Male and Female He Created Them: Between Sodom and Babel on the Road to Oneness

Male and Female He Created Them: Between Sodom and Babel on the Road to Oneness

“Male and female created He them” (Genesis 1:27).
“The two shall become one flesh” (Matthew 19:5).

These phrases are load‑bearing beams in God’s design: differentiated equality ordered toward oneness. When we honor them, the result is mutuality, fruitfulness, and life. When we distort them, creation itself eventually becomes painfully self‑correcting.

In this article I want to look at our present crisis around sex, gender, and family through two great biblical “bookends”—Sodom and Gomorrah, and the Tower of Babel—as seen “from heaven” (Genesis 11:5; 18:21). They mark opposite ditches on either side of God’s highway of oneness. Between them lies the narrow road of “male and female… one flesh” that Jesus reaffirms, and that this whole series is trying to recover.

1. The Original Pattern: Differentiated Equality for Oneness

In Genesis 1–2 we saw:

• Humanity created “in the image of God… male and female” (1:27).
• The man’s exclamation over the woman: “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh” (2:23)—recognition, not ownership.
• The creational formula: “A man shall leave his father and his mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh” (2:24).

Jesus, in Matthew 19, doesn’t dilute this; He doubles down:

“He which made them at the beginning made them male and female…
and they twain shall be one flesh.
Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh.
What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (vv. 4–6)

“Male and female” are real, good, and purposeful. They are not arbitrary labels; they are part of the architecture of oneness.

ʻAbdu’l‑Bahá expresses the same truth in another key:

“From the teachings of His Highness Bahā’u’llāh is the unity of women and men, for the human world has two wings. One wing is men and the other wing women. The bird will not fly unless both wings are equal. If one wing is weak flight is not possible. Unless the world of women becomes equal to the world of men in attaining virtues and accomplishments, prosperity and salvation will be impossible and unfeasible.”¹

Here, differentiation (two wings) and equality (both must be strong) are held together. This is Genesis in metaphor: without equal dignity and shared virtue, the human “bird” cannot rise into the oneness God intends.

And yet, as history shows, our efforts to “discern good and evil” in the laboratory of life often send us off this road into one ditch, then overcorrecting into the other.

2. Sodom: The Ditch of Unbounded Autonomy

Sodom and Gomorrah represent one extreme. Whatever else we say about that story, it showcases a society in which sexual desire has become radically disordered. Paul later describes something similar in Romans 1:

“Their women exchanged natural relations for those that are against nature;
and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another…” (Romans 1:26–27)

The key phrase is “against nature.” Paul is appealing to creational givens—the “male and female” structure God built into the body and into the call to one‑flesh union. When we sever sexuality from that structure, something deeply human begins to unravel.

He ties this directly to idolatry:

“…they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…” (Romans 1:25)

When God is no longer our reference point, even “natural affection” becomes unmoored. The body is treated as autonomous, desire as self‑justifying, and male–female difference as negotiable. At that point, the destruction that follows in Sodom is not arbitrary rage; it is a catastrophic course‑correction. A culture that treats sexual powers as if they belong to no one but ourselves eventually discovers that the body—and the social fabric around it—presents a bill that cannot be ignored forever.

Today we see new Sodom‑like tendencies:

• Celebrating forms of sexuality that ignore or invert creational complementarity.
• Treating “male” and “female” as freely chosen identities, detached from the body.
• Redefining family as a fluid construct centered on adult desire, with children as accessories.

From heaven’s vantage point, this is one ditch: unbounded autonomy in the realm of sex and affection.

3. Babel: The Ditch of Forced Conformity

On the other side stands Babel. In Genesis 11, Nimrod establishes a city he names Bab‑El—“the Gate of God,” as I discuss in my books. Humanity says:

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens,
and let us make a name for ourselves…” (Genesis 11:4)

This is an attempt at engineered unity: one language, one project, one concept of greatness, one “gate” to God on human terms. It is a kind of ideological “one flesh”—a counterfeit oneness built not on God’s revelation but on a human scheme.

God “comes down” to see this tower (11:5) and names the result confusion. He scatters them, fracturing their enforced oneness. From heaven, this ditch looks like:

• A rigid, top‑down consensus about who God is and what He wants.
• Suppression of diversity and conscience in the name of unity.
• A single, imposed narrative to which all must conform.

We tasted a bit of this in my own story. The Worldwide Church of God had, in some ways, become a kind of Babel: one correct theology, one structure, one “gate” through which you came to God. Its stance on marriage—no remarriage while a former spouse lived, even in cases of abandonment—was part of that conceptual tower.

At the Swedish Supreme Court, my father, newly baptized into the WCG, told the judges he had no plans to remarry to give us a stable two‑parent home, because the woman who appeared there with another man was still, in God’s eyes, his wife. That woman had met the new husband in a bar; her alcoholism was evident. Yet the concept of indissoluble marriage—correct in outline—had become an idol. It overrode the messy reality before us: three traumatized children desperately needing something like an Edenic shelter.

