God's Design for Humanity: Image Bearers - Session 1

Human Sexuality, Gender, and God's Creation

Well, welcome to our Equipping Conference 2024. Our subject is of pressing concern. Not that I think that anybody here is confused about gender and human sexuality, and this is obviously a complementarian church and not an egalitarian church, but it is good for us to spend some time thinking through these issues.

And when I came up with the idea to address this, I thought there's nobody I would rather have address this for us than Owen Strand, who at one time was the head of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

That was the first time that I ever heard Owen's name. I was talking to somebody about a good resource on gender issues, and I said, there's a great book called Biblical Manhood and Womanhood written by John Piper and Wayne Grudem, and they are the heads or started this Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

And then somebody corrected me and said, those guys are no longer there leading that. Now, Owen Strand is leading that, and I don't know who that guy is. But since then, I have followed Owen's work online and appreciated him very much.

I met him a couple of years ago, so he is the one that I felt would be most equipped, and I think probably the best guy we could have to come and address these issues. Owen Strand is the Provost and Professor of Theology at Grace Bible Theological Seminary.

He is a native of Maine and did his ministry training at Southern Seminary and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is married to Bethany and is the father of three children, two of them teenagers.

He enjoys watching basketball, coaching basketball, hiking with his family in natural beauty and milkshakes. He likes to hike in the natural beauty, comma, and he likes milkshakes. Not to hike in natural beauty and in milkshakes, but he hosts the Grace and Truth Podcast and is a Senior Fellow of the Research Council.

I'm grateful that Owen is able to be here, because as we're going to get into in the Q &A, he has a lot of things crashing down on him in his life right now. He is in the middle of a lot of occupational and ministry and family changes, and yet as much stress as he and his family are under right now, he is still here, and I'm very grateful for that.

Owen is the author of this book, The War on Men, that you were given with your registration. Extra copies of this are available for $20. He's also the author of Christianity and Wokeness. I've read both of these books.

They're excellent. These are available also for $20, and then this is not available, but The Warrior Savior, he's the author of this book, A Theology of the Work of Christ, and this has got to be excellent.

I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my, it's on what I call my short stack. It's one I'm going to get to relatively quickly. This just came out in this year, right? January? Is it January this year?

Yeah, so I haven't gotten to it yet. All of that said, that's kind of my long introduction. Owen wanted it to be much longer because he wanted me to talk a lot about him. With that, I'll turn it over to Owen Strand.

Thanks, brother.

That was not true. I said you can be very short. That would befit the subject, but he didn't fit that bill. That's okay. That's okay. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Pastor Jim, for having me.

The team, thank you to Josh for that musical worship, and thank you all for giving your time on a Friday night to be here. We are here to cover momentous things because our whole culture, our whole civilization is shaking over the issues that we will be talking about.

The Stakes of Gender and Human Sexuality in 2024

Even think about this title with me for just a minute, Human Sexuality, Gender, and God's Creation. That's basically in summary form just about everything that has the church under fire in 2024. That's put probably a number of you in this room in interesting positions in your workplace, in your vocation.

If we were to speak up, if some of you were to speak up where you work, where you ply your trade, you could be fired very quickly and very easily and become a headline. In fact, if you say some of the things, I'm just going to lay out here in this strong, sound pulpit in this sound church this weekend.

So this is momentous stuff, not because of me, but because of the subject matter. If you want to open to your booklet before I move into my first message tonight, I just want you to understand this conference schedule page.

I just want you to understand the flow of tonight and tomorrow. You'll see that we start with three sessions on God's design for humanity. That's intentional. We're going to begin in the opening chapters of Genesis, and we're going to see just what God made humanity to be.

We're going to breathe pure oxygen. So all of that, all that madness that swirls out there, that's not in here, praise God. And we get to breathe the pure oxygen of God's glorious design that is good for us.

It's not just right. It's good for us. It brings flourishing. It brings joy when we live according to it by the grace of God. Then in session five, you see a turn there. That's intentional. Satan's design for humanity.

And we do two sessions there. And I just want to map briefly with you. I won't be able to do it full justice, but I want to try to map the system that we're up against in order that we would understand it, but not just understand it and stand far apart from it and maybe throw a few rocks across the stream or something like that in order that we would be better equipped to then press into this world.

Because we're not actually supposed to, even as we're surrounded by beautiful hills and mountains, we're not supposed to head for the hills. We're supposed to press into the darkness. It's not a natural instinct for any of us, but we're supposed to press in.

