Transgender Issues and The Bible

As Christians, our approach to sex and gender must be marked by grace and truth. It’s got to be marked by grace and truth. That’s how Jesus came. He was a man full of grace and truth. And He extended grace to all people no matter where they are coming from.

I want you to hear this explicitly from me. No matter where you’re coming from, no matter what you have done, no matter even if you disagree with me, man, the grace of Jesus Christ is for all people. But He is also a man of truth. That He recognized that lies kill people.

In fact, remember how He talked about Satan and He talked Himself? He says, “The evil one comes to lie and kill and destroy.” He loves killing life. “But I came to bring the truth,
because truth sets you free.”

Now, particularly on this issue, when we approach transgender issues, we need to protect against the ideology while still caring about the individual. I would say when it comes to this transgender movement, it’s easy for us at times to maybe over speak or to react in certain ways. And we’ve got to hold this balance.

I love how Jesus did it. Notice what He said. He said, “I am the good Shepherd; the good Shepherd lays down His life for His sheep. The hired hand is not the shepherd, he does not own the sheep. So, when the wolf is coming he abandons the sheep and runs away and the wolf attacks the flock and scatters it.” Jesus said, I am such a good Shepherd, I protect My own. I protect My sheep. When any wolf comes in, anybody comes in whether it's an ideology, whether it’s a lie, whether it’s anything that the evil one wants to do, Jesus stands full front and He says, I protect My own.

So, He protected His own. But He was also the same Savior that always went after the one, no matter where they had gone, no matter what they were struggling with. And so, as we talk about this today, there will be places I need to speak truth strong and you need to feel that, but in the same way, today, you might be the one here who is struggling.

And you need to know that there is a Savior that we serve, the reason we are so crazy about Him, the reason we align our lives to this Bible, is He goes after everyone and He makes a difference for everyone.

So, as we say that, let me jump in with some terms. And again, I’m a little wary to do this because there are so many terms. And I’ll just say right at the outset I have simplified it in some ways. Now, I think that’s part of the strategy of the evil one. He wants to confuse us and so he has created a thousand categories of everything in confusion. There are a few simple terms that you need to grab as you jump in this.

Alright, the first one is sex. And let me be clear. For the rest of this message, when I use the term “sex” I am not talking about having sex, okay? I’m not. I’m not talking about the act of sex, I’m talking biological sex. Okay?

So, it refers to a person’s biological status and is typically categorized as male, female, or intersex. So, every person is categorized, your body, and it used to be it was pretty simple. When you had a baby, what did the doctor declare? “It’s a boy!” “It’s a girl!” Now that’s no longer the case. It’s called: you were assigned at birth. In other words, the doctor may say that about you but that’s not who you really are. You see the shift in thinking with that?

And so, biological sex is your body. Now, intersex, there’s a rare condition and it’s rare. Again, I keep seeing numbers, one of the strategies of this current movement is try to spike numbers and things that are not as high as they are spiking.

But there is, there’s a condition of those who have both male and female, sometimes body parts, sometimes chromosomes in that, it goes across a spectrum in that. It’s very rare, it does not prove transgender, and almost all intersex people live a binary life. In other words, they live either as a male or a female. It would actually support that.

And so, when you talk about sex, your body is either a man or a woman. Now, you can change parts of your body. You can have surgery, you can alter parts, but it was interesting to me, you know, Dr. Alice McGregor she’s an emergency room doctor, she said when someone comes in, she did a lecture on this, when somebody comes in, you have to know as a doctor no matter what they have done, are they a man or a woman? Because your biological sex is expressed down to the cellular level, down to the cellular level.

And so, whether you have changed that or not, your body is still that, according to science, if you’re just going to start there.

Now, here’s the second - and here’s where it gets confusing - gender is the psychological, social, and cultural aspects of being male or female. So, it’s how my brain views myself, psychologically. Do I view myself, even though I may have a male body, do I view myself at a brain level as male?

Social and cultural, and this is where stereotypes come in and have been actually been damaging both in the Church and outside in culture where we create a stereotype of what it means to be a man and all men like certain things and all women act certain way out of that. And so, if somebody has confusion around that, where they look at it and they go, “Well, I don’t match up to that,” well, “I don’t really match there.” Or, “I don’t feel that way.”

Gender dysphoria is the distress some people feel when their internal sense of self doesn’t match their biological self. So, whether at a brain level or an internal level, I may be biologically male, but I don’t feel male. And so, I don’t identify as male or I don’t identify as female.

