As we examine what the Bible says about being a man and being a woman we enter into culturally-contested areas. We all know this. What is said is freighted with meaning. And who says it is freighted with meaning. To even have the speaker on this topic a man is loaded!

Moreover, as a man, I recognise the strangeness of me standing and speaking on what it means to be a woman. That is why it is good and right to return to God’s word and God’s creative design. Our aim today is deal directly with what God says in his word, to deal with it plainly, and to understand it in its totality, in a way that our culture would find strange but which is magnificent.

In all of this, the creation of humanity as ‘man and woman’ ‘in the image of God’ is critical. This is the foundation for understanding what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman: it is, together, to bear the image of God, in this world, that God created. Here is fundamental equality. Here is fundamental difference. Here is fundamental unity. And all for the sake of gardening-in-relationship, so that the rest of God is sustained!