December 20, 2023 Show with David Reece on “An Exploration of the Dominion Mandate”

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 20th day of December 2023.

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And I'm absolutely thrilled, once again, to have on the program a returning guest who is now a regularly featured guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio every month.

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His name is David Reese. He is the pastor of Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and he's also the

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CEO of Armored Republic. And today we're going to be talking about an important issue, an issue that typically those on the left wing of society hate to hear

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Christians discuss and to reveal as a part of their worldview.

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And it's even an issue that divides evangelicals as to the extent of what we're talking about today.

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We are talking about dominion. And if you have a question about dominion for Pastor Reese, you can send in your emails to chrisarnzen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

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And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese. Brother, thanks for having me on.

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I'm excited to be here. I'm hopeful that this will be informative, but also a very practical discussion that helps people to think about how to increase their dominion and how to honor the

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Lord with their ordinary work. Amen. Well, once again, for the sake of those who have not yet heard you on this program or elsewhere, please describe for our listeners

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Puritan Reformed Church of Phoenix, Arizona. Puritan Reformed Church is a church that is committed to the teaching of scripture, and we seek to honor the

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Lord by recognizing the limited scope of authority that the church has been given, and that is to teach doctrine according to the word of God, to lead the people of God in worship only in those things that God has instituted in his word, and to not add to it or subtract from it in the worship of God.

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And then furthermore, to see that church government uses its authority in the limited and private ways that have been delegated to it by the king of the church, the

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Lord Jesus Christ. And so that would be to see church government properly exercised with proper discipline and to not cower away from doing that, but also to not add human authority with a bunch of invented offices or a bunch of invented powers or functions.

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So that idea, that's the name Puritan. It's about applying sola scriptura to the doctrine of worship and government of the church, and seeking to show the form that God has given in his word for all those things.

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And by the way, I have the print of the painting that you have on your website, which is

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PuritanPHX .com for our listeners, PuritanPHX, which is an abbreviation for Phoenix.

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I have that historic scene from the Westminster Assembly hanging on my living room wall, the print, that is, not the original artwork.

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And it's a— Go ahead. I'm sorry, is that the one where the Congregationalists are standing up to object?

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Yes. That's great. It is a classic image from the Westminster Assembly.

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Well, also, please tell us about your company, where you are

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CEO, Armored Republic. Yeah. So, Armored Republic is dedicated to the cause of creating tools of liberty to provide free men with what they need to resist tyrants and criminals to defend their

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God -given rights for the honor of the Lord Jesus Christ. So we view body armor as a tool of liberty, and our goal is to make that affordable and make it excellent.

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We have really great plate carriers, so body armor doesn't just come and, like, you know, attach to your body with duct tape.

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You have these, you know, tactical vests, and those are called plate carriers. And then the armor itself is sold as, you know, plates of body armor, and those go in there, into the plate carrier.

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And so we have excellent designs for both, and we have all sorts of neat products that we have tried to pull together to make it so that we have things that are available for all sorts of different situations.

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And so every type of body armor we manufacture, and we have a really neat plate that we have organized material in a way that's unique, and that is called the

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A3, and it's a great plate that is light, 4 .6 pounds, and is also able to stop all of the threats that you really want it to be able to.

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If you're concerned about tyranny, it's a good one for stopping the basic rounds that you'd expect to have to deal with.

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And again, so that's the A3 plate. I'd encourage people to check that out as a good tyranny resistor.

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Amen. If anybody wants to find out more about Armored Republic, go to ArmoredRepublic .com,

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ArmoredRepublic .com. And please remember, Pastor Reese, after we're off the air, remember to have a brief conversation with me on exactly the specific information you want me to send my nephew about Armored Republic.

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My nephew, I'll give him a free plug today. He is the owner of Arnzen Arms in Minnesota, and I'll even plug his website,

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ArnzenArms .com, and it is a guns and ammo store in Minnesota.

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So anyway, if you could remember to bring that up when we're off the air, I would love to pass on the details to my nephew.

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Wonderful. I have it listed here on my notes, so I'll do my best to make sure we can do that. Thank you so much.

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Oh, my pleasure. Well, we are talking about an issue today that I already mentioned. It's something that liberals and leftists, when they hear us discuss something like this, they cringe and recoil with revulsion and horror, and even many evangelicals today want to relegate a lot of things that appear in the

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Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. They want to keep it there in the Old Covenant. Many evangelicals don't want us to bring forward things into the

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New Covenant that many Reformed Christians firmly believe belong in the

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New Covenant as well as the Old. And, of course, we don't believe everything should be moved forward.

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We don't believe in Judaizing. But if you could explain to our audience with a working definition of what is dominion.

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Yeah, so dominion, when we think about what dominion is, there's sort of two ways we could think about it.

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One is thinking about dominion in itself, and the other one would be dominion in terms of its use or the exercise of it.

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And so dominion by itself is just a way of talking about authority, right? So authority is the right to do something.

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When you have property in your possession that you have authority over, you are simply exercising lawful possession.

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If you're exercising power or possession over property that you don't have the authority to have, that's called theft, right?

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So God owns everything. And when we think about dominion at a basic level, dominion is the authority that God has delegated to man that man can use to exercise power over the creation.

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And so what have we been given dominion over is one of the big questions that has to be considered.

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And I think when people recoil at hearing the term dominion, oftentimes it's because they misunderstand what the term means.

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And so we talk about dominion, again, it's authority. And the exercise of dominion is the use of that authority to use power.

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And so the power to control things, to govern things, and we realize that God owns everything.

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So that issue of, you know, what do we have lawful authority to use and exercise power over?

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And of course, one of the reasons that immediately comes to mind where many leftists get infuriated over this concept is when we start to discuss man's mandate to have dominion over creation or the mandate to man.

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And so you have environmentalists and perhaps even some evangelicals who are environmentalists.

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And I'm not against environmentalism, but when it's taken to the extreme where the creature is worshipped rather than God and where creation, the wildlife, animals, plant life, and so on have a priority over the benefits of humankind, that's where it gets into lunacy and destructive worldviews.

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But am I making sense there? Absolutely. And I agree with you. And I think you're saying the word environmentalism.

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It's sort of like, well, if by environmentalism we mean we need to exercise our dominion to effectively use and preserve the value of resources that God has given to us and even increase their value, then sure.

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But if by environmentalism we mean do we think that animals have certain rights that humans have to respect?

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No. The only thing that we need to worry about is God's law there. So you don't want to have unnecessary harm of animals where you're just being cruel to them.

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The Bible says that the righteous man is kind even to his beast, but that the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

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And so we don't want to just like, for example, hurt animals, but we can kill animals to eat them, and we can make use of them, and we can use animals for labor and all that.

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And so that's a part of the dominion mandate is that. And so that idea that we don't worship the environment, we don't serve the environment, the environment is for man.

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And I think that that distinction, that we want to be good stewards, but being good stewards means making use of the dominion to the glory of God, not serving the environment as though it were somehow a thing that we owe service to.

