Dominion and Stewardship

Welcome Prayer Song Silence

Genesis 1.26-31 March 13th 2022

Yoke is Easy

Okay . . . so the accounting from last week read:

Genesis 1:26 And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

And verse 27 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

From this we can readily see and say that Man, who God created, comes in two representations – male and female. We like to say that God is both male and female but I prefer to say that God is neither but is the source of both genders completely. And that if the idea of our being made in His image is that we have all the capacities to do (in a lesser degree) what He does – multiplying, having dominion, etc. then there is no problem with this view.

Man’s Purpose and Command

Remembering that we are going to get a more detailed account in chapter two, we now read the general assessment beginning at verse 28 which says:

28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

For a loving God to give these commands a loving God would have to equip Man with the capacities to perform them. And in this we find the distinction between Man and animals – animals can “be fruitful, and (can) multiply, and (can) replenish the earth,

But what about “subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Have you ever heard someone say something like, “yeah, I had plans to have a party at my house by my parents put the kaibash on it?” The word kawbash is the Hebrew word translated, “subdue” here in verse 28. It literally means everything from, “squashing, shutting down, conquering and subjugating, to subduing and even violating.”

These instructions become a very tenuous description in our day and age – and extremely politicizing as it really lays out a view that is looked down upon as imperialist, capitalist and ruthlessly uncaring for the world, upon its creatures and its resources. But as with all things, we have to balance this directive with the rest of scripture, including principles of respect and conservatism herein before we can take this verse and zealously apply it in the extremes of Man being plunderers.

Responsibility and Balance

For instance, in the next chapter, the more detailed description Adam's early purpose was to give care to the Garden of Eden: "And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." (Genesis 2:15)

The word dress best means to work it, and the word for keep it means to guard and protect it. Some reach out to Psalm 24:1 and suggest that what God has said to Man here in chapter one is relative to stewardship not ownership as it reads

Psalm 24:1 The earth is the LORD'S, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.

They back this up with God telling the Israelites in Leviticus 25:23:

"The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you are but guests and my foreigners."

Seeing that God himself appears to recycle dead matter in the first verses of this first chapter, I see reason for a responsible balance in these verses and not one of an extreme in either direction and believe that of all people, Christian’s should be known FIRST to be responsible, respectful and demonstrative both dominating our surroundings AND caring for them.

Provision for Man and Animals

Interestingly, where God has given to Man dominion over all the animals that He has created in verse 29-30 He describes what He has given all beasts and creations for food, (at least at this point) and says:

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. 30 And to every beast of

The Provision for All Creation

the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. It seems pretty clear that in the Garden state, all creations were made originally to be herbivores with fruit included in that term. Carnivorism doesn’t seem to be part of the economy – just yet. It is also interesting that God cares for all of his creations in what they would eat and not just human. And it seems that even the animals are as reliant upon God as Man, remembering that Job wrote

1. Job 38:41 Who provideth for the raven his food? when his young ones cry unto God, they wander for lack of meat.

Psalm 147:9 He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young ravens which cry.

And of course, we remember Jesus teaching:

Matthew 6:26 Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?

In reading this I am amazed at the love of God and how faithless I can be when it comes to worrying about how to survive in this world. Looking back over my life He has always seen to provide and yet I often neglect to see His hand and to trust that He will continue.

Man's Role and the Issue of Free Will

Of course, we have the reality of the Fall to include here, which we will get to, and how Man has abused his directive, and overstepped our bounds, and really messed up the order and ways God established here in Genesis. But more on that later.

Verse 31 says
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

Note that in this general account God says that everything that He had made was VERY good – concluding the sixth day – again, it is up to you to decide what you think “a day” is in the creation – a literal day, a minute, a billion years. And this takes us to Moses continuing with his description of the first week and describing now the seventh day – which we find in chapter two.

Remember that God has just described the creation of Man and also what Man was to do (having been created in God’s image) which was to multiply, replenish, have dominion over and to subdue the earth. So we turn to chapter 2 verses 1-3 we read:

The Completion and Rest of Creation

Genesis 2:1 Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them.

