In his sermon on 'Gender Justice and the Doctrine of Personhood,' Scott Brown discusses the divergence between biblical principles of justice and the current social justice movements. Emphasizing the necessity of aligning justice with biblical teachings, he critiques the adoption of intersectionality and critical race theory, highlighting their contradictions to scripture. Brown argues against concepts such as race and gender as social constructs, advocating instead for a biblical view where all humans are created equal in God's image, distinguished by male and female roles. He references the Danvers Statement to uphold distinct roles for men and women, challenging modern views of gender fluidity and transgender acceptance as oppressive and contrary to biblical teaching. Brown warns against the influence of secular philosophies that diverge from Christian doctrines on personhood. He stresses the importance of upholding biblical gender roles in all spheres of life, including the home, church, and civil realm, critiquing the cultural shift towards gender neutrality and the erosion of biblical gender binaries. The sermon concludes with a call for Christians to remain steadfast in biblical teachings, recognizing the moral revolution as an attack on man as made in God's image.

This afternoon's topic is gender justice and the doctrine of personhood. And we ought to be concerned about justice. God has communicated a comprehensive view of justice in his word, in the ethical principles of his law, in the general equity of the law, in various commands of God. Now so far we've introduced our subject by trying to identify some of the various movements and challenges and contradictions to Christian justice and to contrast it with the social justice movement that is upon us. And the propositions of this social justice movement, almost all of them are opposite to biblical principles of justice.

And we must always compare what we see in our culture, and particularly these social justices, With what the Bible says is just and the Bible alone We looked at what I was calling the fatal flaw of the social justice movement and that is setting aside scripture receiving language and interpretations from the world to describe justice And then thirdly we talked about intersectionality and critical race theory. And, you know, identifying, you know, just really the tragic reality of the SBC formally adopting critical race theory as a legitimate analytical tool, which it is not a legitimate analytical tool at all. And then fourthly, we talked about race and how in Scripture there's no such thing as race. We are all one blood. And as Christians we cannot use critical race theory, which divides people by race.

We cannot use these deceptive, demonic, Marxist tools to do that. Colors are just simply, colors of people's skin are just trace levels of melanin in the skin. They just control hair color, eye color, and skin color. And every person on the planet is exactly the same except about two-tenths of one percent difference and we should celebrate all shades of people just like we celebrate all the Remarkable colors and shapes and sizes of animals in the world God is a creative God and we should give thanks for all of it. There's variety what we what we Made clear was in terms of intersectionality There's only one intersection in Christianity and that intersection is at the foot of the cross.

That's it. And that's what unites us and that's the only thing that we should ought to divide us. So we're trying to compare these matters of social justice. Today I want to talk about gender justice, personhood, and identity politics. And later on, we'll continue with some of these categories.

I'd like to spend a session talking about what people are calling sexual justice and then matters of economic justice later on. But today these are matters of gender justice. I want to read a phrase out of the Danvers statement. This was a statement which was crafted to try to define biblical manhood and womanhood in contrast to the great movements of feminism in the church. Here's how the Danvers statement speaks of manhood and womanhood.

Both Adam and Eve were created in God's image, equal before God as persons and distinct in their manhood and womanhood. Distinctions in masculine and feminine roles are ordained by God as part of the created order and should find an echo in every human heart." So this very statement, you know, is fighting words compared to the modern views of gender justice and personhood. They are in radical contradiction to what God says. Now, why would we talk about gender justice? You know, most of the people in this room have been brought up with some clear and healthy semblance of understanding of manhood and womanhood and gender.

Why would we deal with it? Well, here's why I believe we really must deal with it. We're living in a world where the broader culture, almost universally, is suggesting and is demanding that there's no difference between males and females. We're living in a culture where most people believe that gender is a social construct, not a genetic or a biological construct. We live in a world where justice demands that referring to people by their biological sex is oppressive.

We're living in a world where marketers, sociologists, and psychologists have invented multiple genders. We're living in a world where the new morality is, well, the new morality used to be, transgender is good. The newest morality is, transgender must be celebrated by everyone, or it's oppressive. We're living in a world where if you contradict this claim of homosexuality or transgender as not good, then you are not inclusive, you are unjust, and you are mean-spirited, and you are unsafe to be around or listen to. If you refer to people as he or she, it is unjust and oppressive either to the one you are referring to or to those who are hearing you.

We live in a world where just the simple explanation of the biblical moral code regarding manhood and womanhood is implicitly considered injustice. We're living in a world where upholding the way that the Bible defines justice is considered harmful to society. And we're living in a world where upholding biblical manhood and womanhood is considered oppression and likened to slavery. And various Christian doctrines are considered racist. The very nature of the color of your skin can get you branded as racist.