And this term “gender dysphoria,” it’s actually a pretty recent term. The term itself, it comes from the diagnostic manual. So, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a medical manual that is used. Up until 2013, this was called “gender identity disorder.” And it was treated as a disorder. And so, medically how do we treat the disorder? And then it has been changed since 2013, so that there’s no stigma, it’s called gender dysphoria. It’s not conclusive of how it happens.

Some have studied the SRY gene and where it attaches, which chromosome it attaches to can have some impact. Some have studied a wash of testosterone that happens later in the pregnancy. And so, boys that did not get that wash of testosterone, or little girls that did get it, that can impact the brain, impact the wiring in different ways. It can be culturally created, sometimes it’s based on trauma.

You know, Dr. Mark Yarhouse, when he talks about transgender, he’s a Christian psychiatrist, he says, “If you have ever met one transgender person you have met one transgender person.” And this would be his point, because he works so much with people that he says, “You can’t just assume that, you know, I’m just going to do this broad category.”

And so, when you look at that, the categories around that, there’s kind of three times that it shows up with it. Early onset – it’s really two times and then one subcategory. Early onset: little children, prepubescent – I mean, as early, three to six years old can express some confusion around this. And so, that’s what you’re hearing about in culture today, that early onset, and so they’re immediately putting hormone blockers and treating it with that.

Now here’s the problem with that. Debra Soh in her book The End of Gender, somewhere between sixty to ninety percent, depending on the study, if the child is left alone, if the gender that matches their body is actually affirmed, sixty to ninety percent of the time, it just goes away.

Now, you’re not hearing that today. You’re hearing today, “No, you’ve got to intervene immediately, you’ve got to do something, you…” That’s not true. And so, as a parent, you don’t need to reach a panic point. Little kids can be confused. Little kids can have questions.

Now, for those that it continues with that, it is the ongoing gender dysphoria. And so, we’ve got to be careful we don’t just write it all off with that. But we don’t have to overreact in the same way the culture does in the certain movement. Some, it’s a later adolescent onset. Here’s the newest, this rapid onset gender dysphoria.

In the last six or seven years, you are seeing this spike, especially among teenage girls at a rate that doesn’t match anything else in the population. And so, if somebody were to say, “Well, we are just accepting it more now,” then you would see the same rate across the population. I’m talking like a spike of four thousand to five thousand percent.

But this is a pretty radical movement that, frankly, one, is destroying so many lives. And two, it’s actually hurting people that really do have gender dysphoria, that need help.

So, then when you talk about transgender, this is the umbrella term that describes people whose gender identity or expression does not match the sex they were assigned at birth. So, trans means to cross over. Cis means to be on the same side. So, if you’re called “cisgender” that means that your biological sex and your gender, they both match.

Transgender is someone who they have chosen a gender identity or a gender expression that doesn’t match their biological sex. And it can be a number of different ways. Again, I told you, there’s a spectrum out of that. For some it’s just changing clothes and dressing differently. For some it’s taking on characteristics. Some move to medical treatment, whether it’s a hormone or other treatment. Some move to surgery. Very few move to complete surgery.

And so, again, when you use the term “transgender” it’s a very umbrella term and you have to be careful that you are speaking to the person and not just the movement. Now, I know that’s a lot of terms coming at you fast, but I wanted to give you the lay of the land. Now I am going to go even faster, because we are going to look at what the Bible says about it.

And every one of these verses, I can probably do a sermon. That’s not the point today. I just want to give you a biblical overview; what does the Bible say? The problem with it is there’s no place in your biblical concordance that you can type in the word “transgender” and you go, “Oh, there’s all the verses with transgender in it.” That doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t speak to it, because the Bible has a lot to say about our bodies and it has a lot to say about our sexuality and a lot to say about our identity.

So, what does it have to say? Let’s walk through this together. What does the Bible say? And I would say on this, because I’m moving fast out of this, these categories, I took them straight out of one of the chapters in Preston Sprinkle’s book. I say that so that you know I’m not plagiarizing. I’m not trying to plagiarize. I just used his categories off of it.

The first thing, the body is essential to our image-bearing status. We are image bearers of God. Genesis 1:27, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.” In fact, that word image, it’s also the root word for idols. So, when the false cults wanted to show representation of their gods, they made idols.

When God wanted to show representation of Himself on this planet, what did He choose to do? He chose humanity. And He didn’t choose us to be a spirit or spirit forces. He gave us bodies. They are really important to the expression of the full image of God, both male and female were important to that.