So we're not just trying to critique Satan's design. We very much are. We are calling a spade the whole weekend. But we are actually trying to be equipped to get into the darkness as the light in order to glorify God.

And then we go back to God's design there in session seven in a Q &A. And on Sunday, I'll do a Sunday school on the gospel as our power. And I'll do a sermon on David and Abigail. There aren't a lot of us, I think, that have...

I'm just taking a survey. You can do this when you speak with impunity. Who has heard a sermon on David and Abigail in their life? Okay. Well, we are about to break some barriers, baby. Apparently, I expected a few hands, but should I be offended?

No, it's not my book, but okay. Anyway, there's so much to preach. I'm not throwing shots at preachers here. There's so much to preach in God's word. But actually, the reason I'm in David and Abigail is because a lot of what we're talking about, as Pastor Jim rightly said, is the word complementarity.

That basically sums up, as we'll be going, that sums up, in my judgment, beautifully, God's design for the sexes, that we are complementary, that we are made distinctly, that we are definitely not the same man and woman.

We're the same race, but definitely not the same as human beings. We have our distinctions, and those distinctions are not bad. They can become bad in a sinful world, can't they? We can render those distinctions and differences something that is bad, and they present a real challenge to us in marriage, for example, and even in the home with raising kids.

But in God's design, again, they're good. Our differences are not bad. They're not a matter of hostility. They're to God's glory, just like God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are one God, three persons.

They're not the same person. They're not a carbon copy of one another, just with a different name. They're distinct persons. And so we have a foundation as Christians for both unity, one God, but distinction, three persons.

And that's true in humanity as well. Unity, one human race, all of us image bearers, every single person an image bearer without exception, fully an image bearer, as we're just about to talk about. And yet, man and woman different, and that's good.

And that's the opposite as we start of how our culture talks now about gender, because so much of how our culture discusses these things is it tries to melt everything down into one kind of omnigender, where there's not really distinctions between men and women, and we're all the same.

It's all gender-neutral gray, and with respect to gray neutral tones in your household colors, or something like this, my wife likes neutral tones, so I feel like I should say that in terms of the house color scheme, that's not actually how humanity is supposed to look.

We're not supposed to be blended down into one undistinct color. We're supposed to be distinct colors. When you see a rainbow, remember it's pride month, yes, the rainbow's been co-opted, or they've tried to, but they haven't succeeded, by the way, because you can't edit what God has created, and you can't take anything back from God.

If God has told you that he owns the rainbow, with a smile on our face, we say he owns the rainbow. Nobody else owns the rainbow. But look, think with me just for a second, think of a rainbow. Those are distinct colors, aren't they?

But that's what makes it beautiful. They're not all the same. That speaks to the world that God has made. Well, we are running ahead of ourselves. We need to begin by thinking together about the image of God, a doctrinal biblical reality that is often not treated in much detail.

We don't have a super long session here tonight, so don't worry, we're not about to sit here for four and a half hours, but we do need to give some attention to the image of God. The image of God is the foundational reality of the human person.

You can't understand who a human being is without understanding that we are all an image bearer, every single person. We're going to cover that at some length, but before I get into the image of God from Genesis chapter one, we're starting in session one, in Genesis one, I want to give you five different cultural views of the human person, and all of these relate to these topics, human sexuality, gender, God's creation.

Five False Views of the Human Person

I want to give you then five wrong views of who humanity is, five bad answers to the question, what is a person? Okay, because that is actually the most commonly debated subject today in 2024 in America.

What makes you human? So much of the debate is right there. Five bad views, and then we'll transition to a sixth view, and that is the biblical view. Man is the image of God. The first cultural view that's around us, that's coming at us from different angles, is this.

Man is mere matter. Man is mere matter. This is often called materialism. It can also go under the name naturalism. All we are is just a collection of atoms. We are, not just that, a meaningless collection of atoms.

It's kind of like when you pick up a toy and there is some kind of company, their logo, their name on said toy. I have three kids, 15, 13, and 10. My wife and I are currently in that weird stage of grief when there are not that many toys being played with in the house after years and years and years and years and years and lots of money being spent on toys.

So I know toys well, even as they are fading from our life together as a family, as two of the three have launched into teenage-dom. When you pick up that toy, you see the brand, you know it's from something.

