After Genesis one briefly records six days of creation, chapter two backs up to emphasize the significance of God’s creation of humans. What essential truths can we learn about ourselves from the creation of the first two people?

Have you ever told someone, “I must have missed the first part of your story. I don’t understand”? Without a context most stories lose meaning. So it is with the story of humanity. Ignorance of our beginning breeds confusion and purposelessness. Even the drama of salvation by grace makes sense only in light of history’s opening act.

Mainstream science tells a different origins story. But at least one leading biochemist admits that, “At present all discussions on principle theories and experiments in the field” concerning the problem of the origin of life, “either end in a stalemate or in a confession of ignorance.”^[i] In reality, Scripture and nature say the same thing. We don’t always see how they harmonize. We might misinterpret scientific data or misunderstand Scripture. But our first allegiance is to the Bible through which God communicates “more openly.”^[ii]

The biblical story of the world opens with the eternal, triune God creating all things. He truly created; by his mere word he made everything from nothing (Heb. 11:3). He didn’t need to; he is perfectly sufficient. But he made a world to witness and proclaim “the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness.” Everything owes its allegiance to the loving and just Creator. Every Christian must believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit made the heavens and the earth.

After Genesis one briefly records six days of creation, chapter two backs up to emphasize the significance of God’s creation of humans. What essential truths can we learn about ourselves from the creation of the first two people?

Humans Are Male and Female

In our post-Christian age amid the emergence of a new paganism gender has become ground-zero in worldview battles. “Today’s revolution in theology is not over the doctrine of justification by faith alone, but over sexual identity.”^[iii] Why is sexuality so contested today? Because maleness and femaleness, as both biological and biblical reality, tell us who we are and how we should live. We want to define ourselves. But God already has.

Gender is basic to who we are. When asked about divorce Jesus could have simply quoted Genesis 2:24, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” But he backed up further: “He who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matt. 19:4; cf. Gen. 1:27). Marriage is not simply the commitment of two people, but the exclusive union of the two complementary parts of God’s image. In Scripture’s first seven chapters “male and female” occurs six times; gender is binary by design. The animals brought onto the ark had to “be male and female” (Gen. 6:19) or they would go extinct.

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