Jesus closed his most famous message, the Sermon on the Mount, with the warning that those who ignore his words build their lives on the worst possible foundation—sand. Our sons, daughters, and grandchildren who build their marriages and families by ignoring God’s design of created gender differences and assigned gender roles build on a foundation that is bound to collapse like sand. In contrast, said Jesus, are those who build their lives on obedience to his Word, which would include God’s delineation of created gender differences in Genesis and assigned gender differences in responsibility in their marriages and homes. This group builds their family on a foundation as solid and secure as rock.
Which foundation will your sons, daughters, and grandchildren build their marriage and family upon? You can have a lot to do with the answer. This month’s series, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood, explains a tool by that name. It is a five-week study for high school sons led by dads, youth leaders or men’s ministries, which you can use or help promote. Today we examine six reasons that helping our sons follow God’s Manhood script MATTERS.
Walter Trobisch, in his book, I Loved a Girl, recounts a legend from India about the creation of woman:
The Creator created woman and gave her to the man. After one week, the man came back and said, "Lord, the creature that you have given me makes my life unhappy. She talks without ceasing and torments me intolerably, so that I have no rest. She insists that I pay attention to her all the time and so my hours are wasted. She cries about every little thing and leads an idle life. I have come to give her back to you, because I can't live with her."
The Creator said, "All right," and he took her back.
After a week passed, the man came back to the Creator and said, "Lord, my life is so empty since I gave the creature back to you. I always think of her—how she danced and sang, how she looked at me out at the corner of her eye, how she chatted with me and snuggled with me. She was so beautiful to look at and so soft to touch. I liked her laugh so much! Please give her back to me."
The Creator said, "All right." And gave her back.
But three days later, the man came back again and said, “What shall I do? I can't live with her, and I can't live without her!”
The legend observes that males are BOTH frustrated by females and attracted to them. The reason is that they are so different from us. We can’t live with them easily, because their way of operating is so opposite to ours. But we can’t live without them, because we are powerfully attracted to them as negatively charged electrons in a battery race through the circuit, towards the opposite, positive pole.
The very first mention of human beings in God’s creation account stresses that his creation design of human beings is binary. He made them male and female. There is no hierarchy of value; both share equally the dignity of bearing God’s image. Both share in the cultural mandate, to exercise dominion over their kingdom, earth. As the Triune God is three different persons joined in love, God created his image, “man” as the union of different beings to complete one another. Notice that “man” is both singular and plural, just as God is both. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Since he exists as the loving union of the tree distinct Persons of the Trinity, God designed the unit called “man” to be the loving union of two distinct persons, man and woman to complete one another in love. This union of two separate beings is exhibited in the way their bodies fit together in the sexual union of marriage.
Both the differences that frustrate us and those that generate male-female magnetism result from God’s deliberate design of males and females differently. He intentionally created Adam with weaknesses that only a woman could fill and Eve with weaknesses that only a man could fill. By design, each gender provides what the other lacks. Eve completes Adam by supplying what he lacks, and Adam completes what is missing in Eve. God calls this unit “man” It is worth noting that
God devoted just five verses in Genesis 1 to emphasize Adam and Eve’s equality, but twenty-one verses in Genesis 2 to emphasize their differences. Their differences are intentionally highlighted by God’s parallel structure of Adam and Eve’s creation:
- Adam is made for the ground. The creation of Adam begins with an explanation of why he was needed. When…there was no man to work the ground then the Lord God formed the man (Gen 2:5-6).
- Adam is given a name that means ground (Gen 2:7). Here the word for the man is ADAM and the word for ground is ADAMAH.
- Adam is made from the ground (Gen 2:7).
- Adam’s creation calling is to work the ground (Gen 2:9-15).
- When Adam sins, what is cursed is the ground (Gen 3:17).
In a perfect parallel structure, God explains Eve’s creation:
- Eve is made for the man (Gen 2: 18,20). The creation of Eve begins with an explanation of why she was needed, Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” The next verses summarize a search through creation for such a helper with ended with the words, But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
- Eve is given a name that means out of the man (Gen 2:23). The word for male is ISH the word for woman is ISHAH.
- Eve is made from the man (Gen 2:21-22).
- Eve’s creation calling is to assist the man (Gen 2:18, 20).
- When Eve sins, what is cursed is her relationship with the man & his kids.
God’s design for humans is that each gender delight in what the other gender brings into the relationship to complete it. For this reason. God emphasizes the equality of Adam and Eve in the first chapter of Genes; both bear his image and exercise dominion over their kingdom, earth. But God puts even more emphasis on each gender valuing the other by devoting four times as much space to emphasizing how different male and female are designed to be. God wrote different creation scripts for men than he did for women. Those scripts are fundamental to living out what we have been created for. But as Owen Strachan & Gavin Peacock observe:
“Today, the sexes have lost the script for their lives, and so many of us don’t know what role to play in life. Try asking a male friend at a coffee shop, ‘What is your manhood for? What is the purpose of being a man?’ Or try querying a young woman at the local university, ‘What meaning does womanhood have? Does it matter at all?’…Outside of affirming feminism, transgender identity, and shape-shifting sexual orientation, it’s taboo today to speak of manhood and womanhood in any fixed way. This is true in secular circles and it’s increasingly true even in Christian circles” (The Grand Design: Male and Female He Made Them).
