In the Image of God: Male and Female

Today's Scripture

Genesis 1:26-27 — "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."

Psalm 139:13-14 — "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made."

Genesis 2:25 — "And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed."

The Big Idea

Before the Bible says one word about sexuality, it says something about you: God made you, on purpose, in a body, as male or female, and he called what he made very good. Every conversation about gender and sexuality has to begin there — with dignity, not with debate. If we get the first page of the Bible wrong, we will get everything after it wrong.

Reflection

Start at the beginning, not in the middle of the fight

Most conversations about gender and sexuality start in the middle of an argument. Someone posts something. Someone fires back. Within three comments, everyone is angry and no one is listening.

The Bible does not start there. It starts in a garden, with God making things and calling them good. So for the next ten days, we are going to do something almost nobody does anymore: start at the beginning.

The beginning says something staggering. Genesis 1:26-27 — "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." The "image of God" is an old phrase that means something simple: a living picture of God, placed in the world to represent him. In the ancient world, a king would set up statues of himself across his empire so everyone would know who ruled there. God did something better. He filled the earth with living images — us.

This is why John Calvin opened his most famous book the way he did:

"Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves." — John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

You cannot know who you are until you know whose image you carry. And this image is not something you earn by good behavior or lose by bad behavior. After the flood, long after sin had wrecked the world, God still said human life is sacred "for God made man in his own image" (Genesis 9:6). The image survives the fall. It survives everything.

That means every person in this debate — the gay classmate, the conservative grandmother, the trans teenager, the youth pastor — is an image of God before they are anything else. C.S. Lewis put it unforgettably:

"There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal." — C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Any Christian position on sexuality that forgets this has already gone wrong, no matter how correct its doctrine. Dignity comes first because it came first.

A body is not a costume

Notice the second staggering thing in Genesis 1. God's image-bearers are not ghosts or ideas. They are bodies — and when God finished making them, Genesis 1:31 says, "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good." Not tolerable. Not a rough draft. Very good.

Some ancient thinkers taught that bodies were embarrassing — that your real self was your soul, and your body was just a shell it was trapped in. The Bible never talks that way. Psalm 139:13-14 — "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made." Knitting is slow, deliberate work, stitch by stitch. The psalmist says that is how God made your body. It is not a costume your soul happens to be wearing. It is part of the "you" God designed.

Think about what that means for the war so many of us fight with the mirror. Maybe you have stood there hating what you see — too tall, too heavy, the wrong shape, the wrong everything. Psalm 139 does not claim your body is perfect; we live after the fall, and bodies break, age, and disappoint. It claims your body is authored. And the psalmist, looking at his own ordinary frame, chose his response: "I praise you."

Lewis again, with his typical bluntness:

"There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature... He likes matter. He invented it." — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

And God did not keep his distance from matter. John 1:14 — "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory." When God the Son came to rescue us, he did not come as a feeling or a philosophy. He took a body. He got hungry, tired, and bruised. Whatever the church says about bodies, gender, and sexuality has to reckon with this: God thought human bodies were good enough to make, and good enough to wear.

The early church father Irenaeus, writing barely a century after the apostles, saw where this leads:

"For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

A human being fully alive — body and soul, turned toward God — is what God's glory looks like on earth. That is the Bible's starting point for everything it will say about sex. Not suspicion of the body. Celebration of it.

Male and female he created them

Now the part of the text our culture finds hardest. Genesis does not just say God made people. It says he made them "male and female" — and presents that difference as gift, not accident.

Watch how the story unfolds. Genesis 2:18 — "Then the Lord God said, 'It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.'" This is the first "not good" in the Bible, and it comes before sin even enters the world. The man has God, a garden, and meaningful work — and God says something is still missing. We were built for companionship with someone like us and yet not us.

So God makes the woman, and the man's response is the first poem in the Bible. Genesis 2:23 — "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man." That is not the voice of a man receiving a servant. It is the voice of sheer delight — finally, a counterpart, same and gloriously different at once.

Be careful here, though, because the church has sometimes twisted this text. Genesis says both male and female bear God's image equally. The word "helper" is not a put-down; the same Hebrew word, ezer, is used of God himself when he rescues Israel. The old commentator Matthew Henry caught the balance beautifully, noting that the woman was made from the man's side —

"Not made out of his head to top him, nor out of his feet to be trampled upon by him, but out of his side to be equal with him, under his arm to be protected, and near his heart to be beloved." — Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible

Equality and difference, held together. Some churches have crushed the equality and turned difference into hierarchy. Much of our culture now does the opposite — it defends equality by insisting difference means nothing at all. Genesis refuses both moves. Male and female are equal in dignity, different by design, and the difference is one of the ways we image God together.

This is painful ground for some readers, and Christians should walk it gently. Maybe you are a girl who was told, in a hundred small ways, that you mattered less than your brothers. Maybe you are a boy who got mocked for not being "manly" enough. Hear this clearly: those distortions are not Genesis. They are the fall wearing Genesis like a mask. The design itself is delight — same dignity, different gift, made for one another's good.

Known all the way down

The creation story ends with one of the most wistful sentences in the Bible. Genesis 2:25 — "And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed."

Naked and unashamed means more than no clothes. It means no hiding. Nothing covered, nothing faked, nothing held back — fully seen and fully safe at the same time. Every human being aches for that. It is why we curate our photos and rehearse our texts before sending them: we want to be known, and we are terrified of being known. Tim Keller named the ache exactly:

"To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God." — Tim Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

Here is where today's reading quietly turns into gospel — gospel is an old word for good news. The psalm that says you were knitted together opens with this: Psalm 139:1 — "O Lord, you have searched me and known me!" God already sees you all the way down. Every desire you have never admitted, every question about your body or your identity you have never said out loud — none of it is news to him. And in Christ, the one who knows you fully is the one who went to a cross to love you fully. J.I. Packer called this the deepest comfort in the Christian life:

"What matters supremely, therefore, is not, in the last analysis, the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it — the fact that he knows me." — J.I. Packer, Knowing God

In the days ahead we will talk about the fall, about desire, about hard texts and harder questions. But today, stand at the beginning. You are not an accident, not a problem, not a position in a debate. You are fearfully and wonderfully made — and fully known by the God who made you and calls his work very good.

Going Deeper

Before this plan gets difficult — and it will — practice gratitude for creation. Today, thank God out loud for three specific, physical things: eyes that read, lungs that breathe, a heartbeat you did not start and cannot stop. Then think of one person you find it easiest to argue about — someone on the "other side" of this topic. Say one sentence to God about them: "You made them in your image." Notice what shifts in you when you do.