Opus 2025-493: Rule Two

I recently asked someone if they knew what the first law was God laid down for human beings.  I was told that it was to have children . Oh, OK he got me on that one.  That is true.  The first thing that God laid out as a guideline for human life was to create new human life.  Later on He will give us the framework for that in marriage, but the concept of having children is very biblical.

Then you have a second law. 

Genesis 1:28 (KJV) 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.

It’s a combination of several things.  You’ll notice that it talks about replenishing, of having dominion, in a word we are to be stewards of the world we live in.  How is that going for you?  Do you litter?  Do you thoughtlessly waste?  Do you allow your pets or farm animals to go hungry and unwatered?  Do you mow your lawn?  You might think mowing your lawn has nothing to do with your spiritual condition but I would suggest that perhaps that’s what it means to subdue and have dominion.

But where this thought is going is really having to do with the whole concept of creation and man’s place in it.  You’ll notice that at the end of the chapter God looks back at everything He’s done and He doesn’t just say it’s good, He says it’s very good.  That’s better than good.  And one of the parts of that goodness is that we are commissioned to finish things off for Him.

Now I know it might go against the grain for you to think that God did not complete the job.  However, if you look at what He told Adam to do, it was to take the rough product and turn it into a finished planet.  That does not mean cut down all the trees and plant roses.  It means too carefully harvest the trees and make conditions ripe for the trees to reproduce themselves.  It might mean cleaning out the under brush.  Now at the very beginning there wouldn’t be much brush to clean out, after all God just got through with his work.  But it would accumulate.

So we are in the process of finishing off creation.  It will be a never-ending job at least until the new Jerusalem and the new Earth.  We will have a continual crop of new children to be disciplined and trained.  We will have weeds anxiously trying to run our lives.  We will have rivers that want to get out of their banks.  The challenges will go on.  God is giving us a commission.  We need to take this second law seriously.  The problem with the green movement is not that they are concerned about the environment, but that they consider the environment, which we are to subdue, as being superior to us.  They reject God and the order that he established.

There are some areas where it’s a good thing to be a legalist.

homo unius libri