What happens when a society rejects God’s design for manhood, womanhood, marriage, and the family? Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm sit down with pastor and author Michael Clary to tackle this crisis as they discuss the creation order — God’s purposeful design for men and women and the far-reaching implications of rejecting it. From the opening chapters of Genesis to the modern confusion surrounding gender, sexuality, marriage, and the body itself, they explain how abandoning God’s order leads to chaos — and how joyful submission to His design leads to beauty, harmony, and human flourishing. 

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of Scripture. Of Scripture. So Jason, you know, every generation faces, you know, its defining battles. You know, the first century it was over the Gnostics and the Judaizers, you know, in the fourth century it was over the doctrine of Christ, you know, in the Scottish Reformation it was really over worship, you know, the regulative principle of worship.

And I think the greatest battle of our time is the battle over creation. What is man? What is woman? And what are the implications of the creation order. So we've got Michael Clary to come and talk to us about that today.

Hey, Michael. Hello. Good to see you all. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, glad to have you.

So Michael's a pastor at Christ the King Church in Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and he wrote a book. I brought it in here just a second, appropriately called God's Good design. And Michael, you're also going to be preaching at our Manhood and Womanhood Conference in May, May 7 through 9. And I've given you really a part of the opening salvos of our conference. So I'm really looking forward to that.

So I just said that, you know, the greatest battle of our time is the battle over creation and particularly the implications of that. But I think it might be helpful to define What are we talking about? What's the creation order? When you hear the word order, that often conjures an idea of sequence, this before that. And there's a sequence that, you know, the Bible does show us that God created things in a certain sequence and that sequence has meaning.

But the meaning is what is the most important thing to think about with the order of creation. And the order of creation, I would think of it as there is a structure, a design with purpose and intent that God had in the way he created the world and the way he created man and woman to fit within it and to rule over it as his image bearers and vice regents. And that's why it's important because the way that we live as men and women is the bedrock of the family of marriage of family, which is the bedrock of society, because God is a God of order, not a God of chaos. And so we have to live in line with the way God made the world, but the order of the world. And if we don't, then we are introducing chaos into the world and chaos into our own lives and that's not good for anyone.

There was a blueprint there's a divine blueprint divine design and before you build a building you've got to have you know a blueprint it's almost it's like the complexity of DNA there's a There's a design and the sequencing of the DNA. And, you know, our understanding of Scripture is that everything is wired that way. Right. So Genesis 1, God creates man in his own image and creates male and female, both in his own image. So gender is God's construct.

Then Genesis 2, God creates woman as the helper to the man. So it's so clear if you just start with the opening pages of the Bible, God did this. And it's really interesting the pattern, you know, in Genesis you have these, you have these sort of distinct compatibilities. You have light and darkness, you have the seas and you have the firmament, you have you know the animals and they are male and female, you know you have these sequences and then you and you have man and woman and they are by creation, they are distinct and yet they are both man at the same time. So, you know, human identity is really embedded in the creation order.

You know, how important is the creation order? Well, it's actually the basis of human identity with man as male and female. And there's just nothing more fundamental than that. You know, I know some Christian scientists, they don't believe that you have a body. They don't believe that it's just spiritual.

You're just an eternal spirit, that your body is an illusion, that sickness and things like that is as a result of wrong thinking. I want to tell these people, I have told these people, the most obvious thing about you is your body. You have a body. I was thinking about this just today as I was preparing the message at the conference. There's the, I mean, it's like the arguably the oldest heresy.

It's an old heresy if not the oldest, which is Gnosticism. And Gnosticism, just the view that there's a strict separation of body and spirit. And that's because they view the body as bad and corrupt and what is pure is the spirit part of you. And so the physical body is irrelevant to who you are and what you feel on the inside is all that matters. Now you play that out over time, you end up with the ideologies that we see in our day which is new expressions of Gnosticism.

