Man's Dominion Mandate

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

The Creation Mandate as a Call to Work and Stewardship

I invite you to turn with me to Genesis chapter 1. Genesis chapter 1 in verse 28. And as you turn there, I want to share a few quotes with you from a well-known Puritan in his book entitled A Christian Directory.

The Puritan Richard Baxter once gave a number of counsels to Christians as they sought to honor God in their daily work. He wrote encouragements like this. He wrote, Be diligent in your callings, spend no time in idleness, and perform your labors with holy minds to the glory of God and in obedience to His commands.

He urged his readers, Take pleasure in your work and then you will not be slothful in it. At the same time, he warned, Idleness is robbing God who is Lord of us and of all our faculties. Last week in our study in Genesis chapter 1, our brother Sam took us through verses 26 and 27 and we heard how God made man in His image and likeness as the crown jewel of His creation.

And in so doing, He made man with intrinsic dignity and worth so that it might be said that all of human life is sacred. God prizes human beings above all of His creation. And so we should join Him in that.

And yet, human beings are still subject to Him. And this week as we continue to look at the creation of man in this Genesis account, we see that man's creation in the likeness of God not only speaks to his worth, but it speaks to the work to which he has been called.

The work that we have been called to in our Lord. And as we'll see in our study today, when God created man, He did not create us simply to exist. That is, to recline in the garden and to have the animals serve us.

He did not create us so that we would lay on a bed of ease and be marveled at by angels. But no, He created man with a lofty purpose. Dear Christian in this room, God created you with an exalted mandate.

Namely, to exercise dominion as a vice-regent of the Most High God. To subdue the earth and to be a steward, His appointed steward, of His creation. Contrary to popular opinion, work is not a necessary evil.

But even before the fall, man was created by God to work. To work the ground that God Himself had made. To work and to keep. And to work diligently and joyfully for the magnification of His Master. Now intrinsically, we know this, don't we?

We know that we were created for work, for good works. But to call on Richard Baxter one more time, the devil suits his temptations to men in their daily work and in their business as well. In the midst of the thorns and thistles of the fall, plagued by our own temptations within and the devil's opposition from without, we must acknowledge, all of us dear saints, if you have ever worked a day in your life, that all of us struggle with this thing called work.

The truth is, we are often disinclined to physical and mental exertion. We are predisposed to idleness and slothfulness. We easily give in to grumbling and complaining about our work and our co-workers.

We're hard to motivate and easy to discourage. For some of us, we make a god out of our work. For others, we labor and toil for vainglory to please men rather than to please God. And very few of us, I think, can connect the dots between our earthly vocations.

Have you ever thought about this connection? Very few of us can connect the dots between our earthly vocations and the purposes of God in the world. Are these two connected? And because our view of work is deeply flawed, I would suggest to you, dear friends, that we rob God, the God who created us and our faculties, to serve His purposes.

We rob Him of His due glory, of the productivity that He is owed from the men and women that He has made. And so, with our Bibles open before us to Genesis chapter 1 and verse 28, I want to take us this afternoon through three truths that relate to our mandate in this world.

The very purpose for which we have been made. Why it is that God has created men and women in His image and what He has appointed us to. In Genesis chapter 1 and verse 28, we read this,. And God blessed them and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

God’s Blessed Mandate and the Call to Multiply

The first truth that we need to understand, that we must consider if we're going to get this passage right is this, that God has given us here a blessed mandate. Point number one, God's blessed mandate.

In verse 28, we find the first recorded words of God to man. Can you believe that? Outside of His inscripturated word, the first words of God's direct address to the people that He has made. And what a marvel it is that these first words to man are words of blessing.

We often end our time together when we meet for worship with a benediction, with a blessing. But the Lord does one better than us. He doesn't end only with a benediction, but He leads with, He begins with a benediction.

And don't miss this, so many of us read this text and we read right past those words,. And He blessed man and He said,. But the God of very gods, the one who cannot be contained in human language, who must be described, albeit inadequately, in the plural of majesty, the most holy God, in His first act after creating man, He blesses His people.