Now, as a believer, I am of the opinion that God is the author of life and the taker as well, and that in every case He gives it, and in every case He takes it away. I do not believe medical science can save someone God that wants to take nor do I believe anyone can take life that God wants to save.

Therefore, when someone dies, I believe God allows it, and when someone lives, the same. This rule of thumb crafted out of my understanding of scripture helps me cope with untimely deaths and surprising survivals. That said, I also believe, paradoxically, that we are, in fact, somehow on a two-way street here and that God allows us to contribute to our health, well-being, and longevity as well.

I have no idea how this formula works (or if it even does) but I include it because I have to believe that God is not the author of suicide. Somehow this – whether fast-acting suicide or slow-acting inch-by-inch suicide by lifestyle – somehow these things seem to have an effect in the job of God being the giver and taker of life. Again, we cannot be sure. But what I am convinced of is the freewill of human beings certainly plays a part in God giving and taking life. I mention this because God has just created human life in our biblical account and at the other book end of this Bible he will take it.

Alright . . . verse 2-3 bring us to what scripture describes as “God’s rest.” I need you to sit back and relax here (no pun intended) because a reasonable understanding of these passages comes through context. And it takes some effort to get it right –

God's Creation and Rest

2 And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.

Notice the repetitive words here and which are repeated in this chiasma:

And on the seventh day God ended –

HIS WORK which He had made

And He rested on the seventh day –

From all the work that he had made.

The Completion and Rest of Creation

Now, what had God just done according to the account? He subdued, he had dominion, he multiplied and replenished through all of His creative expressions and then last of all He ended with creating the expression of Himself in Man. Man, male and female, made in His image, made to do what God does and having all the capacities to do them. I am fascinated by the skills found in the human race – the engineering, medical, philosophical, construction, baking, cooking, crafting, and the arts. The intellect and capacities to subdue, dominate, multiply are frankly mind-blowing to me – and all originate from the One who made us in His image! Truly amazing what has been accomplished.

But now Moses teaches us here that God then rested from all his labors – which best means “He reached an end of it and there was nothing more to be done.” So again, God finished all of creation and the exclamation point, the crowning achievement of it all, was making Man in His own image, meaning making Him capable and equipped in various fashions to do what He does.

3 And God blessed (praised, saluted) the seventh day, and sanctified it: (pronounced it as clean, hallowed, holy, prepared, purified) because that in it He HAD RESTED from all his work which God created and made.

Interpretation of God's Rest

That is really interesting thing to say, isn’t it? “That because in that seventh day God rested, He blessed and sanctified it.” In other words, He blessed and sanctified that day because He chose to rest. Now, Genesis 2:2-3 is frequently used by many religious groups to show that people must keep a seventh-day Sabbath because it was established by God well before the institution of the law.

There are passages that we will come to that seem to support this BUT they were given to the Nation of Israel as God’s covenant people. I want to suggest to you right here that this is an improper application to us – and let’s take some time to explore why. In chapter 1, the writer of Genesis used the seven-day weekly cycle as an organizing outline to make an important theological point to the Nation of Israel having come out of Egyptian captivity – remember, this is the audience – a Nation that has come out of BONDAGE.

Theological Implications

The first point is that there is one God of Might (compared to the numerous pagan gods), He is the Creator of all that exists in the heavens and on earth, including the human race whom He made in His image. Again, this outline I believe was in direct response to the myths that the pagan nations had spun about how their many deities were responsible for the creation. With this as a base, Moses works through the week outline and now includes something else about this singular God from whom Man was made – he rested once everything was finished.

God rested? Why? Was he tired? I don’t think so. So for starters, note that the verse here does not say anything about a physical Sabbath-day rest that was to be observed by human beings. It’s an important observation because we do see Moses looking backward to the creation as he writes but applying it to his present audience years later.

Let me explain. At verse 24, when Moses will teach about the creation of Eve, he will add: “therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” In doing this we can see that he takes the creation narrative in hand but assigns it to the Nation of Israel hundred or even thousands of years later.

