Godly Men and Godly Women: Male and Female He Made Them

Gracious heavenly Father, we ask once again that you would help us, I need your help that I might speak your Word clearly, humbly, boldly, faithfully. Your people, we need your help that we might listen, that you might teach us and shape us and give us ears to receive your Word, not hearers only, but doers. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Our text comes from the very first chapter in the Bible Genesis chapter 1, bringing to a close this three-week series on living as godly men and godly women. I thought about starting here, but we are going to end here in Genesis chapter 1, verses 26-28. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 

So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female, He created them and God blessed them. God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it that have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. Everything you need to know about yourself starts in these three verses. Now I did not say everything you need to know about yourself can be found in these three verses, there is a lot that we need to know and the Bible is a big book to tell us a lot of things, but I did say, and believe that everything you need to know about yourself as a human being starts in these three verses. They’re familiar to many of us, but I want you to think about what we have here, of all the things that God could have revealed to us about ourselves, all the questions we might have and wish that He would answer of all of the critical information He could give us at the beginning of time He chose to make known these two things. Number one, you were created in the image of God and number two, you were created in that image as male or female. Those two things are true of every person in this room. Now don’t do this in a real awkward way, just a slightly awkward way, I want you to actually look around the room a bit.The people next to you, okay, see there’s I don’t know, 1300-1400 people here, look around, you see all these people, you like some of them, don’t point to any you don’t like, don’t elbow them, but you see all these people at a lot of different ages, newborn, up to 100 and beyond in this church. You can look around, there are people who were raised right here in Charlotte, people from other countries, you have people of all sorts of economic backgrounds, people with different skin color, people who grew up speaking English, grew up speaking some other language, every single one of you, everyone in this room, you were made in the image of God and every single one of you, God made you, as male or female. Those are the two big things we’re gonna look at and we’ll spend more of our time on the second half. 

Think about the image of God. You probably have had teaching on this before. This language of image and likeness for being so critical, foundational to everything in the Bible and really you can say foundational to western civilization, we’re actually a little surprised that it does not have more information. It does not tell us very explicitly what it means to be made in the image, we’ll come back to that in a moment, and it’s only in a few places, in particular in Genesis. So here in chapter 1 we have this language and notice it starts in verse 26, “Let us make man”, the ESV has a little footnote, the Hebrew word for man, adam, is the generic term for mankind and becomes the proper name Adam. So first of all, it says, “Mankind as a collective was made in the image of God”, and then it will say individually “You are also made in the image of God.” So adam is the word for humankind, for mankind, so what we’ll see is there is a male adam and there is a female adam, and the head of the human race will then be called with that proper name, Adam. 

So, we see it here at creation but turn a few pages to Genesis chapter 5. Now this is important because chapter 3 and chapter 4 go together really as the fall, we know chapter 3 is the fall, then we see the outworking with Cain and Able and then chapter 5 begins, This is the book of the generations of Adam when God created man He made him in the likeness of God, male and female He created them and He blessed them and named them man when they were created. Now why is that there, to show us even after the fall this is still operative, you are still made in the image of God and that same creation mandate is present. God blessed them, said be fruitful and multiply and then one other time in these opening chapters go to chapter 9 and this makes sense so you have the image of God language at creation, that’s one inflection point. You have the image of God after the fall and then you have the third time the image of God language after the flood, because after the flood it is like creation 2.0. Look at chapter 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image”, and here it is repeating once again the command and you be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth, and multiply in it. So, three times at these inflection points to tell us at creation you’re made in the image of God, take dominion, be fruitful. Then after the fall the same thing and then here after the flood once again. 

