Do
The Spirits of Mankind Have Gender?
If the spirits of
mankind do indeed have gender then it seems to me that it is the balance between the mind and heart elements of the spirit
which determines the male or female spiritual gender. Where the heart is ‘bigger’ than the mind we are dealing
with a female spirit and, where the mind is the ‘larger’ spiritual element of the two, then we are dealing with
a male spirit. In the previous Right Hand of God paper I have already considered the differences in male and female brains
and their operation. Briefly the male thought processes are singular and focussed whereas those pertaining to the female of
the species are broader but not so focussed in approach. The female considers the emotional aspects far more than the male.
The difference in spiritual makeup, that I have suggested above, could easily substantiate these differences in the thinking
processes between the two genders and how the male and female spirits therefore interface differently with the physical human
brain to the extent that differences in brain build design and operation are required for the two genders.
Now God gave the original commandment in the Garden to Adam and not to
Eve so arguably it was Adam’s responsibility to ensure that both he and Eve complied:
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying,
Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:
17 But
of the tree of the knowledge of good and, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die. (Genesis 2)
This is interesting
in that there was only a test on Adam not on his ‘helper’. Now if the spirits of Adam and Eve were equivalent
in terms of their both being neuter, then this does not seem a fair test from God if it were only their physical bodies that
were different. The test was on the less emotional and supposedly stronger male spirit of Adam to keep the one commandment
God gave him who was made in God’s own image. Why else would this test not have been given to Eve also?
If we jump in scripture to Paul’s first letter to Timothy, which
we look at again in more detail a little later in this paper, it is made clear that, whilst Eve was deceived by Satan, Adam
was not and therefore deliberately disobeyed his Father:
14 Also, Adam was not deceived, but the woman was thoroughly deceived and came to be
in transgression. (1 Timothy 2)
This
would seem to indicate that God expected His son to exercise more control over both himself and his helper. That control could
arguably come from a strong mind as opposed to a strong heart.
It is interesting that the direct communication from God with the male of the human species was continued
down the generations. Circumcision was the sign of God’s covenant with Abraham. This covenant was between God and His
male adherents on earth, not with women. The role of women was as support to their husbands who, as heads of their households,
were responsible to God for ensuring the household overall met God’s wishes. God delegated His ruler-ship to men directly.
The men had ruler-ship over their households in God’s name. Again would it have been reasonable of God to have given
this responsibility to the men if their spirits were not stronger in the mind than those of women?
9 And God
said unto Abraham, Thou shalt keep my covenant therefore, thou, and thy seed after thee in their generations.
10 This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee;
Every man child among you shall be circumcised.
11 And
ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you. (Genesis 17)
It is not only early on in the Old Testament that we find the differentiation
between men and women in regard to their relationship to God. The primacy of men in this regard is strongly emphasised in
the New Testament also. Paul in his letter to Timothy being a case in point:
11 Let a woman learn in silence with full submissiveness.
12 I do not permit a woman to teach, or to exercise authority over a man, but to be in silence.
13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve.
14 Also, Adam was not deceived,
but the woman was thoroughly deceived and came to be in transgression.
15 However, she will be
kept safe through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and sanctification along with soundness of mind.
(1 Timothy 2)
All
the earlier points are repeated here but with the phrase ‘soundness of mind’ interestingly added. It is as if
scripture is telling us that women have to work more on their spiritual minds. This could be indicating to us the correctness
of the hypothesis that women’s spiritual hearts are indeed larger than their spiritual minds. It seems inconceivable
to me that, in creating the two genders, God is subordinating the female at a physical level only.