Oh how our God is indeed exceedingly good and kind to us. That of all the things He could have done, of all of the things that He could have said, God in His first interaction with man blesses Him. Do we think that this is God's attitude towards us?

If we do not, we are wrong. And notice the very first thing that God says about the role and the function of a man. Before He utters any other commandment, He commands man to this, to multiply and to work.

Now when He says, be fruitful and multiply, what does He mean? This idea of fruitfulness, the language itself conveys a blossoming. A blossoming where the Lord has placed us. And so having created Adam and Eve in the garden, He places them there and He says, Blossom where I have made you.

Be fruitful, multiply, have children, have descendants and fill the earth. And to multiply is to be numerous, to grow powerful. The children are a heritage from the Lord. And God designed that humanity would not occupy a small parcel of land between the rivers, but that we would expand and cover the face of the earth.

And then God commands man to subdue and to exercise dominion. To subdue is to bring into subjection, to bring the earth itself into the bondage of man. And to exercise dominion is to rule, it is to dominate, it is to master the world that God has made.

One commentator says, God gave the human family the privilege and responsibility to act as the caretakers of the world. Man is the crown of God's creation. He is not a mere figurehead, but he is to exercise dominion over God's creation as a steward.

If you can picture Joseph in Egypt, when he went from prison to prime minister, it is like Joseph who served as the prime minister of Egypt and was second only to Pharaoh, having been given Pharaoh's signet ring in the same way God has given humanity his signet ring to exercise authority over his creation.

We see a picture of this in Psalm chapter 8 and verse 4, where we read, What is man that you are mindful of him? Or the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands. You have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea.

The psalmist elaborates in Psalm 115 and verse 16 in a passage that highlights the sovereignty of God, but in verse 16 he says, The heavens are the Lord's heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man.

Now we're going to see over the next number of weeks, the Lord elaborating this theme of our dominion mandate, but I'm going to just dip my toe in a little bit ahead of those texts. Look with me at Genesis chapter 2 and verse 5, when no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain, and there was no man to work the ground.

You see the Lord looking forward to this man who is to work the ground. Then in chapter 2 and verse 15, the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. How many of us, if you think about your life day to day, we treat work like that necessary evil.

I think of a joke that our brother told, if only we could watch Netflix and pet baby goats as our sole occupation. But the Lord has something else for us, to work the garden, to work in this world that he has made, to keep it, to be providers and protectors as part of our human mandate.

I want to take us through a brief case study on the doctrine of work. And I want to ask you, does this reflect your attitude towards work? Or is this something that is altogether foreign to you? If we look at Exodus chapter 20 and verse 9, we find the Lord our God giving the Ten Commandments, the Decalogue as it is sometimes called.

And in Exodus 20 and verse 9, we come to the Fourth Commandment. And when we talk about the Fourth Commandment, invariably, at least those who are perhaps theologically inclined, want to argue about the perpetuity of the Sabbath law.

Is it a perpetual law? Is it a covenant sign just for the nation of Israel? That is for next week. But see with me here in verse 9. The Lord says, six days you shall labor and do all your work. So oftentimes we hone in on that one day of rest and we debate that, but think for a moment that the Lord would have us to work six days.

Not even five, but six. That the Lord values work. All through Exodus, we find this word work applied to the duties of the priests and the tabernacle designers. They were to be continuously working, the priests in this case, to offer sacrifices on behalf of the people of God.

If we bounce forward just a little bit to 1 Chronicles 22 and verse 15, during the construction of the first temple, in the days of King David and his son Solomon, King David called for Solomon and solemnly charged him.

He said, you have an abundance of workmen, stone cutters, mason carpenters, and all kinds of craftsmen without number, skilled in working gold, silver, bronze, and iron. Arise and work, the Lord be with you.