You know, the world will tell you that you can make yourself to be whatever your heart tells you you can be. Now all of these things are the reasons why we need to speak about this. You know, I realize, you know, we have children growing up in this kind of world, and it's critical that we bring the language and the difficulties that are about us now. The perspectives on justice that the world has adopted, I think, are spoken of very clearly in Colossians 2 verse 8, beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy or empty deceit according to the basic principles of the world and not according to Christ. Now, we're living in a world where it's very easy to get cheated by empty philosophies, and they will cheat you.

They will destroy you. And so this is a debate over personhood. One of the most interesting facets of this debate and these matters of gender justice is so much of it is really focused on womanhood. It's focused there. And it shouldn't surprise us.

You know, Eve was called the mother of the living, the mother of living. And this is why the devil has pointed his darts and his arrows and pulled out his arsenal on womanhood, I think even more than manhood, frankly. Because when a woman doesn't play her role as the mother of living as the keeper at home as the one who raises the next generation all of society falls apart if you know it's it's not it shouldn't surprise us that the abortion industry has always been run by women. First wave feminists were women, second wave, third wave feminists, it's women who run the abortion clinics, It's women who are the CEOs of the abortion providers. It's women who are in the clinics, and many of them are doctors in the clinics that are performing abortions.

It's, you know, the devil has gotten hold of Eve in order to destroy personhood the way that God has defined it. So this is a debate over personhood. I think we need to understand that fundamentally. It's very important that you know who you are. If you're saying, I don't know who I am anymore It really means that you've become disconnected from what God has said regarding personhood man as made in male and female and The Bible makes it very clear that first of all you are a person made in his image and God has either created you as male or female and and each of these each of these facets of personhood are determining factors on what you ought to do with your life and how you ought to think about yourself.

This is how critical this is, and they actually show you how to fit in the world, and they show you where to point your energy as a man and as a woman and We live in a world right now where the world would you know is bent literally hell bent on on Moving the attention of women off of their homes and raising their children and having children off of that to something else, to an alternative. But when God points to something and says, this is who you are and this is what you do and you go do something else, You really are defying the whole proposition of personhood in the Bible. And this is why this is such a critical matter. God has established in His order of creation a symmetry and a beauty and an effectiveness of man as made in male and female. And each of these determine who you are and what you ought to do with your life And where you ought to point your energy and what you ought to pray about and what you ought to become like.

And of course, this is why the Bible says that older women who are godly women should teach the younger women what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a wife and what it means to spend your single years and how do you get your way through this life when the devil is attacking you as a woman? And God has established this order, and it's an order that is nothing less about personhood and function. So this matter of gender justice is very critical. This is a matter of simple biblical fidelity. Will we hold to the view of man as male and female or will we capitulate to a culture that demands that we reject biblical gender binary?

Gender binary. We believe that gender is binary. There are only two ways to go with it. The belief trends in our culture are contrary to this and we will continually be pressured to capitulate to these views. Men who are working for the largest corporations in the world today know that.

The pressures are enormous and they're having to change the way they talk at the water cooler. And it's actually shutting down conversations in corporations because people don't know how to talk to one another anymore without using gender specific pronouns it's a threat to biblical Christianity it's a threat to God's people morally it's a threat to God's people doctrinally and it's a threat to God's people morally, it's a threat to God's people doctrinally, and it's a threat to God's people relationally, and it's an absolute death grip on the family. And my view is that, well, here's what I would like to do, I would like to bring comfort today, and to take hold of these views and to have, take comfort in the fixed, inerrant, sufficient Word of God and live by that. And it will make you strange, and it will make you think differently, and it will get you marginalized in this world. And this is what has always been the case for true Christians.

So I want us to be emboldened, to rest our entire weight on the Word of God and trust it and recognize that God's ways are pleasant ways. And frankly, and finally on this matter, God's Word will prevail. Everything that contradicts The law of God will be broken by that law. You will be broken on the rocks of disobedience to God's Word. So it's very, very critical.

I'm going to give you some illustrations of the personal challenges of gender justice that are about us today. There's probably an outline, I printed it, we had an outline printed of this, you'll get more detail. It actually has become unjust, at least in corporate America, to refer to man as male and female. And the idea has taken hold. Your biological nature has nothing to say about who you are.

