The question comes from 3 different young, married, very conservative, Christian people. One in South Georgia, one in Virginia and one in Central California.
The basic question is about all of this transgender stuff. In the process of trying to defend a “two sex society”, (male and female), young Christians (and older ones, I’m sure), are being bombarded with the question of hermaphrodites. They are born with both male and female parts. So how do they know what gender they are? And, if God doesn’t make mistakes then why are they born this way? BIG TOPIC.
I in nowise claim to be a doctor, or even a biblical expert on something like this. I feel very inadequate to answer this but I feel the need to at least explain what I know. I really doubt that I will convince any nay-sayers with this answer but I do intend to accomplish at least 2 things. #1 Help enforce true doctrine and Christian principles for others to have at least some clarity with and #2 NOT leave this generation of Conservative, Pentecostal young people without a voice and some available Q and A interaction. Too many have been told too many times to “believe what you are told and don’t ask questions”.
First of all we must understand that God is all knowing, all understanding, all powerful, etc. If that is true, it applies very much to this question. The first way that it applies is that God can know things that we do not. Everyone is trying so hard to fully explain everything about God so that we can fully believe in God. This makes no sense. If we can fully define, explain and understand Him then how can He be God? What happens is, the first time we come up against something that cannot be fully understood by our faith, we are supposed to discard our belief. Here is my rule. “Even in situations where God cannot be fully explained, I cannot remove God from the equation.”
For example: I believe that God is the creator of all life. The Bible teaches me that God holds the power to create life and breathe the breath of life and He always reserves that power for himself. Because of that (and other things) I am 100% anti-abortion. Abortion is a very difficult thing to be FOR and argue successfully for. Because of that, the pro-abortion people generally grasp for the only few things that can help make their argument to seem to have any validity. Like, “What about in the case of rape and incest?” They reference a tiny, small percent of a percent of all abortion cases and argue that they are the reason for ALL abortions. Making a case against the Christian belief by saying, “Rape is a sin and Incest is a sin so why would God allow that to happen or want that baby to be born? Surely God wasn’t involved in that was He?”
The answer must be that rape is horrible, incest is terrible and disgusting and I cannot imaging how God got a life out of that BUT God allowed that life to begin, He must have a plan for that life and life cannot exist without God and we are still not allowed to destroy that life just because we don’t understand God’s part in it.
The discussion is very similar with hamaphrodites. With possibly a little different added ingredient. Again, the discussion is about society in general. Men being born men and staying men and women being born women and staying women, etc. Again, the other side takes the tiniest microscopic sample of the whole and tries to make an entire cultural issue on a sliver of a percentage of the people involved. The reason they do this of course is because they generally have no good, fair, scientific and or logical reasoning for the major factors in the discussion. Again, we cannot fully explain how or why God would let this happen but, again, we cannot dismiss God every time that we do not understand Him. If we treated each other the way that we want to treat God in this case, men would never have anything to do with women again and vice versa. Because we can never fully understand each other. And again, we already believe that God created and intended a two sex society. In the Bible he created them different, gave them different roles, commanded that they dress different, keep their hair different and on and on. He intends a two sex society and anything that we do to circumvent that is against anti-God.
Now, if we want to delve into the possibilities of how and why these things COULD be happing we can do so. I will give some rules that I use in trying to determine what I believe about such things.
I never allow speculation to be used as fact
All that I do know about God always outweighs what I don’t know about God
I do not try to come to a final provable conclusion about everything because some things do not have one
It is not only important to state what you do know but it is also important to state what you don’t know
When you come to a reasonable and possible conclusion…call it what it is…a reasonable and possible conclusion. Not a fact but a fair possibility
With all of this in mind, and after a couple weeks of study. Biblical, scientific and opinion. I have come to a decision.
#1 God did not make people that way as part of his plan or on purpose. That would defy everything that we already know about God.
#2 It is possible that God created the laws and rules of nature and holds us by His power to bounce around and do the things within those boundaries that we are going to do and generally intervenes only when He is asked to by His children. Thus incest, inbreeding, self poisoning culture, taking all kinds of radiation, eating foods that are not supposed to be ingested and cause cancer, etc. Could very well “cause” these deformities. It cannot be a flaw of God that people refuse to listen to Him and affect generations to come. That is as ignorant as the fat guy bringing a lawsuit against McDonald’s for making him fat.
This world of “Nothing is my fault, I’m a victim, the world owes me and there is a good explanation for everything that I do that is bad” seems to play into this idea that we must accept killing babies because we won’t crack down on rapists, we must we must accept transgenders because we don’t have a moral code and any deformity or deficiency in our society is God’s fault, no matter how arrogant, bullheaded, selfish and sinful we are, because He made us….Is insane! And do not forget that these arguments that tend to trip up the Christian Conservative are almost always less than one percent of the people that the debate is about. That should be your first red flag. If that is their debate, just say, “I don’t have an answer for that right now but let’s talk about the majority of these people.” They generally can’t.
I have no problem with a hermaphrodite being whatever they were medically chosen to be after birth. I'm not even sure that I have a problem with them "feeling" like the wrong decision was made for them. But I am not going to use their plight as a platform to change our entire culture on. And I am definitely not going to "blame God" for yet another problem with our society when we won't listen to Him on everything else.
As if this topic isn’t controversial enough. I will give you one more thing to think about when attempting to Biblically answer this question as to why these babies might be deformed this way. Read Exodus 34:7…
Your humble servant,
Rev. D. Todd Sloggett
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