As God, you can see this with me, as God creates the world, his design is that man would flourish in that world that he has made and bring order to his creation. To bring order in the garden, to bring order in the worship of God, to bring order in the logistical things of the people of God.

Let's fast forward just a bit further to 2 Chronicles 30 and verse 12. In the days of King Hezekiah, we're told that the nation experienced a resurgence in spiritual interest. And as part of that, in verse 12 we read this, that the hand of God was also on Judah to give them one heart to do with the king and the princes commanded by the word of the Lord.

And then in verse 14, they set to work and removed the altars that were in Jerusalem. And all the altars for burning incense, they took away and threw into the brook Kidron. To exercise dominion is to work and to keep, including the work of spiritual reform.

Or when Judah rebelled against God, and perhaps we can most compare, or our situation most compares to this, we can most relate to these people of God. When Judah rebelled against him, he delivered them over into the hands of their enemy.

And God, in this case, spoke through the prophet Jeremiah and he prophesied to the nations that once they entered into captivity, they would remain there as refugees for 70 years. Did the creation mandate stop at that time?

In Jeremiah 29 .5, listen carefully to what Jeremiah tells them as they are beginning, just beginning their 70 years in captivity in Babylon. And listen here for the echoes of our dominion mandate. Here as exiles and aliens in a foreign land, God says to the nation, build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat their produce, take wives and have sons and daughters, take wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage that they may bear sons and daughters.

You see the multiplication mandate. He says, multiply there and do not decrease, but seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

Even as exiles in a foreign land, while under the judgment of God for their sins, the nation is commanded to be fruitful, to multiply, to subdue and to exercise dominion, to work and to keep. They're called to bring that place of chaos into order.

Or if you'll tolerate just a couple more examples, in the case of Nehemiah. In Nehemiah 4 and verse 6, after the exile took place and as the nation made their way back into their homeland, in Nehemiah verse 6 we're told that they built the wall up to half its height and the purpose, the reason for this building of the wall was this, for the people had a mind to work.

Oh, what could be accomplished today if people held the figurative trowel in one hand and the sword of the spirit in the other and had a mind to work. Now if we fast forward just a bit in Colossians 3, we're familiar with this because it's a parallel to our passage in Ephesians that we recently studied in verse 22 when Paul gives instruction to bond servants.

He says that they are to work for their masters, not by way of eye services, people pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. Whatever you do, work heartily as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward.

You are serving the Lord Christ. Paul gave instructions to the Thessalonians to work quietly and to earn their own living. He wrote to Titus in Titus chapter 2 that the older women were to mentor the younger women.

To what end? He said that they are to teach what is good and so train the young women to love their husbands and their children to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind and submissive to their own husbands that the word of God may not be reviled.

In our Bibles, the word work appears 619 times. At least once for every day, almost two for every single day of the year. One of the most blessed things that God has given us in this world to do. From the very beginning, from the opening words that he spoke to us was this, to work.

That work is a good thing. That to exercise dominion over the world, to be an IT technician and to bring chaos into order in the computer system that seeks to serve others is to exercise that dominion.

Not just to be a zoologist, to drive a truck and deliver groceries from one city to the next, to build houses and buildings and to pave roads and almost everything that builds, that grows, that serves man and by extension God is a fulfillment of the dominion mandate.

Spiritual and unspiritual. And man and woman in Christ. This is our summons to hard work. Whatever your hand finds to do. Some of you are students in this room and you feel as if it is not work, but perhaps your work is preparing for court reporting.

Perhaps it is preparing to perform. Perhaps it is preparing to be an accountant, whatever it might be. But whatever your hand finds to do, however the Lord providentially works in your life to bring you into an occupation or vocation that fulfills his dominion mandate, let me say with Scripture, with the authority of Scripture itself, work with all your might.

Of course we should refuse to work for any employer or any cause that undoes that dominion mandate. And I'm sure you can think of examples. I think Christians ought not to be working in adult bookstores.

