Male and Female He Made Them
This clip is part of the sermon “Male and Female He Made Them" delivered by Kevin DeYoung at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, NC on May 25, 2025.
"God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them," - that’s the parallelism, that’s what you would expect, but now there’s a third line, "male and female".
Of all of the things that God wants you to know about yourself, we’re not surprised that he wants us to know about the image of God. We’ve all heard that before. But here is number two - of two - that he wants you to know about yourself, that’s how important it is, that God made you a man or a woman.
He did not create androgynous human beings. There are other creation stories that maybe there’s an androgynous human being that splits apart, half man and woman, but here at the beginning, God makes the male and female and he does not redeem us to become androgynous Christians.
Herman Bavinck, the great Dutch theologian says, the human nature given to man and woman is one and the same, so it’s a human nature, but in each of them it exists in a unique way and this distinction functions in all of life and in all kinds of activity. You think of that. We all have a human nature and yet God means for us to live out that human nature in unique ways as male or as female.
This doctrine that we hold to in the church and the PCA teaches what we sometimes call complementarianism. Don’t wanna blame John Piper or Wayne Grudem for the term, but it’s really hard to text all the time and it’s really hard to say, but complement with an "e" not with an "i", meaning men and women equal in God’s image have complementary roles, they do different things and they relate in a different way and we often summarize that, that the man is to be the leader of the household and qualified men are to serve as officers in the church and those things are certainly true and probably you’ve heard teaching on that many times.
But we want to be careful that we don’t reduce what the Bible says about men and women to simply a couple of rules. As if men and women, basically everything’s kind of the same, but kinda here’s the bad news, sorry women the man is going to be the pastor. Or maybe it’s, hey, here’s the good news you don’t have to go to elder meetings, however you wanna look at it.
One of my fears, and I maybe used this analogy before, is that we end up with a kind of arbitrary way of talking about the differences between men and women. So, here’s the homely analogy. When I was a kid and wanted to play basketball in the driveway, you go to the store and you get a basketball and that’s your outdoor ball and it gets all scuffed up and the little beads get worn down and then you might buy a separate basketball and you mark that for your indoor use, if you ever get to go and you get to play at a gym somewhere. And you go to the store and you buy two basketballs, they’re exactly the same, same thing, but you put one, that’s my outdoor ball, so that’s got some special rules, and that’s the indoor ball and that’s got some special rules.
Sometimes people think about men and women like that. Alright, they're exactly the same and the Bible just happens to have a couple of rules about ways in which they’re different. Then the rules end up just sounding sort of arbitrary and I guess we submit ourselves to scripture, it doesn’t quite make sense, but alright you’ve got one ball and you’re gonna be the outdoor ball and you’re gonna be the indoor ball.
What if a better analogy is to think about the basketball and a football. Both balls, both for sports, but for different sports and they don’t function in the same way. You could try to play basketball with an American football, difficult to dribble. You could try to play football with a basketball, hard to hold onto that, hard to throw it very far, so you could try, it just gets awkward and you think that’s not really the way they were designed to be.
And so when we talk about male and female we want to understand that it’s not that God’s Word slaps on a couple of arbitrary rules, indoor ball, outdoor ball, but rather that God has shaped us and designed us for certain purposes that ought to be reflected in life.