--The question is why God takes for Himself the masculine gender in pronouns. And this is actually both simple and complicated, as you’d expect with matters of gender. --As we noted yesterday, our feminine role (we humans, both male and female) is to be the receivers of God’s blessings, initiated by Him as masculine to us. And our duty is to return love and affection to God for them.
--That, ultimately, is why God is He and we are she.
--But if gender (and masculine/feminine as gift giver/receiver) are showing something about God, isn’t God incomplete if He’s ONLY a He?
--That’s exactly the right question. And since we know God is complete, it means that God must have in Himself the gendered features He is revealing to us in male and female, right?
--But where is God the receiver of anything?
--In the Trinity. In the community of the Trinity, God is both masculine giver of honor, glory, and service and the receiver of it from one Person to another.
--So this means (and here I know some people are going to hear this wrong, but so be it) God is every bit as feminine as He is masculine.
--God made US in His Image, and then differentiated us into genders from the same single substance in Genesis 1 and 2. This alone should prove the equal dignity and value of men and women in imaging God’s full nature. Unless someone would prefer to affirm the heretical view that women are not really made in God’s image.
--And if someone chafes at the notion of God also being feminine, what you do in fact usually find underneath that reaction is a kind of superiority/inferiority of male over female.
--So if God isn’t implying superiority, and if He’s every bit as much feminine as masculine, why does He refer to Himself as He so explicitly in Scripture and only obliquely as She, like in comparing Himself to a mother hen?
--That’s for tomorrow.
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