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Amen. And we should never forget that God commanded in the

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Hebrew Scriptures that even the animals were to have a Sabbath rest and were not to be forced to labor on the

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Sabbath. And one interesting thing that I always find fascinating is, and in fact,

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I don't think I've ever heard anybody in a sermon or otherwise bring up this, when they talk about Nathan the prophet revealing to David his crimes of adultery and having

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Bathsheba's husband Uriah the Hittite murdered on the battlefield, when

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Nathan brings up the story of the man who has a lamb that he is raising as if it was his child, and it would eat right at his table with him and so on.

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And then the rich man steals that lamb and kills it and cooks it for guests that he's having over his home.

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When David is horrified by that story, Nathan says, you are the man.

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And I find it interesting because it does two things at the same time.

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It not only, I think, uses the illustration of an animal that is being wrongly treated because it was not the possession of the person who killed it and cooked it, and also revealed that the man loved this lamb as a pet, proving that the typical instinctive reaction to an animal being treated cruelly is almost universal, unless you're a complete sadist of some kind.

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And it was therefore, Nathan knew that that story would raise the ire of David and raise anger up in his heart and mind, not realizing that the story was supposed to picture him at first.

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But it also shows you how David was more concerned over an animal than the human life of Uriah the

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Hittite. So, I just thought I'd throw that out there because I've never heard anybody address that aspect of the story in a sermon or elsewhere.

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Yeah, I think that the fact that there's this interesting presentation of a pet, like you said,

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I think that's one of the great things that you just expressed is that there's this kind of pet relationship. And that seems to be sort of an example, the fact, the kindness towards some animal in a way, where it is a pet, it's not just for utility, but it's the pleasure of being able to simply treat something kindly and to enjoy its favorable disposition toward us.

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And that's sort of a part of the creature comforts of life is this ability to train and care for animals in such a way as to simply be sort of an ornament and a part of the ornamentation of our life.

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And I think that idea that there's a prize animal, so to speak. And so, the response that David gives is for the guy to be put to death and for the property to be restored fourfold in terms of four lambs to replace the lamb that was taken.

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And that's in 2 Samuel 12 verses 5 and 6. And so, the property aspect is dealt with, with the fact that he demands that the man restore fourfold.

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But then, why execute the man? I think the idea is this guy has acted with premeditation in a cruel way to oppress the poor.

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And so, it's sort of an indicator that this guy is a recidivist criminal. And so, this principle, here's a recidivist criminal.

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He is cruel. He is oppressing the poor, using his power to abuse the poor man, take his pet.

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And so, there's the property element as well as the sort of oppression and the recidivism there. And so,

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David's response, and you mentioned the fact that David has more compassion about this animal and about the man having his lamb taken.

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But in comparison, he has stolen a wife, which is far more valuable, and then also has not only done that, but then also taken away the man's life in the murdering of him.

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So, that condemnation of himself is such a powerful thing. And God is amazing in the way that he traps us in our own consciences to show our inexcusability.

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And I think that that story that you gave is such a powerful one for showing us the responsibility we have.

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And David having authority as a king, he had dominion, he had authority in a special way in one of the four institutions that God has granted dominion in.

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And one of those is the state. And that's the last one to be instituted. And so, when we think about the origination of dominion, the first giving of dominion goes all the way back to Genesis 1.

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And so, at the end of chapter 1 of Genesis, we have this statement that God has made man in his image, which is rationality.

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But then furthermore, not that dominion is a part of the image, but dominion is based on the fact that man is rational.

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So, you can't have dominion. You can't exercise authority unless you are rational.

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And so, animals, for example, can't really have dominion. They can't have authority. They're not rational beings.

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They can't exercise a rational rule. And so, when we get to Genesis 1, verse 26, it says,

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Let them, let man, have dominion. And then it lists all the animals. It says, over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle.

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And it talks about being over the earth and over all the creeping things. And so, this is followed by a command for kind of a goal.

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And that is verse 28. It says, Then God blessed them and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

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Have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

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So, our rule over the beasts is in order to fill the earth and to subdue it.

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And so, the subduing of the earth is the exercise of this dominion grant. And that dominion grant is a grant where we are supposed to make use of the earth and everything in it.

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And we're supposed to use the creation in order to increase the number of humans in the earth and make the earth a habitation suitable for humanity.

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So, habitat for humanity, you might say, is sort of, you know, that mission. And then furthermore, we are supposed to fill the earth with humans, with this subdued habitat.

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But the filling of the earth is in order that man, as the image of God, that the image of God would fill the earth.

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And that image of God, when properly formed, includes the knowledge of God. And so, when we have total, when we have the corruption of our natures from the fall, there's a corruption of the image, and we're being renewed after the image of Christ in knowledge, holiness, and righteousness.

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And so, the knowledge of God fills the earth as the waters cover the sea, as people fill the earth, and as those people are taught the knowledge of God.

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And so, dominion before the fall was given for the filling of the earth with humans and the filling of those humans with the knowledge of God.

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And that would be how God's glory fills the earth. And that can be manifested also in terms of the way that man orders the physical creation.

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And we see that, for example, in the book of Zechariah. It talks about how even the bells that are on beasts, like a horse might have a bell on it so you can hear it if it gets away, or cattle might, and they're going to say,

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Holy unto the Lord. And that's what would be written on, for example, the turban of the high priest in the temple in the old covenant era.

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And so, the idea that there's going to be a moral rule, a moral reign, a dominion exercise that takes things out in extraordinary detail as human dominion and economic capabilities and knowledge increases so that we can see the law of God imposed on everything.

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So, everything, every little piece of culture manifests the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ in the earth.

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And so, that's what dominion's goal is, is to show, to display the glory of God in human culture as we rule nature, right?

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So, we rule the natural order and we have sort of the garden get expanded out to replace wilderness.

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And we also see the garden advanced to become city. So, when we get to the book of Revelation, you have the heavenly

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Jerusalem as a sort of garden city. And so, we want to go from a small plot of garden to garden filling the earth, and from garden to garden city.

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So, there's this beautiful artifice and nature in harmony for man's habitat so that God can be known throughout the earth and the knowledge of God fills man and so that there is a depth and breadth of the knowledge of God and that's manifested in the artifacts where culture is.

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These little captured points, these artifacts of culture, where there's a display of God's glory with the word written on it and with the beauty of it and the excellency of it, all down to the little trinkets like the bells on animals so that you can hear them when they walk too far away.

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Well, we have to go to our first commercial break. If anybody wants to join us with a question of your own, once again, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

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Don't go away, we'll be right back. Hello, I'm Phil Johnson, Executive Director of Grace to You with John McArthur.

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That's RareDocTraders .com. Puritan Reformed is a

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Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church. We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in Scripture alone.

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Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image -bearing prophets, priests, and kings.

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We teach families to worship together as families. Puritan is committed to teaching the whole counsel of God so that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

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Christ. This is Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Join us in the glorious cause of advancing Christ's crown and covenant over the kings of the earth.

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So please go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with David Reese, pastor of Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and CEO of Armored Republic.

