By Brady Small | LTVN Reporter/Anchor
I’m pretty sure most of us have heard the Ariana Grande song “God is a Woman.” I don’t know if anyone else has a problem with the subject, but I do.
Let me get things straight: God doesn’t have a gender. God is not a human, and we as humans personify him to understand how something can be omnipotent.
We typically use images from pop culture. For example, “Family Guy” has a depiction of God as a white male with white hair. In the movie “Bruce Almighty,” we see Morgan Freeman dressed as a very pristine old man.
My point is, we perceive God subjectively. We cannot understand what God might look like, so our brains fill in the missing spots. Is there an objective truth to what God looks like? Yes, but we cannot understand that until we are in heaven.
I dislike reading a lot. As a kid, I would read something called “The Action Bible,” which was the Bible as a comic book. The authors drew God as a white light in the sky, and that’s how I personally view him — a white light. I don’t know what is behind that light, and it’s a mystery as to what God actually looks like.
Now that we have our facts straight, why do I have a problem with calling God a woman if I view him as genderless and refer to him as God the Father?
The Bible was written in a patriarchal society. Women did not have much say, and there was an argument to be made that if Jesus was a woman, the Bible would look very different.
Viewing God as a man stems from a patriarchal society, but the Bible also compares God to a mother at times. For example, Isaiah 66:13 says, “As a mother comforts her child, so will I (God) comfort you.”
This is saying God is like a mother, but it doesn’t call God a woman, just that he has motherly tendencies. Making the claim “God is a woman” takes the emphasis away from God and puts it on to someone’s beliefs.
We all have our ways to perceive God, and in the past, that’s been as a male. The act of changing God’s form intentionally doesn’t sit right with me. We perceive him with whatever makes sense to us, but altering the image of God to whatever you please is not something I think most Christians can get behind.
We have to apply some sort of pronouns to him. God is not just another carbon-based organism confined to two genders, but for most languages, gender matters in how we talk about someone or something.
God has no gender. You can’t change the way you refer to him without implying or asserting some sort of bias or self-interest. God is not a tool for your agenda.