What does it mean to be made in the image and the likeness of God. Over the centuries lots of theologians have tried to unpack what that means and many over the years have identified the image of God with a set of attributes that human beings possess. So it’s often said that to be made in the image of God is to have capacity for reasoning or maybe an appreciation for beauty or the capacity for language, and there may be some truth in all of that, but you’re hard to find anywhere in the Bible that actually spells out those elements of consisting in the image of God and if we sin well that’s what the image of God really means, well that you can reason and you can speak a language. Can AI reason, speak a language? I have seen this terrifying story this week of this AI machine that threatened to blackmail its maker with an affair he had had if he didn’t do something. That, that sounds like maybe the robots are getting too smart. Number one, don’t have an affair, number two don’t put it in an email, number three don’t give all your emails to AI, so there’s one way around it. Don’t animals have language, haven’t people studied that with the dolphins and the whales, and more importantly, if we say the image of God is in rationality and human language, we all know persons, people we love in our own church who don’t have those abilities either because of old age or born with certain disabilities. Do we want to say that they are somehow less in the image of God, certainly not, so is there a better way. Let me give you two-word pairs. These both come from a book by John Kilner who taught at Trinity. Let me give you two-word pairs you can just stick easily in your head, won’t give a lecture, just two-word paris to help you think, what does it mean to bear the image of God.

Here’s the first word pair. Connection and reflection. So connection meaning that human beings have a special calling, we are made to have a covenant relationship with God, so that’s the connection and then reflection. We were made to look like God. God does not propagate other deities, but He places us in the world to propagate His image and His likeness. Tselem and demut, those are the Hebrew words for image and likeness, and they are both used in the Old Testament at times to refer to a physical image of some other kind of deity. In fact, we should think of, you know in a temple in the ancient world, there’s a temple to a God and then the God puts His image in that temple. Now the temple in Jerusalem famously didn’t have an image, it had the arc of the covenant, which was not an image, but it was a box to represent the glory of God. Well, this creation is the temple. Psalm 78, He build His sanctuary like the heights, like the earth he established it forever. So God’s temple on the earth was meant to be a reflection of the greater cosmos and heavens that is His temple. So, if this whole universe in a way is the temple of God, then to place in that temple an image makes sense. In fact, there’s all sorts of connections between creation and the building of the temple. Both are conspicuously by the spirit of God, in both cases there is an inspection of the work, there is an announcement of the completion of the work, and then a blessing, and a consecration of the work that the temple tabernacle before that is the kind of creation and creation is a holy temple and therefore we are put into God’s house, this world, to occupy it and to reflect His image, to say, This is God’s world. We’re meant to reflect who God is. So that’s the first, connection and reflection.

Similarly, here’s the second word pair, and this is the title of Kilner’s book, Dignity and Destiny. Dignity meaning to be made in the image of God is inherently whatever choices you make, they may or may not reflect the image. Come to that in a moment, but whatever your mental or physical capacities, you have dignity, having been made in God’s image. James 3:9, “With the tongue we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.” And James is saying, “May it not be.” That doesn’t mean you can’t disagree with people, or we can’t criticize what other people do, or we can’t hold other people accountable, of course we can, but it means “Everyday as you interact with one another you think, this is someone who has the dignity of a royal stamp upon their life of the king of the universe. And as C.S. Lewis famously said, it would almost make you shutter if you could really see the full grandeur of the human person, that everyone within an immortal soul will live forever in heaven or hell. We think far too little of who we are as human beings. So, there’s a dignity, a special status set us apart from all else in creation, all other animals and then a destiny. See the Bible doesn’t tell us a lot about what it means to be made in the image, but it does tell us a lot about who is the image. We’ve already read that from Colossians. Christ is the image of the invisible God, so the New Testament helps explain Genesis. What does it mean to be made in the image of God. It means fundamentally that each and every one of you were created that you might be conformed to Jesus Christ. You were made to know Jesus Christ, and conform to his image so that’s destiny, that the image of God, even more than a set of attributes we posses now is something that God created you to be for all eternity. You think about the devil’s temptation in the garden. He says now, God is trying to keep something from you, He didn’t want you either because you’re gonna be like God, that the devil’s lie to us. If you listen to me, the devil says, I can help you be like God. Just follow your desires, do what you want, if it looks good eat it, if it seems pleasurable take it and then, here’s the devil’s eye, you will be like God. Adam should have said, and Eve should have said to that snake, but serpent we already are like God. It’s the lie of the devil to say if you could only find your sense of expressive individualism then you will truly be God-like. When the Bible says, no you will find “your true self when you find yourself in conformity to Christ, that’s who you were made to be, that is your destiny, you already are like God, grow into it.” Dignity and destiny, connection and reflection are the second half, that was the shorter, just a reminder of what it means to be made in the image of God.