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We are discussing Dominion, and if you have a question for Pastor Reese, send it to ChrisArnson at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Always give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you disagree with your own pastors or your own congregation or denomination over something that we're addressing today, and you obviously don't want to bring attention to your identity at this point in time, or something else that would compel you to remain anonymous.

32:42

But please, if it's just general, the question, if it's just a general question, please give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence.

32:49

And before I go to any listener questions, Pastor David, if you could continue with some of these aspects of Dominion that you want to highlight in the discussion today.

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Absolutely. Thanks, Chris. So the assumption of continuity is one of the things you brought up, that when we look at the

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Scriptures, should we look at the Scriptures and say, every time something new is said or when there's any transition point, should we just assume that everything that was said before is now ended?

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Or do we realize that there's certain things that carry through? And so what I want to posit for an important part of how we interpret the

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Scriptures is that when God gives a command, if God says jump, we keep jumping until He says stop.

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And so the idea that He has given us authority over the earth and over the animals and over the physical creation and that somehow has ended would rely upon either a teaching of Scripture that that has stopped, or it would rely upon an assumption that somehow the powers granted to Adam were taken away.

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And so when we look at the grant of authority, this is done in that first grant of authority covenant that God gives to Adam in the garden.

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But what we see is actually, there's this sort of continual adding of authority that is given throughout time.

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And the authority that we have in the new covenant is greater than the authority that was given in the old covenant.

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And so this kind of constructing that occurs when we see in the garden in the covenant of works that's given where Adam is given authority, we then see the first giving of the gospel in Genesis 3, that there is a giving of authority that in terms of how to worship

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God properly in that context. We then see, for example, Noah being given authority in the state.

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So we have the individual, the household, the church and the state are the four institutions that where God gives authority.

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And we see the creation of the household that's given and we have marriage being created in Genesis 2 when there's the giving of Eve to Adam.

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We also see that implicitly in Genesis 1 that there's male and female. And so we have this grant of authority to the individual, grant of authority to the household.

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We have grant of authority to the church and then we have the grant of authority to the state. And all of those things are places where we see authority given.

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And so what I wanna emphasize is individual rule and household rule is where so much power and influence occurs.

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And everybody wants to talk about the state and the civil authority, and everybody wants to focus on that, but there's a real diminishing of the authority of the church, the household and the individual.

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And so I wanna emphasize that dominion is principally about this managerial authority that God has given to us to manage ourselves and to manage things around us.

35:49

And so dominion, you could also just kind of talk about the sense of the management authority or the stewardship authority that's been given.

35:57

And so I wanna encourage the Christian listener that the image of God is rationality and that manifests itself in knowledge, holiness, and righteousness.

36:08

And so we wanna have good thought content, knowledge. We wanna have good goals, holiness.

36:13

And we wanna have good choices, righteousness. And so the law of God teaches us how to exercise dominion well.

36:22

And when we pray the Lord's prayer, the Lord's prayer, we pray, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

36:29

And the leading not into temptation is we're asking God to help us to put our lives in order, the world around us in order, our time, our bodies, the property that we possess, the skill development we have, this idea that we're removing temptations and instead setting things up so that we have encouragements to do what's good.

36:49

And we pray that God would deliver us from evil. We're asking him to remove the power of sin as well as the rule of Satan.

36:56

If we were bound underneath slavery to Satan, we'd be asking that we would be removed from that and also from the world, the oppression of the world.

37:07

And so this idea that we manage ourselves well. And so I wanna point people to this idea that we have been given a management mandate.

37:15

We've been given a dominion mandate to manage ourselves and our households well. And we look at the law of God and it teaches us about how to govern our minds, how to govern our bodies, how to govern our relationships and all that kind of stuff.

37:28

And one simple example, when we think about time, time, we are in the very creation.

37:35

God has six days of working and then rests and he gives a blessing and calls that day holy.

37:43

And so he gives this example of rest and then in the 10 commandments, there's the fourth commandment with the commandment to rest appealing back to that example.

37:53

And there's this idea that we have six days to work on. And so in a basic time structure, one of the ways, one of the management keys that God has given to us to rule ourselves and to rule things around us well, including the people who are under our authority is to recognize that we should find six days for our ordinary work and recreation and we should schedule that out and we need to devote one out of seven days, the

38:16

Lord's day in the new covenant era, the first day of the week. We devote that to the people of God, to ministry, to the worship of God, to works of necessity and mercy.

38:26

And so that focus of time is one of the key elements for exercising our dominion, knowing that the

38:33

Lord has shown us how to pattern time. And so this structure to realize that we have six days for our ordinary dominion work and that one day for that rest and the focusing of the feasting on the word of God is key for us to know how to rule ourselves and to rule our time.

38:51

And so I wanna suggest the productivity systems that ignore that are going against the law and order of God. And so we look at the first four commandments and the first commandment teaches us what we should worship, that there's no other gods that we should have but the true

39:04

God. But it also shows us the goal of glorifying God as the highest good. The second commandment says to take the means that God has appointed for his worship and to use those so we can order our minds by them.

39:16

We should use the word and not look at idols to get knowledge of God, for example. And the third commandment is about the proper attitude that we use his name in a way that encourages our affections to be properly ordered.

39:28

And so there's this setting of our affections properly and then the ordering of our time.

39:33

And the fourth commandment, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy, work six days, rest one. And that idea, those first four commandments help us to understand how to direct ourselves on the key purpose of glorifying

39:45

God, knowing what we're to worship, how we're to worship, with what attitudes that our affections are properly shaped and then forming of time.

39:52

And when we look at the six days besides the Lord's day as days for dominion, ordinary dominion work, and we think about our recreation as being a part of that, it helps us to think about how to properly set in place the rest of the rhythms there.

40:05

And God has given us morning and evening. He's given to us night as a divider of days so we can also see things.

40:12

And so part of our creatureliness in terms of what we're supposed to manage is to recognize that we have to number our days and realize the limits that we have in terms of the resources that are available to us.

40:24

And time is the great limiter there. And how we properly order the division of our time so that we can have proper proportions is something that God gives us wisdom that Christians have that the world does not.

40:36

It makes it so that we can better manage ourselves. And he gives promises, for example, in the book of Isaiah, that if we call the

40:42

Sabbath a delight, that we will ride the high places of the earth. In other words, that we will be given increased dominion.

40:50

And so this idea of a increase of dominion that we might think, oh, if we have one day devoted to the rest to worship

40:57

God, then we're gonna have less days than other people to do the stuff that we wanna do and the stuff that we need to rule the world.

41:03

And God says, no, take this time, seek first the kingdom of God and God's righteousness imputed to us,

41:09

Christ's righteousness imputed to us by faith alone, and make that the priority. And then he gives the other blessings.

41:17

And so that's one of the key principles of dominion I wanna give is that everybody understands that we have been given authority in order to glorify

41:23

God and setting our time in proper order and accepting the rhythms of morning and evening, accepting the rhythm of the

41:29

Sabbath and using worship on the Sabbath and the idea of private worship in the morning and household worship in the evening, or you can flip those so you have the day bookended by the worship of God.

