Christians have absolute truth to offer our confused world. In Scripture, which is God’s revealed Word, the body is not made for confusion. The body is not a curse; it’s a gift. The body is God’s revelation to us of His good will and wise order of creation.
Bodies are not unimportant in God’s design. To the contrary, the body is crucial to living as God desires. We see this in Genesis 2 as God makes the man and the woman. Given a masculine body, the first man must “work and watch over” the garden, a divine commission that gets our attention in a hurry (2:15). In these terms, the man is made to work. The man is also made to protect and to lead (2:24). He is the one who leaves his father and mother to start a family; his is the one who holds fast to his wife, not the other way around. The woman, for her part, is given a feminine body. She can bear and nurture life by God’s design (and the man cannot). The woman is given the identity of helper by God (2:18, 20). While under the man’s headship (Ephesians 5:22-33), the woman has distinct abilities, inclinations, and strengths that she brings to marriage and the family.
Sadly, when Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit in Genesis 3, they use their bodies and their very lives to dishonor God. Their sin is common in our time. Though we are formed as a man or woman for His glory, some around us reject the idea that gender has a certain meaning and purpose. Given a distinct identity by God, they reject God-designed “nature” and creation order (Romans 1:26), and argue that we all must find our own identity. In this fallen mindset, anything other than affirmation of our own self-driven path shockingly amounts to hatred.
Tragically, these effects play out all around us today. Children grow up with little sense of the meaning of manhood and womanhood. Young men wear the clothes and adopt the hairstyles of young women; young women wear the clothes and adopt the hairstyles of young men. Gender androgyny now represents the vanguard of modern culture, while holding to any hard-and-fast understanding of maleness and femaleness seems increasingly ancient and discredited. Rebellion abounds, especially among the rising generation, and children are left unsafe and unprotected from warped gender ideologues. The “doctrine of demons” has taken hold in our culture like a shadow falls across the plains.
Circling back to the truth in Scripture, unlike our depraved culture, God’s Word is abundantly clear on the sinfulness of not honoring God’s design of our individual gender. The clearest indication of this in the Old Testament comes in Deuteronomy 22. It is wrong, Scripture teaches, to do what we call “cross-dressing.” Verse 5 makes this clear: “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” This shows us that wearing the clothes of the opposite sex is irreversibly wrong and an offense to the Almighty.
The New Testament proclaims exactly the same truth. In Matthew 19:3-6, Jesus addresses the reality of the sexes in a discussion of marriage:
[3] And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful to divorce one’s wife for any cause?” [4] He answered, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, [5] and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? [6] So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.”
This portrait of God-designed marriage between one man and one woman in a lifelong covenantal union teaches us a lot about identity and sexuality. Jesus tells us quite succinctly that God has made men, and God has made women. If you have a male body, you are a man. If you have a female body, you are a woman. Your calling from God is not to rework this equation; your calling from God is to honor Him in your body, savoring manhood and celebrating womanhood (1 Corinthians 11:3-17).
*Used with permission, this material has been used and edited from the book, What Does the Bible Teach About Transgenderism? by Owen Strachan and Gavin Peacock.