Grounded in His Good Design

Mary Kassian: I want to introduce you to my COVID babies. My granddaughter, Charlie Ann, who was born the weekend that COVID shut everything down; and then Josephine Hope, who was born about eight weeks later. And then there’s my newest baby, who was conceived during the pandemic and arrived just last week, and her name is Connie—that’s short for confident, The Right Kind of Confident: The Remarkable Grit of a God-Fearing Woman. Isn’t she cute?

Now, I had no idea when I started writing books about God’s design for women that I would end up with so many grandbabies. I have six grandchildren now, and five of them are girls. 

Callie, in the pink jacket, is four years old, and she is a woman who is secure in her own opinion. If everybody is turning left, Callie will turn right, just because.

Clara, the oldest, is seven. Clara is a deep thinker with deep emotions. She’s creative, she loves reading, and she needs alone time to recharge, just like her grandma.

And then there’s Amery. Amery is highly relational; she’s highly attuned to others. She lights up; she comes alive when she walks into a room of people. People are her drug. She is just a real people person.

Then five-year-old James is the only boy. He is all boy, all energy, endowed with all sorts of superpowers, and constantly on the move and constantly torn between the desire to create and destroy. (laughter)

I often think about how rapidly the world is changing and what that means for my grandchildren. This past summer, as Clara and I were working on a craft together, we were gluing on a piece of felt, and Clara pipes up, “Omi!” (“Omi” is German for “Granny.”) She says, “Omi, Emma says a girl can marry a girl. Emma also says a girl can become a boy if she wants to.”

Wow. Those are the kinds of conversations that seven-year-old kids are having—seven!

Now, I’m well aware of the changes that we’re witnessing in society with regards to gender roles and sexuality, but I must confess that I wasn’t expecting it to impact my grandkids so soon and so young. It’s difficult for us to imagine that only ten years ago we had only two choices when it came to gender: male or female. Gender was a binary based on anatomy.

In 2014, Facebook added an “Other” category and allowed users to choose from a dropdown of about fifty-six options. As time passed, Facebook added more and more options to the list, until they just couldn’t keep up. So, they introduced a fill-in-the-blank freeform field. Now every single person can customize his, hers, zis, aers, hens, ems, xselves or thems own gender.

The argument is that our sex has to do with our biological plumbing, our hardware, whereas our gender has to do with our psychological makeup, our software. Trans people feel that their hardware doesn’t match their software; their physical bodies don’t match the gender they psychologically view themselves to be.

Now, when the disconnect between a person’s hardware and software causes ongoing discomfort and distress to that person, the condition is labeled “gender dysphoria.” That’s the official term for the deep pain and mental anguish experienced by people who feel at odds with the physical plumbing they were born with. It is deeply painful.

Gender dysphoria has reached epidemic proportions in our society. In the past decade, the number of teenagers being referred for hormonal treatment and gender reassignment surgery (or, to use the newer, politically correct term, “gender confirmation surgery”) has increased over 4,000 percent! 

Some physicians in the United States are performing double mastectomies on healthy thirteen-year-old girls, and often parents have little say in the matter.

Two years ago, a Texas jury ruled against a dad who was seeking custody of his twin seven-year-old sons in his attempt to stop one of the young boys from transitioning.

School boards are directing teachers to assist and encourage children of any age to adopt transgender identities—without parental consent or knowledge. Some schools secretly provide the child with a year’s worth of counseling to help that child advance in their new gender identity.

All over the Western world, parents who instruct their children that gender corresponds to their biological plumbing at birth, parents who instruct their daughter that God created her to be a woman or their son that God created him to be a man are now at risk of being accused of abuse or neglect.

Our world is shaking. Do you feel it?

For some of you, you feel the shaking more than others. For you, this topic isn’t an intellectual exercise. Your daughter, your baby girl, has had her breasts cut off, her female innards carved out, and her genitals surgically altered. The hormone therapy the doctors are administering has lowered the pitch of your child’s voice, made hair grow on previously smooth skin, and created a bit of a bald spot where you used to start your little girl’s braid. You’re noticing mood swings, depression, and other alarming signs. You feel heartbroken, confused, helpless, hopeless, and scared. What happened to your little girl?

