Why Is God Referred to as He? Masculine Language Explained

Question 2022. Masculine language for God runs through the whole Bible, “He,” “Him,” “Father,” “King,” and I am often asked why, given that God is spirit and not literally male, as I explained in my article on whether God has a gender. This question digs into the small word “He” specifically, the pronoun itself, rather than the broader question of gender, and I think it deserves its own careful, separate answer.

My answer is that Scripture’s masculine language, including its pronoun choice, is neither accidental nor just a product of the patriarchal cultures the Bible was written in. It is deliberate, revelatory language, chosen by God Himself to communicate something true about how He relates to His creation, even though He does not possess biological sex.

Every language needs some pronoun, and Scripture chose one

Start with the practical reality. Hebrew and Greek, like English, require a pronoun whenever an author refers back to a previously named subject without repeating the noun every time. Scripture had options available. Hebrew has a feminine pronoun. It has neuter constructions in certain contexts. The biblical authors, across roughly forty different writers spanning fifteen hundred years and multiple literary genres, consistently chose masculine pronouns and titles for God. That consistency across such a long span of time and such different human authors is itself worth noting. This was not one culture’s passing convention. It is the sustained testimony of the whole of Scripture.

The New Testament makes the choice deliberately, even against grammar

The clearest evidence that this masculine language is deliberate rather than accidental comes from an unexpected place, the Greek grammar of John’s Gospel. The Greek word for Spirit, pneuma, is grammatically neuter. Ordinary Greek grammar would require a neuter pronoun, “it,” whenever John refers back to the Spirit. Instead, in John 14:26 and John 16:13-14, Jesus uses the masculine pronoun ekeinos, “he,” breaking the expected grammatical agreement. This is not a scribal slip. It happens repeatedly and consistently. John is deliberately overriding Greek grammatical convention to signal that the Spirit is a person, not an impersonal force, and the masculine pronoun was the vehicle chosen to make that point unmistakably. If pronoun choice were theologically weightless, there would have been no reason to violate ordinary grammar to secure it.

What masculine language communicates relationally

Throughout Scripture, masculine titles for God cluster around a consistent set of relational functions: initiating, providing, defending, covering, going before. God as Father begets and provides for His household. God as King rules and defends His people, going before them in battle (Deuteronomy 20:4). God as Bridegroom pursues, initiates covenant, and gives Himself for His bride (Ephesians 5:25). “He” is not a claim about divine anatomy. It carries this whole cluster of covenantal meaning, initiating love, protective strength, faithful provision, meanings that would be genuinely lost, not just rephrased, if the pronoun were simply swapped for something considered more neutral.

Scripture is not afraid of feminine imagery, which makes the pattern more significant

I find this point decisive. If the biblical authors were simply trapped inside patriarchal assumptions with no other conceptual resources available, we would expect them to avoid feminine imagery for God altogether. They do not. Isaiah 66:13 compares God’s comfort to a mother’s comfort. Isaiah 49:15 compares His faithfulness to a nursing mother’s love, a bond Isaiah says is more reliable than God’s own faithfulness. Matthew 23:37 has Jesus wanting to gather Jerusalem “as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.” Scripture had the vocabulary, used it deliberately, and still consistently settled on “He” as God’s self-revealed pronoun. That combination, willingness to use feminine imagery alongside a settled masculine pronoun, argues strongly against the idea that “He” was simply an unreflective cultural default.

What the Trinity’s own inner language shows us

Masculine language is not limited to how God relates to us. It also describes how the persons of the Trinity relate to one another. The Father is Father to the Son, not to a daughter. The Son is described as “the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14), language that carries its own internal masculine logic quite apart from any question of how humans should address God. This matters because it shows this language is not simply a device aimed outward at human readers for pedagogical convenience. It reflects something in the eternal relations within the Godhead itself, the kind of relational structure I explore further in my article on what eternal generation of the Son means. If masculine language were purely a concession to human limitation, we would not expect it to appear this consistently in texts describing realities entirely internal to God, prior to and apart from any human audience at all.

Does this pronoun choice diminish women?

No, and Genesis settles this directly. “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). Both sexes together, equally, image God. Masculine language for God has sometimes been misused historically to suggest men are somehow closer to God’s nature than women, and I want to name that misuse plainly as a distortion of what Scripture actually teaches, not a faithful application of it. The pronoun “He” describes God’s relational posture toward creation. It does not rank the sexes against one another in their capacity to reflect Him.

How this compares to Ancient Near Eastern goddess language

It is worth noticing what Israel’s masculine language for God was actually set against. The nations surrounding Israel routinely worshipped goddesses alongside gods, fertility deities like Asherah whose worship often involved practices Scripture condemns outright. Israel’s exclusive use of “He” for the LORD was, among other things, a deliberate theological boundary marker, distinguishing the God of Israel from the fertility cults and sacred sexuality that saturated the wider Ancient Near Eastern religious landscape. This does not mean femininity itself was viewed negatively, Scripture is full of positive feminine imagery and honoured women, but it does mean this pattern of speech carried a polemical as well as a positive function, protecting Israel’s worship from being absorbed into surrounding fertility religion. That historical context reinforces rather than undermines the case that this language was chosen with real theological purpose.

Why I would not change the language even with good intentions

Some contemporary translations and liturgies replace masculine pronouns for God with “God” repeated, or neutral constructions, hoping to make the text feel more inclusive. I understand the motive, but I think it comes at a real cost. Masculine language is not incidental packaging around a gender-neutral content that can be swapped out without loss. It carries meaning, the meaning of a Father who provides, a King who defends, a Bridegroom who pursues. Removing “He” removes real content, not just a grammatical wrapper, which is why I continue to use the language Scripture itself consistently uses, while remaining equally committed to Genesis 1:27’s insistence that both men and women fully bear God’s image.

What Job learned when he stopped arguing

It is worth noting that when God finally speaks to Job out of the whirlwind, after chapters of Job questioning why God permits his suffering, God does not appear as an abstract force or a neutral principle. He speaks as a King addressing His creation with commanding, masculine authority, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). Job’s response is not to negotiate with a concept but to fall silent before a Person, “I lay my hand on my mouth” (Job 40:4). The relational, personal, masculine shape of that encounter is part of what makes it land the way it does. An impersonal “it” issuing the same questions would not carry the same weight of confrontation and comfort combined.

I think this is instructive for how we hold this whole question. Pronouns are not neutral technical choices in Scripture. They are part of how God makes Himself known as a Person to be met, addressed and submitted to, rather than a force to be analysed. Whatever discomfort a modern reader may feel about “He,” I would rather sit with that discomfort and let Scripture’s own choice of words shape my theology than quietly edit the text to feel more comfortable to contemporary ears.

So, now what?

Next time you read the small word “He” in reference to God, let it carry its full, intended weight rather than treating it as a mere accident of ancient grammar or a simply outdated cultural habit worth quietly discarding. It is telling you that the God you are reading about initiates toward you, provides for you, and stands ready to defend you the way a faithful king defends his people. That is not a smaller truth than the maternal comfort Isaiah 66:13 also promises. It is a different facet of the same faithful character, and Scripture gives you both without asking you to choose.

“When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me.” (John 15:26, ESV)