Friday, May 2, 2014

It's a Girl!

When Lydia was born a few weeks ago, the doctor held her up, I saw her and said, "It's a girl!" The doctor proclaimed, "Congratulations, it's a girl!" The medical records all identified her as "Machel, Baby Girl".

When we called our families to let them know the good news, all of them heard "it's a girl". Our two older daughters were excited to hear they have a little sister. When they got to meet her, they probably said "Baby Lydia is a girl" about twelve thousand times (roughly).


It was incredibly refreshing, dealing with honesty and sanity. Just as there are no atheists in hospitals, there are no gender-queer theorists in delivery rooms.

Could you imagine an excited father saying "It's a girl!", only to have some reprobate say "Actually, we may not know for decades what its gender will be. The outdated male/female model is an ignorant social construct. We now have identified at least 58 gender possibilities, and more are certainly possible. Your child may choose to be a womyn, but it may also be Androgyne, Neutrois, Two-Spirit, Gender Variant, or anything else it may manifest as."

Aside from the unlikelihood of being able to spout that much idiocy at that moment without being punched, nobody would say anything like that because nobody actually believes it. There are just boys and girls, and everyone knows it, and at that moment nobody bothers to pretend otherwise. Any talk of a child developing its unique gender identity expression is nonsensical tripe ("but is the tripe local?" - TGC), an utter absurdity that thankfully vanishes in those moments of clarity, when everyone acknowledges the patently obvious.

But if it's so incomprehensibly stupid and nobody actually believes it, why is it so prevalent and popular? Simple. The absurdity of a create-your-own-gender society pales next to the absurdity of rebelling against your own creator. Because we fully intend to do the stupidest thing imaginable, no excuse can be too flimsy, no justification too ridiculous, for us to incorporate.

Romans 1 describes our predicament. We know there is a God, yet we want to be god for ourselves, so we suppress the truth in unrighteousness. We rebel against our Creator, and His created order. And so we have an advanced society in which "boys and girls are different" and "everything didn't spontaneously come from nothing" rank among the most controversial things you can say.

But there are those blessed moments of clarity - the birth of a child, the nature documentaries where atheists can't go five minutes without using creation language - when the truth is too obvious, and it's clear that we all know it.

Though we try to deny it, everybody knows that we were created, that we continually rebel against our Creator, and that God's wrath rightly is coming against our rebellion.

What we need to know is the solution - repentance and faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sin and reconciliation with God. Preach that.