Through the joint workings of man and woman, God would use humanity to continue putting the earth into its beautiful order and fill it with His image. This is why generally men are more drawn to tasks that form and shape the world, whether physically or intellectually, and women tend toward tasks that fill and beautify the world, also both physically and intellectually. Furthermore, we should note that how God designed for the earth to be filled with His image-bearers is also reflective of God’s work of creation. 

Darwin (1809-1882), Freud (1856-1939), and Marx (1818-1883) can quite rightly be called the architects of modernity. During the 1800s, these three men were foundational in providing secularism’s answers to three of life’s most important and unavoidable questions regarding our origins, our guilt, and our hope.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was the key to explaining man’s origin. How did we get here? Of course, answering that question always leads to a very important follow-up: Why are we here?

Although much of Freud’s work on psychoanalysis is no longer practiced by the psychological community, many of his ideas have so thoroughly permeated society that it goes unnoticed. Concepts like the unconscious, libido, id, and ego have weaved their way into our everyday vocabulary. But most importantly, we can thank Freud for teaching us to turn to psychology to help us resolve the strain that our sin and guilt place upon our consciences.

If Freud taught us to look inward, Marx gave us a vision for understanding the world around us. Focusing largely upon economics, Marx saw life as a great power struggle between the ruling class (the bourgeoisie) and the working class (the proletariat). He believed that nothing short of violent societal revolutions were necessary for the proletariat to free themselves from the financial chains that the bourgeoisie had shackled them with. Yet after such a revolution, utopia would surely emerge, a communist paradise without hierarchies and without oppression. Today, Marx’s economic vision of power struggles has been applied to all aspects of culture, fitting being called cultural Marxism.

Again, these three men gave secularism intellectual credibility. Because of them, humanity no longer needed to look beyond this world to answer questions about our origins, our guilt, and our hope. And it is largely due to their influence that we have need to spend an entire lesson focusing upon the questions before us. For over a thousand years, everything that we are going to discuss was practically assumed in the West, and the fact that we must now defend the reality of there being only two sexes can be extremely disheartening.

Nevertheless, we should remember that there is nothing new under the sun. Secularism is only a modern form of paganism that worships the self rather than the gods. Thus, with the diminishing of Christendom, we have actually been living through a revival of paganism. Of course, it has been rebranded. Instead of the world being created through the fighting of the gods, Darwinism says it was created through the struggle of every living to survive. Instead of visiting priests to absolve our sins, Freud taught us to visit psychiatrists, and instead of seeing a shaman to make us magic potions, we produce them in bulk and in convenient capsules. Instead of believing in places like Valhalla or Elysium, we now look for the communist paradise. You see, history does not repeat, but it certainly does rhyme.

Before Christianity became society identity of the West following the fall of the Roman Empire, only Christians and Jews believed in the imago Dei of mankind, yet for over a thousand years, it became an assumed doctrine in the West. In our present struggle over the doctrine of mankind, it is right that we must begin the doctrine that the Bible presents to us as the pinnacle of its very first chapter. The secular revival of paganism means that what was once assumed must now be defended and clarified.

Question 3

The first of the four sections of Gordon’s catechism focuses upon creation. That is an apt place to start because the Darwinian rejection of creation is at the foundation of nearly all the matters of sexuality that we will be discussing throughout this study. As we said in our reworking of question 2, we should be aiming to learn and remind ourselves through this section of the goodness of God’s design for mankind, including human sexuality. Let us begin then with Question 3:

How many sexes did God make a creation?

God made two sexes at creation; “in the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them.”

Gordon fittingly makes a direct quotation of Genesis 1:27 because that is the Bible’s explicit answer to that question. Together with verse 26, these verses form the climax of Genesis 1 and are also one of the most important portions of Scripture for answering the theological and cultural challenges before us. Thus, let us take a moment to consider them in context.

Even though God could have very easily caused the cosmos to exist in their entirety less than the blink of an eye, the LORD chose to create through a six-day process, which means that there must have been significant reason and purpose for Him doing so.

Indeed, if we take a sweeping glance over the six days of creation, we find that the first three days are works of forming and shaping. On day one, God creates light and divides the light from the darkness, naming them day and night. On day two, God divides the waters from one another and creates the heavens. On day three, God gathers the waters together so that land is formed, then he covers the land with plants of every kind. Day four corresponds to day one with God filling the cosmos with objects of light: the sun, moon, and stars. Day five corresponds to day two with God filling the heavens with birds and the waters with creatures. Day six corresponds to day three with God filling the land with a kinds of animals.

Day six concludes with the creation of man. He is last of God’s creation to show that he is the pinnacle, yet he is still created on the sixth day to show that he is still within the created order. Indeed, as we will read in verse 26-28, God gave man dominion over all the earth, but he is just as much as much of a creation as the earth itself. Indeed, Genesis 2 will reveal that God used the dust of the earth to form the body of man. For the moment, let us read Genesis 1:26-30:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

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.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.

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