Matt Chandler - Incomplete

All right, if you have your Bibles, grab them and open to Genesis chapter 2. If you don’t have a Bible, there should be a hardback black one somewhere around you; if you don’t own one, that’s our gift to you. Starting in August, we wanted to enter the fray of what I personally perceive to be a bit of madness regarding the topic of mankind, its role in and on the earth, and really how we define ourselves as male and female. Although there were a slew of illustrations I used early on, even in the last couple of weeks, there have been new illustrations presented to us that reveal we’re just not thinking well as human beings. So, let me give you two of them before we enter what should be a pivotal week in this series as we start to move away from «What is a man?» and into «What is a woman?» taught by a man, which is going to be hard for me. I can just let the Bible be the Bible, so that’s good news.

Okay, the first bit of evidence showing that something’s broken in our thinking is a couple of weeks ago when a nurse in Spain contracted Ebola. You know this is going around; in fact, it’s quite the scare; Dallas is on the map, right? So, this nurse in Spain contracted Ebola, they put her husband in quarantine, and they euthanized her dog. The fact that they euthanized her dog created an uproar in Spain. I mean, they rioted and marched, all because the dog was put down because it was carrying the plague. This reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how mankind is vastly different from the rest of the created order. When we can riot over a dog carrying a virus with a mortality rate of over 50%, we are not equal to dogs. Now, we do have dominion, which means we should care for them and never abuse them, but they are not our equals. Common sense dictates we know this, and the default might be to look at Spain and say, «Crazy Europeans with your fashion and your love for animals, progressive weirdos.» But then it just happened in Dallas. We didn’t even euthanize that dog; we just quarantined it, and there has been nearly a million dollars raised to take care of the loneliness of this poor puppy that is used to running wild and might be carrying this plague, while we raise a million dollars so it can apparently have a PlayStation or something while it waits to see whether or not it’s carrying the virus. Just to be clear, I’m not an animal hater; I have a dog, his name’s Gus, an Australian Shepherd. He’s awesome! I like him. He’s not in any of our family photos, but I like him. All right, we feed him, we spend money on him; he even has toys. Now, he doesn’t have clothes, but he has toys. It’s a line I just can’t bring myself to cross. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong; I’m just stating that it’s not right. And so, you are literally dealing with something that runs contrary to basic intellect when there’s this type of outrage—not over Christians being slaughtered in Iraq, not over all sorts of oppression and madness that we see around us, but over a dog carrying a disease that could kill half this room.

So, that’s the first instance showing we don’t quite understand how we fit into God’s design for human flourishing. The second instance on the manhood and womanhood front was the hubbub down in Houston. Over the last couple of weeks, I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but the mayor of Houston put out an anti-discrimination law, which as Christians, we should be against any form of discrimination. Yet in her bill, it’s proposed that telling a biological male who identifies as a female that he cannot go into the women’s restroom is illegal and an act of discrimination. So, a 40-year-old biological male who merely states, «I’m not a male; I’m a female,» is allowed to go into women’s restrooms, and to say he cannot is an act of discrimination punishable by law. Now, look at me—listen, that’s crazy. It’s just crazy. If this brother is struggling with identity issues, let’s serve him, let’s walk alongside him, let’s care for him, but he doesn’t get to go to the bathroom with my daughter. He doesn’t get to do that. That’s crazy! I don’t know… it’s like we’ve let something out of the box here that’s driving us, and we’ve lost our minds. Some sort of revolution began that we cannot control and it’s making us behave in a way that goes contrary to every aspect of historic logic and intellect, so we’re just confused.

We said starting in August, we’re going to enter the fray; we’re going to enter into the madness and try to make sense of it. We said that the good Creator God created us in His image, in the imago Dei, as male and female, equal in dignity, value, and worth. Being made in the image of God elevates us above all the other created order so that we are to exercise dominion over creation, which means we don’t abuse; we don’t burn it to the ground—but where mankind is being mankind…