In liquor stores serving alcohol or pouring drinks or whatever the case is that you can fill in the blanks there. I don't want to go on a tangent here and say the wrong thing that I'll refuse later. But anything that does not fulfill that mandate, we must not do.

But anything that does fulfill that mandate, serving a fellow man, serving a brother or sister, caring for an animal, plowing the earth, drilling for oil, whatever that could be, we're to do with all our might.

Dear saints, how we will stand out in this world. We are not doing this to stand out in the world, but how we will stand out in the world for the glory of Christ even in the most secular vocation if we would but work.

I did a bunch of reading on stats, most of which I threw right out. It didn't end up in the sermon, but I'm just gonna bring a couple stats from the working world to paint a picture. Researchers have found that the average worker in an eight-hour workday is productive maximally for two hours and 53 minutes.

31 of the time that they are paid to work, they are not working. I'm not here today to say, brothers and sisters in Christ, make more bricks and make it without straw. But instead, if the Lord has given you eight hours in a vocation that seeks to expand God's dominion, that seeks to subdue the world, that the roads, for instance, in Rome, pave the way for the expansion of the gospel.

If there is a way that the Lord has enabled you to work, then work. And work for your eight hours and work all to the glory of God. It is no wonder if most are working two hours and 53 minutes a day that another stat says 73 of managers are unhappy with their young employees.

There's a generation, it's a Z, that this stat is speaking to. And that same segment of those who work remotely, another stat says that 50 of them do their work from bed. This is not how we are going to fulfill our dominion mandate.

I think of the words of Spurgeon. He said, hard work will do almost everything. But in God's service, it must not only be hard work,.

But hot work.

The heart must be on fire as we work. If you are in a vocation, if you are studying, if you are learning, if you are teaching, if you are working, whatever the case is, your brothers and sisters, work as unto the Lord.

Not by way of eye services, people pleasers, but as unto him for the glory of the God who sees you at every moment. And I'm not under any illusions at the current state of the economy. I know that some of you at this moment would work if you could find suitable work.

And let me just say to you, don't wait until that time to work. But while you are looking for work, improve your available time to work at things that you will not be able to do once you are in full-time work.

Seek to serve a brother or sister in Christ. Use the skills that the Lord has given you. I'm reminded of one brother who was a carpenter, and when he was laid off from his work, sought to do renovations.

He made furniture for the church. He did a whole variety of things because the Lord had given him a skill, and he was made to work. And some of you, brothers and sisters, you have, maybe because of physical infirmities or other limitations, you might say, but I cannot work.

I cannot use my hands. I cannot build a set of stairs for my neighbor. I can't build a deck. I can't lift the sound equipment. I can't do these things. I'm reminded of a dear brother, a friend who was a pastor at another church in Edmonton, and he went to visit a woman who was in the hospital, who was infirm.

She had gone blind. She was completely bedridden, and she lamented as my brother went to visit her. She said, I feel almost useless in the world. I feel useless to the church. I feel useless to Christ.

And my brother, in God's kind providence and in the wisdom that he gave him after listening to her for a time, he said to her, Sister, perhaps God has given you now one of the most vital and privileged ministries that a Christian can have, and that is the ministry of intercessory prayer.

You don't need to lift one finger, but you can lay in your bed. You can see nothing. You can know nothing of what's going on around you. You can't work. You can't keep. You can't even keep yourself, but you can bring every need that you hear before the God above.

This woman who had seemingly lost her ability to work and to keep, she now was reminded that she had a direct line to God, the very one, not who works and keeps, but who makes and who decrees and who provides and who brings all things into place.

Leonard Ravenhill once said, there are few ministries more important and indispensable than the ministry of intercessory prayer. Next, in verse 29, you see that we've been given a mandate to work. I want to show us next God's blessed provision.

And God said, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of the earth, of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food, and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.

And it was so. How many of us, as we go about our work, we eat the bread of anxious toil. Our family just recently started putting together a tight budget, the very best budget that we could put together.

