SNEAK PEAK: The Kingdom of God Film

The Garden, the Cultural Mandate, and the Fall

God's intention was in putting his image in the garden.

Yes.

And how he puts him in it, take dominion, cultivate it, and the effects of the fall.

It was a desert before it was a garden.

Okay.

Because it says that no water had yet fallen on the land.

Read it. Yes.

So, Genesis 2 .5, when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up.

It's a desert.

For the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and the mist was coming, going up from the land, was watering the whole face.

Of the ground.

So now a garden's coming up.

Okay.

So it was a desert, there was no bushes, no water, and then all of a sudden, God allows a mist to come on the land. All of a sudden God allows a mist to come on the land, and from that land he creates Eden.

Okay.

So from a desert, he creates a garden. And then what happens? Man sins.

Right.

And he turns it back into a desert.

Okay.

So, God's purpose in putting Adam in the garden, what is he supposed to do? It's God's image in the garden, and he's told to do what?

Work it and keep it.

Okay.

Dress it and keep it.

Okay.

As the KJV says. So, essentially, he's to cultivate God's cultivation.

Okay.

So, Richard Gaffin says that the garden was very good, but it was not very best.

Okay.

So, Adam was there really just to make things better, and you know, because there's levels of good. We're not saying that, you know, it was like a terrible place to live or anything like.

That.

So, God created everything, he called it good, and then when he created man, he called it very good. And then he places Adam and Eve in the garden, and then there's, he says, I'll make it better. Essentially, right?

So, and by doing that is, you know, one, Adam gets a wife, right? Adam is called to name, first thing Adam gets called to do is to name the animals. That's a creative process.

Right.

Right.

So, he can name them whatever he wants, and God says, that will be the name. So, he has authority.

Right?

So, he has creative authority, creative control, and he can do as he wants as an artist. And the cool thing is that in the garden were rivers, and from the rivers flew onyx, delium, and gold. And those are not useful minerals for making hoes and axes to grow.

Now, you see, God already caused the plants to grow and stuff.

Right?

So, they're not useful in terms of making hoes and axes and pickaxes and stuff. They're used for beauty.

Right?

So, they're, like gold is used to adorn things. So, God comes in the dawn, and he's looking at the work Adam has done, and just imagine like there's a wooden bench adorned with gold in the midst of the section of the garden where God and Adam can just sit and look back on God's creation and talk with God.

So, this is what, it's almost like a museum. Eden is this museum of God's beauty and God's work. The animals, the bushes, the trees, the fruit, all this stuff, and God, and Adam's role is to work it and to keep it and to beautify it.

So, he's essentially the curator of God's museum.

Okay.

Yes.

And so, the fall enters, and Adam brings death, death enters the garden. He's God's image.

Before that, he's told in the garden to be fruitful and multiply, subdue and fill the.

Earth. Okay.

Right?

Right.

And then after sin, there's pain and childbearing, and there's a pain and a toil of the ground. So it's still be fruitful and multiply with pain and childbearing, and subdue and fill the earth with pain and toil.

Yeah.

So that mandate is still there, and then you see it right afterwards when it's going through the line of Cain, and you see they've made bronze, they've made iron, they've made music, they've made pipe.

So they're still taking the ground, they're still working it, they're still keeping it, they're still cultivating it.

Right.

So, there's not a disconnect between the Garden of Eden and today. It's the same, it's just harder.

Christoplatonism, Heaven, and the New Creation

So, um, non-Christian views of the world and spirituality that even sometimes impact Christians' thinking is that because of the fall, like, this is all bad now.

Christoplatonism.

Yeah, this is bad, heaven is good. And 100%, let's buy the t-shirt and get the bumper sticker. Heaven is great.

Absolutely.

Okay?

But the idea is that this is all sort of like, icky, this is ugly, icky stuff.

Yes.

And we want to get to the better spiritual stuff later and sort of escape this ugliness. And so...

Heaven is great because that's where God dwells. We were never created to be in heaven, we were created to be on earth. That's where we were in the beginning.

Right?

