This is the word of the Lord. Let's read it together.
These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created,
in the day that the Lord God made the earth in the heavens.
When no bush of the field was yet in the land, and no small plant of the field
had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land,
and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land,
and was watering the whole face of the ground.
Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground,
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,
and the man became a living creature.
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east,
and there he put the man whom he had formed.
And out of the ground, the Lord God made to spring up every tree
that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
The tree of life was in the midst of the garden,
and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden,
and there it divided and became four rivers,
and the name of the first is the Peshon.
It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah,
where there is gold.
And the gold of that land is good.
The Delium and Onyx stone are there.
And the name of the second river is the Gihan.
It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Kush.
And the name of the third river is the Tigris,
which flows east of Assyria,
and the fourth river is the Euphrates.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden
to work it and to keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man saying,
You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
you shall not eat.
For in the day you eat it, you shall surely die.
And then the Lord God said,
It is not good that man should be alone.
I will make him a helper fit for him.
Now out of the ground,
the Lord God have formed every beast of the field
and every bird of the heavens
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.
And the man gave names to all livestock
and to all the birds of the heavens
and to every beast of the field.
But for Adam, there was no,
not found a helper fit for him.
This is God's holy work.
We're in a series working through Genesis chapter one and two.
And today we come back again for the second time
to Genesis chapter two.
And there's so much in the verses we read.
I know I say this all the time.
There's so much here.
There's so much we can't talk about today that's here.
One of the things we won't get to look at today
is the covenant that God made without him in Eve
and the tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
the tree of life.
So we're gonna look at that in our first week
on Genesis three in February.
So come back February first Sunday
and we'll cover the covenant in the two trees.
But Genesis chapter two is a second way
of looking at the creation story from Genesis one.
And it's sort of a close up view,
a narrowing the lens,
whereas Genesis one is a broad view
of all that God did in the creation week.
Genesis two hones in and looks at more specific details
in the creation week and gives us
sort of a different angle.
And one of the ways that scholars and theologians
and the church have talked about Genesis two for centuries
is that it really does explain the image of God
that we read about at the end of Genesis chapter one.
And so last week we talked about the fact
that part of what it means to be made in the image of God
is we were made for God to be in relationship with God,
a deep relationship and that we're made for Sabbath,
which really means ultimately to enter into God's rest.
And this week we look at the next aspect
of what it means to be made in the image of God
through this word that we get in Genesis 126, dominion,
that then is explained I think a little bit more
in the details of Genesis chapter two.
And so there are really three words that you need
to understand and to live into this call
that we all have as God's image bearers
to take dominion as God puts it in Genesis one.
And the three words are this, the word culture,
work and power.
Three things we all have in our call to culture,
work and power.
And that's what this concept of dominion means.
So let's think about that together.
First, culture.
If you have a Bible, you can flip back with me
just a couple of verses to chapter one, verse 26,
where it says that God made us in his image.
So we all have dignity made in God's image
every single human no matter what they believe in.
And then the very next line is,
and let humans have dominion over the fish,
over the birds, over the heavens,
over the sky, the sea and the land.
And so the closest clause to the word image
is let them have dominion.
And so we know that dominion is very important
for what it means to talk about the image.
And this word dominion is a royal term.
So it's a term of kingship and queenship.
It's a term that says that we participate
in God's royal rule over all of creation
as sons and daughters of the king, human beings.
That we have a royal stewardship
over everything that God has made
as the pinnacle creature of creation.
And there's a second verb just after that
that helps explain it as well.
And it's down in verse 28, and it's the verb God says,
and God blessed them and he said to be fruitful
and multiply and then he tells them to subdue.
And subdue, to subdue the land, subdue the earth
is another way of talking about dominion.
And really it's a verb of service and stewardship.
So it means to take all the stuff that God has made
and given us and use it for the purposes
that God has given us to use it for in this world.
So in other words, it's to take nature,
the natural world and form nature into a garden.
That's taking dominion and subduing.
And that's one of the basic ways we image God into the world.
We're royal, we have a royal stewardship
over all of creation and over all the things
that God's made.