And one of the things that we found is we were seeking to allocate more money to savings and allocate more money to generosity and all of these things that all of our living expenses already exceeded all that we make.

The cost of living is such that we just need a budget to keep the bank account at the current balance. And so for many of us in this world, we can look at the decisions that are made, we can look at the way that the economy is going, we can look at the way that the dollar is shrinking and we can begin to eat this bread of anxious toil wondering what in the world.

Is going on?

Why would I work hard.

When there is no reward even? But see this with me. What day was man made? Man was made on the sixth day. Let me ask you, when did God himself make, as we see here in verse 29, every tree with seed? And for the beast of the field, every green plant for food.

If we go back, we see that on the first day, God made the light. And then on the second day, he made dry ground, verse 10.

Let's just see,.

I want to make sure I'm doing this right. And then on the third day, verses 11 and 12, he made vegetation, plants yielding seeds, fruit trees bearing fruit, in which is their seed, each according to its kind on the earth.

That God made man's food. God provided for man even before he was made. That the Lord God, who knows our very need, made our food even before we existed. Now this is radically different from what the early people of God would have understood the surrounding nations' gods to be like.

And again, having done a case study on work, let's look at a case study. Again, the kindness and the goodness of God. As we said in the first week of our study in Genesis, really the star of creation is not creation.

The star of creation is the creator.

It is God.

Let us see how good God is. Compare with me for a moment the customs of the Babylonians and of other pagan nations, where according to almost all of the traditions of those gods that surrounded the first people of God.

This is, of course, long after Adam and Eve. Man was specifically created to work in the world not as an expression of his innate created ability, but to work in the world to provide food for the gods.

That it was not God.

Who provided food for them, but they were to provide food for the gods. Their gods did not provide sustenance for them, but men and women were enslaved in a cruel form of bondage that threatened misfortune on those who did not satiate the hunger of these false gods.

These nations served, at least as they believed it, temperamental deities who were prone to mood swings and malicious treatment of even their most devoted worshippers. And this is not the God of the Bible.

You go out into the world and you tell people that you are a Christian. You tell enough people that you are a Christian. Invariably you will encounter people who will want to paint your God as the most vile and capricious being amongst all gods.

But nothing could be further from the truth. In contrast to the other angry so-called gods of the ancient world, Yahweh, the God of the Bible, shows himself to be sovereign and kind and loving against the backdrop.

Of a whole host.

Of the most wicked and demonic deities. God emerges. Our God emerges as unspeakably good. The very God who created you. Unspeakably good. This is one of the hardest things about being a preacher and trying to preach Christ.

Trying to preach the glories of God is that He is so good that I am going to fail. As we were praying just before the service, a brother asked me, how do you feel about the sermon? And I said, I feel the same way I feel pretty much before I preach any sermon.

I am doomed to fail. But God is so exceedingly worthy of our praise that if we were to employ every word in the dictionary, every word of praise, every synonym, every word in every human language, it would fall short of explaining the goodness and the kindness and the graciousness and the holiness and the love of our God.

God's first words to man are not words of cursing but of blessing. His first act is not a cruel demand for food but it is an act of provision. He is not a God who is served by human hands as if He needed anything from man but instead He created the world to showcase His own glory for the enjoyment of His creatures and to show acts of love and mercy toward man, the man and woman that He created.

Now, I said I wanted to do a case study in surrounding gods. I got ahead of myself but here it is. Compare this with Marduk and Anu. I've tried to use so-called gods. When I use the word God, speaking about these, I'm talking about small g-god.

I'm not saying these gods exist but so-called gods that we read about in our Bibles. For Marduk and Anu, these were the gods that the ancient Babylonians worshipped. Marduk was the god of the thunderstorm.

Anu was the god of the sky. And what they promised when they were not satiated, when they were not satisfied, they would bring storms and floods and droughts and other natural disasters. And so it was only fitting.

We should not be surprised then that the people of Babylon to worship Marduk and Anu would do things like this. They would hold annual fire festivals, nocturnal fire festivals in the winter where they would bring men and women and children and light the night sky with their burning bodies in the flames.

