Today is my birthday. In the almost 20 years I’ve been married, I have spent my birthdays at the beach. This year, my family squeezed in a quick beach trip between the end of school and a summer baseball camp. The featured image for this post is from our trip. As we drove home yesterday from my birthday beach trip, I thought of the culture we live in. A culture that promotes following our feelings. Now when I take my children to a doctor’s appointment, I’m asked what gender they were assigned at birth and which gender they currently claim. However, I am not asked which birth date they were assigned the day they came into this world and which birth date they want to now claim. So, today is my birthday, but what if I want to claim another month, date, or better yet another year for my birthday? (I’d like to not be pushing fifty!) The drive to the beach was 416 miles. It took six and a half hours to drive that distance. But what if I felt like the trip should take three hours? Well, I cannot safely drive 416 miles in three hours. The distance between my home and the Gulf is still 416 miles. I cannot manifest a shorter distance. And if a cop were to pull me over for speeding, could I then tell the officer that I felt like the speed limit was 85 and not 70? Why would the officer be right to give me a speeding ticket, but a school is not right to have separate bathrooms based off of gender?
In our culture, we have major logical fallacies, and we are appealing to popularity, not Scripture, when it comes to gender identity. If we follow the thought all the way through of what is currently trending with gender identity, we do not have a leg to stand on in other areas like dates of birth, speed limits, and geographical distances. Why do we allow our feelings to dictate our sexuality, but we don’t let our feelings dictate the number on the speed limit sign for example? One might argue that identifying however you want to is not harming anyone, but driving over the speed limit could harm someone. When students once asked me questions about why people should not identify however they want, I responded by asking, “What if I, as a married woman, wanted to identify as having other intimate relationships while being married?” They told me it was different because I would hurt my husband but that identifying however you want does not hurt anyone. I then asked them, “Why are we not asking does it hurt the Creator?” From this question is where I want to process and wrestle. My intention is not to hurt people who struggle with gender identity. My intention is to get us to think as the logical creatures God made us to be. God as Creator, as first source of all that exists, is my starting point because he has self-declared in the Bible that he is God, and I live under the authority of Scripture, not what is trending.
Here are some passages I’ve been in recently that talk about God as Creator: Gen 14:19 & 22, Deut 32:6, 1 Sam 2:8b, Ps 18:15, Ps 24:1-2, Ps 95:5-6, Ps 102:25, Ps 139:13, Is 43:1-15, Is 44:2, Is 66:2, Amo 4:13, Matt 11:25, Lk 10:21, Jn 1:10 & 13, Acts 3:15, Acts 14:15, Acts 17:24, Rom 9:5, Heb 2:10, Heb 3:4, Rev 10:6, Rev 14:7. There are plenty of other places in Scripture that attest to the God of the Bible being the Creator of all. We’re also told in Gen 1:27 that he creates man in his image in the dual sexuality of male and female. Yes, he created the binary. It’s not only in gender, but in the rest of creation. There is male and female (day 6 he pulls female out of male), night and day (day 1 God pulls light out of darkness), waters and sky (day 2 he separates the atmosphere from the waters), and sea and land (day 3 he pulls land out of sea). Humanity, though, is unique. We are made in his image. We are the ones he entered into a covenant with. We are the ones he came to redeem.
When I asked my students why no one is asking the question – Is gender confusion hurting God, they gave no answer, but God does. Let me first put this topic in context. All sin hurts the Creator. Ezekiel 16 frames sin this way. It is all prostitution against our Bridegroom. Ezekiel 16 gives a stunning and convicting allegory of the Creator coming to his people “wallowing in [their] blood,” and he declares life over them. He enters a covenant with them. They become his. He washes them, dresses them, adorns them with jewelry, and gives them food. But with the splendor he had given them, they trusted in their beauty and used their fame to play the prostitute (vv.14-15). They took what God had given them and prostituted it (vv.16-19). They did not remember their naked, bloody state God rescued them from (v.22). Verses 23 to 29 are quite true to our day of selfism. We’re told that in addition to their prostitution, they built a mound for themselves, lifting themselves up, degrading their beauty. Why? Because they were insatiable (v.28). We were not meant to worship ourselves. Self-worship (of any kind) will leave us unsatisfied. God calls out his adulterous wife in verse 32, saying she prefers strangers to him, her own husband. He goes further to say – And, you didn’t even get paid like other prostitutes. Instead, you (not the other party) willingly gave the payment (vv.33-34). Sin is sin. What this passage is showing us, though, is the effects our sin has in our relationship to God. We have played the whore. We willingly turn against him after all he has done for us. Verse 39 speaks of what Romans 1:18-25 also says. God eventually hands people, who do not submit to him, over to their ways. His love is not controlling. When we exchange the truth of God for a lie, worshiping the created rather than the Creator, he hands us over to our prostitution (Rom 1:25).
And here is our culture, in the exact same place since the prophet Ezekiel wrote to Jerusalem. Isaiah 43:21 phrases our reality this way. We were formed (created) by God that we might declare his praise. We, as his creation, are his witnesses (v.12) just as the rest of creation bears witness to his glory (Ps 19:1-6). This is our rightful position. In this job as his image bearer, there is freedom. When we confuse our role with any prostitution (gender identity confusion, homosexual sin, heterosexual sin, lustful thoughts, looking at pornography, hatred in our hearts towards another, slander, gossip, etc.), we are not living the way we were designed to live. No human, except Christ, is free of this prostitution. No one is exempt from what is listed between the parentheses. And it is because of our sin, our prostitution, that we need to fall back into the arms of Jesus over and over, surrendering to him rather than giving into how we feel.
So, what is our design? We were designed, as male or female, to be a bride to our Bridegroom. Here are some passages that talk about God, the Creator, being a Husband to his created humanity: Isaiah 54:1-10, Isaiah 61: 10, Isaiah 62:5, Jeremiah 31, Ezekiel 16, Hosea 2, Matthew 9:14-17 (also see Mark 2 and Luke 5), Matthew 25:1-13, John 3:22-36, 2 Corinthians 11:1-6, Ephesians 5:25-33, Revelation 19 & 21. I am married to Jesus because I’ve been removed from my bloody state by his blood. And what Romans 8 teaches me is that my legal standing of prostitution against my Creator, my Husband, has been cleared by him. As a Christian, I still sin against my God, but he can be in a relationship with me because his blood covers me and justifies me. My sin does not hurt my standing before God, but it does hurt him as my sin hurts my earthly husband or anyone I’m in a relationship with. Knowing my sin hurts people I love and the God I love makes me want to surrender my whoring ways over to my Creator. He is my only hope for change because as he says about himself, “I, I am the Lord, and besides me there is no savior.”