WHY RECOVER GOD’S MANHOOD SCRIPT?
(The rest of this text is taken from the new booklet, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood, but the interactive questions are left out.)
A. The first reason is that God thinks it is important. There are 1189 chapters of the Bible, God’s revelation to us. After the creation of the world God devotes part of the first and almost all the second to explaining how Adam and Eve are fully equal, created to be different, and are to relate to one another. Understanding these truths is of utmost importance to God!
B. Healthy males want to develop their masculine identity. Author David Murrow makes this point in summarizing what psychology tells us about men. He writes,
“Boys grow up in a feminine world. A boy spends his first nine months inside a woman’s body, and after he is born, a multitude of women—his mom, babysitters, nursery and daycare workers, and schoolteachers—care for him. At some point, however, a boy must break from the feminine and begin to define himself as something different from the mother, from whose body he sprang. Psychologists call this separation/individuation. A boy must reject…her feminine ways and take his place in society as a man. A male who fails to separate, psychologically from his mother faces a lifetime of gender confusion, abuse, or dysfunction. “
Every one of the thirty trillion cells in a male body has XY chromosomes and in the female body XX. Embryologists now know that at eight weeks, the presence of the XY chromosome in the human embryo causes the male’s whole body to develop differently than a female’s body, including his brain. One scholar points out, “Sexuality permeates one’s being to its very depth; it conditions every facet of one’s life. As the self is always aware of itself as an “I,” so this “I” is always aware of itself as himself or herself. Our self-knowledge is indissolubly bound up not simply with our human being but with our sexual being” (Jewett, Man as Male and Female).Understanding God’s design for manhood matters to males because we are hardwired with an inner compulsion to be masculine.
C. Godly males want to attract godly females. God created the magnetism between female and male. So, it stands to reason that the more we become godly men the more a godly female will be drawn to us. For example, in the dance of man with woman, God has assigned the man the role of taking the initiative, just as Jesus, our Bridegroom, took the initiative to leave heaven to pursue us, drawing us to himself with the cords of love. A woman naturally finds her heart drawn to masculine men who are not passive, or tentative in pursuing them but consistently take the initiative in each new phase, as the relationship grows.
Have you ever noticed how often a beautiful woman marries an average-looking guy? I think I know why. Whereas a man looks for a woman to love, a woman looks for a man who will love her. Her attraction to him is much less related to his looks than it is to his confident ability to love her consistently, making her feel treasured, cherished, and loved.
This truth has tremendous implications for guys getting ready to date. Smart guys put more energy into learning how to be attentive to a girl’s needs and make others feel valuable than into worrying about their looks. The masculine strength to consistently love her is just one part of God’s masculine design of manhood. Women can’t help but be attracted to the godly masculinity to which God designed them to be drawn.
D. Understanding God’s creation design of male and female is essential for making male-female relationships in general work throughout life. Although marriage is not on the minds of most high school guys, picking up what they can about the feminine creation design is valuable before marriage. After marriage may be a bit late; most divorces are filed for by unhappy wives whose husbands did not realize how different their wives’ needs were from their own. In fact, not learning about a woman’s emotional makeup ahead of marriage has caused a large majority of female divorcees to say that their married years were the loneliest years of their lives (Stephen Arterburn and Fred Stoeker, Every Woman’s Desire).
Not only is understanding femininity essential before marriage; it is invaluable for preventing potential male-female misunderstandings in general. At one stage in my marriage, I read a Christian counselor’s observation that men tend to use words to communicate decisions and ideas, but women tend to use words more to communicate feelings. Thankfully, that realization came to mind in a critical conversation with one of my twin daughters.
Both girls had decided independently to go to Covenant College, but Karen took a while longer than her sister to decide. Fast forward. As we pulled up the driveway to drop off the girls at Covenant College with my five kids in my van and a u-hall trailer behind, Karen said, “I don’t want to be here.” Every part of my masculine soul wanted to turn around and say to her, “Don’t you think it’s a little bit late to say that?” But I actually realized she wasn’t questioning her decision; she was telling me how she felt. She was afraid—afraid her college roommate might not like her, dreading being eleven hours away from our close-knit family, fearful that she wouldn’t fit in with the girls on her floor. I held my tongue but then heard her seven-year-old brother say through tears, “I just don’t know why you have to go to college so far away.” We all had a big cry and moved on.