Or maybe you are that baby girl. You scorn the braid that your mum used to put in your hair. You’re vehemently repulsed by all your female bits and pieces, because to you they’ve only been a source of pain, and living as a man seems like the best way out.

Some of you here have or have loved ones who have come out as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, nonbinary, gender fluid, asexual, or questioning. Everything you used to believe about the world has been shaken. Your heart has been shaken, and maybe your faith has been shaken, too.

How did all this happen? How do we respond? How, in the midst of all the shaking, do we remain grounded in God’s good design?

Please open your Bibles with me to the book of Genesis. Genesis chapters 1–3 are foundational if you want to understand God’s design for gender. True Woman 101 focuses on these three chapters, and I urge you to do that Bible study if you haven’t already, but today we’re going to park in Genesis chapters 4 and 5.

The first half of Genesis 4 tells the story of how Adam and Eve’s oldest son, Cain, murdered his younger brother, Abel. Can you imagine being Eve or being a mom and how badly that must have shaken her world? Having one son murder another would be unspeakably horrible. It would be a horrible event to live through.

I want to pick up the story after that event. Cain moves away and starts having kids, and Eve becomes a grandma. We’re going to pick it up in Genesis 4:16.

Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. When he built a city, he called the name of the city after the name of his son Enoch. To Enoch was born Irad, and Irad fathered Mehujael, and Mehujael fathered Methushael, and Methushael fathered Lamech. And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah and the name of the other Zillah. Adah bore Jabal; he was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all who played the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal-Cain; he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal-Cain was Naamah. 

Lamech said to his wives, "Adah and Zillah, hear my voice, you wives of Lamech; listen to what I have to say. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold."

And Adam knew his wife again, and she bore a son and called his name Seth, for she said, "God has appointed for me another offspring instead of Abel, for Cain killed him." To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, He made him in the likeness of God; male and female He created them. And He blessed them and named them men when they were created.

When Adam had lived 130 years he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of Adam after he fathered Seth were 800 years, and he had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died.

Now, at this point you may be scratching your head and wondering what all this mishmash of Adam’s family history has to do with our topic at hand, but let me assure you that it’s highly relevant and even profound. I’m going to use it to answer two crucial questions.

Question number one: How did we get here? How did we as a society reach a place of such gender confusion? Why is the ground under our feet shaking?

Question number two: How do we respond? How do we stand firm in God’s good design for gender and become His ambassadors of mercy, grace, and hope to a broken and hurting world?

First, how did we get there? The answer, in a nutshell, to this question is that the Fall created a fault line in human sexuality.

Now, anyone living near the San Andreas fault in California can tell you that a fault line is a fracture in the earth’s surface. It’s the place where the rock is broken. When there’s movement at a fault line, it causes an earthquake. That’s why earthquakes happen; it’s when the fault line shifts.

The Fall created a fault line in human sexuality. Now, sin fractured us in many ways, but I don’t know if you ever stopped to consider that sin fractured us and impacts us sex-specifically. When mankind fell, God pronounced judgment against sin sex-specifically. He told the man how sin would impact him as a man, and He told the woman how sin would impact her as a woman. That’s highly significant.

Sin messes with who I am as a woman and what I do as a woman. It creates fault lines in my identity and my sexuality.

Now, a fault line is a point of vulnerability. It’s where earthquakes happen. Here’s what I want you to grasp: cultural shifts in ideology, accompanied by technological advances, trigger a quake along the fault line of gender, sexuality, and morality.

Let’s go back to the narrative about the life and times of Grandma Eve. Genesis 4:16: “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord,” and that right there is a huge ideological shift. Cain walks away from God. Adam and Eve had raised him in the ways of the Lord, but Cain chafed against God’s directives. He got angry at God. He got angry at his brother, who was happily doing what God wanted him to do. And there were undoubtedly plenty of occasions when Cain had a chance and had to make the choice whether he was going to go his own way or God’s way. But here he hits a major, life-defining fork in the road. For Cain, it became a point of no return. He killed his brother, lashed out against God, and went away from the presence of the Lord. He went his own way.

