Darwin (1809-1882), Freud (1856-1939), and Marx (1818-1883) can quite rightly be called the architects of modernity. During the 1800s, these three men were foundational in providing secularism’s answers to three of life’s most important and unavoidable questions regarding our origins, our guilt, and our hope.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the key to explaining man’s origin. How did we get here? Of course, answering that question always leads to a very important follow-up: Why are we here?

Although much of Freud’s work on psychoanalysis is no longer practiced by the psychological community, many of his ideas have so thoroughly permeated society that it goes unnoticed. Concepts like the unconscious, libido, id, and ego have weaved their way into our everyday vocabulary. But most importantly, we can thank Freud for teaching us to turn to psychology to help us resolve the strain that our sin and guilt place upon our consciences.

If Freud taught us to look inward, Marx gave us a vision for understanding the world around us. Focusing largely upon economics, Marx saw life as a great power struggle between the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) and the working class (the proletariat). He believed that nothing short of violent societal revolutions were necessary for the proletariat to free themselves from the financial chains that the bourgeoisie had shackled them with. Yet after such a revolution, utopia would surely emerge, a communist paradise without hierarchies and without oppression. Today, Marx’s economic vision of power struggles has been applied to all aspects of culture, fitting being called cultural Marxism.

Again, these three men gave secularism intellectual credibility. Because of them, humanity no longer needed to look beyond this world to answer questions about our origins, our guilt, and our hope. And it is largely due to their influence that we have need to spend an entire lesson focusing upon the questions before us. For over a thousand years, everything that we are going to discuss was practically assumed in the West, and the fact that we must now defend the reality of there being only two sexes can be extremely disheartening.

Nevertheless, we should remember that there is nothing new under the sun. Secularism is only a modern form of paganism that worships the self rather than the gods. Thus, with the diminishing of Christendom, we have actually been living through a revival of paganism. Of course, it has been rebranded. Instead of the world being created through the fighting of the gods, Darwinism says it was created through the struggle of every living to survive. Instead of visiting priests to absolve our sins, Freud taught us to visit psychiatrists, and instead of seeing a shaman to make us magic potions, we produce them in bulk and in convenient capsules. Instead of believing in places like Valhalla or Elysium, we now look for the communist paradise. You see, history does not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme.

Before Christianity became society identity of the West following the fall of the Roman Empire, only Christians and Jews believed in the imago Dei of mankind, yet for over a thousand years, it became an assumed doctrine in the West. In our present struggle over the doctrine of mankind, it is right that we must begin the doctrine that the Bible presents to us as the pinnacle of its very first chapter. The secular revival of paganism means that what was once assumed must now be defended and clarified.

QUESTION 3

The first of the four sections of Gordon’s catechism focuses upon creation. That is an apt place to start because the Darwinian rejection of creation is at the foundation of nearly all the matters of sexuality that we will be discussing throughout this study. As we said in our reworking of question 2, we should be aiming to learn and remind ourselves through this section of the goodness of God’s design for mankind, including human sexuality. Let us begin then with Question 3:

How many sexes did God make a creation?

God made two sexes at creation; “in the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them.”

Gordon fittingly makes a direct quotation of Genesis 1:27 because that is the Bible’s explicit answer to that question. Together with verse 26, these verses form the climax of Genesis 1 and are also one of the most important portions of Scripture for answering the theological and cultural challenges before us. Thus, let us take a moment to consider them in context.

Even though God could have very easily caused the cosmos to exist in their entirety less than the blink of an eye, the LORD chose to create through a six-day process, which means that there must have been significant reason and purpose for Him doing so.

Indeed, if we take a sweeping glance over the six days of creation, we find that the first three days are works of forming and shaping. On day one, God creates light and divides the light from the darkness, naming them day and night. On day two, God divides the waters from one another and creates the heavens. On day three, God gathers the waters together so that land is formed, then he covers the land with plants of every kind. Day four corresponds to day one with God filling the cosmos with objects of light: the sun, moon, and stars. Day five corresponds to day two with God filling the heavens with birds and the waters with creatures. Day six corresponds to day three with God filling the land with a kinds of animals.