God says the wisdom of Scripture is more precious than jewels, and nothing you desire can compare with her. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. This claim is certainly true in understanding what God has revealed about his glorious design of femininity and masculinity. It leads to pleasant paths of shalom, which is the Hebrew word for flourishing.
E. Discipleship is the call to show the power of Christ to restore manhood and womanhood, broken by sin, to the pre-fall, creation design. The target of male discipleship is restored godly manhood. The target of female discipleship is restored godly womanhood. When both Peter and Paul call Christ-followers to discipleship, their challenges to women and men are different. Consider Peter’s way of motivating Christ-like character in women. Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear--but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart. How motivating is this appeal to you? Compare such words with Paul’s appeal to male leaders at Corinth. Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
F. A fractured view of sexual personhood has captured the minds of many teens today, leading them down a destructive path. The fifth reason for understanding God’s gender design is to be able to thwart a view of sexual personhood harming those we care about. This view is being promoted by Trans Student Education Resources, through their Gender Unicorn graphic. This fractured view of sexual personhood splits apart five aspects of sexuality, proclaiming that every human is free to choose and change all five. He/she then lives a fractured existence. Here is their definition of each fractured part:
- Gender identity: deciding for yourself that your identity is male, female, or bisexual regardless of your anatomy.
- Gender expression (role): the way you express your gender, adoption of expectations for your gender.
- Sex assigned at birth: the designation on your birth certificate as male or female was merely the opinion of parents/doctors.
- Physical attraction: sexual orientation, same-sex, heterosexual, or bisexual attraction. This is distinct from emotional attraction. So, a man can be in love with his wife but do his sexual thing on the side with a fellow homosexual.
- Emotional attraction: romance. Separating emotional attraction from physical attraction is the basis for prostitution and the sexual abuse of women and children. It is evil.
Some Christians argue that love requires us to embrace feminism’s attempt to overthrow the Bible’s “unjust patriarchy” and our transgender friends’ attempts to choose their genders. But Paul said love does not rejoice at wrongdoing but but rejoices with the truth. As Christ-followers, whose eyes have been opened to the truth of God’s Word, we see both the destructive power of the Gender Unicorn view of sexual personhood and the glory of God’s design of male and female differently to complete each other. Our conversion causes us to savor, not apologize for God’s gender design. Strachan and Owens observe:
"When we trust Christ as our Savior, the beauty of God’s design comes into view. Our conversion opens our eyes to the nature and purpose of our God-given sex. We see the body not as a blunt instrument for our lusts, but as the gift of God for his glorification. We see our relationships with the opposite sex not as a power play, but as an opportunity to serve others in the name of Christ. We see the plan of complementarity, the roles we have the privilege of filling, not as a sentence to misery but as a summons to happiness" (The Grand Design).
Not only does the comparison between the Gender Unicorn view of sexual personhood and God’s gender design lead us to embrace God’s design ourselves. It also urges us to take a stand in our culture. Jesus assigned us to be light to the world and salt that retards the decay of sin on earth. Strachan and Owens, again rightly point out: "When it comes to understanding gender, Christians have something far, far better to offer our children and culture. It is not human disintegration—the splitting apart of one’s biological sex from one’s sexual identity and sexual role, or the separation of physical attraction from emotional attraction. It is an integrated view of body and soul that sees God’s design of male and female to be glorious. Our culture desperately needs to hear our message" (Ibid).
For Further Prayerful Thought:
- It is hard to overstate the prominence that God gives to his manhood and womanhood scripts in the first two of 1189 chapters of his revelation. Why do you think Christians today don’t think more about those scripts?
- What do you think of the statement, “Healthy males want to develop their masculine identity?” How is the identity of a male Christian like the identity of a female one and how is different?
- Which of the six reasons given that God’s “manhood script” should matter to high school guys most stood out to you?
WOULD YOU HELP US SPREAD THE WORD?
The content above is from the first chapter of the new booklet, Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood. How valuable do you think it would be for a teen guy to process this content with some older guys, especially his father, but also a youth pastor or other men in the church? Can you imagine what would happen if just ten percent of the Christian dads in America pursued this journey to biblical manhood with their sons—how that would radically change their relationship, the impact it would have on our culture, how the world would see Jesus through self-giving manhood displayed by Christian guys?
One way you can help us is by posting a message like the following on your Facebook page with the link to our bookstore along with copying the book cover below. Here is some possible wording:
“A Christian ministry I support is celebrating Fatherhood Month by letting the Christian community know about a new 5-week journey to biblical manhood for high school guys, which they have just published, to be led by fathers, youth leaders, or men’s ministries. It is Men Helping Sons Embrace Biblical Manhood: A Five-Week Study for High School Guys Designed for Dads or Youth Leaders to Lead.”
Here is the link to our bookstore and below is the image of the book cover to be copied to your Facebook page. Thanks so much for your help.
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