The first time the words “male” and “female” appear in scripture is on page one. 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” (Genesis 1:26).
God would make image-bearers, and they would exercise dominion over the creation he had made. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
We are embodied creatures because bodies matter — and bodies matter because God made them.
Then God blessed his image-bearers and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and 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” (Genesis 1:28).
God made Adam and Eve as embodied creatures (Genesis 2:7, 22-23), and their embodiment had a sexual design because they were capable of procreation. Their maleness and femaleness were not separate from biology but were clarified by it.
Now, of course, in a Genesis 3 world, not every male will father a child, and not every female will deliver one. Reasons for this abound. Nevertheless, we must notice that in Genesis 1:26-28, maleness and femaleness involve sexual complementarity. Moreover, God had told the man, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18).
God created male and female, and this design was good, complementary, and pre-fall. We know that God’s design is relevant post-fall as well. When Jesus taught about marriage and divorce, he said, “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, 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’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matthew 19:4-6).
In Jesus’ words about marriage and divorce, we can discern the echoes of Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:24. One takeaway for post-Eden image-bearers is that God’s good design remains relevant and instructive for our good and for human flourishing.
We can deduce from the embodiment of God’s image-bearers in Genesis 2 that their physical bodies were not dispensable — or extraneous — to their existence. In other words, Adam and Eve were not created as bodiless souls that were later given physical frames. They took the breath of life as embodied creatures, and their bodies were good. The man’s maleness was evident by his body, and the woman’s femaleness was evident by hers.
We live in an era marked by tremendous and heartbreaking confusion about the biological and theological realities of maleness and femaleness. Biological facts are no longer pervasively considered to indicate whether you are a man or a woman. Rather than a person’s body being understood as an objective clarifier of one’s gender identity, the body is sometimes viewed as the problem for a person’s subjective perception of who they are.
When natural and special revelation — in this case, biology and the Bible — are ignored in the understanding of human identity, the result is a pursuit against reality itself and a defiance against God himself. Such defiance will cause havoc, inhibit human flourishing, and calcify consciences. This will not end well.
God created male and female, boys and girls, men and women. Our bodies are not opposed to our identities but rather, give objective and biological clarification to who we are. We are not bodiless image-bearers. We are embodied creatures because bodies matter. And bodies matter because God made them.
This essay was originally published at Dr. Mitchell Chase’s Substack, Biblical Theology.
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