Thesis 77- We must train our daughters to be women and our sons to be men.
Men and women alike bear the image of God. We are joint heirs in Christ, the same in dignity, value, equally loved by our heavenly Father. We are not, however, the same. We’re not interchangeable parts, our masculinity or femininity nothing more than a skin we shed at will. That the broader culture is desperate to get us to believe this lie is a good sign that believing it is a bad thing indeed. If, however, we simply embrace our own biblical convictions and do not pass them to our children, then by default they will take their cues from the world.
It is true enough that there is no bright and shining light between cultural clues and hard-wired realities. An interest in knitting doesn’t make a boy effeminate, nor does an interest in baseball make a girl a tomboy. That truth, however, doesn’t undo the truth that there are genuine differences, in make-up and in calling.
Allow me to illustrate. There are myriad outstanding reasons to be opposed to women serving in combat roles. Many of those reasons are profoundly practical. One reason, however, is deeply ontological. Women should not be serving in combat roles because boys are to protect girls. It’s how God made us. It’s what He wants from us. Training up children in light of this is pretty simple. Our boys are told clearly and often that simple truth, “Boys protect girls.” They know that has an impact in how they interact with their friends. And how they interact with their mother.
The call of boys to protect girls is innate, God-given, irreducible. It can, however, be numbed, squashed, fought against. In fact, we are in the midst of this. An age where boys “marry” boys, where “girls” with all boy parts compete as “girls” against girls, when this sentence makes a weird kind of sense, “Bruce Jenner thinks she’s a girl but he is mistaken,” is an age that must be pushed back against.
Pushing back doesn’t mean embracing those distinctions that are clearly merely cultural. I won’t make my sons more masculine by teaching them to belch and spit. It does mean embracing those distinctions that are clearly not cultural. Boys protect girls. We sacrifice our comfort for the sake of their comfort. We lead with gentleness. We endure hardship for the sake of those under our care.
There are few things believers can do that are more clearly counter-cultural and more clearly biblical. Of all the places and all the ways the culture pushes back against the law of God, there may be none in our day more powerful than how it pushes against God’s revelation of sexual roles and duties.
Martin Luther, who knew a thing or two about Reformations, said it best- If I profess with loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except that little point which the world and the Devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ.
No matter how insane the world goes, in God’s kingdom men are men, and women women.