To me, if this rest was the basis for a universal Sabbath day observance I think Moses would have done the same thing by adding something like, “Therefore, because God rested, Man is to also rest on the Seventh Day forevermore,” right? But we are not given such instruction by

The Significance of Sabbath in Biblical Context

Moses. Even more to the point, if Moses wanted to make the point that God commanded the Sabbath to be a day of rest for humans since the creation, then he also fails to support this idea even in further chapters. What I mean by this is there is zero evidence that any of the great patriarchs, (from Abraham or Isaac, kept the seventh day as a “holy” day in remembrance of God resting after the creation) and this is true from Adam all the way to Moses on the Mount. Nothing about keeping or breaking a sabbath or seventh day ever mentioned – it is only mentioned once the Law is given and the Law was only given to the Nation of Israel, not the world.

However, we cannot get around Genesis 2:2-3 where Moses does tell us that God made the seventh day of creation week “holy.” What does this mean? When God makes something “holy” he sets it apart in some way for his special use or uses something He has set apart to illustrate part of his purposes. For example, the temple had a Most Holy Place which only the High Priest could enter, and only once a year. The book of Hebrews explains that the “holiness” that God ascribed to this location was to show that a true entry into his presence was not yet available.

Illustrating Rest and Holiness

And from this we can see what God set apart was to show or illustrate something. Same is true of Him resting here. And remember the audience – they were made in God’s image to do what God does AND they had just come out of . . . bondage.

Take a minute and think about these word comparisons:

Work (and) Rest Bondage (and) Rest Captivity (and) Rest Labor (and) Rest

But Genesis 2:2-3 fails to tell us what lesson we are to learn from the seventh day of creation being made “holy” (or set apart). But what we do know is that God does not become tired or need rest (if He is what scripture says He is a consuming fire, light, love, not a man, etc.) Nor is He apparently subject to time and the laws of energy and entropy. Because of these things we might believe that Moses is using a literary device here when speaking about the “rest” of God as a means to illustrate or teach something to his audience.

He has already used the seven-day week as an outline on which he hung various events in creation and by which he made some theological points for the Nation to consider relative to the false traditions they brought with them out of Egypt. It seems that Moses would then use the metaphor of God’s “rest” to make another theological assertion about who this God of Israel was, and what His purposes were for them (who He made in His image) which are in contrast to where and what they just came out from.

Again, this is fresh information to this audience and the “rest that God takes” immediately follows His creation of Man—male and female—whom God made in His own image then commanded them to do what He does by “being fruitful, and multiplying, and replenishing the earth, and subdueing it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea” – and then to rest from their labors. In other words, this might be Moses way of saying that, “All work and no rest makes Man a dull boy.”

Consequences of Disobedience

Notice, that what Moses describes here about God is a totally different picture of what the Nation had experienced over the past 400 years of their history in Egypt. Remember, at this point, the narrative of Genesis 1 is general and is applicable to God creating and then saying that “everything He did was very good.” But what will happen next, in the chronology, is the opposite of good and rest – it will be a fall, resulting in forced labor, sweat of the brow, blood, disease and deathSeparation from God—now overcome. Physical death remains, but it no longer separates us from life with God..

The notion of labor then, which is the opposite of rest, becomes an important motif in the Genesis account and to overlook it is to overlook the purpose of Moses including this here. Labor begins with the serpent, once glorious and perfect being forced to crawl around on his belly and eat dust for the rest of his days. It moves forward on Eve who in childbearing, is condemned to suffering, (through what we appropriately call, LABOR) with the Lord saying

The Burden of Labor and the Search for Rest

In Genesis 3:16:

“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.” And then in the next verse, Adam will be forced to labor in order to eat as the Lord tells him, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.”

When their firstborn son, Cain, murders Abel, his blood figuratively finds no rest, as it “cries out” from the ground (4:10). And then for his sinMissing the mark of faith and love—no punishment, just lost growth or peace., Cain will be forced to engage in backbreaking labor as the Lord tells him, “When you work the ground, it will no longer yield its crops for you” (4:12). More than this, Cain was to be a “restless wanderer on the earth.” He would have neither rest in his labor nor rest from enemies seeking to kill him because of his murder.

