Ask yourself, "What is a male or female?"  What makes a male a male and a female a female?  Is it not the physical body, with its inherent chemicals, genes, hormones, DNA and other elements we could point to?  One could attempt to say that a female is a female because of her thinking, outlook, emotions, experiences and demeanor, but aren't these a result of all the physical things I enumerated?  We know for a fact that spirit beings do not have physical bodies.  There are no genes, physical parts, organs, sexual organs, DNA, hormones or anything else that we could point out in a physical body.   We know for a fact that spirit beings do not engage in sex and they do not produce offspring.  They are made totally of spiritual essence.  When we, who are presently human, are changed to spirit beings, we will retain our memories and experiences and character but we will not hold the designation of male and female in the way we look at male and female in the physical sense.  Our existence is on a much higher plane than anything we could imagine.  In an attempt to show the difference between human and spirit being, imagine taking an old penny and having it pulverized into a fine dust.  Now compare that one cent to 900 trillion, trillion, trillion dollars in gold and silver.  Can you imagine the difference?  This example does not come close to demonstrating the true difference.  Now can we even begin to attempt to apply aspects of the physical body to that of the spirit body?  To attempt to do so is to say there is somehow a one-to-one relationship between the two.  It is like saying the ONLY difference between me now and me then is what the body is made of.  Such is not the case.  [See diagram for another comparison]

 

We can, in no way, truly apply physical aspects to spiritual.  Yes, God does refer to Himself in masculine terms and Jesus Christ did manifest Himself as a physical male while on earth, but this does not give us justification to equate the physical with the spiritual.  We do not read of female angels or female spirit beings in any sense of the word.  We do use masculine terms, but only as a point of reference.  Think about it for a moment, if spirit beings are not male and/or female in the sense we think of male and female, how on earth or in scripture could we refer to them?   There has to be something and therefore both man and God uses the masculine.  The only drawback of doing this, from the human side of the equation is the pitfall of thinking of spirit beings in physical terms.  Frankly, we don't have the ability to really think in any other terms and this is why we do it.

 

Let me use another subject to express the point.  Let us consider the subject of Time.  Only humans and physical things are subject to time.  Spirit beings are outside the realm or element of time.  Now attempt to describe that state.  You cannot begin to utter the words, can you?   How would you describe it to me? Every time I do it, I find myself using expressions of time and dates and durations.  We do not and cannot conceptualize anything else.  It is the same with attempting to conceptualize the difference between physical bodies and those that are made of spirit.  No one can even attempt to define or describe what spirit is.

When we humans succeed in the Salvation Process and it is time to enter into the Kingdom of God, which is actually the Family of God, we are all one and equal before God.  That is, we are all members of His family.  We could talk about rewards or positions or ultimate situations God has planned for each of us individually, but as a spirit being in that Family, we are all equal and the fact that I was a male and another was a female in this physical life has no meaning or bearing.  God has not formulated plans about each of His children based on whether they were male or female in this physical life but by their character and the works they did by the power of the Holy Spirit---Christ in and through them.  Godly character is Godly character.  There is no such thing as male Godly character and female Godly character.  There is only Godly character.  We all take this with us into the Kingdom and Family of God.

See my sermon, "A Glory to God", a sermon about women and how the Bible cannot be used to put women down.