Baal, who was said to be the god of fertility and rain, who multiplied one's children and who caused the vegetation to grow. Are you seeing a parallel here? As we look at this passage, can we see why God would be so displeased with the worship of Baal, the fertility and vegetation god, essentially, by the worship of Baal in the Old Testament?

Because he is an imposter. He is taking credit for the very things that God has done. And yet what did Baal require of humanity in order to bless them with children and to give them seed-bearing plants for food?

He was propitiated by human sacrifice. And you can see parallels here. I'll let you connect your own dots. But it was the elites of the day, the elites of society, who offered the people of the lower class to this bloodthirsty god and they would say it was for the good of the whole community.

Other gods and goddesses demanded orgies. Others stealing to provide sacrifice or to provide offerings, excuse me. The Artemis of the Ephesians demanded that young men be flogged and their blood collected.

And then once all of the blood was collected, they would pour it until it covered the entire 10-foot tall statue, until it was dyed entirely with human blood. But perhaps few were as bloodthirsty as the ancient Canaanite god, Molech, that we read about in our Old Testaments.

You see, as we're going through Genesis, I'm trying to expand on all that we're seeing here in the Old Testament. We're in a canonical context. There are things happening here. And listen to this false god, Molech.

That word Molech is a compound word made up of two Hebrew words, one for king and the other for shame. And this Molech, king of shame, was a bull-headed humanoid statue fashioned out of iron. It was made, and if you look at pictures of Molech, depictions of it, it is so grotesque.

This being with arms outstretched as if to receive a gift. And a fire would either be kindled around the statue or inside of the statue. And parents, in worship of Molech, one by one, would take their healthy baby boys and girls, usually their firstborn, and they would offer them as a sacrifice to placate Molech.

The servants of Molech would take these babies and, again, you see the wickedness of this? And I'm telling you, you can draw a straight line from that act to what we see today. And with reference to what our brother spoke of last week in the area of abortion and the sanctity of human life.

The servants of Molech would take the babies and place them into the abdomen, where the womb of Molech would be, where they would be burned alive by the flames. Or in cases where the abdomen wouldn't receive the babies, they would place it outside of Molech's outstretched arms, where they would be consumed by fire.

The nation of Israel would eventually get caught up in this worship of Molech, where they would go to the valley of Hanom, literally translated, the valley of weeping. Why? Because the children would take their firstborn, weeping as they went, to offer them to this false god, who they were told must be fed their firstborn children.

It became known as Topheth. We actually see this in 2 Kings 23, when Josiah destroyed the altars of Molech in Topheth. What does Topheth mean? It means the roasting place. Christ himself used this valley when he spoke of Gehenna.

What hell was like, and referencing Gehenna, Gehenna itself is that valley of weeping. It is a picture of the torments of hell itself. So next time someone says to you, your god is the most vile and capricious being in the world, you look back at them and you say, my god's first words to me were words of blessing.

Not just to me, but to all of man. My god's first act was to provide for my needs, for your needs, for our needs. God designed that man would work in the garden, that he would eat the fruit of that work and of that garden.

We should not miss this fact, that God provided that food for man before he was even created. One commentator says, God is depicted as the beneficent provider who ensures food for both human and animal life without fear of competition or threat for survival.

And then our Lord himself, the Lord Jesus Christ, in Matthew 6, if you go there with me for a moment, relies on this picture of God's provision, not only for man, but for all creatures, as teaching, as a counsel, as an exhortation, not ever, ever, ever, ever to be anxious.

How many of us are anxious for our food? We work and we grieve that our work is difficult. We experience the thorns and the thistles and we say, it's almost all for naught. And yet, verse 25, our Lord says, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body.

What you will put on is not life more than food and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air. You see this, you can, again, we're drawing a lot of lines here, drawing a line right from Matthew 6 to Genesis 1.

They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life?

And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?