“We blossom and flourish as leaves on a tree, and wither and perish, but naught changes Thee.” This line, from one of my favorite hymns, Immortal, Invisible, beautifully contrasts the nature of mankind with the attribute of God theologians refer to as Immutability or the quality of unchangeableness. All of God’s attributes are infused with all the others, so it isn’t really possible to rank them in a list. His omnipresence, omnipotence, and omniscience are all equally present in His goodness, patience, and love, just to name a few. But if one could be chosen, I think a fairly convincing argument could be made for the preeminence of His immutability. For how could there be perfection in any of the others if they could grow or lessen over time? But what I want to show in this post is that this most incommunicable of all His attributes is nonetheless on display in us, His little shifting image-bearers.
Like the line I quoted at the beginning of this post describes, changeability is a defining mark of humankind. Whatever we may be, it seems we won’t be that for very long. Are we hardy and hale? Wait a few years and see what time will do. Are we kind and pleasant? Remove from us some creature comfort for the shortest span of time and see how quickly that flower fades. No, change is one of the most unchanging things about us. But there is one aspect of our nature even more unchanging, and one I’m convinced is meant to point to our unchanging God – our sexes.
One of the most ancient doctrines of the church is the clear and biblical teaching of the Imago Dei, the likeness we bear to our Creator. I think we would understand this even if it weren’t so clearly taught in Scripture. Intuitively we recognize a difference in us from every other living thing. But even as we’ve defended the orthodoxy of this truth, we’ve struggled to pin down exactly where the likeness lies. We recognize that we have souls, unlike all the other creatures on the earth in whose nostrils is the breath of life. But is this the extent of our likeness to our God? Being that we know our God is spirit, we may be tempted to look elsewhere than our bodies for signs of image-bearing. But this reality of the sexes is the very thing our God points to at the introduction of this truth. “So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Gen. 1:27)
Does it not strike you that the actuality of the sexes and its connection to the Imago Dei must be incredibly important, being that we find it in the very first chapter of the sacred text? Think of all the other attributes that could have been cited at this dawning moment. Why is this, of all our characteristics, most clearly tied to our reflection of the Lord there at the start? Could it be that the goodness and steadfastness of the sexes are meant to remind us of the goodness and steadfastness of our God? Every other attribute we may imitate is subject to the shifting sands of human nature. But not so, the sexes. Our sex at birth is what it shall be at our death. For all our withering alterations, our maleness and femaleness is an immutable image of our unalterable God.
Perhaps this understanding will shed some light on the attack this immutability is experiencing at the moment. You may have noticed that I have not used the word “gender” in writing on this topic. This is an intentional omission. In modern parlance, Gender is the word most often used to describe our differences. But it is far less concrete than “sex” and inherently more fluid by design. This watery word flooding all our cultural discourses today is meant to make it easier to wipe away the image of our Creator by and by. The binary biology that we have relied upon for the propagation of our species is under direct attack precisely because the world hates our God and these categories point to Him. But the tragedy is that those desperate souls so eager to rid of the world of this duality of sexes will find no freedom in the 64 other ways to define our race, and the awful mutilations or augmentations to their bodies will not alter who they are in the end. Fighting to destroy their sex, they reject the glorious thing their sex declares and only accomplish the destruction of themselves.
The blessing of our being, that we are here at all today, is manifested evidence of this multiplying truth – Life only comes from God and only through two sexes. And ultimately, the life that flows from the union of these two immutable distinctions is meant to point us to the eternal life of Him of whom the same hymn says, “To all life Thou givest, to both great and small, in all life Thou livest, the true life of all.” May the immutability of man and woman be a reminder today of our beautiful, immutable God, and lead us to only seek our life in Him.
