The Blessing and the Commission

Genesis 1:28 is the first recorded blessing spoken over humanity. Notice the order. God did not begin with a command. He began with a blessing. “And God blessed them...”

Before God asked anything of mankind, He blessed them, and the blessing is written down before the commission is. Favor is my word for what that blessing was, and here is why.

Six verses earlier, and the same blessing and the same words go over the creatures of the sea. So I will not build favor out of the word blessed by itself. What I can say from the page is that the blessing came first.

Then God spoke, just as throughout Genesis 1, God’s Word carried purpose, now His Word is directed to mankind, and to me everything God had spoken to creation reaches its highest point in the one who bears His image. That is how I read the progression, and Genesis does not stop and say it.

The Commission

God gives five imperatives. Be fruitful, multiply, replenish, subdue, have dominion. I call them responsibilities, and that is my word for them, but the five are there in the verse.

“Be fruitful.”, and you have just read the same words over the creatures of the sea, so the plain sense of it is bearing and multiplying. And I take it wider than that, and I will say that I am taking it wider. To me fruitfulness is the natural expression of life that comes from the Creator, and it shows in more than children.

“Multiply.”, and the very next word is replenish, or fill, so the multiplying moves toward the filling of the earth. God intended His image-bearers to fill the earth. And when I say the blessing was never meant to remain in one place, that is me putting it my own way, because Genesis says the people spread and it does not say the blessing did.

“Replenish the earth.”, and the Hebrew underneath the King James word replenish means to fill. Nothing in that word says the earth had been populated before and now needed filling again. The earth was to be filled with those who reflected God’s image and lived under His rule.

“Subdue it.”, and this is a strong word. It means to bring under, to subject, and I am not going to soften what it says. What I will not do is read a licence to abuse out of it, and I will tell you why, and it is the same reason I gave for the other word. It is the God who is handing it over. He entrusts His world to those made in His image, and I read the subduing under the character of the One who gave it.

“Have dominion.”, and the word here is radah, to rule, to govern. That is the word.

Now what kind of ruling it is, the word does not tell me on its own. I read it as the rule of a shepherd-king over what is entrusted to him and not a tyrant over what he owns, and I read it that way because of the God who is handing it over and because of what the rest of Scripture says about how He rules.

Dominion is not ownership, and the earth still belongs to God. And that is not my conclusion out of Genesis 1:28, it is said plainly elsewhere.

The earth is the LORD’s. So man is given delegated authority, and he is God’s representative within God’s creation.

And here we must be clear, dominion does not mean creation. To have dominion is to rule, not to create. The making belongs to God alone, in the beginning God created, and no man was ever given that power. Radah governs the work of God’s hands, it does not make its own.

And the keeping word comes from the next chapter, where God puts the man in the garden to dress it and to keep it, so I am carrying that word across and I will say that I am.

Dominion, then, is stewardship under the authority of the Creator, the faithful keeping of what God has entrusted, never the claiming of it as one’s own.

The Order Is Everything

Genesis 1:28 only makes sense because of the two verses before it, so let me put them up.

God first declared His purpose, then He created man in His image, then He blessed him, then He commissioned him. That order is on the page. Genesis does not stop and tell me Moses meant anything by it, so when I say the order is intentional, that is me saying it. Purpose, identity, blessing, and commission.

Man was never commissioned apart from God. Every part of it came from Him, and the dominion was exercised under Him.

The Thread Through Creation

And here is a pattern I see running through the whole chapter, and I will call it what it is, a pattern I see. God speaks. What He speaks comes into being. And to my eye everything He makes is made for something, and is expected to be what it was made to be. Genesis does not lay that out as a rule anywhere. It is what I notice when I read the chapter through. And humanity does not escape it, and to me humanity is where it comes to its height.

Everything else in creation fulfills God’s spoken purpose by its nature, and man fulfills God’s purpose by consciously walking in the commission given by the Creator.

Genesis 1 closes this section by showing us that mankind was never created merely to exist. Humanity was created to represent God, to steward His creation faithfully, and to live out the purpose for which the Creator brought them into being.

The blessing and the commission reveal the heart of God, He does not simply create life, He blesses life, He gives it purpose, He entrusts it with responsibility, and that is the dignity of being created in the image of God.

He Equips Us for the Load

And here is the mercy in the commission.

We are not asked to start over, and we are not asked to do what God did in Genesis 1, for that creating is finished. Genesis 2 says it plainly, the heavens and the earth were finished and God rested from all his work. And I am talking about that creating and no other. Men make things every day, and the Bible even uses that same Hebrew root of men clearing woodland, though in a different form and with a different meaning. What no man was ever handed is what God did in chapter one, and the work of His hands already stands. God planted the garden, and then placed man within it.

So our commission is not to make a world, it is to build from the one He has already made, to tend it, keep it, and carry it forward. He does not lay creation upon us. He lays stewardship upon us.

And now I am going to reach forward into the New Testament, so let me say what I am doing. Genesis 1:28 does not promise anybody help with the dominion. There is no Spirit in that verse, and there is no word there about the load being light either. What comes next is Christ sending His own disciples after the resurrection, and John is not telling me it is the same commission Adam had. I am the one holding the two together, because I believe the God who sends is the same God in both. And He does not send empty.

He sends, and then He breathes on them and says, Receive ye the Holy Ghost.

And that is why I hold the two together the way I do. Genesis hands man a dominion and no promise of help with it. Then Christ sends men out and breathes on them. Nobody in Scripture stands up and tells me those are one thing, and I am not going to tell you they are. But this is what I believe. The dominion He gives is never a weight I believe we were meant to carry independently of Him.

And for the stewardship He gives, Paul tells me where the sufficiency comes from.

Our sufficiency is of God. It is a trust we carry by the strength He supplies, built upon the work already finished by His hand. He equips us for the load, and then He sends us.