In this day when God is often referred to as 'It' or 'She' or 'Goddess' for the sake of leveling, I must say I can't recall Satan ever being referred to as 'She.' - Jeffrey Jones

I ran across the above quote in an email newsletter and saved it because it was strangely profound. Stop to think about it for a moment. When did you even hear of Satan being characterized as being anything but male? Even the popular cartoon of him has him in a power red suit, not a pair of feminine pink tights.

What does it mean when we question whether God is male or female or if He even has a gender at all? The identification of gender is part of a person's core identity. People of different sexual preferences than heterosexuality will nonetheless identify themselves as being either male or female. Even if they believe themselves to be of the opposite sex from that which they physically are, they do choose a particular gender as a key element that determines how they relate to themselves and to other human beings.

The confirmation of a gender is part of the confirmation that the thing in question is a being. Rocks do not have gender. Energy sources or inanimate forces do not have gender. A god usually does have gender as part of his or her identity, though. Start questioning the gender of a particular god, and you have questioned his or her existence or subtly introduced a different god into his or her place.

That is why it raises an alarm when people start tampering with the gender references in the Bible, changing them to gender neutral forms or changing the sex of God from male to female or neuter. The people who do so are deliberately trying to make the Bible more inclusive, superficially a worthy goal. However, when they alter the meaning of the text by their well-intended tampering, especially when it alters the definition of Who and What God is, they blur His Identity in a way that is the exact opposite of why we have the Bible in the first place. The Bible is meant to introduce us to God, and He has said that He is unquestionably male and that there is a definite reason for that.

God created maleness and femaleness in His creation as part of explaining to us how He relates to us and how He wishes us to relate to Him. Men and women do relate differently to their children and to each other, no matter how much the feminists would like to blur the differences or define them away. The biological differences are far more comprehensive than the mere physical differences.

God repeatedly uses the picture of the marriage of a man to a woman to picture His relationship to His people. The nation of Israel is referred to at times as His wife as well as His first-born son, with God as the leader in the role of husband or father and Israel as the follower in His protective care. Similarly, the Church is referred to as the bride of Christ, our king and high priest.

It should be noted that this leader is no dictator enslaving and exploiting his wife, however. Christ is a king who was willing to die to save her from her own disastrous fall into sin and death. The godly husband and father is supposed to lead from wisdom by following God's principles and teaching them to his family as Christ did in following God's leadership and teaching his disciples the ways of God. The disciples in turn taught those principles to the churches that they founded and appointed teaching elders to continue spreading them in each succeeding generation.

It is an indictment of the church that we are growing so lax in our duty to continue to pass this Christian heritage to our descendents and to the other people of our generation that it is now becoming politically correct to blur the picture of God rather than to bring it into sharp focus. The Christian culture taught to people in the church is a reflection of the character of God Himself. We are supposed to be growing to resemble Christ more in character as we spiritually mature, becoming individuals of value in shaping our societies into more loving, peaceful, prosperous communities. Thus we are to influence others to become Christians and adopt the same values taught by Christ to lead the world away from bloodshed and strife to a far better way of life in Christ's kingdom within us.

I was struck at how far we have abandoned this role when I recently read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. When this book was published, it quickly became a number one national best seller, with high praise from many prominent people on its wisdom and insight. As I went through the book, I suspected, rightly it turned out, that the author was a Christian.

Indeed, at the end of the book there is a personal note giving God the credit as the source of the principles that he so eloquently explained in his text. The author also rightly notes that there are parts of the human nature that only God can deal with and that education and legislation cannot overcome.

While I rejoiced to see such a brilliant explanation of Christian character building and personal and social prosperity resulting from the wise application of God's principles, I was somewhat saddened that the book itself was written in the style of a scholarly, secular study in psychology and self-improvement. They are actually the stages of character development that take place as a Christian matures to spiritual adulthood. No doubt it was to ensure the success of the book and the spread of the message within, but I can't help but wonder what would have happened if that personal note had been placed in the beginning of the book rather than at the end.

Surely God's wisdom is not diminished by crediting Him with its authorship, yet it is likely that such an enlightening and positively instructive book would have been relegated to the Christian audience rather than the general audience if Dr. Covey's religious convictions had been clearly stated before the reader began his fascinating journey through the book. That is too often the case with so many fine books on similar topics, languishing in the religion sections of secular bookstores or tucked away in the Christian bookstores never visited by much of the general public.

What he taught was not a brilliant new way of positively relating to each other but in fact was a call for the return to the older ways of building positive character traits in the general citizenry that were replaced by the pop culture of the 1960's. He does in fact discuss this at some length in the early part of the book, although it is couched in intellectual rather than spiritual terms.

So much of our American heritage was based on the teaching of godly principles that we are losing these principles so clearly explained in Dr. Covey's book in our current drive towards multiculturalism. There is no question that they work very well when correctly and lovingly applied to work for the benefit of all concerned. The main problem in teaching them is more a growing distaste towards the God Who first taught them to us.

We must not shrink back from our responsibility to introduce Him accurately to our fellow human beings and to credit Him when we succeed through His wisdom. Our God is a wise and loving Father who did not leave us without instruction in the best way to live with Him and each other. Unless we can overcome the falsely negative or confusing image of Him presented so relentlessly today with the true picture of His character and nature, it will be difficult to teach the rest of the message He calls upon us to spread to the rest of the world.