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Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ Covenant Church in Matthews, North Carolina, and you are listening to Doctrine Matters. Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith. We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic theology, be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other.

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And the hope, Lord willing, is we

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will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's word. Thanks for listening. Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters.

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We're continuing in the broad topic of anthropology, that is the doctrine of man. That word anthropos is the Greek word for man or human beings. First, let's think about the image of God. That's probably the most essential thing to know in what most people have heard of. Of course, this comes from the very first chapter in the Bible. Let us make man in our image after our likeness. God created man in his own image, in the image of God. He created him, male and female he created them. So this comes not only chapter one, but again in chapter five and again in chapter nine. There are three references in the opening chapters of Genesis, and it's telling that one comes at the beginning before the fall, and then chapter five after the fall, and then chapter nine after the end of the flood, sort of the creation 2.0. I think we're meant to see that man is created in the image of God and that the fall did not end the imago DEI and the punishment of the flood did not wipe it out. And this doesn't actually appear very often in the Bible, this concept of the image of God. But that doesn't mean it's not important. It's there at the beginning for a reason. And then we see it transposed in the New Testament so that on the one hand, Christ is the image of God. Of course, he is the Word made flesh. And then the shift that takes place is not only focusing on Christ, that the glory of Christ, the image of God, and that by the Gospel we're saved and we're transformed from one degree of glory to another, and that he is the unique image of the invisible God. So that's one transposition. The other is that the New Testament focuses less upon the image of God as our creational possession, though that's there. But it focuses more upon the image of God as our eschatological goal. Or to put it another way, if we see in the opening chapters of Genesis, that we are created in the image of God. What does an image do? We're to reflect the one who made us. That Hebrew word in the Old Testament is sometimes used in the ancient Near Eastern literature to a statue that a king might put into his land to say, this belongs to me. This is my place. These are my representatives. Well, we still have that. But the New Testament then focuses upon what we are becoming. Romans 8:29. For those whom he foreknew, he predestined to be conformed to the image of his son, or 1 Corinthians 15. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven. So for Christians, the image of God is both our dignity and our destiny. To quote from a book on the image of God that came out a number of years ago, our dignity and our destiny. There are both functional aspects of the image of God, and then there are our representational aspects. Or we might say that the functional aspects tell us about what we do, and then structural aspects, what we have. And both have been emphasized, I would say in more recent years, the emphasis, and I think rightly so, has been more on the functional aspects. The older theologians might talk about the reason or the rationality of man or his capacity for speech, but functionally that is what we do. We can think that we are representatives of God. We are created to be in a relationship with God, and as human beings, we are meant to reflect the righteousness of God. Those would be three simple ways to think about how we live out the image of God. What does it mean that God created us? There's a purpose to our life, something we're supposed to be and do, representatives in relationship with him. And then we are to reflect the righteousness of God. And as we are transformed by the glory of Christ, we are moved one degree of glory to another, that we might reflect that righteousness. As we think about being made in the image of God, and as we saw last week, being made male and female, we do need to spend a few minutes on some of the important ramifications of this creational identity that God has created us according to his good design. And we could spend the rest of the year on these two topics, but just a few minutes, a few sort of bullet points on each of these really important topics for our culture, marriage, and then just a little bit about transgenderism. There has never been been a time in the Western world, or in the Christian west at least, where there's Been more confusion about marriage. And there's a lot we could say. But you can think about three biblical themes that sketch out a basic biblical understanding of marriage, complementarity, covenant and kids, and then Christ and the church. The first complementarity we see from Genesis chapter two, and here I'm not even talking about everything that might be called complementarianism, though they're certainly related by complementarity, I simply mean that in the Genesis account, the man and the woman are uniquely fit for each other. They are complements, they are designed for each other. The woman is taken from man, named in relationship to man, and the woman was created from the side of the man so that this one flesh union is a kind of reunion. That's the moral logic. They were made each for each other, uniquely male and female. Second building block of an understanding of marriage, covenant and kids. And here we move from Genesis 2 to Malachi 2. Malachi 2:14 refers to marriage as a covenant bond. And marriage in the ancient world, like in our day, is constituted by two things, a verbal oath and a ratification sign. That's how the covenant of marriage was formed. And you can see the, the echoes of this today, that most people, you're going to get married, you have some verbal oath, there's a ceremony. Even non Christians would have a ceremony. You make vows to each other. And then the ratification sign in this case is sexual intercourse. When the minister says, you may kiss your bride. That's a, a nice public way of signing the marriage with the anticipation that privately the, the rest of the, the physical intimacy will take place. And we're glad for just the public kiss. So it's a covenant. And part of the covenant, though