Male and female in Genesis 1 are categories of sex, not gender. So, when they used the term “male and female” he’s not talking about genders, he’s talking about their sex. And so, there’s not a de-linking there. Look at it, the very next verse. “God blessed them and He said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.’” One of the core things that they needed to do with their body is actually have sex so that they could fill the earth.

The third thing that we see out of this, Adam and Eve’s bodies are viewed as sacred. When Eve was created, and we often talk about, you know, He put Adam to sleep and He took one of his ribs. The word there literally means “side.” And it’s interesting, this word in Hebrew, sela, it’s usually presented, in fact, almost every other reference you’ll see it, it talks about the side of a sacred building, like a temple or the tabernacle.

From the very beginning we were created to be temples, our bodies are temples. In fact, you see it again in the New Testament, what does Paul emphasize to us? “Don’t you know your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit?” this sacred function of the body from the very beginning.

Jesus’ views of Genesis 1 and 2 are normative. So when Jesus is asked about this, what does He do? He quotes this passage. Here we are thousands of years later, this is what Jesus was referring to. And so, if you want to go, “Yeah, okay, that was the Old Testament, but what did Jesus say?” This is what Jesus said. And He went back to that because it was so important.

Paul sees the body as significant for moral behavior and correlates the body to personhood. I’ve talked to you about, in Corinth, there was every form of sexual expression and one of the problems they had in the Church is often people would go see prostitutes, because they didn’t consider prostitute sex as sex, sex. Because there’s no emotional engagement. I mean, it’s just, you know, you are paying for it. It’s about the lowest form.

And Paul says, “Yeah, but do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit…you are not your own, you were bought with a price. Glorify God with your body.” That’s why he says in Romans 12, “Present your body,” all of who you are, “as a living sacrifice.” Because your bodies matter.

Scripture prohibits cross-sex behavior. And so, if you look at in Deuteronomy 22:5, “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does those things is an abomination to the Lord your God.”

Now, again, we talked about the complexities of dipping back into the Old Testament Law. But what are those principles are one just ceremony to Israel, what are those principles that are teaching us moral standards that still apply?

And in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul, when he references this same thing about what women wear, it’s referencing those same principles. It’s not just the garment itself. In fact, in the Hebrew, the word there is “men’s things,” or, “women’s things.” And so, it’s this prohibition of aligning your life to live, or to adorn, or to present yourself as the opposite sex of what you are.
Scripture prohibits cross-sex behavior. And so, if you look at in Deuteronomy 22:5, “A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does those things is an abomination to the Lord your God.” Now, again, we talked about the complexities of dipping back into the Old Testament Law. But what are those principles are one just ceremony to Israel, what are those principles that are teaching us moral standards that still apply?

And in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul, when he references this same thing about what women wear, it’s referencing those same principles. It’s not just the garment itself. In fact, in the Hebrew, the word there is “men’s things,” or, “women’s things.” And so, it’s this prohibition of aligning your life to live, or to adorn, or to present yourself as the opposite sex of what you are.

You see as well in 1 Corinthians 6, “Do you not know the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers,” and I use the NET translation, because they spell it out, there’s actually two different terms when he talks about homosexuality.

One are the passive homosexual partners, the malak, and one are the practicing homosexuals. And this one in particular, this passive homosexual partner, it was a common thing and it was men that took on the role of women, especially in a gay relationship.

And so he talks about both the dominant and the passive. There’s no place in Scripture that ever condones or endorses cross-sex presentation or behavior. And the places that we do have in Scripture that speak about it, condemn.

Continue on as well. The incarnation of Christ affirms the goodness of our sexed embodiment. The fact that Jesus came and He didn’t come as a sexless being. He came as a man, He lived as a man, He experienced it. And as Colossians tells us, for in Him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.

Now, here’s the amazing part. Jesus is still a man. Jesus still has a body. When He was incarnate, He became a body for all time. And so, as we look at that, you go, “Man, if our God and our Savior embraced that, the importance and the importance for us.” Sex differences probably remain after the resurrection.

Now, you’ve got the one verse and we looked at it last week that you’re not given in marriage when we are resurrected. So, from everything we can tell, it doesn’t look like you have the act of sex post-resurrection, but it doesn’t mean that we stop being male and female. In fact, if you look at it, Paul tells us the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you. He will give life to your mortal bodies. It’s this body that counts. And it’s going to get new life and it’s going to be redeemed into that.

