Dominion and Keeping: The Two-Fold Mandate

Today's Scripture

Genesis 1:26-28 — "Then 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 birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth...' And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it.'"

Genesis 2:15 — "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it."

Psalm 115:16 — "The heavens are the LORD's heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man."

The Big Idea

"Dominion" does not mean the earth is ours to do with as we please. It is a royal job description: humans rule God's world on God's behalf, the way a good king protects his people or a house-sitter cares for a friend's home. We were made to work the garden and to keep it — and we answer to the Owner for both.

Reflection

A royal job with a twist

Few words in the Bible have caused more trouble than "dominion." In 1967 the historian Lynn White Jr. famously argued that this one word gave Western civilization a license to strip the planet. Some Christians, embarrassed, dropped the subject. Others doubled down, treating the earth like an all-you-can-take buffet. Both responses misread the word.

The Hebrew word in Genesis 1:26-28 is radah — a king's word, the word for royal rule. And notice who gets it: creatures made "in our image." In the ancient world, kings would set up statues — images — of themselves in distant provinces to say, "this territory is mine." Genesis says God filled his world with living images of himself. Every human being is a walking statue of the King, placed here to represent his kind of rule.

That is why Psalm 8:5-6 sounds like a coronation: "you have... crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet." Crowned. Dominion is not permission to plunder; it is a crown with responsibilities attached.

Irenaeus, a pastor from the second century — barely two generations after the apostles — described what an image of God is actually for:

"For the glory of God is a living man; and the life of man consists in beholding God." — Irenaeus, Against Heresies

A human being fully alive, ruling the way God rules, shows off God's glory to the rest of creation. That is the job. A tyrant with a chainsaw shows off something else entirely.

And watch the first official act of this newly crowned king. Genesis 2:19 — God formed the animals and "brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name." Dominion's first act was not consuming a single creature. It was naming them — which requires watching them, learning them, paying the kind of attention a poet pays. You cannot name what you have not noticed. Before Adam ever harvested anything, God trained him to delight in everything. That is the original posture of dominion: attentive enough to tell one bird from another, and authorized to care for both.

Two small words: work it and keep it

Genesis 2:15 gives the job description in miniature: God put the man in the garden "to work it and keep it." Two Hebrew words. Avad — to work, serve, cultivate. Shamar — to keep, guard, watch over. It is the same word priests would later use in the blessing, "The LORD bless you and keep you." Adam was to do for the garden what God does for his people.

So the first human job was gardening — and notice when it was assigned. Before sin entered the world, not after. Tim Keller points out how surprising that is:

"The book of Genesis leaves us with a striking truth — work was part of paradise." — Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor

Work is not the curse; futility is. Cultivating the earth — farming it, building with it, making music and medicine and bread out of it — was always the plan. But the second word, keep, guards the first from going wrong. A gardener changes the garden, yes, but in order to make it flourish, never to bleed it dry.

John Calvin, writing on this very verse over four hundred years ago, drew the conclusion plainly:

"Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence... let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses." — John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis

A steward is someone who manages property that belongs to someone else. Think of house-sitting for a friend. You may use the kitchen, water the plants, enjoy the porch. You may not sell the couch or let the dog starve. Why? Because it is not yours — and the owner is coming back.

Notice how this guards us from two opposite mistakes. One ditch says the earth is merely a warehouse: drill it, strip it, pave it, no questions asked. The other ditch says the earth is untouchable: humans are a plague, and the kindest thing we can do is leave nature alone entirely. Genesis rejects both. We are commanded to work the garden — to farm, build, develop, create — and commanded to keep it. A steward-king is neither a looter nor a museum guard. He is a gardener.

The Owner kept the title

But wait — doesn't Psalm 115:16 say "the earth he has given to the children of man"? Yes. The earth is given to us the way the garden was given to Adam: as a trust, not a transfer. God handed over the keys, not the title deed. We know this because of what God says elsewhere about his world.

Psalm 50:10-11 — "For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine." Mine. Mine. Mine. Long after Eden, God still talks like the owner, because he still is.

Francis Schaeffer built his whole argument on this distinction:

"Man has dominion over the 'lower' orders of creation, but he is not sovereign over them. Only God is the Sovereign Lord, and the lower orders are to be used with this truth in mind. Man is not using his own possessions." — Francis Schaeffer, Pollution and the Death of Man

"Sovereign" means the one with final authority. We have real authority — Schaeffer never denies it — but it is borrowed authority. A manager who torches the store he was hired to run is not exercising management. He is committing a kind of treason against the owner.

This was Schaeffer's whole answer to Lynn White's famous accusation. White said "dominion" caused the environmental crisis. Schaeffer agreed that something had gone badly wrong — but the culprit was a counterfeit dominion, ripped out of its biblical frame. Take away the Owner, and "have dominion" curdles into "take whatever you can." Keep the Owner in the sentence, and dominion becomes the most demanding conservation ethic in the world, because every acre you touch belongs to Someone who loves it. The cure for distorted dominion is not less Bible. It is more.

That is why John Stott, one of the most respected pastors of the last century, said the church should never have lagged behind on this issue:

"Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship." — John Stott, Issues Facing Christians Today

The vanguard — the front of the column, not the back. And C.S. Lewis reminds us how much is at stake in whose world we say this is:

"There is no neutral ground in the universe: every square inch, every split second, is claimed by God and counterclaimed by Satan." — C.S. Lewis, Christian Reflections

There is no plot of land, no industry, no acre of rainforest that is simply "neutral stuff." Every square inch is claimed.

The King who rules by serving

How do we know what good dominion looks like? God showed us — first by telling us what it is not. Ezekiel 34:2-4 is God's furious word to Israel's leaders, pictured as shepherds: "Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?... The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed... and with force and harshness you have ruled them." Rule that feeds itself and starves the flock is not dominion. It is the thing God judges.

Then God showed us in person. Mark 10:42-45 — Jesus said, "You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them... But it shall not be so among you... For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many."

Here is the true image of God, the true Adam, the King of every square inch — and he rules by kneeling with a towel, by healing, by feeding, and finally by dying. Watch him exercise dominion in the Gospels. He commands a storm, and it obeys — then he uses the same authority to touch lepers, feed crowds, and bless children. Never once does he use his power to take. Every act of rule is an act of service.

Then remember what the soldiers pressed onto his head: a crown of thorns. Thorns are the Bible's emblem of the cursed ground, the broken creation — the very thing our false dominion helped produce. Our King wore the curse of the earth on his own brow to ransom us, and to begin making all things new.

So the gospel does not just forgive bad stewards. It re-crowns them. In Christ, you are not a consumer who must be shamed into recycling. You are a restored steward-king, servant of the Servant King, learning to rule his world the way he rules you — gently, sacrificially, and with the Owner's love for every inch of it.

Going Deeper

Pick one small territory that is genuinely yours to keep — a pet, a houseplant, a yard, a locker, the strip of street in front of your home. Today, do one deliberate act of shamar there: guard it, mend it, clean it, tend it. As you do, say to God: "This is yours. Thank you for trusting me with it." Dominion is learned the same way Jesus said greatness is — in small acts of service no one applauds.