By Sinclair B. Ferguson
As we discuss the remarkable fact that God created mankind as male and female, it’s important to recognize that this isn’t just the view of Genesis 2. It was also the view of Jesus on the basis of Genesis 2. He said to the Pharisees: “Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate” (Matt. 19:4–6).
Jesus could not have made it clearer that the teaching God gave in the beginning—far from being contradicted, changed, or adapted by Jesus, as people sometimes say—is the very teaching of Jesus. Why is this so important? Because it establishes the Christian view that marriage is between a man and a woman.
There is another implication of this passage as well: there were ever meant to be only two created genders. Human beings come in only two created sexes. Anything other than this is a distortion and disordering of the creation and God’s purposes for it. This, too, is the view endorsed by Jesus.
We can draw several conclusions from this. First, our governments are mistaken when they endorse any other view. More than that, they are rejecting the Word and wisdom of God and of our Lord Jesus Christ. Second, it’s simply not true that love takes a different view today. Neither God’s loving Word nor human anatomy has changed.
The One who is love incarnate affirms this view. Jesus’ affirmation of Genesis 2 outlaws what is today called “gay marriage.” It also outlaws no-fault divorce. Jesus didn’t believe that the individual’s demand for, or even the individual’s understanding of, his or her own happiness is the most important consideration, for incarnate love does not tolerate the disordering of God’s creation order.
We live in an era when that is an unpopular thing to say, for powerful forces have been released in our society. We need to take a leaf out of Jesus’ book. Or to put it another way, we need to take a leaf out of Jesus’ logic to unmask the deception that quotes “Love conquers all things”—in this case, referring to conquering all obstacles and barriers to what a person wants to do. Seven words are all that the biblically instructed Christian needs: “From the beginning it was not so” (Matt. 19:8). That is it.
Today, we see women exchange relations with men and vice versa for same-sex relationships, and instead of the threatened thunder and lightning of God’s judgment, there is happiness. But if Romans 1:18–32 makes one thing clear, it’s this: God’s present-day judgments are usually manifested not in cataclysmic destruction but in giving people over to their own desires to do what they want to do.
Three times in Romans 1—verses 24, 26, and 28—Paul tells us this: God simply gave them over to their own desires and to the consequences of those desires. As C.S. Lewis once put it, there is a sense in which the most terrible words in the universe are when God Himself says to us, “Thy will be done.”
It’s very telling how Paul ends his exposition of Romans 1:18–32. He says that those who break God’s law in this way not only do it themselves, but give approval to those who do the same. In a sense, they’ve got to. Rebellion against God must have company. It must make its own way normal and, if possible, normative.
But as has often been said, we can never really break God’s law because it is indestructible. We can only break ourselves against it. And we need to pray with great compassion that our world will soon realize this before more people destroy themselves.