It has nothing to say. Language is being changed. When you change language, you change worldview and that's what's happening before our eyes. This is the greatest social revolution of my lifetime, probably the greatest social revolution in 200 years in America. For example, in Berkeley, California, you can no longer refer to manholes in the street.

You do not call them policemen any longer. You do not, you now, it's a maintenance hole, not a manhole. You are no longer asking children to refer to one another as ladies and gentlemen. Gavin Newsom, the current California governor, his wife is no longer calling herself the first lady. She's calling herself the first partner.

She's defining herself as first partner. And this is logical, actually, because it could apply to the future spouse of a female governor, or a homosexual governor. Last week, presidential candidate, or two weeks ago, Joe Biden was asked how many genders there were when he was involved in his Iowa campaign and his answer was there are three genders And what he meant is that you can identify as male or female or some other multiplier of other genders. Facebook has 58 genders listed. This happened years ago, three or four years ago.

Lesbian, gay, agender, transgender, cisgender, gender fluid, and you can, you have the opportunity to choose your pronouns, him, her, they, or their, the singular they. In Fairbanks, Alaska, just recently they removed all the gendered words in their public documents and moved them to they, their, or them. The Fairbanks North Star Borough Assembly adopted an ordinance that removes gender-specific pronouns and replaces them with actually grammatically incorrect pronouns in their city code. He and she is now called they, his and hers possessive is now known as their, him and her are now them. So they voted unanimously to adopt this new language.

Okay. My newest grandson, born in the Nebraska Hospital just a few weeks ago, my daughter discovered that they had changed the induction forms and had supplied alternative gender identities in the induction forms. This is happening in every hospital in America, I'm pretty sure. I've talked to several people in these hospitals, and the forms are all being revamped right now. And my daughter was talking to the nurse just expressing amazement at this.

And the nurse just said, oh yes, we've also changed the tags on the bassinets. Used to be blue and pink. Now they're a gender neutral color. And the nurse said that she had just come out of a room with a couple where a new baby was born. And the nurse went into the room and said, is it a boy or a girl?

And the mother said, we're going to let the child decide. This is in Nebraska, USA. So Just a couple of weeks ago, there was a Virginia ruling on a high school bathroom policy and their transcript policy. The judge ordered a school in Virginia to allow a girl to go into the men's bathroom and also for this person to change this transcripts on record to have a from a female to a male. So this is the kind of world we're living in right now.

In 2015, there was a poll of adults 18 to 34, a majority see gender as a spectrum rather than a man-woman binary. There was a Harris Poll two years ago of millennials. 12% say they identify as transgender or gender non-conforming. So this is what's happening. This is just sort of a thumbnail sketch of the drift.

Boy, what a fast drift. Even if you went back five years ago, you thought you had woken up in a different world, and now the language is changing, and it's going to continue to change You're going to be dealing with this language and you're gonna have to ask whether you're gonna use it or not You're gonna have the church is gonna have to ask itself. Is it gonna play pretend on personhood? Is it going to pretend? Are you going to pretend that there is such thing, even such a thing as a transgender person?

Well there isn't. There are only two genders that have been created by God, man as male and female. That's all there are. Anyone else is deceived. Their minds have been bent.

It was up until 1970, homosexuality by the American Psychological Association was treated as a mental illness. I want to go back to 1970 of all of all times I was alive in 1970 and things were drifting hard at that time So let's turn to the Word of God. I just want to lay down a few passages of Scripture. I've listed them on your outline so you don't need to take them down, But I just want to lay down a record of how the Bible talks about gender. When you read these words here, this is gender justice, true justice.

Anything that contradicts it is injustice. We're living in a world where people don't know their right hand from their left and they call what is good evil and what is evil good. But Christians have always existed in environments like this. Okay, I'm gonna run through these fairly quickly here. Genesis 1, 27 and 8.

God created man as male and female. So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them then God blessed them and God said to them be fruitful and multiply fill the earth and subdue it have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth. The Bible does not recognize gender, transgender.

The Bible only recognizes two genders. They are biologically determined, they are fixed, and there are two associated roles with those two genders as male and female. As a result of the sexual revolution, people now think on two planes. They think of biological maleness and femaleness on the one hand and identity, which is a cultural, sociological, mental matter, and separating the two. Genesis 2 18, God creates a helper for the man.

This is the revealed role of womanhood. And the Lord God said, it is not good that man should be alone. By the way, when it says man should not be alone, I will create a helper comparable to him. That happens to be a woman, okay? The language is very, very clear, In Genesis 2, 20 and 25, the woman is created to marry a man and a man to marry a woman.

