October 22, 2017
taught by Ken McGarvey
First Baptist Church of Tellico Village, Tennessee
A natural (knee-jerk) response would say God made people male and female, and they have no right to change that. This is a pretty simple beginning, but it begs more questions. Should men not shave, because God made them with whiskers (when they got old enough)? Should women not color their hair? Or should we not medically correct birth defects? There may be good answers, but not by oversimplification.
So then, how does God feel about transgenders? He loves them. He has compassion for them. He longs for them to live in fellowship with him. He wants them spiritually whole. He wants them to know him, to love him, to live forever with him. That=s why he sent his son, Jesus, to redeem them.
We live in an imperfect world, a fallen world. People are born with different traits. Some people are large, some are small. Some are born with high intelligence, some with low. We are born into different societies, different cultures. We are born with different body types, different skin color, different resistence to the environment.
Here’s something extremely important to remember: you and I are NOT the norm in this world. We are not the norm in age, nationality, wealth, skin color or faith. We are a minority in all of those in this world. Let us never dare to think that because answers seem simple to us, that they should to people more directly affected by difficult situations!
If you are looking for easy, black & white answers to difficult Bible questions, often they do not exist. If they did, they wouldn=t be difficult questions. So let=s look at the questions. As originally stated to me, the question was, AHow does God feel about transgenders?@ The reason I added the others is that transgendered people have made a choice to change the attributes with which they were born into this world.
There was a time when some preachers preached against women changing their hair color. (If God intended you to be a blonde, he would have created you that way.) When some people in the ’70s objected to my growing a beard, I occasionally answered, “God gave me these whiskers. I just decided to stop thwarting his purposes by knocking them off every day.”
A fairly common birth defect is harelip and cleft palate. Even when I was a child, babies born that way were usually surgically corrected at a very young age. Today there are Christian mission organizations who save, socially and medically, thousands of children in undeveloped countries by providing that surgery.
According to the most trusted estimates, approximately 1.7% of the population is by some definition intersex. That=s about the same percentage as redheads. There are more intersex people in the world than there are Jews.
So then, what is intersex? We like to simply break down society into two groups C male and female. And that covers most of the territory, but not all. Some have a different chromasomal makeup than simply XX or XY. About .05% are born with ambiguous genitalia, ambiguous enough that gender disorder specialists must be called in to assist parents and physicians in deciding what to do.
In the past, parents and medical personnel decided shortly after birth to determine which the child would be, and make surgical changes to make the child socially acceptable. After childhood, many of those children have complained strongly about the choice that was made without their consent. Some have sued doctors, hospitals and parents. Now these represent a very small percentage of transgenders, but there are some. And God understands all this, whether we do or not. We want life to be simple. But we dare not make it simplistic.
Many Christians are so upset with the LGBTQ agenda, that they assume the transgender situation comes from them. Although the LGBTQ community supports what they call transgender rights, they are different issues. Transgender is unrelated to sexual attraction.
Who are transgenders? What does God think about them. What should we think about them? I would hope that we would try to think about people the same way God thinks about them.
Our gender is made of physical characteristics, chromosomes, hormones, mental identification, thought processes, etc. If you have a baby boy and notice that he likes dolls more than sports, military or other boy things, you are concerned, right? It=s not really cause for concern at that point. However, some children never feel comfortable with their gender. They may not articulate it until many years later, but that may be how they felt for years. This has nothing to do with their sexual attractions, but simply their feeling about themselves.
There=s historical data about a few transgenders, so we know it=s not a new phenomenon. However, with today=s society=s attitudes of extreme permissiveness, it has become far more widespread.
We (society) want to be sure that people are comfortable. We don=t want to force anyone to be what they are not naturally. That=s why society calls Christians judgmental for condemning homosexuality and gender-bending. However, Christians fall into the same trap, choosing a church or changing churches because of comfort or discomfort, or what they call Afit.@ And while we may condemn transgenders for not learning to live with their discomfort, we strongly condemn them because we are not comfortable with them and their new identity.
We may also condemn them because we fear them. They are so different from us or anything we have even imagined, we wonder what is going on and don=t trust it. There may be a real fear factor involved.
Does God love homosexuals? Do we? Does God love adulterers? Do we? Does God love illegal aliens? Does God love people politically different from us? Do we? Does God love transgenders? Do we? Does the Bible command us to judge them, or even give us permission to do so? Does God want us to win them to Christ? Does God hate their sin more than he hates our sins?
Some like to bring up God=s teaching in the Old Testament. Deuteronomy 22:5 A woman must not wear men=s clothing, nor a man wear women=s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this. This is part of the law God gave to the Israelites as they were about to enter the promised land. How do we decide which laws are for us and which are not? It seems the only ones we want enforced are the ones that apply to others, but not to us, such as: Deuteronomy 22:9B12 Do not plant two kinds of seed in your vineyard; if you do, not only the crops you plant but also the fruit of the vineyard will be defiled. Do not plow with an ox and a donkey yoked together. Do not wear clothes of wool and linen woven together. Make tassels on the four corners of the cloak you wear.
I mentioned babies with ambiguous sex organs. In the Bible there=s a birth defect mentioned that many commentaries seem to ignore. And it is related to our central problem. Have you ever thought about eunuchs? In Matthew 19:12, Jesus says, For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.
A eunuch is a man who has been castrated, generally for the purpose of making him unable to have sex and/or making him less aggressive. Rulers had eunuchs guard their harems, as in the book of Esther, or to handle official business, knowing they would not be compromised by sexual liaisons. Jesus is saying that some men are born eunuchs C they have birth defects that make them unable to have sex. They may have undeveloped genitalia, or have no testosterone production. In other words, they may have been born Aintersex.@
In the Bible, the word Aeunuch@ is used over a hundred times. They are never spoken of disparagingly, but live their lives much as anybody else, other than sex and marriage.
How does God feel about people? How does God want us to feel about them? Are our attitudes punitive? Condemnatory? Redemptive? Compassionate? Would God be more upset with people who are different, or with how his children treated them?
In my personal opinion, among the most destructive sins people commit are arrogance and judgmentalism. These are often at the heart of our difficulty with those who are different.
Let us learn to love people into the kingdom, hoping and praying that they will learn from God how to live more holy lives and be wonderful like us. Or not.