The Image of God in Gender

The Bible begins with a good, creative, beautiful, imaginative, wise, fun, all-powerful God who created the world. It says that all of God's creation was good, except for one thing. Mankind. God had purposed to make man in God's image, but it was impossible to achieve with the creation of only one person. No one person could ever bear the full image of God, because God was too complex to be expressed in a single human personality. So the perfect man that God had created, perfectly capable, confident, creative, and strong, did not and could not bear the full image of his complex Creator. So God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and removed one of the man's ribs. With it, God formed the female man. When the male man awoke and saw her, he recognized that he could only be complete by being together with her. He was not only missing her rib, but also her softness, gentleness, and sensitivity, complexity of feeling, simplicity of trust, and absolute fulfillment in serving others.* These things were as foreign to him as the rib that was now in her body. They had origin in him, but found life in her. She was a part of him, and he would never be whole without her. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. And when the Two distinct personalities, the male and the female, came together for the first time, something entirely new was created. The two had become One flesh. And it was this new creation, this new man, this marriage of the male and female, the representation of masculine and feminine personalities of God, that could finally reflect God's full image. And with this new creation, this new man which bore the full image of God, God saw all that had been made, and it was very good.



* One of my frustrations with much that is written on the differences between men and women is the simplistic suggestion that any human being can possess 100% masculine or 100% feminine characteristics. Instead, I believe that all people are created with a unique combination of the two, which makes us bearable and functional as human beings. If any man was without some amount of gentleness and compassion, which are seen as being feminine traits, he would be a fearsome creature, indeed. And if any woman were completely devoid of rational thought, she would be annoying and helpless beyond imagination. So I see different traits of masculinity and femininity on a spectrum, with all human beings possessing some of each. For this reason, I get frustrated with books that generalize "men" and "women" because they make it so easy to both wrongly assume things about others, and feel like less of a man or less of a woman because of areas where God has blessed us with traits generally found in the opposite sex. So no individual is without aspects of masculinity and femininity, though gender certainly determines whether a person tends towards the masculine or the feminine.

** This interpretation is just that- one possible interpretation. I added an amendment to this blog, if you want more details.