So we say, well, we're going to die and go to heaven, probably for a short time, until the consummation, but there's going to be a time when people are risen from the dead, they're judged into heaven, they go into eternity with God or eternity without God.

And then there's the new creation, the consummated earth, the end of all things, and we're still going to be where God intended us to be. And God's going to walk with us and God's going to visit us.

Yeah.

And so, in the beginning of creation, God creates his image and heaven and earth are.

Met.

Yes.

And so, when the fall enters, God doesn't abandon creation, but now there's a disconnect between God and his people, God and his creation, because we're rebels, we're at war with him. But the beauty of the gospel is that God comes as king to bring redemption to the ends of the earth and forgiveness, salvation, as far as the curse is found.

And the kingdom of heaven is God now kissing earth again. God and earth, heaven and earth coming back together again. And so, Jesus inaugurates that and it's happened. And so, what Jesus does is he brings in that redemption, that healing of all that broken relationship of us with God and our sin and also the very goodness of creation.

God is amplifying now. Jesus comes to save sinners from their sin, to reconcile the world to himself, but the first thing that the second Adam does, our representative, when he conquers death in a garden, which is where it was brought, the first thing he does is begin to work the ground.

He's mistaken as a gardener. God tells Adam, take dominion, make this beautiful.

Right.

And so, we can see, I mean, we're sitting here in a desert, right? And yet we're in Phoenix, where they just had the Super Bowl and hundreds of thousands of people flocked to the desert, where they didn't worry about bringing enough water, they didn't worry about bringing enough food, they didn't worry about dehydration, they had running water, toilets that were flushed.

In the desert.

Here.

This is where it happened.

Yes, right here. Like, this is only, I mean, you could turn your cameras and see, you know, stuff, you know, houses and electricity and telephone poles and stuff, just right around the corner,.

You know?

So, we're here in a desert where God has essentially, we have, because of the gospel, we've created a city and a garden. So that's essentially what we've done. Now, there are cultures still on the face of the planet that don't have gardens and deserts.

There's Africa, Sahara, all these things.

Pagan nations.

You have to ask, how come we did it? What's so different about Africa's geological location than this place?

That's a good point. So the effects of the Christian, of the gospel, people being reconciled to God, is the Christian world view begins to penetrate every aspect of their lives, their families, and then their.

Culture.

Right.

We've cultivated roads and transportation systems, right? So a hundred years from now, I mean, a hundred years ago, if you were to ask people, how do I get to New York to L .A., they would draw the rivers, right?

But now, if you ask them how to get from New York to L .A., they would draw you a map of the interstates, and they don't even know where the rivers are.

Or point you to the airport.

Or point you to the airport, right.

So we have cultivated God's land, and man has created a culture as a result of that. And that's happened here in America, clearly because of a Christian world view, because.

Of capitalism, and science, modern science, given pop by the Christian world view. And so all of those effects are blessings as a result of biblical world view. Man has reconciled with God through Christ, and Christ alone, and His work alone, and then the effects of that reconciliation with God penetrate every area of the world.

Christ's Reign, the Great Commission, and the Authority of God's Law

And so Jesus is, according to Paul, Christian eschatology 101, 1 Corinthians 15, He's reigning now, and He must reign until He has put all His enemies under His feet. Now that's gospel-centered, but everything is being put into subjection to Him.

A nation who abandons God's law, there's famine, and a nation who embraces God's law, there's blessing, and food is abundant, and there's milk, and honey, and all that stuff. And so that's the importance of embracing God's law, because it actually affects you in time and space.

That's right. It blesses society.

Right.

Right.

When justice is done, when righteousness is heralded.

Right.

That quote on Facebook that Crawford said, or he said at his talk, he said, if God promises to bring long-term prosperity to those who obey God's law, why do we believe that evil will triumph?

Yeah.

You know?

Right.

Like, why will they triumph over those who obey God's law, as He promised? That's what he said in the scripture.

I say all the time that our culture sees the great blessing in escape. You know, Jesus says in John 17, Father, I do not pray that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one.

And we pray in the reverse prayers. As soon as things get bad around us, the first thing we're saying as Christians today is, Father, take us out of the world.