Further on in the letter to Timothy, Paul indicates that only men can take
a position of responsibility in the church. Again it does not seem reasonable to the writer for our God to take such a view
regarding the subservient role in the church of the females of the species without the differentiation between the genders
being rather more than merely skin deep:
2 The overseer should therefore be irreprehensible, a husband of one wife, moderate
in habits, sound in mind, orderly, hospitable, qualified to teach,
3 not a drunken brawler, not
a smiter, but reasonable, not belligerent, not a lover of money,
4 a man presiding over his own
household in a fine manner, having children in subjection with all seriousness;
5 (if indeed any
man does not know how to preside over his own household, how will he take care of God’s congregation?)
6
not a newly converted man, for fear that he might get puffed up [with pride] and fall into the judgment passed upon the Devil.
7 Moreover, he should also have a fine testimony from people on the outside, in order that he
might not fall into reproach and a snare of the Devil.
8 Ministerial servants should likewise
be serious, not double-tongued, not giving themselves to a lot of wine, not greedy of dishonest gain,
9
holding the sacred secret of the faith with a clean conscience.
10 Also, let these be tested as
to fitness first, then let them serve as ministers, as they are free from accusation.
11 Women
should likewise be serious, not slanderous, moderate in habits, faithful in all things.
12 Let
ministerial servants be husbands of one wife, presiding in a fine manner over children and their own households.
13 For the men who minister in a fine manner are acquiring for themselves a fine standing and great freeness
of speech in the faith in connection with Christ Jesus. (1 Timothy 3)
Paul’s letter to the Ephesian congregation arguably draws an even more significant distinction between
the males and females of the species:
22 Let wives be in subjection to their husbands as to the Lord,
23 because a husband
is head of his wife as the Christ also is head of the congregation, he being a saviour of [this] body.
24
In fact, as the congregation is in subjection to the Christ, so let wives also be to their husbands in everything. (Ephesians
5)
In this letter Paul compares a man and
his wife to a divinity (Christ) and His congregation respectively. This marks a significantly superior placing of men in God’s
hierarchy compared with that of women. Once again the writer can only believe such differentiation is due to the proposed
gender of the spirit.
Let us take a different tack in this argument for spiritual gender. In Understanding U43 - 50% Survive Armageddon
and 50% do not (http://www.truebiblecode.com/understanding43.html) of the Lords' Witnesses' web-site, it is determined that 50% of mankind are to be saved at Armageddon. That 50% is
itself made up of 50% men and 50% women:
34 I tell you, In that night two
[men] will be in one bed; the one will be taken along, but the other will be abandoned.
35 There will be two [women] grinding at the same mill; the one
will be taken along, but the other will be abandoned (Luke 17).
Now let us consider the implications of this understanding.
If gender is only determined by the physical body, then it would seem to me to be unjust of God to make that judgement purely
based on the physical gender of each human being. The final judgement on mankind is to be based on our spiritual heart condition:
19 And hereby
we know that we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before him.
20
For if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.
21
Beloved, if our heart condemn us not, then have we confidence toward God. (1John 3)
Does it seem likely that all the 50% of men who
are to be saved into the Kingdom will have a better heart condition than all the 50% of women who will be destined for Gehenna
or vice versa? This question is particularly pointed if my proposal of the make up of male and female spirits were to be anything
like correct given that judgement is to be made on the heart condition of each and every one of us regardless of gender. This
would seem to make the luck of the draw as to which type of physical body one happened to reside in a factor on whether one
gets saved or not. This cannot be the mechanism that a perfectly just God would make. The only way for that 50:50 gender-based
judgement to be just is if it is made on a purely spiritual basis which tells us that each human spirit must be either male
or female not just the physical body which it inhabits.
Male and female human brains are different in physical balance whilst remaining the same in fundamental structure.