41:41

Those are the key things that set the rhythm of life and make it so that then we can devote our labor in between those worships to God for his glory.

41:50

Okay, we do have a listener named Goldie in Dana Point, California.

41:57

And Goldie asks, I hope this is not too much off topic, but I was wondering what the difference is between theonomy and Christian reconstruction and what has been called dominion theology.

42:16

Is there a difference and do you espouse any of these ideologies? Yeah, so that's a great question.

42:24

So dominion theology is normally where you take the dominion mandate and somehow include in the original dominion mandate back in Genesis chapter one, the one that we read earlier on.

42:36

And it's very plain that that text gives man authority over the animals and over the space and over the physical matter, but it does not grant any authority over other human beings.

42:47

And so when some people try to take the dominion mandate and turn it into a mandate for Christians to rule over non -Christians, which is not contained in that passage.

42:57

In fact, that passage back in Genesis one has no grant of authority of any human being over any other human being.

43:04

The closest thing you could find to any sort of grant of authority there would be implicit in the nature of property where you could, by voluntary exchange, hire people to do work.

43:13

And if they accept the money by voluntary exchange, then they'd be a wage servant and they would be able to exchange their time for work, which is a sort of submission.

43:22

But there's a, but that's different. That's a voluntary exchange. We're used to that in kind of the capitalist order that's established by the eighth commandment.

43:30

On the other hand, the assertion that the dominion mandate gives human beings authority over other human beings, that's wrong from that text.

43:38

But we do see that there are grants of authority in the household later on in Genesis two. And we see in the church, we see the first excommunication that occurs, for example, in Genesis four.

43:49

And then we see the state with the use of the sword in Genesis nine. And so when we have those three institutions, the household, the church, and the state, we see that there is some sort of dominion.

44:00

There's an authority granted of some human beings over other human beings, but it's not on the mere basis of being a

44:05

Christian. And so what we need to understand is that lawful authorities in those institutions is something that is a grant of authority.

44:14

It's a grant of dominion, but dominion theology is typically trying to lump all of those institutions back into the dominion mandate back in Genesis one.

44:25

So I think that's a significant error because what you end up doing is you end up treating subjects like property. You end up treating sons and daughters and wives as sort of property.

44:33

And in the church, a pastor might be tempted to treat the congregants like property, as opposed to a very careful granting of authority in each of the institutions distinctly.

44:45

So when we talk about theonomy, theonomy is the combination of two words, theos, which means God in Greek, and namos, which means law.

44:52

And theonomy is God's law. It's normally contrasted with autonomy, which is autos, self, and namos, law.

45:00

So a law unto yourself. And what happened in the garden when Satan tempted Eve is he said, hey, you can eat the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and you'll be as God.

45:07

You'll be a law unto yourself. In other words, you'll be the definer of what's good and evil as opposed to the creature who's subject to the definer of good and evil, which is

45:15

God. And so theonomy is an assertion of the authority of God. And typically, it would be applied to every area of life, all the institutions.

45:24

But typically, when we say theonomy, people are talking about the application of law to the state.

45:30

So God's revealed law to the state. And then you're gonna argue over the details. Now, I believe that Caesar is subject to Christ.

45:37

And so I believe that the law of God is what grants Caesar authority and what defines

45:42

Caesar's authority, and that when Caesar goes beyond what Christ has given him authority to do, that he is a usurper, and rather than a minister of Christ, he's a rebel.

45:51

And so I believe in the limitation of the state based upon the law of God, and that the Old Testament gives us principles of justice that are applicable to every nation and not just Israel.

46:01

So that's typically how it would be called, the principle of general equity, where the law of God has principles for every nation.

46:08

And so sometimes that might just be called theonomy or general equity principle or general equity theonomy, whatever you wanna call that.

46:14

So I am certainly that. And then as far as reconstruction, typically you're gonna say, hey, reconstruction is a view that has sort of this view of the covenant institutions as being things that need to be reformed or rebuilt, reconstructed, according to the law of God.

46:29

And there are gonna be different views of how that should be done. But on a basic level, yeah, I absolutely agree that all the institutions, the individual, the household, the church, and the state should all be reformed, reconstructed in accordance with the commandments that God has given as opposed to some sort of, you know, will of man or the general will of the population to make them after the image of man.

46:51

Instead, all the institutions are given and defined by God that have actual authority. Everything else is a voluntary association that people can leave whenever they want.

47:00

But a household is established by a covenant, and you shouldn't just divorce your spouse without just cause, and you shouldn't disinherit children without just cause, and all that kind of stuff.

47:09

And the same with the church, you shouldn't kick people out without just cause, and with the state, you shouldn't exercise criminal penalties without just cause.

47:15

So these aren't just voluntary associations. Those are covenant institutions with real authority that people don't just, you know, join voluntarily and leave voluntarily.

47:24

They have duties where they're bound to each other unless there's just cause for separation. And so that would be sort of the way that we might look at those terms in terms of dominion, dominion theology, theonomy, and also reconstruction.

47:38

And hopefully, those definitions help to make the connections between them clear. And I would typically try to avoid the label dominion theology because I think it's the most likely to be viewed in a way that's misunderstood and is most likely to be associated with a view that men inherently have authority over other men as opposed to viewing a theonomic and reconstructionist type of viewpoint where you're saying that, hey, we have institutional authority as defined by God's law in the correct places, and those have limits, and we need to reform them according to the word of God alone.

48:11

Amen. And by the way, folks, there are quite a number of my listeners who think that I am a theonomist because I have many theonomists on my program that I love interviewing.

48:24

I'm studying through the issue, but I am not currently a theonomist.

48:29

But the thing that angers me is that there are so many non -theonomists out there, even amongst

48:36

Reformed Christians, who really slander theonomists because they're speaking without knowledge, they're inaccurately presuming certain things about theonomists that no theonomist is saying, even to the point where some, even amongst our

48:57

Reformed brethren, accuse theonomists of somehow salvation by law -keeping, and some of those same accusations would be hurled against anybody believing in covenant theology in general, and these are slanderous, false descriptions, and I have no problem with brothers in Christ disagreeing and critiquing things, but you've got to use truth when you do these things.

49:25

I have dispensationalists on this program, I have amillennialists on this program, I have postmillennialists on this program, and when we disagree with one another, we are never to bear false witness against anyone, so we have to make sure that we are not doing that.

49:44

Now, just out of curiosity, before we go to the midway break, would the Dominion theology that you described, over which you disagree, would that be the same kind of Dominion theology that many of us heard about in the 80s and 90s, maybe specifically, that a lot of Pentecostals were beginning to embrace?

50:07

I believe that some have identified Pat Robertson with Dominion theology, but if you could, if you have any knowledge of that area, give your two cents on that.