Right?

Right.

Take us out of the world and leave them to the evil one.

Right.

The unbelievers. And Jesus says, the meek shall inherit the earth. He takes what was the theme in Psalm 37, where it's the wicked who were uprooted from the land and the righteous who were left to dwell in it.

And He actually expands on it now, and He says the meek shall inherit not just the land, but the earth.

Right.

Paul says in Romans 4 that Abraham's descendants would inherit the world. Whereas before they're thinking the land, and Paul's like, the world.

Right.

So like, the biblical foundation of all of our thinking of the world should be this belongs to God and His people.

Right?

Right.

And Christ's gospel redeems sinners, and this world's going to be filled with descendants of Abraham as numerous as the stars.

Right?

And so that gets me to another point, something that you emphasize all the time, is that Jesus has authority in every area, including beautification, including arts.

Yes.

Okay, so talk about that.

Beauty, Art, and the Temple Pattern

Very much so. Okay, as Adam's first job, right?

Right.

There was gold, delium, and onyx that was flowing into the river to beautify the garden.

Yeah.

Gold, we know what gold is for, so it could be used as a currency of course, but it's also used to beautify stuff, beautify other things. Delium is used for incense and for sweet aromas and anointing oils, and then onyx is of course used for beauty.

So then you get to the temple in Exodus, where God commands all these artists to bring their gifts and their talents. By the way, their gifts and their talents were learned in Egypt for 400 years. So pagans can teach Christians how to do art, and we can learn from each other and apply our worldview on what pagans have done.

So anyway...

Flip it, make it better.

Yeah, that's right. So here they are, they're in Exodus, you have this golden calf that they build to worship with out of gold and onyx and delium and all this stuff. Moses see it, they destroy that gold and delium and onyx, and then they use those minerals in the very next chapter to build the temple.

So the place where God dwells is adorned with gold, delium, and onyx in the Garden of Eden. In the temple, it has gold, delium, and onyx. It's the very first thing God commanded to go in the temple, gold, incense, and onyx.

And then, in Revelation 21, when you see the New Jerusalem descending, it's described as having gold, delium, and onyx. So these are all artistic resources. So if you're an artist, God wants you to beautify the earth and to make it beautiful and to create amazing things.

And you can do that by looking at scripture. To Bezalel, he was gifted with skill, with intelligence, with the Holy Spirit, and with the ability to teach. And so those are the attributes of an artist.

Skill, they have to be good at something. Not prideful, but they can boast about the skill God has given them. So if we're in a contractual negotiation, let's say I want to redo your kitchen, or interior design your house, and you ask me, am I good?

And my response is, well, you know, I don't want to brag. Some people think I'm okay.

Right?

You know? I would say, no, these are the clients I've done, this is the work I've done, look how it is, and you're going to pay a lot of money for it. That's not pride, because pride is ascribing to yourself attributes that are not true.

So if God has given you gifts, if God has given you talents, if God has made it so you're a doctor where hardly anybody dies in your care, then that's something you want to talk.

About.

You know? And you want to give glory to God for those gifts, but not hide them and act like those gifts are not part of what God has created you out of the dirt to be. So skill, and then intelligence.

We need to be smart with our arts, we need to be intelligent, we need to be cutting. There's a reason why people like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are as popular as they.

Are.

It's because they're intelligent.

Right?

Even though they're against our worldview, they can still make us laugh, and they can even cause us to think about our own worldviews as a result. It's intelligent comedy. And then you have, so we need Christians that are not rushing out to see the latest James Franco movie, or Vince Vaughn movie, but they're looking to create really intelligent satires and comedic commentaries on the world.

That's smart. And so skill, intelligence, and then of course you have the Holy Spirit. All of this is done according to a worldview, because worldview matters. Your worldview is what dictates the kind of art that you make.

Right?

So if you have a pagan worldview, you're going to make art that has poor theology in what it stands for. And pagans make great art with poor theology, and Christians make poor art with great theology.

Right?

So we've conflicted that and haven't tried to do that.

And it wasn't always that way.

No.