Now, “the way of Cain” is a phrase that became a moniker to describe any person whose life is characterized by a rejection of God’s authority, a scornful attitude toward holy things, and unbridled sexual expression.

Jude verses 8–11 (and I’m paraphrasing): “These people defile the flesh, pollute their own bodies, defy authority, and blaspheme supernatural beings. They scoff at things they do not understand. Like unthinking animals, they do whatever their instincts tell them, and so they bring about their own destruction. What sorrow awaits them, for they follow in the way of Cain.”

Cain was a man who rejected God’s authority, he scorned holy things, and he did whatever he wanted sexually. He defiled his own flesh.

The first century Jewish historian Josephus fills in some of the blanks about Cain’s life. Josephus says:

Cain built a city to increase his wickedness. He only aimed to procure everything that was for his own bodily pleasure, though it obliged him to be injurious to his neighbors. He augmented his household substance with much wealth, and [listen!] by raping and violence he procured pleasures and spoils by robbery, and became a great leader of men into wicked courses.

Josephus argues that the building of the city allowed Cain’s wickedness to increase. This is in line with what we see in our passage. The passage cites several key technological advances.

Verse 17, “Cain built a city.” This required advances in architecture and construction and engineering.

Verses 19–22 point out that Cain’s offspring continued to come up with these great inventions. Jabal pioneered livestock farming. Jubal was a trailblazer in music and in the arts. Tubal-Cain was the inventor of metal. He forged tools and weapons of bronze and iron.

But the passage also indicates that all these great cultural advancements were accompanied by an escalation of sin and depravity, particularly in the area of human sexuality.

In verse 22 we see that Cain’s descendent Lamech abandoned God’s design for marriage; he has two wives, and who knows how many mistresses. Arrogantly here in this passage, Lamech boasts that he knows how to dish out revenge. God’s vengeance on anyone killing Cain was sevenfold, meaning a perfect measure appropriate to the crime; but Lamech vows that he will take vengeance seventy-sevenfold. If anyone crosses him, he’ll unleash an avalanche of violence and vengeance.

We all know the type. I can picture him, half-drunk, maybe grabbing one of his wives by the hair, yanking her close to his face so she could smell his hot, putrid, alcoholic breath and see his bloodshot eyes, and hear him hiss, “Anyone who crosses me, Honey, [cracking noise] I’ll slit their throat!”

Wickedness is escalating. People are becoming more depraved. When Cain went his own way, that shift in thinking had enormous consequences for him, his family, and Cainite as a whole.

Cain’s dad, Adam, lived to see seven generations of offspring born. He and Eve may have met Noah’s dad. They witnessed the events from the time of creation until the generation before the Flood. I wonder how Grandma Eve felt about the change in morals she witnessed in her grandkids and in their kids and in their kids’ kids. Can you imagine how she felt? Rape, abuse, violence, greed, sensuality, debauchery, immorality, unbridled sexual expression. Do you think that Grandma Eve felt shaken?

The shifting ideas and advancing technology during her time were causing massive earthquakes along the fault line of human sexuality. Really, that’s no different than the situation we’re facing today.

At the True Woman conference in 2008, I unpacked the ideas and history of second-wave feminism; you can still watch the video online. During the three decades from 1960 to 1990, feminism caused a huge shift in our thinking about male-female roles and sexual behavior. As a culture, we moved from a Leave It to Beaver view or ideal of women’s behavior to that of Sex and the City.

The main idea behind second-wave feminism was that women needed to redefine their role in society. The women of my generation—I was born in 1960—were encouraged to reject traditional ideas about femininity, reject everything “girly,” reject the role of wife and mother, and reject sexual standards, because feminism taught us that all these things had been defined by patriarchal men.