50:19

Yeah, so my understanding is that the kind of popular use of the term was not really all that well defined, and sometimes it would sort of just be, hey,

50:31

Dominion theology means we need to exercise Dominion and build godly culture. In other places it might be, hey, we need to use godly, we need to use authority over people who aren't

50:44

Christian just because they're not Christian, which I disagree with. And what we need to do is, and you might even call down like, hey, there might be a mixture sometimes with something like a sort of Pentecostal calling of supernatural powers, or you might have sort of this kind of like word of faith type of mixture in where you claim to have the power by calling on something to make it happen, or calling on God to kind of destroy your enemies or whatever.

51:12

It's kind of mixed in sometimes with implications and other things. And so I think it's a proper use of the implications in the

51:18

Psalms, but we don't know if a person is elect or reprobate, and so we call in general sense for God to cause people to repent or to defeat them, right?

51:26

And so one or the other, we leave it to God, and that's generally how that's to be dealt with. And so when we look at dominion theology in the form that I was talking about, for example,

51:34

Gary North has a commentary where he talks about Joseph exercising authority over the

51:40

Egyptians and taking their property with the dream with Pharaoh and everything, talking about that kind of imposition of the state authority there, and he justified it on the grounds that the people were pagan.

51:50

And so I don't think that's legitimate. I think the state has to respect people's rights, whether they are pagan or whether they're

51:56

Christian. And so excessive taxation is unlawful for a Christian government to impose on non -Christians, for example.

52:04

So there are God -given rights on image bearers that the state has a duty to protect. And so that would be an example in that commentary that Gary North had put out where he talked about Joseph, and I can't remember the exact book, but I could find it.

52:17

But anyway, so that's an example of what I'm talking about that I would disagree with as an application there.

52:25

Okay, we are going to our midway break right now, and as always, folks, please be patient with us when we go to our midway break, especially because it is a little longer than the other breaks because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1

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and put I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in your questions to Pastor David Reese on Dominion.

01:10:41

That's chrisarnson at gmail .com and it was just occurring to me, Pastor David, that non -Christians and even anti -Christians who are leftists, if they were to dare scoff at your embracing what is known as Christian Reconstructionism, they are all

01:11:09

Reconstructionists, but of a sinister kind. They definitely want to reconstruct every realm of humanity and society that is built upon a leftist tyranny.

01:11:27

They want to enforce their worldview on people. They want to really remove freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and so on.

01:11:39

So, isn't this a bit of hypocrisy going on here when you have leftists decrying any

01:11:48

Christian who is a Reconstructionist? Yeah, I think that's a great point, Chris.

01:11:53

I think that one of the issues is frankly just, what's the blueprint we're following in terms of the type of society we're trying to build?

01:12:00

Are we following the blueprints that are given to us by God and His Word? Are we following the blueprints that come out of some humanist's mind?

01:12:07

The word reconstruct, as opposed to construct, kind of suggests that maybe there's a pattern that has been at various times in its proper order to some extent and then we're trying to get it back to that or tear down something that's bad and then build something new.

01:12:22

I think the Christian view, we're supposed to tear down things that raise themselves up against the knowledge of God and then rebuild, reconstruct after the pattern that's revealed in the

01:12:35

Word of God. That's what our duty is. And so, if you think the Bible teaches you the way that the social institutions are supposed to be ordered and you want to see those things built in that way, whether it's just your own household, your own church, your own civil society, all of them together, that would be a type of reconstructing according to a pattern and if God has given us a pattern, if He's revealed a pattern in His Word, and well, then why wouldn't we want to adopt that wisdom?

01:13:05

And so, do we think we can come up with a better blueprint than the one that God has revealed in His Word?

01:13:11

And so, I think that that's kind of the key thing I'd want to communicate about that. And I think, unless you have something else you want to jump in first on,

01:13:18

I'd love to be able to explain how the second table of the law, the fifth through tenth commandments relate to kind of a dominion and instruction to help us to think about how to order things well.

01:13:30

Oh, definitely. Go ahead. So, when we talked before about the first table, we talked also about the individual a lot and seeing your soul kind of reordered according to the

01:13:40

Word of God, having your affections set into proper place, having your choices be rightly ordered.

01:13:48

The next thing is, when we start to think about other institutions beyond the individual, for example, the household is the most basic institution beyond the individual.

01:13:57

And the fifth commandment gives us the view of authority, honor your father and mother, and the historic reformed view has been the fifth commandment represents also a general duty to honor legitimate authority in general.

01:14:08

And you can find proof texts for that in support of that in the Westminster Standards, for example. But just, when we think about this idea of honoring legitimate authority, there's a promise of long life there.

01:14:19

Now, that doesn't mean in every particular case that it's like a mechanistic thing, but there's a general tendency, it's a proverbial connection to this idea that if you honor legitimate authority, it tends towards peace and prosperity and longer life.

01:14:33

And so, if you are a son who honors your parents, you're going to tend towards living longer and you're going to tend towards having a more prosperous condition.

01:14:43

If you're a church man who honors your legitimate elders, for example, in the church, it's going to tend towards that as well.

01:14:49

And the same with citizens that honor legitimate authority in the state. And so, honoring those in authority properly.

01:14:56

But the other thing is, the Fifth Commandment teaches duties to those who are in authority, and it uses the language of parents because it's important that those in authority treat those under their authority with care and love.

01:15:08

And so, the language of father and mother encourages a greater desire to serve those in authority, but for those who are in authority also to serve those who are under their authority.

01:15:17

There's a mutuality of care there. And so, recognizing this, and I want to encourage everybody to think about the fact that the household is a place where there is significant authority.

01:15:27

Husbands are to lead their wives, and they are the leader as the husband, but the wife is the queen of the estate.

01:15:34

The husband's the king, and the wife is the queen, and they are master and mistress over the property.

01:15:41

And they together serve as those who should govern others, and that includes teaching children and any servants or employees how to do things well in a way that honors the

01:15:54

Lord on the estate. And as a business owner, for example, it's been my goal to be careful to seek to apply the

01:15:59

Word of God to my business. And I think that a lot of Christians fail to understand the way in which they need to see that their business is not a part of the state.

01:16:10

The HR department that teaches you how to figure out how to properly apply DEI initiatives or whatever, that's not how you want things to be run.

01:16:19

You should think of more in terms of, how could I get a chaplain to help with things?

01:16:24

If you have multiple employees, you want an HR department that's more like a chaplaincy. And so this idea that you are concerned to see your own household put in good order where you and your wife are ruling well together, she is helping you in the dominion work, she's made as your helpmate and you are to work together as king and queen of the estate to manage and build up the property and you use that and you're caring for your children and they are heirs and your goal is to fill them with knowledge that you might have wise heirs and have the joy of seeing your children walk in the truth.

01:16:59

And that will also nourish your own heart, it will give you joy, it will increase your life to see your heirs be godly and wise is something that is life -giving.

01:17:09

And so this idea that we are called to pass on a heritage of wealth but also a heritage of wisdom and so I want to encourage those, everyone to realize the level of authority they have in the household and to view their estate, their property, their businesses, any of that as a part of their household and so the exercise of dominion, you work together in a household to build up that estate.