In the history of the Christian church, we were the culture makers.

Right, that's right. In the Renaissance, the church was buying the art. It was humanist art, because the church was humanist. But they were still making great art, they were buying great art, and then you have the Reformation art, which you have Rembrandt, who made these fantastic paintings that got down to the detail of the reflection of the eye duck, the tear duck, you can see in the paintings and stuff.

And so that's just a level of art that we just don't see anymore. We throw splatter paint up against the wall and we're like, yay. You know, or pornography.

Right.

Which is the art of our culture.

Right.

So art is essentially labor for someone's rest, right? Not necessarily in a Sabbath rest, but like if we're watching a movie or we're just enjoying you know, a night at dinner, our food, right? So it's all this, it's someone else's labor for another person's rest.

And so you see that in the temple, it's labor for Sabbath rest. And then you get to our culture today, where it's literally someone's labor for someone else's destruction.

Right?

That's what pornography is. It's labor for destruction. That's, you know, all these arts that are against God or against the worldview.

Yeah.

And so like, that's a difference. So it's, it's literally labor for labor.

Right?

Essentially.

Wow.

So that's how our world views art.

Christ's Dominion Over Culture and the Meaning of the Great Commission

So, so we think about some foundational things. Christ is risen from the dead, the second Adam. He's conquered our sin. He's washed it away. He's redeeming sinners. He's bringing us salvation to the ends of the earth and nations are going to flow up to the mountain of God.

And he has dominion, glory, and a kingdom that will never be destroyed. And he is actively right now putting things in subjection to himself. First he saves sinners. But we're supposed to care about here and now.

Because he has authority in heaven and on earth.

This is his.

It doesn't belong to the devil. And so Christians have sort of like handed off the culture, the world around them, to the unbelievers because here's the thing. We want to go home.

Right.

And, but the truth is, is Jesus owns all this.

Right.

And so.

It's more than he owns it.

Right?

Right.

It's easy to say he owns it. This is a gift to him from the father.

Yes.

Right.

Right?

It's a gift to him from the father, which he will in turn give back to the father.

Yes.

Right?

So when we sit there and say, it's going to hell in a handbasket, just, you know, prepare the way, you know, for destruction.

Right.

Like, could you imagine, like Jesus, he's like, this is, this is what God gave me as a gift.

Yes.

You know? And your attitude is to just let it go to hell.

Yeah.

No.

Like that's got to be offensive to God.

Yeah.

Who's sitting at the right hand ruling and reigning with power and he's making enemies his feet. It's impossible to look at what Adam has done in the garden, uh, and then to look at just how the dominion mandate, the cultural mandate expands through, you know, the great commission.

Right.

Where it says, uh, go make disciples, baptizing them, teaching them, uh, all things I've commanded, you know, still be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. It's just reworded differently.

And it's with an emphasis of the gospel, which I don't think any of us reject the gospel importance in being in the world.

Yeah.

So, yeah.

So the foundation to all of what we're talking about is, is the good news of what God has done in Christ to save sinners. And like we're supposed to bring that, that message of his authority, his lordship and his redemption to every single nook and cranny.

People go like to my neighbor, we go, yes and amen. Like to my dad, who's not a believer. Yes and amen. Like to my school.

Yes.

And amen to, to the local government.

Yes.

And amen to the arts and media.

Yes. And amen.

And science.

Yes.

And amen. Like everywhere we put, say, look, we need to bring the gospel to this area and the authority of Christ to this area and do it better. Make it beautiful. Turn this wilderness into a garden.

Right.

But he's already done it.

Yeah.

Right.

And so it's not, it's not, when you look at Noah, yeah, Noah's the last remaining family.

On the earth.

As soon as he gets off the ark, he builds an altar and he, and he sacrifices an animal.

For God.

God smells the aroma. It's pleasing to him because of what Jesus does. He, he, he says to Noah, I will never again curse the ground as a result of man. That was 4 ,000 years ago, 5 ,000 years ago.

Right.

So that was way back then.

Right.

And here we are in a desert kicking it.

Yeah.

Right.