Now, this has been called for a long time now
the cultural mandate, the cultural mandate,
mandate, the command of God to make culture.
Genesis 1, 26 to 28 explained in Genesis chapter two.
And it's the command that we've just looked at
to rule, to subdue, to take dominion over sky,
sea and land, over the birds and the fish
and all the creatures.
And it's not domination, never domination, dominion,
a different concept.
And another way to say it is we're called to be,
as human beings, to be culture makers in this world.
That's the cultural mandate.
What does that mean?
When we think about the word culture,
probably some of us will think about being a cultured person.
So you'll think about people who go to symphonies
at Usher Hall.
You'll think about people who read a lot of books.
You'll think about posh culture, to be cultured.
And that's, we use it that way,
but that's not really what the word means.
Culture just comes from the concept of cultivation.
And we're from the very beginning as human beings
called to take the stuff that God made and cultivate the world,
to make more stuff out of it.
And so we cultivate our households, we cultivate gardens.
Some of you enjoy cultivating spreadsheets.
It's a culture I don't understand, but I know it's good
and we need it.
These are all different ways we cultivate.
We're culture makers.
That's what it means to take dominion and subdue.
And so every single one of us today,
if you are a human being, no matter what you believe in,
you are called to be a culture maker,
to take the stuff that God has given you,
the stuff that God has made from nothing
and use it and wield it into new stuff,
in all sorts of different ways.
And that can mean taking dishes from the dishwasher
and putting them into the cabinet.
That's cultivation.
That can mean inventing the iPhone, right?
Only one or two people can talk about it.
That type of cultivation, but it's all cultivation.
It's culture making.
And we're all called to do it.
So dominion, as the image of God,
you're called to be a culture maker.
Now, when you come to chapter two,
if you look at chapter two really carefully,
it's a closer look into that and another way of seeing it.
And so from verse four, where we started reading,
we have the lines, these are the generations
of the heavens and the earth.
This is the beginning sentence
of the overall structure of the book of Genesis.
So Genesis is actually structured
with an introduction, creation, up to chapter two, verse three.
And then the rest of Genesis is formed by 10 genealogies.
And every one of those genealogies starts as,
these are the generations of.
And so here it says, first genealogy,
these are the generations of the heavens and the earth.
So we're about to get the story, the first character,
the heavens and the earth, material.
The first character that the book focuses on
is the material land, the sky, the sea.
And if you were to keep reading the book of Genesis,
you would find in chapter five, verse one,
these are the generations of Adam.
Chapter six, verse nine, these are the generations of Noah.
Chapter 10, these are the generations of the sons of Noah
and so on and so forth, 10 different times.
That's how the whole book is structured.
That means we're being told in chapter two,
the very first character, the very first story
is a genealogy of the land itself, the heavens and the earth.
And then right after that in verse five to seven,
and when you realize that it's not surprising,
we're told when there was no bush of the field,
no plant yet, no rain coming down, no human yet,
to take care of the heavens and the earth,
to irrigate the land, God raised up a human being.
And so immediately we're saying,
oh, the story of the heavens and the earth,
the land is a story of the human relationship
to the material world.
And how was Adam formed?
The first human was formed, we're told,
out of the matter, the dust, the stuff of the ground.
And if you were here a couple of weeks ago,
we said that the word Adam,
which is exactly that word in Hebrew, A-D-A-M, Adam,
is here followed by a word
that sounds just like Adam in Hebrew.
So when it says God raised Adam from the dust of the ground,
the Hebrew word is Adamah, A-D-A-M-A-H.
And so the story of the heavens and the earth,
you hear that connection?
That human beings were, Adam was raised from the Adamah,
that we are a people made from the ground,
for the ground, for the land,
to rule and take dominion, to subdue the earth,
that tight interconnection between us
and our material surroundings all around us.
We're embodied creatures,
we've been saying that throughout the series.
And then right after that, in verse 10 to 14,
it's interesting why in the midst of this creation story,
would all of a sudden God give us this text that says,
and by the way, there's bedelium and onyx stone
and gold in that land.
And also there's these four rivers,
the Tigris and the Euphrates.
And that's next to what you know,
early readers as a Syria.