Now, let me be clear: feminism has and does identify legitimate problems in male-female relationships. It flags issues like abuse that egregiously assault the worth and the dignity of women. What’s more, the Bible would concur that womanhood is not defined by the June Cleaver stereotype. Feminism contains truth, but it introduces a subtle, deceptive twist into its solution. At its root, it is a philosophy that pivots away from a Judeo-Christian view of the world.

Victor Hugo once said, “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

Society’s acceptance of feminist ideas contributed to the sexual revolution in the 60s:

• An increase in promiscuity, immorality, and adultery.
• The divorce rate went up, the rate of marriage went down.
• Abortions increased, the number of births decreased.
• Women’s commitment to self-actualization and career got moved front and center, and marriage, children, and home got moved to the sidelines.

To this day, we are feeling aftershocks of that ideological quake.

But the idea of second-wave feminism could not have gained momentum without the technological advancements that supported them:

• Invention of the birth control pill.
• The proliferation of Planned Parenthood clinics.
• Television as a mechanism of mass communication.
• Computer technology and the proliferation of white-collar jobs.

Without these advancements, the quake would have only been a tremor.

It’s the same with third-wave feminism. The foreshocks of third-wave feminism began in the 1990s, in the riot-girl, feminist punk movement. Then those ideas were popularized for the next generation of women in Jennifer Baumgartner’s 2000 classic book Manifesta, and in Jessica Falenti’s 2017 book Full Frontal Feminism. 

These authors expressed legitimate grievances about how some men treat women, but their solutions moved women and society even further away from God’s design. It was another shift. Third-wave feminists introduced the idea that women could be as sexy and as raunchy as they wanted to be, and that sex and raunch—acting and dressing like a prostitute—was in fact a political statement and a mark of girl power.

Third-wave feminists pushed Kimberly Crenshaw’s gender and critical race theory, which claims that women can’t just fight against oppression along biological lines of their sex, they also need to fight against gender oppression.

The third wave encourages women to deconstruct all rules about gender and sexuality. Women can be lesbian, bisexual, asexual, trans-sexual, a man can become a woman—anything goes. “It’s my body, my experience, my sexuality, my choice.”

In the past ten years society has witnessed hundreds of third-wave feminist marches and protests. The most prominent of which are the women’s marches motivated by Trump’s inauguration and renowned for women symbolically wearing those pink knitted hats. Do you remember those? Contrary to what many participants and observers think, the ideology behind these marches is not benign. The organizers aren’t just making a statement about boorish men who crassly put down women, nor are they just making a statement about the horrors of abuse and rape. No. These protests push an ideology that leads to a deconstruction of the male-female binary. “My body, my experience, my sexuality, my choice. I kissed a girl and I liked it.”

Second-wave feminism deconstructed the roles of male and female; third-wave feminism deconstructs the very category of male and female. It’s no longer a woman, it’s a “menstruating person.” There’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed Chastity transition to “I am Chazz,” Bruce transition to “I am Kate,” Jared (whose parents helped him start the process at age four) transition to “I am Jazz.” We’ve seen a biological male honored with a Woman of the Year award. We’ve seen men who identify as women gain the right to access women’s washrooms, be housed in women’s prisons, and compete against women in sports, even in the Olympics. We’ve seen a male-to-female trans MMA fighter break a female opponent’s skull, only to be lauded by the media as the bravest athlete in history.

The current shake-up in gender and sexuality would not have been possible without advances in medicine, in plastic surgeries, in hormone therapies, nor would it have been possible without the explosion of cell phones, iPads, Internet, and the tremendous influence of social media.

Nevertheless, I want you to understand this: with regards to the fundamental fault line in our sexuality, there is nothing new under the sun. The shaking that we are experiencing with regard to gender and sexuality is only new inasmuch as modern technology has provided sin more opportunity. 

History has witnessed shake-ups like this before. The problem stretches all the way back to the massive fracture that occurred when Adam and Eve decided that it was a good idea to listen to the serpent.

