Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book entitled, "The Lord Is My
Shepherd" comments on the gender of God. He says that our Bible calls
God a "He" for "grammatical" reasons only. Yet
"functionally speaking", he says, God is both He and She. He
says that throughout Scripture you can see God’s feminine and masculine
sides in the things He says and does.
I agree with Harold Kushner. Jesus Himself said in His discussion with
His disciples in John 4 that God is a Spirit. God is not like men and
women. God is a Spirit. He has no mortal or physical body. Yet on the
other hand, as noted in the creation story, men and women are like God in
one sense of the word, that is, we were created in His image.
Being created in God’s image means, that when we laugh, God laughed
long before we had the chance to laugh. When we are sad, God knew sadness
before creation. All of the emotions that we display have been first found
in God. He is not like us, but we are like Him in certain respects.
In creation, God first made Adam. Before God took Eve from Adam, Adam
was both male and female, like God Himself. When we think in terms of
gender, we think mostly in terms of reproductively. Man releases part of
himself into woman and woman gives birth. God does not reproduce like
human beings. God reproduces in His creation. We ourselves are God’s
offspring.
Once again, God is not like man, but man like God in certain aspects.
God has no gender. God is neither male or female as we know it in an
earthly sense. He is genderless. He is Spirit. He does display fatherly
and motherly characteristics in how he interacts with His creation.
He (and Jesus as well) even calls Himself a Father, denoting
masculinity. Yet this too may be for grammatical purposes, especially in
the day and age when the Bible was written.
The conclusion that I make from all of this is that the "He -
She" debate concerning God is irrelevant. For grammar purposes, we
call God a He. So we will use the personal pronoun "He" in
reference to God, knowing that in reality, God is a Spirit.
Now concerning Jesus, the story is somewhat different That is a
topic for another articled