Now step back and think, go to verse 27. Why does it add male and female? Now we can look around and say well because we are males and females, but just think, why did God do it this way? Often in Hebrew poetry and this is set apart as a kind of poetic expression, normally Hebrew poetry is given in parallelism, two lines you can see in chapter 2. These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, number one, and the day the Lord made the earth and the heavens, number two. Or verse 23, “This is bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman; she was taken out of man.” That’s the typical parallelism, two lines that say relatively the same thing, but here we have three in verse 27. 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 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 walking 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 I think people think about men and women like that, although you’ve just got 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. 

So why does God make us male and female, what are the implications of this. Everyone talks about the importance of being made in the image of God, rightly so, but why does it matter that verse 27 has a third line that we were made male and female. That’s what I want us to look at and give you four implications or four reasons why this is important. Four expressions of the significance of being made male and female. Here’s number one. First reason, this is important. The sexual binary was God’s idea. Sexual binary. By that just mean male female, that’s it, that’s it. Two, binary. One or the other, not both, not three, not many, two. In an article for the Wall Street Journal not long ago evolutionary biologist Colin Wright explains, just a little science for the morning, “In organisms sex is defined by the type of gamete, sperm or ova, it has the function of producing, males have the function of producing sperm or small gametes, females ova or large ones, asides there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes, sex is binary, there is at a biological definition. People will rightly ask sometimes what about intersex, what about those who are born with a medical objective physical condition in which sexual organs may be undeveloped or ambiguous. I think there’s actually a verse in the Bible that recognizes something like this, Jesus says in Matthew 19:12, “There are eunuchs who have been born so from birth,” He says there are some eunuchs made for the kingdom of heaven, there are people who say, I am not going to give myself in marriage, sex, for the kingdom of heaven Paul talks about that and here there are some who have been so from birth. Obviously, they do not have the category we call intersex, but thinking they certainly understood in their own day some who may have been born without the capacity or without fully functioning sexual organs, but this does not mean there are no longer only two sexes. 

Again, here’s a little science. In their article genetic mechanisms of sex determination, two biologists from Boston College explain “In placental mammals the presence of a Y chromosome determines sex.” Now you remember this from high school biology, two X chromosomes for females and an X and a Y chromosome for males. They say that’s normal. On rare occasions, however, someone can be born with more than two chromosomes or with only one chromosome resulting in hormonal or sexual development that is ambiguous or mixed and yet they say, even in these instances sex is still determined by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome. Binary. Sex is a physical reality given to us; God has given to you a body. See for most of human history people understood, I have a body that tells me something, something that is God’s message to me, something that is a given and at times though my feelings or though my brain may tell me something different, I need to bring those feelings and those thoughts into correspondence with the body that is given me and now people are saying the opposite where perhaps the body you were given was wrong and you ought to bring your body into correspondence with what you feel or what you think. The body has been given to us by God. A female body or a male body and though there are certainly lots of exceptions on the bell curve, in general there are very significant differences. In his book, Taking Sex Differences Seriously Steven Rhoads argues that traditional patterns of male initiative, traditional patterns of female domesticity have been constant throughout history because he says the most fundamental human passions, sex, nurturing, care, compassion, aggression, competitiveness, these most fundamental human passions manifest them differently in men and women. One day old female infants, for example, he says respond more strongly to the sound of a human in distress than one day old male infants. Unlike their male counterparts one week old baby girls can distinguish an infant’s cry from other noises. Ladies when you say to your husband, “Didn’t you hear that?”, he probably didn’t. Our differences. Another doctor, Leonard Sax, a medical doctor, PhD. In his book, Why Gender Matters. I’m pointing these out because they’re not Christian books, these are medical professionals. He writes, girls can see better, hear better, and smell better than boys. Maybe one of the reasons why the boy’s area does smell. Conversely he says, boys are hardwired to be more aggressive, to take more risks, to be drawn to violent stories, he stresses these differences cannot be laid at the feet of environment and social engineering, “The biggest sex difference is in expression of genes in the human brain occur not in adulthood nor in puberty, but in the prenatal period before the baby is born.” Certain things about us as men and women, we are often rightly concerned with the ought but before we get to the ought we have to start with the is. By that I mean we have all sorts of questions, well can a man do this, what does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be a woman, and we’ve tried to look at those in the last two weeks. But before you go there you need to step back and say, well how are we different? And again, this is a generalization, but one could argue that at a younger age there is often the cultural expectation that if only boys were more like girls, meaning, and don’t I feel this as a parent, I like it when my young kids sit still and play nice. I wish they would sit and read a book and nine kids just waiting for one who wanted to sit and read a book. I would appreciate my children not to want to get dirty. These are things, again generalizations, but we know these are things that are more given for young girls to fulfill those wishes than young boys. And might we say the opposite in our culture that in adulthood the things that are often valued are then the things that men tend to excel in and so the cultural message is what makes you someone important? If you have a position of power, if you have athletic prowess, if you are competitive, if you crush, if you win, if you have lots of sexual energy, well these are things that are and for all time have been more associated with men than with women. At a young age these young boys could be more like young girls and then in adulthood the women that we want to put out there and say, wow, congratulations to them, are the women that have more typical male characteristics. We have to realize that this sexual binary was God’s idea to make us as male or female, not identical, not interchangeable. 

