Gary Yagel, Forging Bonds of Brotherhood

 In 2025, when it comes to Christian men protecting our families, we don’t need to stand in the doorway with a shotgun watching for marauding gangs who will rape or kidnap our loved ones. Instead, we must watch for poisonous ideas that penetrate our homes through the airways landing on their screens taking their minds captive and dragging them down a path to destruction. Ideas have consequences. Toxic ideas have victims, which is why Paul understood spiritual warfare as a battle over the ideas that capture the human heart and mind. 

“The weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” II Corinthians 10:4-5

One of the most toxic ideas harming the rising generation of Christian kids is that gender no longer matters. Gender roles arose, it is argued, out of evil, misogynistic, Biblical patriarchy. Contrast this to the life-giving wisdom of Scripture:

Of the 1189 chapters of the Bible, God devotes half of the first and nearly all of the second to explaining the binary creation of humans as male and female, fully equal as divine image-bearers, yet intentionally designed to be different. God devotes four times as many verses in Genesis 2 to explaining how differently God created male and female than he did in chapter one explaining their equality. He did this for a reason—male and female are designed to complete one another in the bond of married love to bear God’s image—a Triune unity of three distinct persons who love one another.

Creation reveals that every single one of the 30 trillion cells in the normal female body has XX chromosomes, the male body having XY. Embryologists now know that at eight weeks, the presence of the XY chromosome in the human embryo causes the male’s whole body to develop differently than a female’s body, including his brain. When we see the weightiness of God’s intentional design of male and female to be different, both by observing God’s general revelation in creation and what Scripture says, it is hard to imagine a more corrupt worldview than that gender doesn’t matter. Not only that but, discipleship, by definition, is restoring manhood, broken by sin to God’s original design, which brings flourishing to mankind.

Our sons need our help in living out this discipleship calling in our gender-blended culture and the best way to help them is to look this month of June at what Scripture says about God’s gender design together.