Day six concludes with the creation of man. He is last of God’s creation to show that he is the pinnacle, yet he is still created on the sixth day to show that he is still within the created order. Indeed, as we will read in verse 26-28, God gave man dominion over all the earth, but he is just as much as much of a creation as the earth itself. Indeed, Genesis 2 will reveal that God used the dust of the earth to form the body of man. For the moment, let us read Genesis 1:26-30:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

            So God created man in his own image,
            in the image of God he created him;
            male and female he created them.

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.

Notice how verses 28-30 repeat man’s dominion over the earth, but they then continue reveal that God has also created the creatures, the plants, and the earth itself for mankind. Thus, man was not only the capstone of creation; man was the point of creation. God made the earth, all that is upon it, and the heavens above it for the good of man, the one creature that He made in His image.

While we are speaking of man, we should remember that we are referring to mankind or humanity. Genesis 2 will describe to us the particular process by which God created man, both the first man and the first woman, but here in chapter 1 the Bible is speaking of mankind generally, both male and female. This is crucial to understand because it reveals that mankind can only properly image God through the two sexes that God designed for us: male and female.

QUESTION 5

This leads us to the next logical question:

Why did God make us male and female in his image?

That we might use all of the excellent qualities with which he made us, in true righteousness and holiness, in body and soul, as male and female, for his glory as we exercise dominion over the earth.

Although God created Adam first, God did not create men to fully embody humankind, while merely creating women to be subservient to men. No, God always meant for mankind to have both male and female, which is a reflection of the nature of God and perhaps is part of what is meant by being image-bearers.

Notice this: God is triune, one God existing in three persons. Father, Son, and Spirit are all God, but each has a different and unique role and personhood. Thus, God is both plural and singular. In Genesis 1:27, we find a similarity being made with mankind. First, the word man is used, along with the singular masculine “him”, but then male and female are used along with the plural “them”. Thus, male and female are both different and unique but also distinctly human. Each is human, but both are different. Michael Reeves argues that the humanity’s existence in male and female is the clearest picture (though still not a perfect analogy by any means) the Bible gives for how we are to think of the Trinity:

There is something about the relationship and difference between the man and woman, Adam and Eve, that images the being of God—something we saw the apostle Paul pick up on in 1 Corinthians 11:3. Eve is a person quite distinct from Adam, and yet she has all her life and being from Adam. She comes from his side, is bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and is one with him in the flesh (Gen 2:21-24). Far better than leaves, eggs, and liquids, that reflects the personal God, a Son who is distinct from his Father, and yet who is of the very being of the Father, and who is eternally one with him in Spirit.

Indeed, whenever God says that it is not good for man to be alone, we tend to only think of Adam being lonely. However, it would probably be better to read it as God saying that man was not yet complete because he was alone. He was not yet able to image God as He ought because being Trinity, even though God alone is God, He is never alone. Just as the Father, Son, and Spirit together display to us the fullness of the Deity, man could only image God as both male and female. Eve, therefore, was not an afterthought; she was the pinnacle of the pinnacle of Creation. Being made from Adam’s rib rather than from the dust does not make her a derivative of Adam; rather, she is one step further refined from the dust. Herman Bavinck describes the complementary features that mark men and women:

It is the beauty of loftiness that the man embodies, even as the beauty of comeliness is the possession of the woman… To the man belongs the strength of physical prowess, the wide chest, the commanding eye, the full beard, the powerful voice; to the woman belongs a delicate shape, sensitive skin, full bosom, round shape, soft voice, long hair, elegant carriage, and supple movement. He engenders respect, she engenders tenderness.

