Is God a Man?

Now that I am conscious of male privilege, I struggle to refer to God in the male gender

Image credit: freepik.com/zweibackesser. Title: Neptune

Numbers 23:19

“God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act? Has he ever promised and not carried it through?”

Holy Bible (New Living Translation)

I believe in God — as creator of all the earth and holder of the breath of all human kind. In recent times I’ve been struggling with gender neutrality in addressing the godhead. I was taught to address God as the capital He, conferring upon this unseen being an assumption of masculinity.

But is this the truth?

Image credit: freepik.com/zwiebackesser

For a divine being I can’t see, it is hard to know the truth. Of the many accounts written about God, most were written by men; women didn’t actively come into creating the stories and myths that have endured to date in most religious and cultural representations of divinity. I say this, taking a world view premised upon my own African cultural history, where there are male gods and female gods but an over-representation of the former in both the whole…