” (Deuteronomy 32:35, NIV).
Endnotes
1 Declaration of Independence (1776), http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/declare.asp.
2 Bill Chappell (2015), “Supreme Court Declares Same-Sex Marriage Legal in All 50 States,” NPR, June 26, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/06/26/417717613/supreme-court-rules-all-states-must-allow-same-sex-marriages.
3 J. Weinstein (1978), A Practical Grammar of Classical Hebrew (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 314.
4 Dave Miller (2006), Sexual Anarchy (Montgomery, AL: Apologetics Press).