Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good. So the evening and the morning were the sixth day~ Genesis 1:31 NKJV

Monday, in the middle of my weeknight routine (making dinner and catching-up on the news) a story came on that captured my attention. The Episcopal Church in Washington D.C. has voted to end the use of male pronouns in reference to God and has decided instead to:

 “Utilize expansive language for God from the rich sources of feminine, masculine, and non-binary imagery for God found in Scripture and tradition”

 For the record,

I was not the least bit surprised by this news. The leadership of the Episcopal Church exchanged the truth of God for a giant pack of lies decades ago. This decision was simply the next logical step in the plummeting moral and spiritual death-spiral that is their “theology”. 

 What did surprise me was the impression I got that I should blog about it this week. I did not hear an audible voice or anything that dramatic, I simply had a strong sense that God wanted me to write about the subject of gender and why Christians ought to concern themselves with this issue.

 I would love to tell you that I compliantly whipped out my computer and began writing. I didn’t. Instead, I made a mental list of all the reasons why writing on this topic was a terrible idea. The list started with the always profound “I don’t want to” and moved on to “this is a complicated theological issue that few people care about”, “how the Episcopalian Church chooses to address God doesn’t really matter”. I think I ended with: “but, God, I really want to write about something happy this week”.

 In the end, I decided that God was right (as usual). This issue matters because it runs far deeper than how we view and address God. At the heart of this issue is how we respond to reality, the veracity of the Bible, what kind of society we will become and most notably for the Church:

 Will Christians continue to worship the God of the Bible or will we reshape God into an image we are more comfortable with?

 Here are four facts to consider as the gender debate heats up in churches as well as the culture. First:

 God does not identify as genderless, androgynous or female

 This point is so ridiculously rudimentary I almost skipped over it entirely, but tragically, it needs to be stated. Like it or not, the God of the Bible identifies as male, and anyone who states otherwise is either hopelessly deceived or openly attempting to deceive others. Period. There is no third option. No sincere biblical scholar has ever found even the teeniest scrap of evidence that God has ever identified Himself as anything other than male anywhere in the Bible. Furthermore, Jesus is the very image of God (Colossians 1:15, Hebrews 1:1-3) and He was born male (Luke 2:21) and identified as a male (John 5:19). If God chooses to identify Himself as male it is in our best interest to do the same.

 Attacking the notion of gender is an all-out assault on God’s declaration that His creation is “very good” –

 God did not declare creation to be “very good” until after He created both man and woman (Genesis1:31). This seems to indicate that God felt creation was missing something significant and precious right up until the moment that it was made complete with human maleness and human femaleness. Even the most diehard gender-bending liberal has to admit that the world would be much less exciting and life less interesting if the world was stripped of the differences between men and women.

 Rejecting God’s nature (maleness), is really an attempt to undermine everything that God says about everything-

At the root of this debate is the question of whether or not God, the Bible and Christian tradition can be trusted. If God lied about being male (or wasn’t clever enough to know how to explain what He really is) then everything God says about everything becomes even more suspect than it already is in the culture.

 When we deny the truth regarding gender we deny reality and denying reality is dangerous-

 When God created living things He made them (with a few notable exceptions) male and female (Genesis 6:19, Genesis 7:16). We see the male/female pattern throughout all of creation. Gender (maleness and femaleness) is a fundamental aspect of life on this planet. Anytime human beings seek to deny a clearly obvious aspect of reality they cease being reasonable and lose any sense they once had (Romans 1:19-23). Rejecting the obvious is how our culture has ended up with the gender-unicorn (yes, it’s a real thing) and an oversized flow chart identifying 63 different genders (another real thing), it’s also how we arrived at the point where it’s offensive to call someone ‘him’ or ‘her’ even if they are a him or a her. The only way to end the madness is to accept reality.

 What the Episcopal Church does and doesn’t do undoubtedly feels irrelevant to most people reading this blog. It is not. The Episcopalian Church is the proverbial canary in the coalmine. They are, from a historical perspective, always the first denomination to embrace outrageously unbiblical positions long before those ideas take off in the greater culture. However, the notion of two genders and a God who identifies Himself as male is a fight worth having.

 Truth is at stake.