This scientistic view, many atheists around us, many skeptics around us say, when you look at the human person, you pick us up, you look at the bottom of our feet, there's nothing stamped there. No one has made us.

There's nothing purposeful about our existence. No one's designed us for anything bigger. Again, we're just a collection of atoms. We just happened to have come into existence. Yes, this is an evolutionary worldview.

You're well familiar with it. In an evolutionary worldview, there is no, at least in the secular form, there is no divine creator. There is no being guiding our being. There is just what is and nothing more.

So no one has shaped you. No one has made you for any purpose. You are just atoms colliding. When you die, as you often hear people say, especially nowadays in 2024, there's no place you go. There's no heaven.

There's no hell. John Lennon, that great theologian of the Beatles, told us this some decades ago, right? It's just fade to black. Or maybe it's some kind of, I don't know, blissful non-existence, however that is defined.

In this view, we're just matter. You and I know some different thoughts about that. And I'm guessing in this kind of church, you get some equipping for how to respond to that kind of perspective. Certainly you do from the scripture itself, just from preaching the word, preaching the gospel you do.

It's important for us to know though, that lots of people live according to this view. This is the view, for example, that drives the culture of death. This is the view that funds abortion to the tune of tens of millions of babies aborted in this first world civilized country.

There's lots of different world views, of course, that factor into a decision, horrific decision to abort. But one of the key ideas is that the baby in the womb is just a clump of cells. It's just tissue in a woman's womb.

That's all it is. And you and I know the complete opposite. We know that when a child is in a mother's womb, it is being knit together by God himself. It is not simply that God has set up certain processes and stepped away.

And now he's kind of a deistic figure out there in the cloud somewhere unconcerned with the world he has made. No, David and the psalmist tell us that every human life is fearfully and wonderfully made.

But that view goes the exact opposite direction of the man as mere matter view. It's very much a common way to think about humanity today. Second view, man as technological project, man as technological project.

We're now in the age, as you may have heard 18 ,000 times, of AI. Every company that is at all trying to be cutting edge is right now trying to figure out AI and how to use AI. And for some of us in the room, how to get rid of us so that AI can replace us.

Because it is going so well. They told us technology, by the way, was going to make our lives easy. Do you remember those? Do you remember that line? By the way, anybody remember that being, oh, technology.

First of all, we're going to be flying to the moon on a regular basis like the Jetsons. Yes. And then technology is going to solve all of our problems. Have you tried making a phone call to your spouse recently in a moment when you really need to reach them?

Have you ever had a phone call drop? Have you ever had a text message not go through? I wouldn't be so quick to believe the idea that technology solves all our problems. It's still difficult to get your toaster to work on a reliable basis.

If you have solved that particular human quandary, see me at the break. Mankind in this vision, and this relates to an evolutionary worldview, is basically an evolving animal. That's what we are. We're an evolving animal.

And again, lots of people around us think not only that we can use technology to upgrade ourselves, they go beyond that. They think we should use technology to upgrade ourselves. They think that is, what's the word I'm about to say?

That is progress. Progress. Interesting. Now, we do make forms of progress as time goes on in human civilization. Air conditioning is nice. I prefer air conditioning. I like refrigerators. I'm guessing many of you do.

Probably don't have a whole lot of ice chests represented in this room. And yet be careful with that. Yes. Be careful with that whole view that humanity is, as a whole, progressing. That vision has funded a lot of the worst ideas of the last 200 years or so.

But many people are believing this. They are believing that whatever science comes out with, it's good. Take it. Update yourself. Elon Musk, who's doing a lot of good for free speech with what is now called X, which yes, Elon, if you're listening, that's way cooler than Twitter, by the way.

But Elon Musk, on the other hand, is doing a lot to try to implant AI, neural technology, into human brains and thereby effectively upgrade the human person. So good on the free speech stuff. Thank you for saving free speech in America and the West, Elon.

But no bueno on changing the human person itself, changing anthropology itself. That is not a sound project. We are not just technology. We are not software to be upgraded. God wrote this code. God wrote the code of the human person.

We're not an open source system in that regard. But many people around us think that we are. Third view, man as expressive, therapeutic being. That's a mouthful. Man as expressive, therapeutic being. What are we after here?

Well, this is again grounded in what is often called a secular vision of life. The idea is that at the core of flourishing and thriving human living is expressing yourself. So a healthy life, a healthy existence is not about following anyone else's script, even God's.