So Adam gave names to all the cattle, this is Genesis 2, 20, To the birds of the air and every beast of the field but for Adam there was not found a helper Comparable to him and the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam and he slept and he took one of his ribs And closed up the flesh in its place Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, He made into a woman, and He brought her to the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. And then in verse 24 we read, Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. And they were both naked and the man and his wife were not ashamed. Now when you read this you're always going back from man, wife, husband.

You're going back to these gender binaries all the way through. There's nothing else that exists in the creation. Genesis 3.16, The woman is designed to have a husband and bear children. To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and conception, and in pain you will bring forth children. In Genesis 3.16, the woman is designed to be under the authority of a husband.

Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you." Now there's much to say about that which we won't go into now. Genesis 3 20, Eve is the mother of all living. Genesis 3 20 and Adam called his wife's name Eve because she was the mother of all living. How tragic it is that in the creation order a woman is made to be a mother and every single thing she hears from her culture is don't be a mother and don't have very many children and go do your own thing. It's better for you to file insurance papers for a CEO than it is and work in a cubicle than to go be a mother.

That's what this world says. But God is designed for a woman to be a mother. There are some there's some women who won't be married they'll be single their whole lives according to God's providence but most most women will be married. Deuteronomy 22 5 we learned that men should wear the clothing that is distinctively masculine and women should wear apparel that is distinctively feminine. A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor a man put on a woman's garment." That's Deuteronomy 22.5.

Isaiah 3 verse 12 makes it clear that a sign of a society in moral collapse is characterized by women and children ruling. As for my people, children are their oppressors and women rule over them. This is this is the distortion of the role of a woman. Ephesians 5 22 to 33 wives are commanded to be submissive and respect their husbands and husbands are commanded to love and nourish and cherish and really die for their wives. In other words, there are two different roles for men and women in marriage.

In 1st Timothy 2, 11-15, women are to learn in silence in the church. They are to learn. They must be learners. They must have significant intellectual capacity. They're actually going to raise the next generation and be their teachers, and then they need to rise up and teach the younger generation.

Women are teachers, but in the church they learn in silence so that they're processing, they're thinking, they're figuring out how to take the doctrine and adorn it in every area of their life. First Peter 3, 3 through 7, women are to dress in a certain way and conduct themselves with their husbands with the hidden, with the treasures of the hidden person of the heart. In Romans 1, 25 through 27, it's very clear there's a natural and an unnatural use of male and female bodies. They're different and they ought to be treated as different. In 1 Corinthians 11, 14 there's a distinction between the hair of men and women.

Paul says, does not even nature itself teach you? And then he's talking about the differences between the hair of men and the hair of women. In 1 Corinthians 11, 3 through 7, there are male and female distinctions that must be maintained where the apostle says, But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ and the head of every woman is man In first Corinthians 11 8 through 10 we learned that the woman was created for man The woman was created for man And the man was created for the woman in a different way. In 1 Corinthians 11, 11 and 12, a woman ought not to be independent from man. Nevertheless, neither is man independent of woman nor woman independent of man in the Lord.

For as the woman came from man, even so also comes through the woman, but all things are of God." In John 10, 35, we read, and Scripture cannot be broken. Scripture cannot be broken. So to change the pronouns, to change the identities is to break scripture that's very clear The role of manhood and womanhood, my view is that it includes all spheres of life, that it includes the sphere of the home, it includes the sphere of the church and my view is that it also includes the sphere of the civil realm. That the attack on womanhood is part and partial of Putting a woman in authority in the civil realm now, I know This is known as either two or three-point complementarianism some complementarians are two-pointers in other words that authority and submission exists in the home and in the church only, but then when she's in the civil realm, then all bets are off she can become a leader and be different from her nature. I'm a three-point complementarian In the sense that the roles are designed by God to operate in all three of the spheres in the home in the church And in the civil realm and I'll tell you why I'm a three-point Complementarian I don't believe that a woman's nature, number one, I'm going to give you several, I'm going to give you a list.

Number one, I don't believe a woman's nature or function changes when she crosses the threshold of a church or when she walks outside of the door of her home into the civil realm. She was created to be in a helper's role, not a leader's role, and the issue is not that women were created. The issue is that women were created for a specific function, and they are created for man in order to be helpers of man. Number two, in every case in the Bible, civil magistrates are men. They are never women, and there's an explicit order in Exodus 18-21 and Deuteronomy 1-13, choose men, choose men.

And This is the same reason that we believe that only men can be elders in the church. For example, there's no command in the Bible that says women can't be elders. There's not a command like that. But what you do find is every time elders are referred to they are men, every time. So most of the church believes that pastors, elders must be men.