01:17:36

Now the sixth commandment has to do with the exercise of power and the seventh commandment has to do with pleasure and the eighth commandment has to do with money.

01:17:43

And we're told throughout the scriptures there's this danger of worshiping the false gods of power pleasure and money. For example, the kings of Israel were warned don't multiply horses and chariots, in other words don't multiply imperial power, don't multiply wives, so pleasure -seeking in terms of being a womanizer, and also don't be one who multiplies gold, don't use your authority to extract wealth from your people kind of endlessly and turn the country into a tax farm.

01:18:11

On the same token, we see in the qualifications of elders in the church that they're told that they need to not be bullies, which is about using power to domineer people, that they need to be not enslaved to wine, which is about not being enslaved to pleasure, and that they need to not be concerned with filthy gain, or in other words, covetous gain, greedy gain, gaining through dishonest means, or being a lover of money.

01:18:35

And so it's the same thing, it's the same warning as power, pleasure, and money, which are these false gods that are so tempting.

01:18:42

And you see those emphasized throughout the book of Proverbs, for example. And so the sixth commandment gives us instruction about the proper use of power and the preservation of life, the seventh commandment about the proper use of pleasures in their moderate usage in their proper places, so for example, sex inside of marriage, and if you're, you know, gluttony and drunkenness are also typically put underneath the seventh commandment as categories of sin that are destructive to your reasonable government of yourself, and the disorder of pleasure -seeking as your god.

01:19:10

Now, furthermore, with money, the eighth commandment is about, you know, not stealing, but instead, you know, the apostle Paul says, don't steal, instead work with your hands that you might have something to give others.

01:19:20

So hospitality, generosity, these are things that are possible because of the fact that somebody's working, and so dominion includes the pursuit of money, not inordinately, but in the proper order, and so six days are meant for our encouragement of our growth of our state, and so forth, and then we have one day that's devoted to the growth of knowledge.

01:19:38

Now, we should be worshiping God morning and evening every day, and we should have the Sabbath for a day, it's a feast day of the word, but this idea that we have to do work with dominion, and we then build up resources and use it for good, that includes, you know, the tithe, and freewill giving to bless the church and to see the knowledge of God spread.

01:19:58

So, the ninth commandment talks about truth and reputation, right? We don't bear false witness against our neighbor, and that's about truth, and it's also about reputation, and reputation is very valuable, and doing work gives reputation, and so we see all these things that the law of God is so wise that it covers all these things that teach us how to raise ourselves in honor and dominion and increase resources and usefulness, and the tenth commandment is about being content with God as the good, and content with what he's given as opposed to a discontent and envy and this sort of chasing down of things like pleasure, power, money, or reputation.

01:20:33

You're going to honor and try to take authority through unjust ways. So, contentedness prevents us from chasing after those other things and makes us so that we can give attention to what ought to be done.

01:20:45

So often, the reason we don't do useful things is because we fill our time with idleness because we think that idleness will allow us to have pleasure, to have fun, to play games or whatever else, and the other thing that we tend to do with that idleness is we find we think we're going to go sit down and do something good, and then we find that our own thoughts are a little bit painful, and we're discontent with that, and rather than thinking seriously to solve serious problems and looking to God for our joy and praying for him to relieve us of difficulty and give us strength to be able to push through, we can't sit in a room alone to think and pray.

01:21:18

Instead, we need to just run out and find something to do to distract ourselves. So amusement that we seek to fill our time with amusement, and that word amusement is about not thinking.

01:21:28

A museum is a place where you go to muse. An amusement park is a place you go to not muse.

01:21:34

Amuse, A means not. And so that idea of not thinking, we need to avoid just amusing ourselves.

01:21:41

Lawful recreations are things that encourage us to be refreshed and to be thankful to God and to be thoughtful about things and to be restored to go do good work.

01:21:52

Unlawful recreations are things that distract us, waste our time, we consume our energy and strength, chasing down other things, and that all harms dominion.

01:22:01

And so these principles from the law of God teach us about dominion so that we can properly fill our place, and the household is the domain where the division of labor exists so that we can split up work and do things well.

01:22:14

So I want to encourage men to view themselves as managers of their homes and their wives to view themselves as managers of the home and the household so they can together build the estate, spread wisdom, bring their children along and doing work.

01:22:28

And some of the practical ways that I've done this, for example, in my own life, is I have children,

01:22:33

I have six children, and three of them work in one of my businesses. Now, they started out just learning stuff and spending time kind of following me around, assisting with some stuff.

01:22:41

We did homeschooling so we could make that happen. And spending time learning skills and then taking over real responsibilities.

01:22:49

And so that process of finding out how to do that, that begins at home with helping mom, helping to deal with chores, fathers showing their children how to do things, and at first it takes more time, but pretty quickly the children become time savers.

01:23:03

And if you work with your children, there's three things you do to build the relationship, to cooperate together. You work together, you worship together, and you do recreation together to build relationship and enjoying what

01:23:13

God has given. So those are serious, practical ways that really encourage everybody to think about the law of God and think about the relationships they need to order in their household to accomplish a lot of dominion together.

01:23:22

So I got more than I can go through there, but I don't know how you're doing with time, Chris. Well, you have about you have at least 15 minutes if you want to continue.

01:23:36

Great. So what I want to point out to people is also here when we think about holiness, it's partly about relationship building and dominion, you know, who you work with.

01:23:48

There's so much of life where we can spend our time with people that are, it's a waste. And we can give our energy and attention in a wasteful way, but building relationships that really matter are going to be defined for us by the covenant institutions.

01:24:02

And so you think about the household, again, you're the master of the estate, your husband and your father, and that's where you as a man are in your household.

01:24:11

And the wife is the mistress of the estate. She is the wife, and she is also the mother, right?

01:24:18

And so those are offices, those are stations of authority. And so focus your time and your efforts towards your children.

01:24:25

There's this prophecy about what John the Baptist would accomplish in Malachi, and it said that he would turn the hearts of the children to the fathers and the hearts of the fathers to the children.

01:24:36

This is a part of what reforation brings. It brings attention and care, love and attention between people inside of the family unit, and the family becomes the seminary for the church and the state.

01:24:47

It's the place where little seedlings grow up to be fruitful trees that can lead in both of those.

01:24:53

And so that's a part of how dominion gets exercised in these authority spheres, is by the development of children who receive the wisdom, and they receive the resources from their parents.

01:25:06

And if you think back, you remember in Genesis, Chris, where we have the men that are called

01:25:13

Nephilim, and they're also called mighty men, and these are the result of the sons of God taking the daughters of men as wives.

01:25:24

And so these sons of God, these are from the city of God, these are believing men, and the daughters of men are the women who come from the excommunicated community, the apostate community, the city of man.

01:25:37

And so marrying an ungodly spouse results in children that were not, they didn't have their affections properly trained, and their obedience to God properly trained in childhood, and so they take all of this stuff that's built up by godly fathers, all the wealth and wisdom, and they deploy it for wickedness.