A healthy human existence is about chucking any other script and expressing whatever comes naturally to you. Whatever comes naturally, whatever flows from your inmost desires and passions, that's what is good.

Whatever outside forces try to tell you to do, including religious authorities, including churches, including preachers and theologians, that is bad. That is very bad. And that is what our young people today, and I see a bunch in the room, praise God for that.

That is what the younger generation today is inundated with. That view, far more than any of us even know. Part of why we have to be so careful with phones. I'm not here to give a new law, pronounce a new 10 commandment, 11th commandment on technology, the perfect age when kids get phones today, or kids basically are going to get phones today, at least in a lot of cases, but be careful when they do.

Be careful. I would urge caution in terms of age. I won't get us into sticky disagreements tonight or something like that in session one, but I will just say, I will just say, think that one through. Don't just give a phone because you've got a teen in the home that really wants one.

And all the kids in the peer group have one. My kids back in Arkansas, where we live, we're moving to Kentucky soon, more on that in the Q and A to come. My kids do feel a little bit weird because they don't have phones yet.

My daughter, I guess, now has a dumb phone. She's 15 about to turn 16, but we're trying to be careful on that in part because even if she's discipled and hopefully somewhat trained in a Christian home under my wife and I, certainly not perfectly, there still are going to be a ton of messages that hit her on those platforms.

And friends do not overestimate the maturity of your children. These platforms are serious and they are calibrated to get your kids to do nothing other than believe lies about humanity, including the lie that we are expressive, therapeutic beings, that our greatest need is to express our true self or to switch the lingo to Disney's language, to follow our heart, to follow our heart.

Same idea. Yes. If somebody says, follow your heart, that's expressive humanity talking. And the therapeutic part of this third view comes because that's seen as working on yourself. That's seen as improving yourself.

You get the lie there as well. The lie is that, again, those authority figures who tell children how to live from something like the Bible, those figures prevent us from discovering our true self. And so we don't work on ourself.

You even hear that language as well. I'm doing work on myself. I'm working on myself. You see this a lot on Instagram and this sort of thing, especially with some of the mom circles and that sort of thing.

Now it's true that we all need to grow. That's a fundamentally Christian reality, but that's not what this view is after. This is after your own self-directed therapeutic growth. You getting more in touch with you, you living as you want to live.

That is seen as being healthy. That is the new gospel. At least one of the predominant ones. The new gospel is you need to forgive yourself and you need to discover yourself and you need to work on yourself and you need to affirm yourself.

Now, I'm not going to encourage you, by the way, to hate yourself as if there is no image of God and there is no grace and mercy in the cosmos. Christians can even crank up the doctrine of sin to the degree that we effectively are communicating like, if you don't hate yourself, you're not a good Christian.

I don't think the Bible teaches that we should hate ourselves. We hate our sin, but we don't hate who God made us to be in terms of the image of God and a Christian person. But fundamentally, we've got to recognize we don't need to be true to ourselves.

We need to be true to God. And I need to say just a word, especially to the young people in the room. The affirmation you need is not your own affirmation or your peers' affirmation or anyone else's affirmation or some group online who you kind of gravitate toward and they take you in and they give you an identity.

You don't need their affirmation. It might feel good, but the affirmation you need is that which comes from God. You need the forgiveness and grace and transforming power of God, which overcomes your sin and makes you who you truly are made to be.

That's what we need. Fourth view. Fourth view. We are sexualized beings. We are sexual beings. You can put it different ways. We're going to be talking about this at length. I'll talk about this tomorrow in the unit or the message on paganism at some length.

Sexual Desire, Freud, and the Denial of Binary Sex

But for here, I'll just quickly identify this with Freud. In psychological circles, Sigmund Freud, the European psychologist, really the founder of the modern psychological movement, Freud argued that the human person is a simmering cauldron of desires in our core, and a key part of our desires is sexual desire.

In fact, Freud argued that sexual desire is the engine that drives the personality. So what makes up a human person? What drives us? What moves us through life? For Freud, sorry for the straightforward talk here, but for Freud, it was sexual desire.

In fact, Freud believed that both men and women are bisexual in nature and that it is natural for us, therefore, to have all sorts of sexual interests in lots of different directions. Does that sound a little bit like the way the culture encourages us to think about ourselves?

Have you heard someone reference their masculine side or their feminine side? No one talks about their masculine side, by the way. I don't think I've ever heard a woman say, I'm getting in touch with my masculine side.