In one experiment when female subjects were asked to recall vocabulary and definitions, the entire brain lit up like a Christmas
tree on the monitoring equipment. The male brain on the other hand, only had highly concentrated neuron activity in the left
hemisphere. Male brains separate language, in the left, and emotions in the right, while the female’s emotions are in
both hemispheres. Again this substantiates the proposition that the female spiritual heart is greater than the female spiritual
mind and vice versa for the male spirit. I copy a couple of web-site links on the subject to further substantiate the male/female
brain debate:
http://www.cerebromente.org.br/n11/mente/eisntein/cerebro-homens.html;
http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/diamond_male_female.htm
As an everyday comparison with the purchase of a home computer, its specification would be solely determined
according to its prospective usage. A computer to be used for sophisticated games would require more memory, faster and probably
parallel processors, bigger screen, more powerful sound cards and speakers when compared to a general purpose home PC. It
is the software that determines the hardware required not the other way around. The same would be true of the human spirit.
Surely God would provide each spirit with the physical body, and therefore brain-type, that was best suited to that spirit
rather than force-fitting a neuter spirit into one of two pre-determined body types and expecting it to perform to its optimum
performance.
The Implications of Spiritual
Gender on Homosexuality in Scripture
Scripture contains many examples where homosexuality and unnatural sexual
behaviour is clearly stated as sinful. Paul’s letter to the Romans roundly condemns both male and female homosexual
behaviour. Verse 28 is also interesting in a way that I will expand upon shortly:
26
For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that
which is against nature:
27 And likewise also the men, leaving the
natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving
in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.
28
And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do
those things which are not convenient; (Romans 1)
In his first letter to the Corinthian congregation Paul
even adds the activity of a man exhibiting effeminate behaviour as being sinful in the same company as other serious offenders
of God’s laws:
9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not
inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers
of themselves with mankind, (1Corinthians 6)
Going back to Old Testament views on the subject we even find that cross-dressing by either sex appears to be a sin in God’s
eyes:
5 The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth
unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God. (Deuteronomy
22)
So it appears very clear indeed that it is important to God that each gender should keep its proper station
in all respects. Again would God be at such pains to retain the separate behaviours of the two sexes if it were only a matter
of the differences in the physical vehicles which we inhabit? This does not seem wholly credible to my mind and again the
only reasonable conclusion that I can reach is that our very spirits are innately imbued with our gender.
Going back to Romans
1:28 it would appear that both male and female homosexual behaviour cause God to abandon the perpetrators of such sinful acts
to their ‘rejected minds’. This is interesting since we understand that God’s judgement is based on our
spiritual heart condition. Uniquely it seems to be the case of that judgement being on the spiritual minds of homosexuals.
On thinking about it, this makes a lot of sense. If an individual’s spiritual heart is leading him/her into unnatural
emotional feelings towards members of the same gender then there needs to be a reliance on the spiritual mind to override
that tendency by controlling the resulting physical behaviour. Apart from the obvious physical implications of homosexual
behaviour, this would explain why male homosexual behaviour is seen in scripture to be a rather greater sin than that of the
Lesbian variety. Since, in my hypothesis, the male spiritual mind is greater than the heart compared with that in females,
greater control by the mind over the emotions of the spiritual heart is expected of men compared with women. Again all this
would seem to lend support to my theories on spiritual gender.
Now there is little doubt that the heart/mind balance
I have proposed would certainly give rise to individuals within each gender that had more or less spiritual ‘testosterone
or oestrogen’, i.e. some men would have bigger hearts than others and some women would have greater minds than some
of their female companions. Again I see this as a wonderful addition to our individual uniqueness but I would not want to
see this argument used as an excuse for homosexual behaviour. I am certain that when God creates a male spirit then it will
be correctly placed in a male body although I would have to concede that physical factors such as hormone levels in that body
would certainly have an impact on its owner’s sexual predilections. It would appear that such physical factors can produce
male and female differentiated brains which are not always in their anatomically correct body. A male can have a female differentiated
brain, and a female a male differentiated brain. However I would maintain that, notwithstanding this imbalance, it is within
the owner’s capability to control his sexual behaviour except, perhaps, in some extreme cases of hormonal imbalance
where, I expect, God will nonetheless judge that spirit’s behaviour justly.