Feminism is one of them which suppresses the unique beauty of womanhood and tries to make women more like men. And underneath that is, I would say, just a rejection of the fertility of women, the childbearing duty and function of women, and they want to suppress that. And so feminism tries to to minimize and sidestep that, leading to androgyny, which is now the sexual ideal in the modern world, where people are fascinated with gender-bending, interchangeability of the sexes, and you know, whenever I was a kid, or, you know, the biggest pop stars whenever I was a kid were Michael Jackson and Prince, both of whom are males, but they exhibit female characteristics. They, They were very slight in their build. They sing very, very high pitch.

They would wear a lot of lace and just kind of ornate sort of clothing. They were embodying something that it's a pagan idea that the ideal human being is androgynous. It's neither male nor female or perhaps a blending of both. And then this is assisted by reproductive technology. You know, up until the pill, You could not overcome the biological reality that at the end of the day, the woman is going to get pregnant if she has sex and she's going to be the one that has to bear a child.

But the pill kind of enabled at least the illusion of a woman having sex without any reproductive consequences. And then now in our day, we have even more horrific Frankensteinian technology of like trying to perform surgeries to change one sex into the other. All of these are just expressions of Gnosticism and it is built on the idea that our bodies don't matter. What's on the inside is what really matters. What I feel on the inside is what really matters.

That is a fundamental rejection of God's order. We have to live within the world that God made, we have to submit first to the order which is God gave. There's two kinds of man. There's God created man in his image, but man comes in two kinds, and you alluded to this earlier. There's a male kind and a female kind, both of them created in God's image, but there are there's a distinction and that distinction has to be honored and respected because there are duties and responsibilities and privileges of each.

We need each other and whenever we deny that then we are we're really just it's unleashed a demonic legion of chaos and horror in our society. I saw earlier today, it was a post online where two men, they put a picture up saying, my husband and I are going to have a baby and of course no you're not. You purchased a baby from a woman and then whenever that baby is born you're going to deprive that child of the mother that bore that child to suit your own perverted fantasies and your sick twisted fetish and that is disgusting and that is what you do whenever you just deny the created order of male and female. Here's a very basic question that most, will make most Christians recoil. Does God have the right to do this?

Absolutely. So yeah, creation order. Does God, we talk about human rights, we talk about women's rights, let's talk about creators rights. Does God have the right to create male and female and then order it? Well, yeah, Christians should affirm that he does have that right and when we find ourselves Fighting against what God has clearly said he has done in his word.

We should be asking ourselves. Why are we fighting this? Yeah, What are we gaining by fighting this? And what are we losing by fighting this? Well, I think we lose beauty for one thing.

If you look at the creation narrative, what do you see? Beauty everywhere, everywhere from the sun and the moon and the stars and the earth and the animals and then you have a man and a woman. All of this really is a manifestation of this diverse beauty that God has invested in his own creation for his own glory. Yeah, you see that very clearly at the end of Genesis two, whenever God presents Eve to Adam and it's the first song, the first poem in the Bible when he is like, at last, this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. He is delighted and overwhelmed with the beauty.

She is like me in some ways, but she's different than me in some ways. The similarity is what enables there to be true union because you are equals. But the distinction is what enables interdependency to take place, complementarity, and that is where they image God in the action that they take together. And so The image of God is linked to rule and dominion. Because God created in His image, He's given us dominion over the earth.

The dominion function is to fill the earth, to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. That's why whenever God said, it is not good that the man should be alone, the way we usually read that, the way I've heard it taught most of my life is Adam was lonely and needed a companion. And so God created a friend for him. But the friend is different. He can have sex with that friend, but it's a companionship thing.

And of course, that misses—no, that's true, of course, that they do have companionship, but it misses the more foundational, fundamental meaning, which is Adam could not obey God's command without help. And the help that he needed was not merely a secretary. He needed somebody that was different than him, that had a different potentiality, a different function than him, and he needed somebody who could bear life because Adam could not bear life himself. And so, God gave him a command and then he gave him the help that he needed to fulfill the command, which is a woman. Now, when you bring those two together, they work together, there's interdependence, and as you mentioned, there's beauty.

He's delighted that I can now fulfill the purpose for which God created me and do the thing God commanded me to do. I have a role, she has a role, and whenever we submit to the design that God has created us with, then we can fulfill that, and that is delight, harmony, beauty, joy, happiness, all the most wonderful things in life come about because we submitted to God's design. And Whenever we reject it, we see the fall. You know, I just finished a book. I don't think I said, did I send this book to you?