Here, the Babel‑ditch appeared not as sexual license, but as theological rigidity. Forced conceptual unity—everyone aligning around a single, humanly interpreted reading of God’s will—left little room for the kind of merciful concession Jesus acknowledges when He says, “because of the hardness of your hearts.”

4. Lurching From Ditch to Ditch

Between Sodom and Babel, we see the dichotomy of extremes:

• Sodom: the body and its desires enthroned, creation’s structure denied.
• Babel: the concept and the system enthroned, conscience and complexity suppressed.

And we, as individuals and cultures, lurch forward from ditch to ditch in our attempts to discern good and evil in the laboratory God has given us.

• In one era, patriarchy and religious control (Babel‑like) crush women and children under “headship” and rigid rules. The “two wings” are anything but equal; the bird cannot truly fly.
• The next era reacts, rushing toward radical autonomy (Sodom‑like), dissolving even the meaning of “male” and “female” and treating covenant as optional. Here too the “two wings” are damaged—difference is denied, and the bird still cannot rise.
• Then backlash comes again, and new towers rise—ideological, political, or religious—demanding uniformity around a humanly defined “gate of God.”

From heaven, God sees both ditches. His interventions—whether through prophetic warning, social collapse, or inner conviction—are not arbitrary. They are painful corrections to keep us from building, or sliding into, realities that would utterly destroy the image of God in us and make true “flight” toward Him impossible.

5. The Narrow Road: Hermeneutics of Harmony

A Hermeneutics of Harmony is simply learning to walk the road between these extremes by holding together the multiple layers of God’s revelation.

1. Creational givens (Genesis, Matthew 19)
   
   
   • “Male and female” are real, good, and purposeful.
   • One‑flesh covenant is the norm God intends.
   • Any vision of sexuality or family that denies these is already veering toward Sodom.
2. Spiritual equality and justice
   
   
   • ʻAbdu’l‑Bahá’s “two wings” metaphor underscores that men and women must be equal “in attaining virtues and accomplishments” or “prosperity and salvation will be impossible and unfeasible.”¹
   • Any theology that makes women ontologically lesser, or uses “headship” to justify domination, is already veering toward Babel—and grounding one wing so thoroughly that the bird can never lift off.
3. Inner symbolism (Adam/body, Eve/soul; serpent/attachment)
   
   
   • Every person contains both “masculine” and “feminine” dimensions—action and receptivity, strength and tenderness.
   • True order is not male over female, or concept over body, but soul and Revelation over appetite and ego, in men and women alike.
4. Historical–ethical realism (Moses’ concession, Paul’s teaching)
   
   
   • God sometimes permits what He does not prefer because of hardness of heart.
   • Paul’s word in 1 Corinthians 7:15—“the brother or sister is not bound” if the unbelieving partner leaves—was precisely the corrective the WCG needed, and eventually found, to move a step closer to harmony between ideal and mercy.

When the WCG finally recognized 1 Corinthians 7:15, it was a small act of hermeneutical harmony: letting one part of Scripture nuance another, adjusting doctrine to reflect both God’s ideal and His compassion. Sadly, that same humility did not prevail in other disputes, and the church itself eventually underwent a “divorce”—another Babel‑like scattering.

6. Healing Between the Extremes

For us, the practical question is: Where am I, and my community, most tempted to fall into these ditches?

• Do we lean Babel‑ward—using “male and female” and “headship” to justify hierarchy, silence, or control, building a tower of religious certainties that crushes real people and leaves one wing perpetually weak?
• Or do we lean Sodom‑ward—embracing fluidity and autonomy so fully that we dissolve the God‑given meaning of our bodies and our covenants, leaving both wings flailing?

In my own life, I have seen both:

• The Babel‑ditch in a rigid theology that kept my father from imagining remarriage for the sake of his children, that shaped my early ministry, and that contributed to a denominational split.
• The Sodom‑ditch in a wider culture where divorce became normal, family structures fragmented, and sexual confusion deepened—even as I wrestled with my own failures in marriage.

The way forward is not a clever compromise between “left” and “right.” It is a return to the beginning, informed by all we have learned:

• Receiving sexual difference as gift, not weapon.
• Embracing equality without erasing distinction—so that both wings gain strength, and the human “bird” can finally fly toward God.
• Letting the body’s structure and Scripture’s teaching critique our desires and our doctrines.
• Refusing both forced ideological conformity and boundaryless autonomy.

This is the road on which God’s will is slowly done “on earth as it is in heaven”—in our marriages, our families, our churches, our communities.

In the final article, we’ll look to the Tree of Life and the future of faith: how recovering God’s “beginning” patterns can shape a hopeful path forward for Christians, Bahá’ís, and all seekers longing for a healed oneness.

As you consider Sodom and Babel as “bookend” ditches, and ʻAbdu’l‑Bahá’s image of humanity as a bird with two wings, which wing in your own context feels weaker right now—and what would one concrete step toward strengthening that wing, in harmony with God’s creational pattern, look like this week?

¹ ʻAbdu’l‑Bahá, Makātīb, vol. 3, p. 107.