God Made the Body on Purpose

Before God said almost anything else about you, He said this: He made you on purpose, and He made you male or female, and He did not slip when He did it.

Read the order in Genesis. Page one. "God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Genesis 1:27). Male and female is not a footnote to being human. It is stamped into the image of God in the opening breath of the story, in a verse that says created three times over so you cannot miss the point. Your body is not a costume God handed you by accident. It is a word He spoke over you. And the culture has decided that word is up for editing.

The claim now is that the body lies. That a man can be trapped in the wrong flesh, that the truest thing about you is an inner sense and the falsest thing is the body you see in the mirror, and that the loving response is surgery and a lifetime of drugs to force the flesh to agree with the feeling. And where you would most expect a wall, the church, much of it has gone quiet, and some of it has gone further. Whole mainline denominations have moved to bless for children the very procedures a growing list of states now forbid doing to a minor. For a child. And they call it care.

But the God of Genesis did not make a mistake in you. "For You formed my inward parts; You wove me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made" (Psalm 139:13-14). Woven. On purpose, by hand, before you drew a breath. The body you were given is not the prison the culture calls it. It is the gift, fearfully and wonderfully made, and telling a hurting kid that his body is a lie he has to cut away is not compassion. It is teaching him to hate the one thing God called wonderful.

Jesus went back to the same page when they tried to get clever with Him about marriage. "Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female" (Matthew 19:4). Have you not read. He treated Genesis as settled ground, the thing you build a life on, not a myth we have outgrown. If the Son of God rooted manhood and womanhood in the act of creation itself, the church does not get to quietly set it aside because the moment turned uncomfortable.

Now the hard, human part, because this is not an argument to win. It is people. There are men and women and kids in real anguish over their own bodies, and some of them are sitting in the pew, and they are not the enemy. The lie is the enemy. The people selling irreversible answers to teenagers are the enemy. The confused fourteen-year-old is a child God knit together and loves, and he needs a church that will neither mock him nor hand him a scalpel, but sit with him in the confusion, tell him the truth gently, and hold the line while he finds his feet on it.

So the church has to do the thing it keeps refusing to do. Not rage. Not silence. Stand. Say the plain word of Genesis with a straight face and a soft heart. God made you, God did not err, and your body is a gift and not a cage. That word costs something now. It gets you called a bigot for repeating page one of the Bible. Say it anyway, and say it kindly, and say it most of all to the frightened kid who has only ever been handed one answer. He was fearfully and wonderfully made. Somebody has to be brave enough, and gentle enough, to tell him so.