the reason for the one flesh is, is not just that they're holding hands or they're giving a hug. It's not just, just oneness that they're really close, but that coming together in this covenant relationship, they form a organic unit that can fulfill a single organic purpose. And namely, that is the giving and the producing of children. So the Westminster Confession says marriage was given in part for quote, the increase of holy seed. Or the Book of Common Prayer from the Anglican Church says holy matrimony was ordained for the procreation of children. Or the encyclical Human IV type from the Catholic Church says the unitive significance and the procreative significance are both inherent in the marriage act. Marriage is by definition that sort of union from which if all of the, the parts, biological parts are working correctly, and we know that we live in a fallen world and with much sadness. Sometimes they. They aren't. Something isn't working. But insofar as they are that children can and will be conceived. So marriage, complementarity, covenant and kids. And then finally Christ in the church. We see Ephesians 5. Paul's reference only works here. If there's a differentiation in the marital union, it's the coming together of man and woman, of Christ and church, not interchangeable parts, but the man as Christ in this spiritual analogy, and the woman as the church. We cannot insert two men or two women into the logic of Ephesians 5 and get the same mystery or that picture of the Gospel. So if you're just thinking or you're trying to explain to your kids, trying to talk to someone in your class, how to think about marriage biblically, you can have those three steps and you can do it on the back of a napkin. You go, complementarity, Genesis 2, covenant and kids, Malachi 2. And then Christ in the church, Ephesians 5. And then finally, just a few words, though this could take hours to say about transgenderism and the Bible and being created in the image of God. We are created in his image, male and female. God made us. This is not a cultural construct. But he depicts in Genesis the existence of a man and a woman as essential to his creational plan. The two sexes are not identical nor interchangeable, but they were each made for each other. That's what we've been talking about and where transgender inclinations might be sincerely felt. And we know that there is a kind of social contagion and copycat effect. And many people might just try on this identity as something that they think gives them cultural cachet. I'm talking really about those who deeply feel this kind of confusion. Of course, Christians should respond with patience and kindness and truth. And the question is not whether these feelings might exist. The question is whether the is of our emotional or mental state equals the ought of God's design. Is does not equal ought. And Christians, we know this. If we think about eating disorder, someone might feel one way, but we tell them that's not a reality. You think you're overweight, you're not. Or a divorce. I feel like God doesn't want me to be married. Well, but you don't have grounds to get divorced. We understand as Christians that following Christ means dying to ourselves. Being renewed in our minds and being true to ourselves is never the right choice when it means going against God's word. The Bible teaches the organic unity of biological sex and gender identity. To use the the Modern terminology. So male and female are uniquely the type of pair that can reproduce. And it's why Paul speaks of homosexual partnerships as deviating from natural relations and natural functions. The argument works because there is an assumed equivalence between biology of sexual difference and the corresponding identities of male and female. Our world has tried to say, well, sex, biology, physical matter is one thing, but gender is something internal and what you feel and sense. And so your sex might be wrongly identified, or it might need to change it in order to match your identity, your gender identity, because that's who you really are. But that's not how the logic of the Bible works. The body is given to us. The body is a gift. In almost every other area of life, we understand. The body tells us something. And our mental and emotional states need to be brought into coherence with our bodily design. There's a binary of male and female. It's God's design. We're meant to embrace it. The confusion of these realities, therefore, we see throughout the Bible, is frowned upon. Is prohibited that men should not act sexually as women. We see that Leviticus 18, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6, men should not dress like women. Deuteronomy 22, you say, well, that's Old Testament, that's Mosaic. That's true. We always need to put on our interpretive hats when we deal with the Mosaic Law. And yet we can easily see the principle that exists there, and the principle is reinstated very clearly in 1 Corinthians 11, that when men and women embrace obviously other gendered expressions of identity, it is a disgrace. Now, Paul's example, and granted, there is some cultural conditioning here. Paul's example was about the. The length of hair. And I think we can understand even today, there are, though there's going to be lots of gray area, not talking about my hair, which has lots of gray area. It. It's not always going to be that once your hair gets this certain length or has this many curls, it's masculine or feminine. But we can all tell that there is a difference. We can tell that there are some clothes that are for men and some that are for women. And one of the reasons we know that is most of the time, when someone comes out as transgender, think about the very first one in the American culture that really broke through with Caitlyn Jenner, Bruce Jenner, when, when he comes out and says he's now a woman, he looks really in all the stereotypical ways as a woman, because we understand that a woman looks a certain way. And the Bible tells us that because God created us, male and female, to confuse those for men to present themselves as women, for women to present themselves as men is to say, God, you did not create the world in the right way. You did not create me in the right way. It is thumbing our nose at God's design. Which is why, although we want to deal patiently and pastorally, when we have to minister and we get to minister to persons with transgender struggles, we have to be absolutely clear and we are not loving if we present to them a muddy picture of the reality. We do not have an inalienable right to do whatever we want with our physical selves. We belong to God and should glorify him with our bodies. You've been listening to Doctrine Matters with