The Continuation of Restlessness

The “anti-rest” motif continues in Genesis. When Noah was born, a great hope was attached to his future. It was said of him, “He will comfort us in the labor and painful toil of our hands caused by the ground the Lord has cursed.” (5:29). But humanity found no rest, as Genesis 6:11 confirms because “the earth was corrupt in God’s sight and was full of violence.” At the end of the day, the only “rest” humanity could or would achieve in the face of the Fall and nature of Man was a rest in death.

Interestingly, God restated and then broadened the covenant made with Adam and Eve with Noah and in Genesis 9 we will read that He reissues his promise to neither curse the ground nor to destroy humanity despite the fact that He knew “every inclination of Man’s heart is evil from youth.” So, despite this covenant of promise given to Noah, many generations passed and humans only became more and more alienated from God. (The story of Nimrod and the Tower of Babel indicates the condition of the human race as more than corrupt).

And then God will make a covenant with Abraham as described in Genesis 12:2-3, saying: I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

Oppression and Hope of Deliverance

Then Genesis tells us the rest of the story with Abraham having Isaac, and Isaac having Jacob who too, faced hardship and toil through his father in law, Laban. Then Jacob had twelve sons. The oldest ten sold their young brother, Joseph, into slavery. During a famine, they all moved to Egypt, where the family of Jacob grew into a great nation but what did the Egyptians do? They placed the Israelites into ??? That’s right, slavery and hard bondage. In other words, nowhere on earth was anyone finding rest. Everything was toil and trouble.

Exodus 1:11-14 says, referring to how Israel suffered as slaves, saying: So they [the Egyptians] put slave masters over them [the Israelites] to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh…. The Egyptians came to dread the Israelites and worked them ruthlessly. They made their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their hard labor the Egyptians used them ruthlessly. Obviously, even God’s chosen people the Israelites were oppressed with hard and forced labor—and they had no rest for their souls.

But help was on the way, as we will read in Exodus 2:23-24: The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.

The “savior of Israel” so to speak, would be Moses, who, (according to Exodus 2:11) as a young man had seen his own people in slavery and “watched them at their hard labor.” So now, after his own exile of 40 years in the desert, the Lord appeared to him and says to him in Exodus 3:7-8: I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the Egyptians and to bring…

The Concept of Rest in Biblical Covenants

them up out of that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Moses was to tell the Israelites about their impending freedom and physical rest: and was told to say to the Israelites:

“I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people, and I will be your God.” (Exodus 6:6-7)

This promise is the first intimation of a covenant between God and Israel. It is a covenant based on God providing “freedom from slavery,” and hence “rest from unending relentless labor.” To me, the “rest” of God (mentioned in Genesis 2:2) is the end result of Godly (and therefore goodly) labor, which was not attained by humans because of the fall which created the products of slavery and endless toil.

The Promise of the Promised Land

Now a new promise (in a kind of second) Garden of Eden awaiting the Children of Israel once they escaped Egyptian bondage — and what was called “the Promised Land.” In short, the first but old covenant was a promise of physical rest to God’s people, which is illustrated in Genesis 2 in God (in whose image Man was made) openly and freely pausing (resting) after he multiplied and exercised dominion and subjection over the earth. This is Moses way of providing a template for Man made in God’s image – the right template.

We know from the Exodus story that the Egyptian Pharaoh did not want to let the Israelites go free and when told he must let God’s people go his response was to force them to work even harder. But God rescued the Israelites and brought them into the wilderness in preparation for their entering the Promised Land of freedom and rest through Him. Because that first generation failed to trust the Lord, and were not allowed to enter into that rest, so the next generation of Israelites will enter the Promised Land fittingly under the leadership of Joshua (same name as Yeshua or Jesus).