What is a family, a catechism for diagnosing and restoring the Christian home? I believe you did, yes. I did, okay, yeah, It's like 201 questions, but it covers everything you just said. Okay. But in, in, in, in short form and catechism, you know, kind of form.

But The Bible is just so clear about all this. You talked about disembodied souls. Elaborate on that. Disembodied souls? I mean, the embodied souls is, So disembodied souls would be the Gnostic dream of what eternity would be like, floating around on clouds.

We don't have anything flesh because the body is considered bad. What scripture teaches is embodied souls and I see this in a number of places. Genesis 2-7 is one of the first places where it becomes clear. I like the way the King James translates it. The ESV says God breathed into Adam's nostrils and he became a living creature.

But creature doesn't quite capture what the Hebrew word nephesh, which is a soul. And so the King James says, God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul. It didn't say that there was a soul that was housed in a body. It said man became a living soul, meaning God formed him so there was a physical part but whenever God breathed the breath of life into him he became a nephesh, he became a living soul. So what makes somebody a human being is both a soul and a body.

So if we, it is not accurate to say well the real you is the you that's on the inside and this is just matter, this doesn't matter. I would say no that's not true. The real you is who you are on the inside and the body that you inhabit because we are living souls and those are formed of flesh and then we have the soul within us and together they form a composite or a psychosomatic unity you could say. It's a composite of spirit and flesh. And we see this fulfilled in the New Testament.

Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians how we are the temple of the Holy Spirit. Now that's true corporately of the church, but it is true also individually to where our body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. And he says, therefore glorify God in your body. We don't just glorify God in our heart or in our spirit. We do that, but our body matters.

And one of the ways that we glorify God is through the things that we do in our bodies because our bodies matter. So that's what I mean by being an embodied soul. You know, a couple years ago I preached through the book of Revelation and I could not get out of chapter 21-22. It's heaven, right? And what do you have in heaven?

Well, you have people who are in a city, they're in a garden, there's a river, there's trees, there's food. I mean, You are an embodied soul in heaven. Your body at the resurrection is going to be reunited to your soul, and you're going to exist in your body, not somebody else's body, not your vision of your body, the body that God gives you in heaven. And we were meant to live everlastingly in our bodies except for that time from when we were put into the grave and our bodies decay and then we're resurrected on the last day. Michael I love the title of your book God's Good Design.

It is God who did it and what we're talking about is a reflection of the way he designed it but the middle word is so critical. We ought to just affirm this is good. This is the best for humankind. Why are we kicking against these goods? We have a shepherd who's taking us to quiet waters and green pastures.

Why are we kicking against that? Well, here's why. Here's why we're kicking, because it has implications of our headship and authority in marriage. It has implications of distinct roles in the church. It has implications about work and dominion.

I mean, we could talk about the impact of the creation order in just a very practical everyday street level life. Maybe we can talk about some of those. Let's maybe talk about marriage. What are the implications of the creation order in marriage? I heard an illustration that you can never experience mastery over something until you first submitted to the design of that thing.

And so, you know, if you want to, you know, whenever I was a kid, I learned to play piano. And the you want to get to the point to where you have the freedom to be able to play with a lot of skill and for it to be effortless to have the muscle memory. But you don't get to that point until you have submitted to the instrument. You've submitted to notes and scales and chords and timing and there are very specific parameters and you must work within those parameters. Sometimes you might break a rule, sometimes you might bend a rule, but you must know the rule and master the rule in order to be able to express freely within, to make something beautiful.

And I think marriage and sexuality, the relation of man and woman is the same way. We have to submit to the design of God in order to be able to make the music in order to experience the beauty of the world the way God made it. And what we're doing is it is an anarchy. People don't like being told what to do. People don't like being told what to not do with their body, what they want to enjoy pleasure on their terms, when they want, how they want it.