So the blessings of God saving us do not just stand isolated within us and our own individual relationship with Christ, but we're saved. And Jesus doesn't save us just for heaven one day, but he saves the whole person.

Yes.

Right?

Right.

And, and in saving the whole person, that redemption just spills out and starts to bring.

Fruit. Right.

Right.

And so the, the message is, is to bring the good news to the world of salvation in Christ, but also his authority over every area and to allow what we believe about Christ and, and, and God and his world to actually affect everything.

To look at something that's, that's ugly and say, that needs to come under the feet of Jesus and it needs to glorify him in every, in every area of art and, and, and in your particular expertise, like media and, and film and all those things, like Jesus has to have ownership.

God uses things, uh, to accomplish his will.

Yeah.

God uses means to save, right? Preaching the gospel is something man does.

Yes.

So, so that even, even the Bible says, uh, if you spank your child, you'll save him from.

Sheol.

Right?

So, so there's an element to God using means as a way in a sense, in a sense, uh, fertilizer in which whenever he decides to regenerate based on completely his own will, these things in which we've done softens the soil and allows God to regenerate it.

So the big, the big picture we should have as Christians is that Jesus is king and that's a meaningful statement. It's not just a punch line at a party. He's king.

Yes.

And that, and that his, his authority, his kingship is over every area. And so we ought not to see an area of the world, art, science, media, whatever as, well, we can't touch that. We can't beautify it for Jesus.

We can't make it better. Whatever your hand finds to do, you know, do with all your might and whatever you do in word or in deed due to the glory of God, we should be actually bringing the authority of Christ and his beauty into every single area of life because we're saved because he saved us by his grace.

We're redeemed in Jesus and we're reconciled to God.

Faith and Works, Grace, and the Beauty of the New World

However, James says, what good is it my brothers if someone says he has faith but does not.

Have works?

Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you say, one of you says to them, go in peace, be warmed and filled without giving them the things needed for the body.

What good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works is dead. So there's an element here, and we read Ephesians 2, 8 and 9, for by grace you are saved through faith, not of works, so no man can boast.

However, you are saved to do unto good works.

We're his workmanship created in Christ Jesus unto good works.

Unto good works. Before the foundations of the world, right? So essentially, God, the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit covenanted before the foundations of the world to do this thing here in time and space.

And that was the agreement, and that's what they've done. And so these works that we do now as a result of our Christian were prepared beforehand. The reason we were saved was to do these works. And so James is saying, hey, if you just preach the gospel to them and they go away hungry, you're not helping.

Go be warmed, be filled. It's good to go and slam the door.

But it works the other way too, right? So if you just tell them, hey, here's food and stuff, and there's no gospel, that doesn't accomplish anything.

Nothing.

Right.

It's just a momentary fix.

So they're harmonious in the advance of the gospel. And if you go to the garden, back to the garden, God made fruit and the trees, and he said, they're beautiful and they're good for food. So they're beautiful for the eye and they're good for food.

So they were beautiful for beauty's sake, and they were practical, right? So there's an element of beauty and practicality there. And then we see Jesus, who is the tree of life in the end, when in the New Jerusalem, the tree of life is Jesus.

Jesus is also beautiful and he's practical in time and space. He actually lived in time and space. So the gospel is beautiful and practical. It does stuff in time and in space.

So someone says, I don't know, Marcus, that God is concerned with here and now. He may not really be concerned with all this. The real punch is how concerned is God with his people and his world? He entered in it.

He took on flesh and he's a part of it, right? And so is he concerned with redemption? Well, he tabernacled among us to save us, touched us, ate with us, hung out with us. And so he cares about what's going on.

There's no split where God goes, well, send enters so I could care less. Let it rot. Let it be destroyed.

Even more so, the temple, the veil was ripped open, and now God doesn't dwell in temples. He dwells among us as believers. So essentially he's here all over the earth as the gospel goes forth now. So where's the goal of Delium and Onyx, right?

That's what we're to do. We're to beautify the new world.

And Jesus says, behold, I'm making all things new. Not I'm making all new things, I'm making all things new.

Yes.

Right?

Right, that's right.

There you go.