There is also something reflective of God’s nature in the work that He has given to mankind. Again, God first created the world formless and void. In the first three days, he formed the formless, and in the last three days, He filled the void. That twofold structure of putting order to chaos is reflected in the masculine and feminine nature of humanity. Consider again the creation mandate or first commission that God gave to Adam and Eve:

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

Those commands are for humanity as a whole. They could only be obeyed together, by the man and woman working in tandem. Yet Eve’s specific feminine role would be to fill the earth with God’s image-bearers by birthing and sustaining each of their children with her own body. Adam’s specific masculine role would be to form the earth, to work the ground and make the rest of the earth like the garden that God planted for them in Eden. Thus, through the joint workings of man and woman, God would use humanity to continue putting the earth into its beautiful order and fill it with His image. This is why generally men are more drawn to tasks that form and shape the world, whether physically or intellectually, and women tend toward tasks that fill and beautify the world, also both physically and intellectually.

Furthermore, we should note that how God designed for the earth to be filled with His image-bearers is also reflective of God’s work of creation. In eternity past, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit were unified together in perpetual and unending love. From that love, God created. The Father spoke, the Son enacted, and the Spirit empowered. It is fitting, therefore, that He would design His image-bearers create and be created through love as well. That is why both sex and children are so hated by the spiritual forces of evil that war against us. Since Satan cannot harm God directly, he aims to distort and destroy God’s image-bearers as much as possible, and there are few avenues more heinous than the corruption of sex and the slaughter of children. Sadly, all of history, including our own age, is filled with both.

It is critical that we understand God’s good design in making us to use all of the excellent qualities with which he made us, in true righteousness and holiness, in body and soul, as male and female, for his glory as we exercise dominion over the earth. Because things are not as they should be, and without this proper grounding of the world as it was designed to be (and as it will be again!), it can be easy to be swayed by the lies around us. For instance, feminism is essentially a particular branch of cultural Marxism, since it is predicated on the constant power struggle between men and women. And honestly, they have a point. History is filled with such power struggles. But this should not catch us off guard because we also know their origin.

After rebelling against God’s command and rejecting God’s goodness, God made this declaration to Eve: “I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). Now there are a multitude of nuanced interpretations for what exactly the second sentence means, but one thing is clear: the relationship between Adam and Eve was just as fractured as their relationship to God. Owen Strachan writes: “The woman was made by God to be cared for by the man’s loving leadership; now, she will not receive his authority happily, and he will not exercise it benevolently.” We will cover plenty of the brokenness in the coming questions and weeks. For now, let us simply root ourselves with the truth of how God intended humanity to image Him before the sin corrupted that image.

QUESTION 4

Now that we have seen that God wonderfully created mankind to image Him as male and female and something of why He has done so, let us conclude with what God requires of each of us:

What does God require of us in making us in his image?

God requires that we love him as he created us, male or female, with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.[1]

Of course, Gordon here points us toward the greatest commandments, which are to love God supremely and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Like the Ten Commandments, it is rather difficult to argue that the world would not be in a much better place if we lived accordingly. The reality is that we only find these commands burdensome because they contradict the Satanic lie that dwells within our heart, saying that we ought to be gods ourselves.

If God is our creator, who has made us in His image and likeness, then we should love Him as He has created us. A book exists for the purpose for which its author wrote it, and a piece of pottery exists for the purpose for which its potter formed and fired it. Likewise, as the New City Catechism says, it is right that we who were created by God should live to his glory. Or to approach the same matter from another angle, I greatly enjoy the answer to question 5 of the Catechism for Boys and Girls:

Q: Why ought you to glorify God?

A. Because He made me and takes care of me.

God is not only our Creator; He is also our Sustainer. He is our Potter as well as our Shepherd. Being made in His image, it is right that we would seek to know Him, love Him, and glorify Him with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our strength and that we would love His image-bearers as He Himself loves us. In the end, that is what it ultimately means to be human and to be made in God’s image.

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[1] Lev. 19:18; Deut. 6:5; Matt. 22:37-40