Isn't that interesting? I'm not even speaking, I'm not even passing judgment on that. I'm just saying I don't think I've ever heard a woman say that. I don't think lots of women are trying to get in touch with whatever the masculine side.

I think they're trying to get far away from the masculine side. The masculine side of the bathroom is like, you be over there. And the feminine, there is a feminine side in terms of husband-wife bathrooms, we can say that.

And you're supposed to mind those lines very carefully if you're the man. Men, though, do talk about getting in touch with their feminine side. Their feminine side. And I have a friend named Gavin Peacock.

We've written some books together. He played Premier League soccer in the UK. He was a star in the UK for years. Captain Chelsea, if any of you like soccer out there. And he said at one point when we were preaching together, he said, I didn't know I had a feminine side.

I don't think I do. And that's exactly right. That kind of thinking, in all seriousness, goes back to figures like Freud. The Bible doesn't teach men that they have a feminine side. We can talk about different traits and we can talk about men and women showing overlapping traits or things like that.

But fundamentally, if you're a man, you're a man. And if you're a woman, you're a woman. And by the way, just to cut to the quick here and give you the jeopardy answer at the beginning of the game, there are only two sexes.

God made them. You can't change your sex. No one has ever changed their sex. No one has ever become a woman who is a man. And no one who is a man has ever become a woman or vice versa. It's never happened.

No one has ever changed their sex. You can't change your sex. You can tragically get on very powerful drugs. You can go through body altering surgeries. Yes, you can be told all sorts of lies. You cannot change your sex because God made it.

God is the one who formed it. And you can't change it. Just like you can think you can become a mouse, but you can't become a mouse. And some of you are still chuckling, but there are people around us who think they can become a mouse.

Okay? So the confusion is very real today. And we can laugh at that. We really can because it's crazy. But people are in these positions. And even if that thought is wild and wildly off base, these are people who need the gospel.

These are people we've got to go toward, not away from, and reach in compassion. And there but for the grace of God go us. Without the grace of God, I know this is strange to think, but you might not just be a garden variety center.

You might end up thinking that you are a cat, that you are a furry. This is a thing now. In public schools, there are increasingly litter boxes for kids who identify as furries and think that they are cats or this sort of thing.

Now that is altogether ridiculous. It is. But these are lost sinners just like us who need the gospel. We've got to go to people who think they're furries. But again, just to establish the point, just to nail it to the wood here at the outset, no one has ever become a mouse who was a person or no one's ever become a tree or changed back because what God makes you can't alter.

You think you can, you can try, but you can't. Freud did a lot of damage as did Alfred Kinsey in the same period of time in the 1940s. He famously did a lot of experiments about human sexuality. I'll spare you the details and polite company, mixed company, but basically with a lot of kids in the room, but basically it's now all sides acknowledge the political right and the political left, the academic right and left acknowledge that Kinsey's subjects were in many cases people who, for various reasons, many of them tragic, were inclined to what we would call deviant sexual practices.

So Kinsey treated these people, many of them prisoners and this sort of thing, people who really do need a great deal of help along these lines. He treated them as if they were normal. And then he did all this research and presented it to the public as if everybody is effectively a sexual deviant.

And that is not true. We all struggle with sin and sinful desire runs through all of our hearts in some form. But Kinsey cooked the research from the start. This is a majorly impactful view that we're a sexualized being.

I don't even really have to keep going in that regard, but let us just note that for now we'll be engaging that view as we go. Fifth view, man is a racial being. We are a racial being. I don't have time to go into this in depth, but the academic theory most associated with this view is critical race theory, which teaches you that the world is made up of power dynamics.

It owes to what is called critical theory behind even critical race theory. And critical theory argues just that, according to Marx and others, that the world is made up of two categories, oppressor and oppressed.

The people who are in the majority become the oppressor. The people who are in the minority are the oppressed people. They are wronged by the majority. That was applied to race starting in about the 1980s and 90s in legal studies under Kimberly, Crenshaw, and other figures.

And what this has come to mean in layman's terms in America in the last 10 years, roughly, as critical race theory got out of the tiny little discipline of legal studies and somehow went viral and went global.

What this all means is that, in the most basic form, white people as the majority group, white people in air quotes, are the oppressors of people of color. And we're racial beings, it's argued. And so this is the most important fact about us.

And this is the most important fact of our civilization. And this is why it has been argued, as many of you have heard in lots of different forms, that we are in a systemically racist or systemically unjust society.