01:25:57

And so godly fathers can give a large power base to their children to go further than we've gone in our own lives.

01:26:05

And if you develop your children well, that can be one of the powerful ways that you can serve the church and honor the

01:26:11

Lord is by setting people up, having a multi generational vision. We often are very short -sighted, and I think it's very important that what we consider is the long -term dominion work that can be done, and how that works in terms of discipleship.

01:26:26

So we have the dominion mandate to make the earth a habitat fit for man, and then to fill the earth with the knowledge of God.

01:26:33

We also have the Great Commission to disciple all the nations, to baptize the nations.

01:26:39

And so the idea that every state ought to be covenanted in submission to the Lord Jesus Christ is something that's captured there in the

01:26:46

Great Commission, and is a part of the effect of when we govern ourselves well to honor the

01:26:52

Lord, when we see households put into good order, and functioning well, to be depositories of wisdom and wealth across generations, and we see men who are fit for church office where there can be discipleship, and there can be connections of relationship with other believers to do work with, and have fellowship, real fellowship, where you're working together, and there's this idea of sharing together in the work of discipleship and dominion.

01:27:17

There's the communion of the saints, where we have different gifts for the division of labor there. You can see these are building on each other to be able to accomplish more, and the state is a place where there's a restraining of evil, and also a commending of what is good, and that occurs in nations, where we've seen that occur in history in different nations, but if we can see that happen where the individual, the household, the church, and the state are all put into good order, that makes a sphere of overlapping spheres, where there's all this work together to exercise dominion effectively, and to preserve the gains that have been attained to.

01:27:52

And so that's the blessed social order, and if we think about the connection of those various institutions, and we think about their different roles properly, that helps us to deal with that.

01:28:05

But the place I want to emphasize, everybody wants to talk about how do we take over the state, and everybody wants to go kind of point fingers at the collapsing of the church.

01:28:14

You have authority over yourself and over your household. Make those things excellent.

01:28:22

You can't do that unless you know the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit gives you faith to believe it, and then causes you to yield fruit, and as you meditate on the law of God, the law of God gives you strength when it's empowered by the

01:28:40

Holy Spirit to walk the way you ought to walk. Now, you can't do that apart from the gospel. You have to know the saving news, and the law shows you your need of a

01:28:49

Savior, and it restrains your wickedness, but after you're saved, it is a light unto your feet, and it shows you the way that you should walk.

01:29:01

And so, I want people to understand that dominion, which is authority, is exercised when we use power lawfully, and the law of God shows us that blueprint of dominion, and in our own lives and in our households, we can be properly ordered in such a way that we act in a way that fits with the design that God has given, and it results in the increase of honor and reputation, it results in an increase of power, it tends towards the increase of property, it tends towards the increase of life, and it results in when you raise up a child in the way that he should go, it allows you to have these things to pass them on, that they can go further than you did in honoring the

01:29:42

Lord in this life. So, I commend every father to take this to heart if they want to see the godly dominion and have a godly ambition there, to make sure to think about it in a multi -generational way, and to rule their houses well.

01:29:55

Amen. And I don't want to take us on a rabbit trail, but I'm assuming from what you said, you do not agree with those, even amongst we who are

01:30:06

Reformed, there exists some theologians, scholars, apologists, who believe that the

01:30:15

Nephilim were angelic beings that had relations with human women, and gave birth to giants and so forth.

01:30:25

From what you said, it seems that you disagree with that theory. Yes, absolutely.

01:30:31

So, I would hold to what's typically called the Sethite view, which is when you look at Cain and Abel, Cain kills

01:30:37

Abel, so the godly line is killed there, but then Seth is appointed to replace

01:30:43

Abel, and Cain is cast out, and so you have the city of man and the city of God distinctly established there.

01:30:50

And so this is the view, for example, that Augustine explains in his City of God, and so he's talking about the distinctive society of the church, and I think that there's this desire to have the medieval kind of exciting view that, oh look, here's demons spawned.

01:31:09

But the practical reality is that the emphasis is on the importance of having a godly seed, and that goes back to Genesis 3.

01:31:19

There's this promise of the seed of the woman and the salvation coming, and so the church is established in Genesis 3.

01:31:27

In Genesis 4, you have Cain being excommunicated. You have this idea in Genesis 5 of the men from the church marrying women from the city of man, and that's where that separate society has been established, was

01:31:42

Cain being pushed out. And you have this section talking about the descendants of Cain and the various ways in which they do certain dominion work and develop arts, but the danger of the wrong affections of taking an ungodly woman as a bride.

01:31:56

Think about how much the idea of the importance of godly marriage is emphasized in the Scriptures. How often are we warned about avoiding sexual interaction with demons?

01:32:05

This is not the emphasis of Scripture. The emphasis of Scripture is far more on those institutions, and I think this is a distraction that makes us misunderstand

01:32:13

Genesis and its emphases, and the other thing is, frankly, it's not possible for procreation with demons to occur, and procreation with demons, we have human bodies, and reproduction is after our kind, and the idea that there are these demons spawn that come in.

01:32:32

Demons do not have physical bodies. They can have physical manifestations, but they don't have bodies with reproductive organs that are able to result in the formation of children.

01:32:42

They are spirits, not spirits with bodies, and furthermore, they are designed distinctly to not be able to engage in marital relationships, and so we realize that this is a pure invention and is something that makes us so that we're distracted from the consistent line of Scripture teaching us about godly children and this idea that there's a distinction of the two societies, the city of God, which is the church, and the city of man, which is the world, and so this is a warning about the attractions of the world, and I think about how much more practical that is and how much of a daily real problem that is, and the demons, the way they deal with things, is they bring in false doctrines, and they influence the world, and they influence the philosophers of the world, and they influence false teachers in the church, and so the danger of demons is false prophets and false doctrine and lying miracles and following after that.

01:33:39

That's the danger of demons. We ought not to have this fanciful view of demon spawn as the problem.

01:33:47

So in other words, I can sigh with relief that my grandmother was wrong when

01:33:52

I was a kid when she referred to me as demon spawn. Yes, she was incorrect,

01:34:00

Chris. Just using hyperbole. That was all she was doing.

01:34:06

Well, maybe one of these days we could have a debate on the program with a person who advocates the actual the other side of the definition of the

01:34:17

Nephilim and so on. That'd be kind of interesting. Yeah, that'd be fun. And we are going to our final break right now, and there are people already waiting to have their questions answered by you, but if anybody wants to see if they could get in line before we run out of time, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com

01:34:38

c -h -r -i -s a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

01:34:50

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal or private matter. We'll be right back.

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Hi, this is John Sampson, Pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona. Taking a moment of your day to talk about Chris Arnzen and the

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I know it would be a huge encouragement to Chris, if you would. All the details can be found at ironsharpensironradio .com

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where you can click support. That's ironsharpensironradio .com I've been a biblical family counselor since the early 2000s, and what

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That's P -T -L BibleRebinding .com As host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio I frequently get requests from listeners for church recommendations.