And so, when we are God’s children now, we – it’s not yet appeared what we are going to be like, but we know that when He appears, we shall be like Him because we shall see Him as He is. So, in other words, in the same way Jesus had a resurrected body, we will have a resurrected body. And notice in this, He makes a really strong declaration. “We shall see Him as He is,” because He is male.

A few more passages with this. Jesus acceptance of the eunuch is not a pattern for understanding gender identity. So, Jesus talked about eunuchs in their time. He said, “There are eunuchs who have been so from birth, there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, there are eunuchs that have been made, who have made themselves eunuch for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive this.”

Eunuchs in that time period were either people that were asexual, they had no sex drive whatsoever. Many times they were men that were castrated. And they would serve in the court, they would watch over the king’s harem. And so, there was one way that he made sure that the guy watching over the harem wasn’t messing with the harem. Or a lot of times they were generals, because they wanted a guy who is focused on war and not women.

Here’s the one part, though, that it’s not speaking about at all. In fact, there’s no eunuch that ever presented themselves as a woman. They were still men. The only thing this passage would speak to in this - one, it speaks to Jesus’ affirmation of singleness. Two, it speaks to Jesus’ affirmation that some have chosen life without sex for the sake of the kingdom like the apostle Paul.

And he goes, “Man, that is a life to be praised, not diminished.” But nothing about this verse speaks to gender identity or transgender. One other verse, Paul’s reference to neither male or female does not overturn sex differences. The verse where he says, “They are neither Jew nor Greek, there’s neither slave nor free; there’s no male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Some have used this verse to go, “See, he is showing a spectrum. It’s not binary anymore.” It’s not speaking to their sexed bodies. It’s not speaking to the differences not existing anymore. There are still Jews and there are still Greeks. There are still slaves and there are still free. But in Christ, now, we have been united as one. And these barriers are not in place. But this doesn’t speak to gender identity.

These are verses that people debate, and so you need them at least to understand with that. But I would encourage you, if this is an issue you’re struggling with, go back through the verses. I would want you to understand them, I would want you to wrestle with them, because here's the reality: God’s truth is the truth we align to, not my opinions.

And so, I may say certain things that you look at and you go, “Well, I don’t know on that.” Go back to the Bible. I encourage you to do that. Let me give you a few summary points out of this. One, biological sex and gender are linked together and important to God’s design. There’s no way around that as you go through the Bible, God links the two together and they are both important in His design.

Second thing, instead of transitioning, we should help people accept their bodies as part of their God-given identity. Man, it may be hard to hear this, but I think this is the hard truth that Scripture leads us to, that we should not encourage transitioning, but encourage a discipleship. And part of that discipleship journey is learning to accept your body and learning to see God’s good design even in your desperate struggle.

We need to recognize the unique struggle for Christians who suffer and I use the word “suffer” with gender dysphoria. If you start reading some of the firsthand accounts, unbelievable levels of suffering. And I have got to confess, I don’t know what that would feel like that every day some of them describe as almost like electricity through your body and just every day you feel wrong. Every day there’s just this tremendous battle in it.

If you’re so far removed from this, you may look at those expressions and you see the drag queen hour and you see the different really radical expressions of it and part of you just reacts in disgust. Or part of you reacts with a, “Well, they just need to stop it.”

Hear me, there are Christians who love the Lord, they are praying every day, and they are struggling with this in an internal way. And so just dismissing it is not going to help them. Now, embracing the ideology doesn’t help them either. It actually is killing them. And so, as Christians we have to be people of truth but extend the grace.

And recognize, when I say suffering, the level of suicide, for those who have attempted suicide, for people who struggle with gender dysphoria, it’s one of the highest of all groups. In fact, it’s one of the things, though, that drives the ideology, because here’s the thinking here. “Well, it’s so, yeah, I mean, they’re going to try to commit suicide and so even if they are a little kid or even if they are expressing it at any point, man, it would be better to go ahead and change their gender so that they don’t commit suicide.

Here’s the problem. They don’t take in account any of the other coexisting conditions, like depression, like anxiety levels, and OCD, and bipolar. A lot of which exist in this. Here's the other thing they don’t take into account. The suicide rates don’t go down for people who transition; in some cases, they go up. That’s a reality that needs to be said, because so many people are held hostage by a high suicide rate that they go, “Oh, we have to do this.” No, that’s not what it shows.

