God clearly created man and woman in His image (Genesis 1:27).
However, for many reasons, He defines Himself constantly throughout the Bible as a “He”. There’s a reason for that.
First, God could have used an “it”. But, He’s a personal God, and so chose to associate to a gender to appear more “human” to us.
But, to be clear, He certainly could have used a “third gender” if He wanted, and we could call God as a Zhe or something. He probably didn’t because He wanted to be far more relatable to us, especially as a Father.
Women, by their essence, come after men:
- The woman was made from man’s rib (Genesis 2:18-23)
- Women build homes from men’s houses
- Women finesse what men craft
- Men pioneer, then women settle
- Women make the form where men make the function
One major difference among the genders comes through how they reconsider decisions. Both of them will research as needed, then make their choice. However, women are disposed to periodically reconsider a decision’s wisdom without provocation, while men only reconsider actions with an outside event justifying it.
Power
Leadership requires a single-mindedness, especially as it scales, and leadership decisions require sole focus on the best interests of the organization. Often, the consequences of a bad decision must continue to prevent the entire group imploding from too much change. This primal need for slow, decisive movement from our leaders is why we usually stand behind leaders with a single-minded message.
This world obsesses over power dynamics. If we focus strictly on raw power, men are stronger and women are smarter. In a contest of direct power, men can subdue while women can outsmart.
Women, however, serve an invaluable support role to men. They provide analysis and consideration that men are incapable of thinking. Without a woman’s guidance (and lack of public credit) most men are helplessly lost.
Cursed
Men are cursed to work endlessly just to survive (Genesis 3:17). Their curse fits their simple-minded nature.
The other part of humanity’s curse was reserved for women to have at least a partial desire to rule over men, along with complications around the experience of having children (Genesis 3:16).
Both are punishments designed to humble mankind, with men receiving a worse one physically and women receiving a worse one mentally.
Unfortunately, a woman’s desire (as part of her curse), when fully actualized, will lead to them instead adopting the curse of endless work instead.
Specialized
Men and women are designed already with specializations, and our curse requires us to stay in that zone for us to find the most meaning.
A woman desiring a man’s role is desiring leadership. Unfortunately, they’re too smart for the role, since leadership requires conviction and openness to others more than raw intellectual power. Women who can succeed in leadership are working well outside their natural design, and they must learn the practical, straightforward burden of leading.
When women are in a leadership role, the general closed-off thinking of men renders the entire dynamic relatively ineffective, and most of them will labor along without thinking of the consequences of their actions. The more intelligent women are also susceptible to changing their mind as well.
When a man’s role is inverted, he becomes relatively silly and impotent. Men aren’t disposed to gentleness or sensitivity, so they must learn it, and men would utterly fail if they became solely caretakers of babies.
The result of inverting their specializations would be that there’d be a complete lack of strong leadership to give modeling for children (and later adults), without any legitimate nurture or emotional support to accomplish anything.
A male misusing power means they must be held accountable, similarly to how an uncaring female must learn to be affectionate. The answer is not to swap roles, since another adequate-enough male will do the job of a male better than a highly qualified female can, and vice versa. Most contentions about this arrangement arise through dysfunctions around the curse: either the woman’s (because she wants to rule over men) or the man’s (because he’s lazy).
Dependence
Men and women need each other. A society of nothing but men will travel the stars within a few centuries, but have an average lifespan of about 20. A society of nothing but women would live very long lives, but for millennia would never explore more than 10 miles around their domicile.
Men require challenges, and women require security. Men must learn compassion, while women must learn respect. This can only be reconciled through love for one another, and that love only comes in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, by our own power, it’s guaranteed to fail.
From another perspective, men and women need each other as a type of “salvation” to fix the defects of the gender:
- Men require women to civilize them.
- Women require men to learn to be more efficient.
To see what we’re missing, we must consult the God who made us. God is a spiritual being, so He has no “gender“, but He still made genders. The patriarchal dominance came with the curse we brought on ourselves, and it’s not the way God wants to see us live.
It’s reasonably possible to speculate that we may transcend genders someday (Mark 12:25), but they’re a significant part of our identity as long as we have our present bodies.