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A church I've been strongly recommending as far back as the 1980s is Grace Covenant Baptist Church in Flemington, New Jersey pastored by Alan Dunn.

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Or call them at 908 -996 -7654 That's 908 -996 -7654

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So please disregard the website that was announced in the commercial Also folks, I want to remind you that the

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That's for the law firm of Buttafuoco & Associates Please, please mention that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio We're now back with David Reese for the final segment of our discussion on Dominion and we have

01:50:50

Coral in Shiner, Texas and Coral says

01:50:56

Don't you think a part of the problem of misunderstanding Dominion is that very often people, especially if they happen to be liberal or left wing jump to the conclusion that you're justifying things like the annihilation of Buffalo from the continental

01:51:15

American soil which nearly happened over a century ago or in our modern day, things like companies dumping toxic waste into rivers, streams and lakes.

01:51:28

Aren't we supposed to have a godly stewardship over this world in which we live that God has blessed us with?

01:51:38

Yeah, that's absolutely true. So Dominion, a part of Dominion would be the requirement that we not do things that are just wasteful and that we not do things that are destructive of human life

01:51:51

For example, the law of God has things like if you dig a pit and don't cover it and somebody falls into it, you're responsible for those harms as though you had done it intentionally

01:52:01

It has things in it that teach, for example that if you were just not taking proper care with a rooftop balcony for example and you don't have a parapet around the edge, you don't have a railing essentially and somebody falls off and you've made it a space available for people that you have left it unnecessarily cared for.

01:52:24

Now, at the same time, if I were to pour water if I were to pour poison into a stream, knowing that it was going to go down, that people could be harmed by it that's sort of the same sort of thing

01:52:35

It's a digging a pit and it's leaving it uncovered And so, rather than a system of a kind of massive administrative state that tries to regulate a bunch of stuff what we need are penalties associated with harms where a person who takes action that's harmful to others gets punished for that action and their punishment repays the people they harm

01:52:56

And so we have a mixture of that with the administrative state in our time and also with the system of the adversarial system for torts where harms can be pursued

01:53:07

But sometimes the administrative state sets up regulations that make it so that there's sort of a protection against liability if harms are caused and somebody is following what the administrative state says

01:53:18

And so the law of God would teach us the principle that rather than a regulator defining that what we need to do is to deal with the principle of reasonable and foreseeable harms

01:53:29

And so that would be sort of the biblical case law system In addition to that, the destruction of animals and everything

01:53:35

One of the great problems that exists in terms of property destruction is the problem of the commons

01:53:41

And so if you have property that's owned commonly, or in other words it's socialist in its ownership where you have some sort of means of production or whatever owned by the state, there's a tendency of waste

01:53:50

The great polluters in history have been states, and so state -owned land gets polluted, and states are the great polluters of land

01:53:58

Private property is far more carefully taken care of than publicly owned land or state -owned land if you look at the history of things

01:54:06

And so what I would encourage is for people to think about the scriptures establish a free market and they have a limited state, so other ways for the adversarial system and for private ownership to be dealt with as the means of protecting land, and I would suggest that we look around and see that privately owned land is far better dealt with and better preserved and that we should think about things like the buffalo as animals to be ruled and also that we often think about species wrongly, rather than thinking about the biblical system of kinds

01:54:34

We think about things as every minor variation is its own independent thing and extinctions are the loss of something forever

01:54:41

I would suggest that the bible gives us categories that are types of things, and those things have a bunch of traits, they're sort of like Swiss army knives of beings that you can have, you know, a horse could be bred into a zebra or whatever a chihuahua can be bred into a

01:54:57

Great Dane, there are these limits of kinds, and so we don't lose species in that way, kinds are preserved across time, and they can be bred back into things, but there are sort of hard limits on the edges of how much change can occur inside of a species, and so that's the system that we have, and we should not try to be overly protective of minute details of things as though every kind of little variation is some sort of thing that has to be infinitely preserved and protected forever, so that's what

01:55:24

I would say about the environment and how the bible seems to provide solutions for it as opposed to the administrative liberal state

01:55:31

RJ in White Plains, New York wants to know how our eschatology affects our view of dominion, and if you have time, can you offer any kind of critique of the moral majority movement that seemed to have correct intentions in this area but perhaps because it was largely dispensationalist, it failed

01:55:55

Yeah, so I think eschatology, you look at pre -millennialism, you're going to tend to think that we're going to lose soon, and most pre -millennials in the

01:56:00

United States at least are dispensational and typically believe that the formation of Israel as a state is a time marker for the return of Jesus, and so you'll typically say, oh any second now,

01:56:10

Jesus is coming back, any second, any second, any second and so as a result you have very short term strategies for the deployment of capital, resources and time, and what

01:56:17

I would encourage is that we don't know when Jesus is coming back so work hard, and have long term planning, and if God interrupts your long term plans, because Jesus takes you pretty quickly here, then at least you know that you were deploying things trying to make stuff happen, and the

01:56:32

Lord will not find you idle, and so I would advise long term, multi -generational planning I obviously am not dispensational and I'm not pre -millennial, but I would say with the all -millennial view, if you have a perspective that we're kind of in God's Vietnam here and we're just going to fight around for a long time and not really win, and then

01:56:48

Jesus will come back and then we win, then I would advise you to have long term plans and say well at least in some zones there could be some reformation there could be some real significant progress so have long term planning, knowing that you're going to seek to help to advance other people, and leave it to the

01:57:02

Lord to bless it, and then if you're post -millennial, obviously you're encouraged to say hey we win, so let's be victorious, and we're going to take a while, so we're going to work on stuff hard here, so I certainly think that post -millennialism helps people to have a dominion attitude that's better, but I think you can, if you believe the law of God teaches you the good life, then

01:57:19

I would encourage you regardless of your eschatological view to seek to have a dominion view that's multi -generational in its view of faithfulness, as far as the moral majority is concerned, the moral majority

01:57:30

I think did not seek to apply God's law in its proper way in terms of looking at the general equity of the civil law, and seeking to apply it, but instead tried to limit itself in a way where it didn't have a consistent way of seeking to look at the law of God as a system

01:57:44

I think chapter 19 of the Westminster Confession gives us an excellent way of viewing it, so I would encourage people to look at that for more detail.

01:57:50

By the way, I want to quickly plug my friend Calvin Beisner, who

01:57:55

I've interviewed on this program, this is specifically involving the woman - He's awesome. Yes, he is.

01:58:01

This is specifically involving the question on stewardship. He is running the founder and national spokesman for the

01:58:15

Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. If you type in his last name in the search engine on irontreponsineradio .com

01:58:21

Beisner, B as in boy, E -I -S - N -E -R, you will get all my interviews with him.

01:58:27

I also want to remind you the website for the Puritan Reformed Church of Phoenix, Arizona is puritanphx .com

01:58:35

puritanphx .com and the website for the company where my guest is the

01:58:40

CEO Armored Republic, you can find more about them at armoredrepublic .com armoredrepublic .com

01:58:46

I want to thank everybody who listened, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater savior than you are a sinner.