Okay, that’s how we got here. Now, how do we respond?

About ten thousand people each year are killed in buildings that collapse in earthquakes, and one of the main reasons that buildings collapse is the failure of the foundation. A strong foundation with piles driven deep into the ground is one of the primary ways to earthquake-proof a building. In the same way a strong foundation protects a physical building from being damaged by an earthquake, you can protect yourself from being shaken by quake-proofing your mind with God’s foundational truth about gender.

Verses 1–2 of Genesis 5 contain a succinct and profound summary of what is true when it comes to gender and sexuality. There are five rapid-fire truths contained in these phrases. First, “When God created man . . .” Here’s the truth: God created you! You are not an evolutionary accident. God formed your inward parts and knit you together in your mother’s womb. He puts an incalculable value on your life, and He’s involved in the process.

Number two, He made you in the likeness of God. Here’s the truth: God created you to bear His image. The reason you can think and dream and reason and make moral choices is because you are an image-bearer of God. That doesn’t mean you bear His image well. Sin can mess things up, and sometimes badly. Nevertheless, though God’s image in humanity has been effaced, it has not been erased; therefore, every human being deserves to be treated with dignity. From the drag queen in the library to the cross-dresser in the grocery store, from the cisgender missionary to the transgender activist, we are all made in the likeness of the Almighty God.

Number three, “male and female He created them.” Here’s the truth: God assigns you to one side of a binary: male or female. There are two categories—only two—and the category He puts you in depends on the plumbing between your legs at birth.

What about intersex people? Well, 0.018 percent of babies are born with a birth defect. Their chromosomes and genitals are undifferentiated or don’t match, and blood tests can’t give them information about whether it’s a boy or girl. In these incredibly difficult and painful situations, doctors and families have to do their best to figure it out. But in 99.982 percent of births there is no question whether the baby is a boy or a girl.

Here’s another truth: God’s binary applies to sex and gender. It doesn’t just apply to our hardware, it also applies to our software. Society tells us that sex and gender are two different things that can be dissected from one another. But God designed our bodies, our souls, our spirits, our identities, our sexuality, and sexual behaviors to function as part of a unified whole. Whether we agree with Him or not, He’s only given us two tick-boxes.

Number four, “He blessed them.” Truth: God created manhood and womanhood for our good and for His glory. It can be tough, admittedly, to view womanhood as a blessing, especially when we consider the abuse, rape, trafficking, mutilation, and the degradation experienced by our sisters all around the world. But the horrors of sin and evil do not change the fact that God’s creation of male and female was good, very good.

As humans, we flourish when we step into who God created us to be. In doing so, we bear witness to the great cosmic love story of Christ and His Bride and the eternal union to which gender and sexuality point.

Five, He named them man when they were created, which in Hebrew is Adam, meaning mankind. Now, God gave humanity as a whole the name Adam to indicate that we all inherit the sin nature of God’s firstborn human, Adam, and to foreshadow the redemption that would come through Jesus Christ, the firstborn over all creation, the last Adam.

This statement gets right to the nub of the matter, doesn’t it? Who has the authority and the right to name? Who gets to say what humanity—maleness, femaleness, sex, and gender—is all about? If we’re to believe the Bible, the answer is crystal clear: God has that right and we do not.

In Ephesians 3:15, Paul bows his knees before the Father, “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” God does the naming. God has the right to tell us who we are, how we should live. He’s the Potter, we are the clay. Isaiah 29:16,

“You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay. Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it, ‘You did not make me?’ Can the pot say to the potter, ‘You know nothing?’” 

If you do not anchor yourself to these foundational truths about gender, you will not be able to stand firm against all the shaking that’s going on. How can you respond? You can quake-proof your mind, and I challenge you to become an earthquake lady.

Lucy Jones was two years old when an earthquake struck not far from her family home in Ventura, California. As the ground lurched, her mother took Lucy and her siblings and guided them into a hallway and shielded them with her body. That event impacted little toddler Lucy profoundly. When she grew up, she became a seismologist, and for forty years she has helped people in the state of California deal with earthquakes.