They were told to obey the covenant that had been made between the people and the Lord and all the tribes were told to help each other take possession of the land, “until the Lord gives them rest, as he has done for you.” (Joshua 1:15). We read that this promise was fulfilled when Joshua pens his final earthly words saying:

“the Lord had given Israel rest from all their enemies around them.” (Joshua 23:1).

The Sabbath as a Symbol of Rest

The high point of this physical rest and well-being for the Nation occurred during the days of King Solomon where it says in 1st Kings 4:25: “During Solomon’s lifetime Judah and Israel, from Dan to Beersheba, lived in safety, each man under his own vine and fig tree.” Now, stay with me – one of the hallmarks of the Law of Moses was an emphasis on the “rest” that God provided Israel. According to Deuteronomy 7:10-12 this included many physical blessings (which produce “rest” in peoples lives), as well as God’s merciful grace in saving the nation from extreme toil and servitude under the hand of Egypt.

All of this . . . all of this was remembered and memorialized in the religious practices of the nation and their weekly “Sabbath” was the central expression of the rest God have given them. Early Christians (who patiently waited on the Lord’s return) participated in communion. The bread and wine that they ate served to remind them “that God had saved them” through the redemptive work of Christ and they were to keep that communion until He returned to take them as promised.

The Sabbath observance for Jews served a similar purpose as a weekly reminder that God had saved them from Egyptian bondage and had blessed them abundantly – all which amounted to them finding purpose through their relationship with Him – including purposeful rest. Under the Law, the Nation began each WEEK laboring (in accordance with the command God had given Man along with the demands of the Law) and their week ENDED with this symbolic memorial.

Moses' Reminder of Liberation

Interestingly, while Moses will speak to their weekly Sabbath being tied to the first week’s rest of God after the creation, a restatement of the Sabbath command found in Deuteronomy 5:12-15, gives other reasons for this observance, where Moses writes:

“Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out.”

Sabbath Observances and Rest

Of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.” (5:15). I suggest that while the rest God takes is memorialized in all of this by the Jews' Sabbath observances, all of it pointed to the actual relational rest every individual human being can experience directly through Christ and His finished work.

The weekly rest the Jews kept under the Law was but one memorial of how God had saved the nation from Egyptian slavery and mindless toil. We forget that there were also seven yearly “rest” days (within three yearly festival seasons) that also were celebrated by “ceasing from all labors.” Beyond that, the land was also to lie idle and not be tilled every seventh year (according to Leviticus 25:1-7). This means that while the land rested, the people could also rest, because they did not need to sow or till the ground.

Year of Release

Then finally, each 50th year a “land-rest” was to be observed, which was also called “the year of release.” This is described in these directives from God to them, saying: “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each one of you is to return to his family property and each to his own clan.” In Egypt, the Israelites had neither land nor inheritance nor any liberty. Now, from the hand of the true and living God, each family was to enjoy its own parcel of ground, which was an inheritance AND the liberty to rest.

While the Promised Land was not a place of idleness and ease, there was rest from backbreaking and meaningless toil which, for 400 years, was relentlessly demanded by the Egyptians for them to perform on THEIR land and by THEIR command.

Moses and Rest

In all of this we might begin to understand why Moses may have been so keen to divide the physical creation into a six-day format and then make the seventh day a day showing God “resting.” The curse had required backbreaking toil in unyielding soil. The curse had also brought famine and disease, fighting and war. Life was anything but restful. But Moses must have seen the problem of the “curse” in retrospect and the restless sorrow it brought to all in that day and wanted to provide a better template for human life – one of joyful labor and joyful rest.

Of course, we know that when Jesus came He called Himself the Lord of the Sabbath, inviting all people “to come to Him and that He would give them rest.”

This is the point – human beings are made in God’s image – to do what God does. But in this way, we are to be free, and at liberty to labor and to rest – just as He did.

Christian Rest in Christ

The Christian's rest is solely in Christ. All who labor and are heavy laden He invited to come to Him for rest. It is not in a day but is everyday. Do we still labor? Create? Multiply? Replenish? Exercise dominion? And rule? We do if we embrace being made in His image. But we also find liberty and license in Him in doing something just as important . . . resting.

Questions/Comments Prayer