Today, we're pleased to share with you an audio essay written and read by Kevin DeYoung,

entitled Five Questions About God's Design for Gender. Kevin DeYoung's book is Men and Women in the Church,

a short, biblical, practical introduction.

Five questions about God's design for gender, written and read by Kevin D. Young.

Question. Why did God choose to make men and women? Answer, God didn't have to make two different kinds of human beings. He didn't have to

make us so that men and women, on average, come in different shapes and sizes and grow hair in

different places and often think and feel in different ways. God could have propagated the human

race in some other way besides the differentiated pair of male and female. He could have made Adam sufficient without

an Eve, or he could have made Eve without an Adam. But God decided to make not one man or one woman,

or a group of men or a group of women. He made a man and a woman. The one feature of human existence

that shapes life as much or more than any other, our biological

sex, was God's choice. In an ultimate sense, of course, the world had to be made the way it was

in accordance with the immutable will of God and as a necessary expression of his character.

I'm not suggesting God made Adam and Eve by a role of the dice. Actually, I'm reminding

us of the opposite. This whole wonderful, beautiful, complicated business of a two-sexed humanity

was God's idea. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him,

male and female, he created them. The whole human

race is, always has been, and will be for the rest of time, comprised of two differentiated

and complementary sexes. This perpetual bifurcated ordering of humanity is not by accident

or by caprice, but by God's good design. And why? What is at stake

in God making us male and female? Nothing less than the gospel, that's all. The mystery of marriage

is profound, Paul says, and it refers to Christ and the church. Mystery in the New Testament's sense

...