They affectionately call her the earthquake lady. She frequently appears on TV, educating and warning them about earthquakes and telling them what they can do to prepare. She coaches Californians on how to prepare for the big one, and she is the motherly voice of care and concern and calm that they turn to whenever the earth begins to shake.

I suspect that Eve learned how to be an earthquake lady. After the earth-shaking trauma of Cain murdering Abel, she bore another son, and she named him Seth. God’s promise that He would crush sin through Eve’s child had seemingly died with the murder of the godly Abel, but Seth was a bright ray of hope. Cain’s kids were becoming increasingly wicked, but Seth grows into a man and begins to have kids of his own. Look what it says in verse 26:

At that time people began to call upon the name of the Lord.

The increasing wickedness made them desperate for God; it made Eve desperate for God. You moms and grandmas with prodigals know that feeling.

There’s something else tucked into this passage that really excites me. Chapter 5 starts with the words, “This is the book of the generations of Adam,” and then it traces Adam’s family line from Seth to Noah.

Now, in the Bible, family records are introduced with these words: “These are the generations of so-and-so.” In Hebrew, this record is called a toledot. There are lots of toledots throughout Scripture, but this one is unique. It adds a phrase that is absent from all the others. It says, “This is the book of the generations of Adam.” There’s only one other toledot in all of Scripture that uses those words, and it’s found in Matthew 1:1. “This is the book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

Luke traces Jesus’ human ancestry back even further. We find out that Jesus Christ is the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

So in the Bible there’s the book of Adam and the book of Jesus, the last Adam. Jesus Christ is the exclamation point at the end of Adam’s wild and crazy story. Cain was Adam’s firstborn son, but he isn’t listed in Adam’s toledot. After Seth was born, Adam and Eve had lots of other kids and grandkids, but they aren’t listed either. Seth’s family line, which pointed forward to Jesus, was the only storyline that mattered.

Every person in the human family has been born in a fallen condition, in the likeness of Adam, but Jesus rescues us from Cain’s fate. He redeems the massive fault line that sin has created in human sexuality. The incredible hope to which even this passage in Scripture points is Jesus.

God’s good design for human sexuality is not something we bash people over the heads with. Our goal is not to make people heterosexual, our goal is to introduce them to Jesus, the Lover and the Redeemer of their souls!

So, how do we respond to the cultural shaking that’s going on in gender and sexuality? We quake-proof our minds in truth and we become spiritual earthquake ladies. Earthquake ladies love people. They love others; they are compassionate, and they lovingly help others withstand the quake. They pass on truth from generation to generation to generation, to all their physical and spiritual babies and grandbabies.

Earthquake ladies call upon the name of the Lord. They are intercessors who wrestle on their knees for this generation, for their children and children’s children, against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of the dark world, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms; because, it’s a battle.

In Colossians, the passage that Nancy talked about, we see that there is a battle for our minds. Human philosophy wants to pull us away from the truth of the Word of God. Earthquake ladies—and this is the most important point—always point people to Jesus, because Jesus is the only one who has the power to recreate and to redeem.

This is a tough topic. We’re going to go out into the world, and this is not a popular stance, that God created us male and female. Many of you in this room have had quakes in your heart along that fault line of sexuality. Maybe it isn’t with regards to your gender; maybe you’re very firm and convinced in who you are as a woman. Maybe it’s in terms of other sexual behavior. That’s your point of vulnerability because of the Fall. But because of Jesus, He wants to take that and write a new story.

Do you want to be an earthquake lady? Would you stand for a moment? I’ll pray over you.

Heavenly Father, I pray for each woman with arms raised, that she may be the voice of truth and compassion, that she may hold that balance between truth and compassion and love in hand. Heavenly Father, I pray that You will strengthen her, give her courage, make her strong, help her put her confidence in You, and be bold and very courageous in this world that is shaking. May we be earthquake ladies who point people to the only answer that is found in Jesus. Amen.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.