Because of that, we're trying to assert ourselves over the design. And whenever we do that, it's not music. There's no beauty there. It is disorder and it's ugly and chaotic. And so I think the thing that I've seen, the healthiest, most joyful, happy marriages are the ones where the man has a firm commanding lead of his home and the wife has a joyful, humble submission to the leadership of her husband.

That doesn't mean they always agree. That doesn't mean that things are always perfect or there's never any problems. But they are far happier than the ones where they try to invert that design. The ones that try to invert the design are always miserable because they're trying to play an instrument without first submitting to the rules. And the rules are good.

The rules are for our good and for our happiness and for God's glory ultimately. You know, the most stately, solid women I've ever known are women. They trust God, they submit to their husbands because they know that God is in control. And they're not frightened by anything. And they're the furthest thing from doormats because they're not even thinking in those terms.

You know, they are actually, their submission to their husband is actually submission to God. So that's primarily who they're serving. And so They're free in a way that a woman who's kicking against these goes can ever be free You know, I remember I I read or I heard Rosario Butterfield talking about Going into her pastor's home where there were there a bunch of ladies. She was still you know still enmeshed in her former lifestyle as a lesbian activist. And she talks about how different these women were.

They weren't flighty. They weren't complaining. They were just, I'm sure I'm using the wrong words, but she was really talking about women who were very different and they weren't frantic, they weren't worried, they had a calming kind of presence that really she took note of. That's a great testimony. So then you've got distinct roles in the church.

The creation order has explicit implications of really the division of labor and functionality in local churches. Teaching and authority is reserved for men at 1 Timothy 2.11, 1 Corinthians 14.34, you know, it's shameful for a woman to speak in church and if she has a question, let her ask her husband at home. So you have this order and authority even in the church that's despised and rejected among men. Well, the church is a scaled up household. The same father rule principle of the home is applied in the church and the elders of a church are the fathers of the church.

And so the same basic structure, the order of the household is the same in the church as it is in the home. And the church thrives whenever we submit to it, just as a home thrives when we submit to it. Yeah. And how does it happen? It happens because Jesus Christ, He's the restorer of the creation order.

He brings the disorder into order and he uses his people to restore what had been damaged through the fall. What a blessing that is. That's our only hope. Amen. Okay, parting shots.

Jason and Michael, you got a parting shot, you first. I was reflecting on Philippians 3 earlier today for my talk at the conference coming up where Paul speaks of our citizenship is in heaven and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body by the power that enables Him even to subject all things to himself. I find that really a delightful thing to think about, that Jesus is forever in a body. And there's nothing I could think of that would more dignify the human body than that God himself would occupy one for all eternity. I mean, if there's a Bible verse that were to say the body is good, well, great, we'll believe that.

But to demonstrate it in such a way is all the more striking in my mind, and it disturbs my heart to worship him that Jesus honored the body by inhabiting it and he will do so for all eternity to intercede for us as his as his bride. And he is the savior of the body. Amen. Yeah, amen. So my parting shot is this.

The problem isn't lack of clarity from the scriptures. So if the problem isn't that, what is it? Well, it's interpretive tricks in order to get to a predefined way to say that the Bible doesn't say what it clearly says. Hey, that's dishonoring to God, and also the interpretive tricks never stop with you. In other words, when you're throwing off something clear from Scripture with interpretive tricks, the next guy in line who wants to throw off something else just uses your tricks.

And I think what we're seeing in the church across a broad range of different issues is it's expanded way beyond creation order and bled into other areas where people have learned the tricks to get the Bible to not say what it's clearly saying. So There's a really high price to be paid for kicking against the goads. You know, Carl Truman just kicked out a book called The Desecration of Man. I just read it. And his thesis is that when people desecrate God and the image of God, they desecrate the image of God in man.

The desecration of man comes from really a desecration of the creator. It's brilliant and I think it is a helpful, helpful way to think about it. And so, but you got to go get Michael Clary's book, God's Good Design, it's a great book, and it's just full, full of really helpful stuff for all these things that we've been talking about. So okay, Michael, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it.

I appreciate you. Thank you so much, brother. Okay. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Please be with us next time and be with us next year in October.

It's a long way away for our national conference. We're gonna deal with really, really practical stuff about the Church and the family. Hope to see you there as well. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com