What does it mean that God created us male and female?
Question 05006
Genesis 1:27 is one of the most foundational statements in all of Scripture, and in the current cultural moment it is also one of the most contested. When God created humanity, He created them male and female. That is not an incidental biological detail appended to the more important statement about the image of God; it is part of the same declaration, and it carries the full weight of divine design.
The Declaration of Genesis
Genesis 1:27 reads: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The verse is remarkable in its structure. The image of God and the creation of male and female are placed in immediate sequence, suggesting that sexual differentiation belongs to what it means to bear that image rather than being incidental to it. This is a theological statement about the nature of humanity as God designed it, not a biological footnote.
When Jesus was asked about marriage and divorce, He did not appeal to cultural convention or Mosaic accommodation. He went back to creation: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female?” (Matthew 19:4). The Lord Himself treated the creation account as the definitive word on human sexual identity, and He cited it as binding on His hearers. That is the interpretive move that Scripture itself authorises.
Two Sexes, Not a Spectrum
The biblical account presents human beings as existing in one of two forms: male and female. There is no third category, no spectrum, and no provision for the idea that a person’s subjective sense of identity can override the physical reality of their created nature. This is not a product of ancient cultural limitation; it is a deliberate ordering of creation by the God who made it. The consistent witness of the Old and New Testaments operates within this binary framework without qualification or apology.
The bodily difference between male and female is not accidental. It is the expression of a deeper reality about how God has designed human beings to relate to one another, to bear and nurture children, and to reflect something of the relational life of God Himself within the structure of marriage. The two are different and complementary rather than interchangeable, and that difference is created and therefore good.
Complementarity and Its Purpose
The creation of male and female is immediately followed by the mandate to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28), and by the observation that the two become one flesh in marriage (Genesis 2:24). Sexual difference exists within a relational framework, and that framework is marriage between a man and a woman. This is the creational design to which Jesus explicitly appealed when He addressed the Pharisees, and it remains the framework within which human sexual existence is properly understood.
Paul’s argument in Ephesians 5 connects the pattern of husband and wife to the relationship between Christ and the church, which means that the male-female distinction carries theological freight extending beyond the sociological into the redemptive. The way a Christian marriage is ordered is meant to say something true about the relationship between Christ and His people. That is only possible if male and female are genuinely distinct.
The Question of Gender Identity
The contemporary claim that a person’s gender identity can differ from their biological sex, and that the subjective experience of identity should be treated as more determinative than the biological reality, has no foundation in Scripture. The Bible is consistent in treating male and female as corresponding to physical reality rather than to inner experience. The creation account, the law, the wisdom literature, the prophets, and the New Testament all operate within this framework.
This does not mean that people who experience gender dysphoria should be treated with contempt or dismissed. Gender dysphoria is a genuine psychological condition, and those who experience it are entitled to pastoral care, compassion, and honest engagement. What pastoral care cannot do, however, is affirm a claim about identity that contradicts the person’s created nature. Genuine care tells the truth, even when the truth is difficult. Ian holds clearly that affirming a claimed gender identity that contradicts biological sex is not a form of care but a failure of honesty.
The Christian understanding of the body matters here. The physical body is not a prison or an accident; it is the material form in which the person exists and through which the image of God is expressed in the world. The resurrection of the body confirms that the physical dimension of humanity is permanent rather than temporary. What God made in the beginning He will redeem in the end, and what He will redeem is a body that is male or female.
So, now what?
The question of what it means that God created us male and female is not primarily a culture-war question, even though it functions as one in the current moment. It is a question about the nature of reality, the character of God’s creation, and the authority of Scripture to speak on matters that contemporary culture has decided to resolve by other means. The Christian answer begins and ends with the text: God created human beings in two complementary forms, and that creational reality carries the full weight of His design and purpose. The church’s calling is to say what Scripture says about this, with both clarity and genuine pastoral compassion for those for whom the question is not abstract.
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27