There’s a difference between being made in the image of God, and as the image of God. We are the former, but we are not the latter. So when someone claims at a supposedly “Gay Christian” conference that God made them trans and that the church causes trauma when it fails to let ‘LGBT+ people be who they feel they are, we don’t need to wonder if this is true.

Amy and Julie live next door. They have a golden retriever, a backyard flock of chickens, two adult children from previous heterosexual marriages, and extensive PRIDE paraphernalia perennially decorating the front porch. Ten years ago, they were living in a celibate gay partnership, but when it became legal, they got “gay married.” The church they go to embraces gay Christianity. They agree with Wes Hill that  “homosexual orientation [is a ] doorway to blessing and grace.” When Bible-believing Christians make homosexuality analogous to sins like lying, adultery, or addiction, Amy and Julie are dismayed and cry foul, claiming such a comparison is untrue and unChristian. After all, being gay is who they are, not how they feel, and as lesbians, they bear the image of God.

So here’s the question: Do you have lesbian neighbors? 

No.

You have neighbors. These beloved image-bearers of a Holy God have fallen into lusts of the flesh that wage war against God’s created order. But they are not a different kind of man or woman.  A “gay man” is a man with a sin issue that embeds deep into his flesh. Same for a “trans-non-binary they.” His ontology – his state of being – is no different from any other man. He is a man who must submit to Christ and learn to go to war against his sin. And if he does this, he will find victory in Christ over the deeds of the flesh. Biblically speaking, it is nothing short of a delusion to believe that LGBTQ+ describes a different category of person. Rather, LGBTQ+ is found in the flesh, forbidden in the law of God, and overcome by the Savior.

The Myth of Sexual Orientation

 This brings us to the modern invention of sexual orientation – an idea that entered history as a fringe Freudian fetish in the early 19th century – and which reflects a category mistake about what it means to be made in the Image of God.

Worldviews have consequences, and bad ones have casualties. In our anti-Christian world, two competing worldviews about what it means to be human are on a collision course. One is the category of being made in the image of God. The other is the category of “sexual orientation.” Our identity is going to come from one or the other.

 God defines our identity and experience like this:

“God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness….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” (Genesis 1:26-28).

Theologians call this the “creation ordinance,” and from it, we extract five principles about personhood, identity, and experience:

1. God’s created order is limited and authoritative: we are made in God’s image as male or female.
2. God’s created order is relational and noble: man and woman are made for one another; “Man is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man….In the Lord, woman is not independent of man nor man of woman” (1 Corinthians 11:7, 11).

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