Numerous Adventist friends around the country have sent us copies of the front cover of the October Issue of the Pacific Union Recorder Magazine. The cover features two guys pushing baby strollers and leaning towards each other in a manner reminiscent of housewives sharing butternut soup recipes over the back fence. Here is the cover:
Number one, it’s predictable. The Pacific Union has spent most of the last twenty years trying to redefine male/female roles in the SDA Church. After years of placing women on the front page of the Recorder to give legitimacy to WO, apparently it’s now time for the next step to unravel the gender binary.
Number two, putting two Mr. Moms on the cover of the Recorder during a cultural onslaught against biblical role distinctions between male and female is irresponsible. At a subliminal level, it sends the message that boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Flannel shirts and construction tools are out, they can be traded in for a synthetic pseudo-maternal motherhood (for the guys, I mean). Women, on the other hand, can be groomed in our official magazines and universities to covet traditional (dare I say Biblical) male roles, including shepherding the flock. That, after all, is where our culture is. “It’s all good bro.”
Third, masculinity isn’t all that important to cultural revolutionaries. It’s an expendable character trait, standing in the way of leftist goals. More accurately, liberalism treats masculinity as a pathology for men, but as a coveted prize for women. This is a segment of postmodern thinking—once shunned by Bible-believing Adventists, but now fully embraced by Lefty Adventism.
Summary
In closing, the Bible remains our best guide on male and female roles. In the Word, the male is presented as the spiritual leader, protector and provider of the family, and the female is presented as a helpmeet, a nurturer and a keeper at home. Both of these divinely-designed complementary roles are a great blessing to our families, churches and our society at large. Our gender identity cannot simply be renegotiated the way in which we refinance a mortgage or reschedule an appointment. God created us, and we are his creatures, both men and women.
Having been created male and female, we are husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters. Thus, the way in which we live our lives—is in and through our divinely created gender identities. These gender identities, in turn, are not merely superficial but run deep, affecting who we are as persons, family members, church members, and citizens.
We do our rebellious culture no good when we participate in any politically-correct blurring of the lines between God’s design for man and woman.
As believers, by grace and through faith, we have the privilege to point to God by living out His wise and beautiful human design before a world that languishes in sin and desperately needs salvation.
Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).
Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it (Ephesians 5:23)
But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God (1 Corinthians 11:3).