Second, and it goes along with the first, God created us as sexual beings. The term, I already said in verse 27 and in verse 26, man, mankind is adam and in male is the term zakar, in female neqebah, not just man and woman, but suggestive of sexual differentiation, that this one adam, mankind, will for all time exist as male and female and because that is God’s design, and God is a God of order, it’s why God opposes the confusion of man as woman and woman as man. This is Paul’s argument in 1 Corinthians 11. There are lots of ways to try to understand what exactly that’s talking about and how to apply it and there are some cultural contextual glues and yet the bottom line in 1 Corinthians 11 is clear and it is this, “It is disgraceful for a man to take on the appearance of a woman and disgraceful for a woman to take on the appearance of a man. Now why, I just want you to see this logic, because from the very beginning God designed you to be a man or a woman and to want to confuse though, yes culture is going to give us lots of clues. I think I shared this story before, I think I heard Alistair Begg say it one time when he was growing up and some of the older men were really just chiding that these women were wearing pants and then somebody said, but you’re wearing a kilt. So, yes there are cultural clues and some of those things will change and yet because God made you as one or the other, you want to blur that if it you think you can switch that and you can’t. It is among other mistakes saying God you did not do what was right and wise and I do not like the way you design the world or designed me. It’s one of the reasons the Old Testament law forbade cross dressing in Deuteronomy 22. You think, well that’s strange out of nowhere, but it makes sense. God of order and design said I made you as one or the other and sexual differentiation means we are also sexual beings. Now yes, the animals are too, but importantly Genesis doesn’t get to that here. Here in chapter 1 just wants to focus. It’s a different way of describing things. It’s only talked about that the animal kingdom reproduces after its kind, but here we’re told male and female and in chapter 2, we will have the two becoming one flesh. Again, have you ever thought why, why did God want to do it this way, why didn’t He do it like in the movie Gremlins, that little mogwai, you reproduce when you get wet. Now that would be a different life wouldn’t it? Why this, God didn’t have to do it this way, he could have, when he says be fruitful and multiply, why not just a high five or why not people who go in and, ya know, like you make fire and you just rub sticks and stones together and there’s a new life, he decided, I’m going to make a male and I’m going to make a female and they are sexual beings and in order for this great purpose in the world, to populate the earth, to be fruitful and multiply it will require a man and a woman. It still does, we have technology that does not insist that two must come together in that conjugal moment, but it still takes male and a female and this, notice at the end of chapter 1, is a part of the creation that God says, “Behold it was very good.” I stress that because you may yourself or someone you know, you may think about the pain associated with sexuality or the confusion. Maybe you’re very confused yourself or maybe you’ve seen how sex has destroyed someone’s life as an addict or a marriage, infidelity, and it can be tempting to think, I wish God just didn’t make us this way, it’s just confusing and painful. God should have picked a different way. You might even be tempted to think, I wish God made me not as a man but as a woman or not as a woman but as a man or maybe you think I just wish He didn’t give me any of these parts at all. If you hate all of that, you hate God’s very good creation. The creation here in Genesis and His creation of your body, what God declared is very good. He made us as sexual beings. Of course it makes sense that the devil wouldn’t he take the image of God so that lie, you need to be like God by doing your own way, that’s getting at the image of God and then the second thing we see, you were made as male and female, wouldn’t it make sense that the devil would concentrate so much of his energy over the millennia at that one thing because it is such a good gift of God and when He can get that messed up in your life, that confused in your life, when He can get you enslaved to that good desire in your life then He has more than a foothold, He has a stranglehold.