Who has heard some form of those terms in the last five to 10 years? Most of you. Okay, that's because we have been fed that vision. The concept of race itself is not a biblical concept. The concept of ethnicity is different peoples who have a shared culture, shared language, shared region of background.

That's valid. There's Jew and Gentile, of course, in New Testament categories and Old Testament categories, to be sure. But there's not a sense that because we have slightly different shades of melanin, we are effectively different people groups, and we have no unity as human beings.

That owes to secular thought as well. And that whole argument, again applied to America in the most direct form, that has caused horrific division in this country in the last roughly five to 10 years.

It has caused many so-called white people to be told that they are oppressors and they commit injustices against people of color at all times without even meaning to. And basically, just by virtue of a lot of us being a majority group, for example, in America, we are a wicked people group.

The same thing, of course, could be said of any majority people group in any society, right? So you could take that argument and apply it to Asian territories or African countries or et cetera. But it has been used here to do great damage in the church, for example, and teach people that they have an extra sin that they need to repent of, the sin of whiteness, for example.

And so that has done, as I say, great damage because, just so you hear this, it is not wrong to have what is called white skin. The Bible does not extra condemn you if you are white. The Bible does not condemn you if your skin is not white.

In past generations in America, people thought that people who did not have white skin were inferior. Nowadays, people with white skin are called inferior. Suffice it to say, we are believing the same lies, just directed at different people, that we were believing in the 19th century, with the same horrible results.

Can I give you a better vision just quickly? We are all one race, Acts 17 .26. We are all one human race. We do have differences in terms of culture, and there can even be distinctions in terms of how people live and some of that clusters around skin color, let that be said.

But there is nothing hard and fast that makes us a different kind of vision of humanity from one another. We have way more in common than we have apart, and there is no biblical basis for labeling a majority people group, for example, an oppressive group, just by virtue of being a majority group.

There is a lot more to say about these things. As Jim kindly said some minutes ago, I wrote a whole book on this. There is a lot of complexity here. There is a lot of things to unwind. My book, Christianity and Wokeness, gets at that.

I am going to sign, I will sign every stinking book you buy tomorrow at lunch, okay? They are all $20. I shipped them from my author account with my publisher. I tried to give you a sharp discount. You can see the salesman up here, sorry.

But if you want to buy it, it is $20, and I will sign every book tomorrow at lunch. Books aside, I am just trying to get these units shipped and sold. So the church does not have 800 books sitting in some corner somewhere for the next four years.

That does happen, sadly, to some of us. But these are complex matters, and they are divisive matters. But praise God, we have the image of God, as we are just about to talk about briefly, and we have the gospel.

The gospel is what unites us as Christians. Wherever the gospel takes root in a people and in a community, at least in a lot of different places, there is going to be some form of diversity. That is beautiful.

That is glorious. We love that, and we want that. We are not trying to artificially manufacture that in a cheesy way, and there is plenty of that out there. But wherever the gospel goes and sinners get saved and Christians join churches, that diversity naturally comes, and that is a beautiful thing.

We are the people then who have the biggest stake in diversity because we are a global body of believers from across centuries and millennia. So we have a big stake in the diversity of the body of Christ.

And just a final word here, be wary of critical theory on the other side. Be wary of critical theory that would tell you that because white people are targeted today, white people, and they are, that therefore we should go into some kind of project on the opposite side, not of hating our whiteness and repenting of it, but of making our whiteness something to be celebrated.

And that is our identity more than the gospel is, more than unity and Christ is. That is a rising danger today. Our Savior is not an Anglo-Saxon European. Our Savior is a Middle Eastern Jew who died on a Roman cross for us.

So you be careful about those message boards that tell you that your whiteness is your identity. You may have one form of skin color or another. It honestly doesn't matter like the world tells us it does.

You know what matters most is that a man named Jesus Christ died for you and died for a whole bunch of people, some of whom look something like you and a lot of whom don't look a lot like you, but you have unity in Christ.

In fact, Paul says, Ephesians 2 .15, we are one new man in Christ. That is what the world needs to hear. That's the message of the gospel. Sixth view. Those are five bad views. This is the sixth. Oh, I don't know what that was.

This is the sixth. And it's this, man is the image of God. We are the image of God. So we learn in Genesis 1 .26 -27, after making everything except for the human person on the sixth day, God said this, let us make man in our image according to our likeness.