And we're being told all of this geographical data.
And why in the world are we being talked about
in the creation story about rivers and onyx stone?
And it's because we were made for the land
and the land was made for us.
And that means when there are rivers and they intersect,
you can put a boat on a river that intersects
and you can send stuff away.
And you can create commerce and markets.
And you can take onyx stone and bedelium and gold.
And you can beat it into materials
that will create other stuff.
And ultimately you can build a city.
You see, chapter two is explicating the reality
of how much we are meant from the beginning
to be culture makers.
And that the story of Christianity does not begin
in Genesis three.
It begins in Genesis one and two
where God made this world to be with us
and us to be with this world,
to be workers full of delight and fruition.
This is where our story begins.
And this is the thing that we are being healed
toward in Christianity.
It all starts right here.
And so if you just scan your eyes across this chapter,
it's so earthy.
It's place centric.
There are bushes in the field, lands and plants and rain,
and irrigation and man working the ground
and the mist, the dust, the breath, the nostrils,
the garden, the east, organic growth, trees, food, rivers,
gold, bedelium, onyx stone, fertility, place names,
Tigris, Euphrates, Assyria, Kush, it's geography.
And that means that we're being told here
that we are made to use the stuff God made
and be culture makers.
Tolkien, the writer of the Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien,
he wrote a famous letter, letter number 153
in his series of letters, the book that comprises his letters.
Then he wrote this letter to a man called Peter Hastings,
who was a Roman Catholic bookshop owner in Oxford.
And Peter loved the Lord of the Rings
in the early days when they just came out.
But he wrote to Tolkien upset and he said that
one of the mistakes in the Lord of the Rings
was that he, Tolkien gave too much power, he thought,
to Gandalf, Tom Bombadil, and Treebeard, one of the ints.
And he said, when I read the book,
these characters have too much power.
They can create things, they can wield the world
in a way that feels God-like.
And he was upset about that.
He said, it actually seems that in your world,
you're taking power away from God
and giving it to creatures.
And Tolkien responded to him in a very fan,
this letter's very famous for a word that Tolkien coined.
And it's the word sub-creator or sub-creation.
And this is what Tolkien said.
He said, first off, Peter, it's fiction.
Okay?
So don't take it too seriously.
Second off, Tolkien said, I'm a sub-creator and so are you.
And in my story, these characters are sub-creators.
And sub-creators means that they are not able
to make something out of nothing,
but they are in their own world able to take the things
God made and wield them into something else great.
And he said, and that's how I see myself
in creating this legendarium, the Lord of the Rings.
I'm a sub-creator.
And he said, so I made languages,
but I did not invent language.
I named plant, I created new plants and animals
that don't exist in our world,
but I did not create the concept of plant and animal.
We are sub-creators.
We are little world makers.
We build things and create things
and Tolkien coined that word for us.
That's who you are.
Now, secondly, the second word you need,
and we have to hurry today
on our busy schedule this morning,
that means that if we're culture makers,
made to make culture, made to take dominion and subdue
and to wield things into new things,
that the second word is, we just call that work.
That's just work.
So we were made for work.
So we cultivate households, we cultivate marketplaces,
we cultivate spreadsheets,
we cultivate classrooms full of kids, right?
And all of that is work.
And that's the word we use.
And so down in verse 15, you see God say that,
the Lord God took Adam, the man,
and he put him in the Garden of Eden,
and he gave him a job, work it and keep it.
And so from the very beginning,
when the first things were told,
and is that we were made for work,
culture making expresses itself through our vocations,
our work.
And I know that come back in February,
we will talk about the priestly element
of the verbs to work it and to keep it.
But today, just focused on work.
God commands this of Adam and Eve
from the very beginning.
Now, that just simply means first, work is good.
Work was made good.
And we live in a very broken world,
Genesis three is coming, but work was created good.
What kind of work is good?
God made Adam here out of the dust of the earth.
He got, God dug into the world, into the soil,
and made Adam.
And that means that from the very beginning,
God got his hands dirty and in a good way,
in the way that the soil is so good.
And that means that the first thing we see
is that manual work is very good.