Well, two-point complementarians don't apply that to the civil realm, And men are the only gender included in the biblical testimony for civil magistrates. And we use the same argument for elders. I use the same argument for elders as I would civil magistrates because only men are mentioned for civil positions. You know, my view is that women are, you know, should not be CEOs. They should take on the role that the Bible communicates.

I wrote a book about this called Feminine by Design. It's a little book I wrote actually for teenage girls. I wrote it for my daughters first, but I'll communicate that view there. Number three, when God chose kings for his people they were always men, never women, never. Does that mean anything?

Number four, my view is that political career violates her role as keeper at home. She's a helper of her husband. Number number five, if a woman were president would you be comfortable with her being authority over every male in the United States? Number six, if a woman were president do you feel that her submission to her husband would now, through her, subject all Americans to her husband's will, since she's obligated before God to submit to her husband in Ephesians 5.24? In everything.

In everything, is the biblical language. Number 7. The basis for the right structure of the family and the church is taken from the creation order, And we should not look at the creation order and disregard it for the state. Number eight, the argument against extending the nature of women to the civil realm is an argument from silence. It's an argument from silence.

When you have this other, I think, explicit evidence, just like we have evidence for why we should have male elders. We have the exact same kind of evidence and argumentation for the civil realm. You know, we could talk about Deborah. She's always the one brought up. There's much to say.

I don't really believe she was a civil magistrate, and there's a lot to say about that. I don't think we should take as a paradigm the worst period in biblical history and make it normative for today. Maybe we can deal with that some other time. The roots, let's talk about the roots of what I'm going to call gender injustice. The roots really are Rousseau and Darwin and Marx and Freud and the feminists that followed them.

Here's what they believed. You can be anything you want to be, anything you feel yourself to be. This was Rousseau, this was Darwin, this was Freud, and this was all the feminists that came after them. Their proposition reduced down to a simple statement is this, follow your heart, don't follow your biology. This is a the heart of the debate here is over personhood and this this generation believes that their bodies don't tell them anything about who they are.

They pretend that their physical characteristics don't mean anything. And they fundamentally hate God's design. That's the reason. They have rejected that man is made in the image of God as male and female. And their proposition is that you ought to ignore your physical and observable and public and verifiable biological identity.

You must reject it. And, you know, Many people who claim to be transgender say that they got the wrong body, they were born into the wrong body. Others say that their brains, their way of thinking is transgender, and they say that it's a lie that if you have a female body that you are female. It is a hatred of man made in the image of God. It literally is a hatred of the body.

It's a rejection of the body. In Christianity, you have a body and a soul, and the two actually are complimentary to one another. This is why there are sins against the body and this current wave is sin against the body and a rejection of the creation order. And that's why the center point of the sexual revolution is personhood and it's it's the heart of the debate over sexual preferences homosexuality of transgenderism and it's even the heart of the matter of the the culture of abortion and Assisted suicide. It's a hatred of the body When you don't believe that man is made in the image of God, you don't mind killing a baby You don't even mind killing a baby right when it's being born because you don't believe that man is made in the image of God.

You believe that man is just a collection of protoplasm. It's just a collection of cells. Just a collection of cells. In terms of sexual preferences, homosexuality and transgenderism is a man made as male and female issue. There is no third gender.

And in terms of our culture of abortion and assisted suicide, our babies and old people who have afflictions, persons. Are they persons? And the problem is that intolerance on any of these issues will get you labeled as discriminatory, sexist, homophobic, and not inclusive and unsafe. Now everyone will ask at some point in their life, who am I? And the way they answer that question will show which side they are on, Whether they are on God's side of the creation order or are they on the devil's side of creation disorder.

And when you find yourself saying, I don't know who I am anymore, it's a sign that you become disconnected from biblical truth. You know, those who advocate transgenderism and homosexuality have a very low appreciation for their bodies and the way that God made their bodies. And they would rather dismiss their bodies in trade for their feelings about other people. And they have a low view of the body. And there's some writers today are saying that this revolution is actually a hatred of the body.

And so this all comes down to the doctrine of personhood. You know, your children need to know who they are. They need to know that their bodies tell them something true about themselves. And it's for the church to stand on the Word of God. So my primary objective today was to communicate somehow that this moral revolution is a revolution against man made in the image of God and it's so important let's pray Lord we pray that you would help us to rejoice in how you've made us and to do the role that you've called us to do, that we would love it, that we would plunge our whole lives rejoicing in what you've done rather than turning away from it and preferring the disorders of this world.

Amen.