What I am about to share is likely to strike some of you as controversial. Not because of how I interpret the Word of God in arriving at this, but because of how you have been taught to look at the subject by modern, secular culture. I suggest to you that the modern view is sundered from reality and leads to dysfunction in relationships and the psychological dissonance involved in the perception of gender today.
What is the essential biblical truth in this matter? Biological males and females are different from each other both physically and psychologically.
Our society, as most western societies, has been laboring for decades under the false assumption that men and women are basically interchangeable. Fundamental differences in outlook, values, ambitions, etc. are seen to be superficial trappings artificially foisted upon us by developing under outdated patriarchal societal norms. Under such a view, gender is actually nothing but a choice in perspective, not a physiological assignment with psychological implications.
What I’ve seen anecdotally over my lifetime is that whatever our society has been trying to adopt in regard to the issue of manhood and womanhood has been a massive failure. I think we're collectively trying to pound a square peg into a round hole. It seems clear to me that the fallout has been the dissatisfaction, dissociation, divorce, and the sad state of gender confusion we see so prevalently today. So what does the Bible say?
There is but one creature God made in his image (imprint), man, of which there are two genders, male and female. Mankind, male and female, is one creature made with one purpose by God in his pristine creation--to rule over earth. In this there was no differentiation between male and female, and no implication of preeminence or authority. There was, however, a differentiation in roles.
Though male and female humans were undifferentiated in being (image of God), purpose (dominion), and authority (equivalent), they were made by God different in role, even in his pristine creation. The male was made to till and care for the garden God had planted. The female was made to relate to and accompany man, and eventually bear children.
Made as he was for his role, the male had a pristinely pure desire to plant, raise, maintain, and watch over the creation over which he exercised dominion. The female had a pristinely pure desire to stand beside (aid) the male she cared for and who cared for her as she exercised dominion. This condition of either sex was implied by their created purpose and verified by the dysfunction imposed upon them by the curse.
Secular psychology will not make this distinction, but the Bible can and does, and therefore, reality does.
Understanding this truth is to apprehend why males tend to be task-oriented and find identity in what they do, and females tend to be relationally-oriented and find identity in how they are connected to other people. Ask a man about his life and he’ll tell you about what he does or what he plans to do. Ask a woman about her life and she’ll tell you about the people in her life. A simplistic generalization, I know, but it certainly jives with my experience of people throughout my life.
This difference between the sexes is deep-rooted. It goes back to the purpose of God in creating us, and persists despite the flaws pervading our being since the Fall. Regardless of what we may say about gender differences in our politically correct affectedness, the difference is genetic, biological, and defeats our best efforts to erase it by social posturing. Even something as mundane as video game preferences betray our innate differences: female players prefer The Sims and male players prefer Grand Theft Auto.
Since the curse, Adam and Eve and all that have followed after, are frustrated in their innate created purposes. Together in frustration, but distinctly so from each other, men and women live and die in an irreparably broken environment. Man was struck in body and in what he did: now all that he was purposed to do fights against his doing of it and then he dies. Woman was struck by death too and with increased difficulty in childbirth, as well as how she related to man. Instead of a mutually caring, egalitarian relationship, she is objectified by man, frustrated by subservience to him and then she dies.
In this age since the Fall, the differences between men and women are no longer strictly about their roles within a singular purpose (dominion in God’s image), but are also differences in the frustrations we experience with life led under the curse on the way to death. The things our natures were made to pursue are subject to struggle, are always out of reach, and then we die. So, we owe it to our husbands, our wives, and our children, by way of being examples of love, to understand the frustrations our mates experience because of the curse.
Husbands and wives do not experience the frustrations of life and death in the brokenness of this world in the same way. With patience and consideration we can make each other’s world better than it would otherwise be by understanding the burden our spouse experiences because of the curse. Jesus has broken that curse, but we can't get back to the unbrokenness of Eden in this life. We can, however, with love and understanding live by the light of faith, together, rather than walking by sight darkened by the curse, apart.