In our city, which is very high and lofty,
we are the most educated city in the United Kingdom,
per capita.
And that means for most of us,
many of us in this room are knowledge workers.
And sometimes in a culture like ours,
knowledge work can look down upon manual work
and manual labor.
And actually, the very first thing we see
in the beginning of human history is that God says,
you were made so good, manual labor is so good.
There's no such thing as hierarchy in this.
There's never any space for us to look down
on any type of worker as long as that work is not sinful.
All, this is a bit of a truism,
but all non-simple work is good.
And there's nothing that looks more like Genesis too,
perhaps, in a sinful and broken world
than the janitorial service that comes to our streets
every single morning and picks up the rubbish
that was left overnight.
Beautifying, cleansing the space,
bringing order back from chaos from the night before.
There's nothing that looks more like Genesis too,
in a broken and fallen world than a job like that.
And so here we see that work is good,
manual work is good, knowledge work is good.
Boy, spreadsheets are good,
but we also need crops more than spreadsheets, amen.
We gotta eat.
We all started this way.
And how does this go right?
How can you take this reality
into whatever sphere of work you've been called to
and do well by culture making,
by the way God's created you as God's image bearer?
Let me give you a few things.
One, first, be aware of how quickly this goes wrong.
We're in a sinful world,
but there are twin ditches here.
And the twin ditches are the one we looked at last week.
The problem we all have, many of us have, of overwork.
And so last week we said,
you need to enter into God's rest
and stop your working on the Sabbath day.
Lay your deadly doings down.
But a more specific way to get at that
is the real ditch for many of us in the modern world
is that we overwork because we've taken the power
of culture making and used it for selfish ambition.
And God in Genesis one says,
let us make man in our image.
But when you come to Genesis 11,
these culture makers who had the power
to take bedelium and other stones
and build a great tower to the heavens,
what did they say at the Tower of Babel?
They said, let us make a name for ourselves.
God said, let us make man in our image
to wield their work in a way that honors God.
At the Tower of Babel, we said,
let us make a name for ourselves with our work.
And so the biggest and first problem we face
with culture making is that we in our hearts
immediately turn it around and say,
thank you for giving us the ability,
but now I'm here to build my own little kingdom.
My money, my bank account.
I've been called to steward the resources you've given me,
but now they're mine.
So we build a sky to the heavens, a tower.
We build our own kingdoms.
We pursue work through the means of selfish ambition.
The other ditch that we can fall into
with being a culture maker
is one we didn't talk about last time,
and that's the opposite problem, which is under work.
And under work in the Bible is called slothfulness, laziness.
And this is not a modern productivity conversation.
This is biblical.
This is all over the proverbs
that many of us struggle with overwork,
many of us struggle with underwork,
and all of us are gonna go in one direction
or the other in our lives.
And so some of us today's,
we all need to hear one or the other.
Some of us need to hear,
six days you show labor and one day you will rest.
The command of liberation,
because we overwork, we need to be told.
It's a command to rest.
Others of us need to be told,
one day you rest, but six days you labor.
Six days you work, because you were made for that.
And if you're overworking or you're underworking
in either direction as a culture maker,
you will be unfulfilled.
Underwork or overwork, you'll be empty in either direction.
Either you're living for yourself
and building your own little kingdom,
or you're not fulfilling the calling you've been given
to actually be a worker that makes things in this world,
either direction.
Now let me give you three ways this can go very right.
And they're very short.
One is this, in verse 15 we're told
that God put Adam in the garden
and he told him, work and keep the garden,
the place I've put you.
That means that God created us as culture makers
and he created us as workers and he put us where we are.
And that means one way to protect yourself
from these twin ditches is to always remember
that ultimately God is your boss.
Your local boss is not your ultimate boss.
And maybe that's good news for you today
if you don't like your boss.
Ultimately God is the one you work for.
And when we can remember in our hearts every day
as we go out to work, whether that's household work,
gardening work, or the financial district of the city,
God is our ultimate boss.
We work for him, we were made to work for him.
The second way we can get this right
is to realize that this verb, he says work it and keep it.