In fact, the only longitudinal study, it was a thirty-year study of those who transitioned, they actually saw a spike in suicide at the ten-year mark. That it didn’t solve what they thought it was going to solve. We need to recognize this struggle and we need to speak into it and we need to come alongside and, because here’s what I would say. I don’t care what the rates are – one suicide is too many.

And so, could I caution you that maybe you see something and you want to go express your disgust. There may be somebody around you, you know what they hear in it? They hear, “I’m not lovable. And maybe I’m disgusting.”

Now, I know as I say that, some of you will go, “Yeah, but Tim, don’t we have to…” Of course we stand for truth. But we serve a Savior who stood against lies while He still chased after people who were the one sheep that went astray.

And to that end, here’s what I say, as a church, we’ve got to create a safe place where people can find and follow Jesus. Jesus is the key. We need to be creating relationships with people outside of this church across all spectrums. That’s part of our evangelism. We need to welcome people. But hear me. We don’t fix people. I can’t fix me! But I introduce people to Jesus and He’s fixing me. And He changes everything. And it’s got to be the heartbeat of our church as we do that.

We need to avoid defining genders according to stereotypes and embrace the diversity of expression in God’s design. See, there’s a stereotype that sometimes we have contributed to that to be a man you’ve got to be a big, burly man. And you have to love sports and you have to do these kind of activities and that’s what makes you a man and you’re really strong and you’ve got a lot of hair and that’s manly!

And the same thing with girls. Man, if you’re a girl, you don’t really like sports and you’re really refined and you’re sweet. And, I mean, all these things in that that may be true. Nothing wrong in that, but the reality and this is where the culture is using these stereotypes, because you take a teenager, you take somebody going through puberty, you take a time period and hear me, young people, all of us were confused at that stage in life.

And the culture takes your confusion and they take your doubts and they go, “Well, maybe you’re not really a manly man. Or maybe you’re not really a girl.” And you know what their answer, to put you in another gender stereotypical box and make you transition.

Here’s what I love about the Bible. God loves the diversity of all of us; He actually created it. God looks at you and says you are fearfully and wonderfully made. You are exactly like I wanted you. And if you start reading through the stories of the Bible, read it sometime, you want to take a manly man, there’s nobody manlier than king David. He killed a giant. But he also was a guy who liked to hang out and play his harp and he was a poet. And his best friend was a dude named Jonathan and when he died he told everybody, “I loved him more than any woman.”

Now, in our culture we go, “Oh, was he gay?” No. No. But the diversity of what it means to be a man. Look at Jacob and Esau. Esau was the manly man. Had hair on his arms; he’s a great hunter. Jacob was real smooth skinned and he liked to cook. [laughter] I look at a woman like Deborah who led the army into battle. Or Jael who, in the tent, she put a tent peg through a general’s head. You look at it, some of the greatest entrepreneurs, in the Bible, are women. Lydia was one of the major supporters of the Church.

Guys, here’s why I say this. If we would actually read our Bibles, we would recognize God loves the diversity of that expression, but it doesn’t change their gender. That’s what the culture is doing to you.

And if you’re a young person today and you keep hearing these things and you keep feeling a little confused or you are struggling with your own identity, hear me. The answer is not radical surgery and radical hormones that are actually destroying bodies and they are destroying fertility. It's madness at a certain degree that we are so quick to prescribe this.

And by the way, if you think I’m just saying this as the ranting pastor, Sixty Minutes just had a few months ago a whole segment on twenty-year-olds who transitioned and all of them said, “Why did we do that? And why did they rush us into this?”

We don’t do this anywhere else. You would never look at somebody that has a mole on their skin and go, “Oh, you need radiation and chemotherapy today.” They’d go, “What?” “Well, that could be cancerous.” But that’s what we are doing in this area. Don’t believe the lie. As we do this, we’ve got to confront the lies of the current ideology, because it, guys, it is destroying life.

And even me speaking, anybody that speaks out on this these days, you get canceled. And anytime I see that, I look at it and I got, “Whoa, what is going on there?” Why the vitriol? Why can we not talk about it?

And anytime I see something this embedded or they lie and kill and destroy, just hear me, there’s part of the movement, I’m not talking about the people, I’m talking about the movement, there’s part of the movement, it’s demonic. And even at the risk of being cancelled and rejected by culture, we are going to live truth even at a cost.

Never lose sight of the individual that Christ loves, no matter how their lives have been impacted by sin. We stand against an ideology; we chase after individuals.  And so, I think we need to be a church that is willing to speak truth. But we also need to be a church that lives truth and extends grace.