Third, implication follows on the second. God created us to carry out this creation mandate as male and female. Notice the creation mandate is given in two commands, dominion and procreation, for the two things. Dominion, subdue the earth and then to be fruitful and multiply. When He says to be image bearers, that’s at least part of what He has in mind, that we are not all given to fulfill these in exactly the same way. It is given to creation, mankind as a whole, and in so far as we are able these are two ways to reflect God, both as a God who is a ruler over things and notice the creation mandate is given to men and women, it’s really revolutionary that both of them would be given the command to subdue the earth, and both of them together are given this command then to multiply. We have been distinguished as differentiated sexual beings in order that we might be suitable for the propagation of the species. So, what other way to say what is a man and what is a woman? A man, someone whose body is oriented toward the implanting of life and a woman the body is oriented to the receiving and the incubating of life. So, when a man and a woman come together as one flesh it carries out that sexual act for a single organic purpose. It is an amazing thing that a man and a woman by God’s design can create a living soul. You see how that’s Godlike? And God breathed his breath and made a living soul. What greater act of creative power and energy could be given? And to humankind God gives this act. 

I’ve maybe talked about this before. Have you ever thought, why, okay one flesh, one flesh union. What is it about that act that is one flesh, that that constitutes, that’s essential to the marital union is a one flesh sexual, why are you not one flesh if you hold hands. Okay, good, good that didn’t mean you were married. But isn’t that one. What if you give somebody a really big hug. You say now I’m understanding you pastor, all you Dutch people you don’t want, well but a hug doesn’t make you one flesh. Aren’t you glad that when you were in grade school, nobody probably still does this before, you lick your finger and you stick it in someone’s ear and you give them a wet willy. I got married today mom. I’m just being a little blunt here but isn’t that one part in another part. That’s not one flesh, why? That’s just combining. A one flesh union is that act that has the latent potential, again our bodies are affected by the fall, but that latent potential to fulfill a unitary organic purpose. That’s why sexual activity between a man and a man and woman and a woman is not a one flesh union. It cannot fulfill that unitive and generative purpose that makes it truly one flesh. You can have body parts come together, but it’s not one flesh for that organic purpose to fulfill the earth, to fill it, and to multiply. And in dominion, within this joint rule the man and the woman are given different tasks, they’re created in different realms, the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it. That makes sense because he was made from the ground. The woman was given to be a helper to the man. That makes sense because she was taken from the man. Different tasks, different realms created in different ways. Both fit together that they might subdue the earth, have dominion over it. There is a complementarity of male and female. Another man could have helped Adam till the soil. Another man could have been a friend and helped in loneliness. God could have gifted the man with a plow or a team of oxen or a bunch of golden retrievers to hang out with his buddies in his literal man cave, but none of that would have been a helper suitable for him, that the woman was a helper not mainly to fulfill some emotional loneliness because if you think that, then you think, well anyone who comes together then we call that marriage, if you fulfill emotional needs for each other. She alone was the suitable helper because only the man with the woman could now fulfill the tasks that God had given to them namely to fill the earth. We are sexual beings, and we are meant to carry out the created mandate as these differentiated sexual beings.