The verb keep there is a verb of organization,
beautification and protection.
And that means one of the things we're being called to
is in our work, is your work meaningful and fulfilling?
One of the things you can ask is,
am I working in order to keep it?
Meaning to push back chaos and death in this world
in some way to make something more beautiful than it was
and to pursue what's good, not evil in this world.
Is your work in any way participating in that?
Then you're fulfilling the thing you were made for.
And so maybe that's happening in a way
you've not even realized yet in the way you work.
And you've got to just wake up to it
and embrace it a little more.
So are you an engineer in the room today?
Maybe you're an engineer that's working on Northbridge.
And let me say, you could go faster maybe?
No, she can't.
But you discovered a problem in that bridge
and you were making sure it doesn't fall.
And that is being a culture maker.
That is fulfilling such a good purpose
that you are gonna protect us.
That's pushing back the chaos of death.
And maybe you're here today as a medical professional
in some way, shape or form.
And you take the human body and the chaos
and the death that's being wielded through brokenness
and you push it back through other things in this earth
that we've taken, like all sorts of things from the earth
and wielded into medicine.
And you push back death and chaos.
You're doing it.
You're fulfilling what you are made to be as God's image.
You're in the law court and you're establishing justice.
You're a janitor and we've already said it.
You're beautifying the city.
You're doing exactly what God made you to do.
Are you a student?
Let me ask you if you're a student today.
Do you go to university or school or college or whatever?
And are you there to learn a vocation in order
to glorify the Lord with your work
and push back death, disease, chaos
with goodness, order and beauty in this world?
Or are you there to build your own kingdom?
Are you at home, full-time parent right now at home,
cleaning up dirty nappies every day?
And that's your main gig.
And you're at school in a room full of kids all the time.
Boy, you are cultivating the image of God itself,
human beings.
And talk about pushing back the chaos, bringing order.
Every time you throw away that dirty nappy,
you do something that is so good.
You work and keep, you bring back beauty and order
and chaos and cleanliness to a little one
that really needs it,
to bear the image of God in their own way in time.
God put us, God put Adam there.
God has put us where we are.
And so there's a calling we all have.
And we'll have to talk about gifting
and searching for vocation another day.
But let me just say it like this and move to the final thing.
We're all called to change the world
through culture making in our own way.
Not the whole world, not at all,
but the little bitty worlds that God has each put us in.
And so there are people that you can reach.
There are people you can help.
There are spheres, vocational spheres
that you can get to and impact that I can never get to.
People that I will never be able to have a relationship with
that only you and your small world,
just like me and my small world, have an ability to change.
Are you going in the name of the Lord
to glorify God as your ultimate boss,
to be a culture maker towards the good
in wherever God has put you?
Lastly, that means as we close
that we have all been given this third thing.
And that's that if you've been called to make culture
in this world, if you've been therefore called to work
in whatever way God has given you, you have power.
And power is something we all possess.
In the academy today, it's very popular
to say that power is bad, period.
And of course, that's obviously not true,
that all of us wield power in all sorts of ways.
And the question is, are we doing a good job
with our power or poor job?
At the end of this passage, Adam is given the opportunity
by God to name the animals.
Of course, God could have named the animals.
But he actually said, Adam, I want you to do it.
And Adam was given this opportunity to name.
And in Hebrew, when you name something,
you really define its essence.
You set it apart for what it's going to be and do.
There's this sense here of domestication.
And God gifted Adam this enormous power.
I can't imagine what it must have been like.
We all have been gifted power in different ways.
And in that, we've got power
that we have to assess, are we wielding it
in the name of the Lord for the good of the city?
In the name of our household for the good of our household.
In the name of the Lord for the good of our household,
I should say.
How are you using your power?
There's power in your money,
but we can quickly misuse it by becoming greedy.
And you can take through greed the power of money
and turn it into a great oppressive evil.
There is power in sex and sexuality.
In the balance of covenant marriage,
but you can quickly take the gift of sex and sexuality,
a power and abuse it so quickly that it will destroy you.
There is great power in work itself,
but we can wield our work and selfish ambition
and use it in a way where we become power hungry.
And it becomes an idol in our lives.
