‘What is God’s sex?’ is as meaningless a question as, ‘How old is God?’ To have sex (gender) implies not only sexuality but a certain incompleteness outside of union with the opposite sex. There is no incompleteness in God.

To think of God as either male or female – as humans are – is not only theologically mistaken, it is an insult to God. God is neither fully male – which would imply some sort of need or yearning for a female God, nor is he an emasculated male, as if there were something lacking in him. The Almighty is perfectly whole and self-sufficient.

God is not only not sexual, he is not even physical. He is warm and personal and yet he is spirit. He has many qualities of which our own are reflections, and we have such compatibility with him that we were literally made for him, and yet he is breathtakingly different to us. As a mother and baby are so intimate and yet so different in their abilities, God is even more intimate and different to us.

Since all humans have gender, few, if any, earthly languages have the capacity to refer to a being who has a personality (God is no “it”) without automatically assigning a gender to that person. This has nothing to do with the nature of God, but the nature of human language. The Lord referring to himself as if he were male must not be interpreted in a strictly literal sense, anymore than we should interpret literally God calling himself a rock, a tower, a shield, a lion, and so on, and referring to his “hands,” “feet,” “wings”, and so on (Deuteronomy 3:24; 1 Corinthians 15:27; Ruth 2:12).

Taken from God as Tender as a Mother?

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