And here’s the fourth and finally, God created us male and female so that the whole plan of redemption would make sense. That’s surely a little bit of an exaggeration, it’s not, the story of the Bible does not hold together unless God made us male and female. Think about the complementary nature of creation itself. In the beginning God created what, the heavens and the earth, a pair. And not only that, but within this cosmic pairing we find other couples, the sun and the moon, morning and evening, day and night, the sea and the dry land, plants and animals, all couples and finally at the apex of the creation we have Adam and Eve. In every pairing each part belongs with the other but is not interchangeable with the other. Heaven and earth were created to be together. Why does the Bible end the way it does with heaven coming down to earth and why is that likened in Revelation 19 to a marriage, because that’s the whole picture. The very first couple in the Bible is heaven and earth. The last couple to come together then is heaven come down to earth. None of that coheres without an adam that is both male and female. Two differentiated entities uniquely fitted one for the other. Heaven and earth were created to be together, and so marriage is that symbol of divine design and we see in Revelation in particular all of this transposed to a spiritual key. You said the creation mandate is to have dominion over the earth. Revelation 2, “To him who overcomes I will grant to eat the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God.” If you’re an overcomer, if you have dominion, now what does dominion look like there, it’s not the size of your house or how many, ya know, bears you can kill in the wild with your hands, it’s to be a spiritual overcomer, to overcome the flesh and the devil and your own sin. When you have that dominion, that spiritual victory, then you are given the right to eat from the tree of life. And what about procreation, well it’s taken to a spiritual key, “And behold I saw what, a great multitude that no one could count.” They filled the earth, they filled the earth, yes with physical human beings, but those physical human beings the point is that then they might be part of this great multitude that gathers around the throne to worship Christ. It makes perfect sense that the coming together of heaven and earth in Revelation 21 is proceeded by the marriage super of the lamb in Revelation 19 because marriage was created as a picture of the fittedness of heaven and earth or as Ephesians 5 puts it, “Of Christ and the church.” Marriage by its very nature requires a complimentary yet differentiated pair. Each part belongs to each other. That’s why marriage is not two men or two women. Government may say what it says, but it’s not, it cannot be, how can that make sense of the whole story, not just of the Bible, but the way God created us. This isn’t just, well you Christians have one definition of marriage, no there is a definition of marriage, and it requires this differentiation, not Christ and Christ or church and church, but Christ and church, male and female. 

I want you to think when you are, most of us will be at a wedding sometime this summer probably, they’re great fun, they’re very expensive, they take a lot of your weekend, but they are a great occasion and they should be, they should be a great celebration and a feast and a party and the people should be happy. I want you to think, looking around at all the smiles and all the joy and the bridal party and the groom, the bride, God is giving us a picture of the Gospel. This is the joy that He has for us, now and in the life to come. Revelation 17 is the fall of Babylon. Well of course that makes sense because Babylon is the antichurch. Babylon is the prostitute woman, not the pure woman of the church. If you don’t like stories where, now I’m gonna say this, it’s a little bit over the top, but let me just, I’ll say it, okay, if you don’t like stories where a man rescues a woman, I know you can have them in a bad way, the woman doesn’t have any agency, all those caveats, but if you don’t like those stories, how are you gonna like the end of the Bible. The man rescues the woman. Now here’s the thing to put it in its place, least you’re offended by it, we are collectively the woman in that scene, we’re the church in need of rescue, in need of a deliverer, in need of someone to come and to save us. Jesus Christ, the story of salvation loses its internal coherence without Genesis 1:27. There’s a man, there’s a woman, there’s a wedding, there’s joy forever. Let’s pray.

Heavenly Father, thank you for your kindness to us and giving us your Word, pray that you might implant these things deep in our hearts to do them, to think them, to feel them, to delight in them, we pray. Amen.