And we wield it to utter destruction
in the lives of so many people.
It happens in every sphere.
How do you wield your power that God's given you
over a few or over many in this life?
Today you've got to come and you've got to look
at the one we're told in the New Testament
is the image bearer himself, Jesus Christ.
And if we look at his life
for just a couple of minutes as we close,
Jesus Christ is the ultimate culture maker,
the human being, the image of God itself.
And when you look at his life, you think about it,
how did he wield his power?
Called by God to work, he was.
And he came into this world,
and first he came into an existing culture.
We all have subcultures, Edinburgh culture
and Glasgow culture and all sorts of things.
Jesus came into Jewish culture in the first century.
He would have been known as Yeshua Bar Joseph,
Jesus the son of Joseph when he came to the synagogue.
And he learned the Old Testament, he memorized it.
He learned to do his chores.
He became a carpenter, he worked.
We don't know a lot about his carpentry skills,
but what we do know is that Jesus never overworked
or underworked.
We know he was a carpenter who worked in exactly
the right way he should have throughout his life.
He was a culture maker.
You know, think about the things that Jesus
has given the world culturally.
He gave us the parable of the Good Samaritan.
He gave us the parable of the prodigal son.
He gave us this whole genre.
He gave us eating with tax collectors and sinners
in a world that did not allow that.
He disrupted and remade the culture.
Jesus Christ ultimately offered the world by his death
and resurrection the culture of the very kingdom of God
that has come and is coming.
He remade the world.
He gave us the culture of Sabbath in a new way,
in a way that Sainsbury's on Sunday opens later
and closes earlier and they don't know why.
And it's because of Jesus Christ.
They used to stay closed all day,
but they still do it different.
And it's because Jesus changed the world.
He made a new culture and that means if you look to him,
I think there's one word that really encapsulate
true work, culture making.
And that's Jesus's example of servanthood.
He said, I came not to be served but to serve.
And if there's one way you can use your culture
making power in this life is become a servant.
Look to Christ.
And who among us today can say,
I've taken the power God has given me,
the vocational calling God has given me,
the people God has put in my sphere,
my calling to work and to wield my resources
and has done that as a servant to the glory of God fully.
Now you think about the way you've worked,
the way you've stewarded your household,
the way you've stewarded the marketplace,
the way you treat your own money.
Who among us can say, boy, my work reflects Genesis too
and the example of Jesus Christ?
And when you think about the greatest bit of culture,
Jesus ever offered this world.
The greatest thing that Jesus ever did for us
is that the image of God himself,
the one with true power, the utter culture maker himself,
he came into this world ultimately not just to make culture
but to be unmade by culture.
The culture of crucifixion,
God gave us this power to create, we built crosses.
God gave us this power to wield,
we created cultures of death and destruction
and Jesus came to be subdued by the cross,
to be subdued by every act of selfish ambition
that we did in this world in order to remake us,
to renew us, to set us back to rights with him
and say now go and work in the way you were made,
to be remade, he was unmade so that we could be remade
in the way we are culture makers into this world.
And so today as you leave, how do you go forth
and work in the light of Jesus Christ?
You've got to be changed, you've got to be renewed,
you've got to admit I have not wielded my resources,
I've abused my power in ways,
I've not done what I should do
but Jesus Christ was unmade so I could be changed.
And from there, Jesus restores us
to stewardship of servanthood.
Become a servant all around you
in whatever power you have
and you will walk in the way of Christ.
The lines of the Jude doxology to close,
to the only God our savior through Jesus Christ our Lord
be glory, majesty, dominion and authority.
Before all time now and forever, amen.
Let's pray.
Father, we give thanks for the gift of culture making
and we ask Lord that you would today remake us
to wield that gift in the ways that actually serve
the world as we were made.
That we would be here to build a great city,
that we would be here ultimately to shine
through our work, your glory and point to you.
We thank you Lord Jesus for the cross and the resurrection
that you came to serve us all the way to the point of death
so that we might understand what it means to be pardoned
and renewed unto true servanthood.
And so we ask for that gift today, that vision
and we pray it in Jesus' name, amen.