What sort of Dominion has God given us?
A series on music's essence and role: part 4
We are in a series on music: what it is and what it does. Last week, we made important clarification that God’s creativity is of a different sort than ours. Now we are ready to talk about ours.
Consider the human activity of culture making.
In Genesis 1:26–28, “[26] 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 over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ [27] So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [28] And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’”
So much glorious truth is packed within those few verses. Begin with God’s unique command to humanity: subduing. There are other commands in the passage—to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth—but the animals share that command. God uniquely commissioned humanity to subdue and have dominion.
Let’s define those terms and then walk through some biblical passages to notice how the Bible describes subduing. Subduing is the work to bring order to chaos for the purpose of flourishing (see Wolterstorff, Art in Action, 75–79).
With that working definition, consider three different responsibilities that God gives humanity in Genesis 1: responsibilities to creation, to others, and to God.
Responsible to the World
First, God made humanity responsible for the created world. To illustrate a biblical view of subduing, imagine a kitchen counter full of dirty dishes and the work it takes to clean those dishes. The person who cleans dishes works to bring order to chaos for the purpose of flourishing. They clear the counter of dishes and utensils. They labor, scrubbing off dirt, separating clean from unclean, and declaring a clean fork to be “good.” Then, when a person puts away clean silverware into a drawer, they not only separate forks from spoons and knives, they also separate dessert forks from salad forks, small teaspoons from big serving spoons, and butter knives from steak knives.
This ordering work prepares for the next day so that when it’s time to set the table, someone can easily find the exact utensil they need. If utensils were kept in an enormous dumpster of “things” instead of a silverware drawer filled with helpful dividers, no one would ever find their ice cream scoop. Subduing allows creation to flourish.
The American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, argued that good architecture makes nature more natural (see Frank Lloyd Wright, An Organic Architecture [1939]). From Lloyd Wright’s perspective, people make nature more natural by structuring it, moving and ordering things to allow nature to be more natural and really flourish. Natural wildflowers certainly have a type of natural beauty and glory to them that comes from where they randomly fell and grew. But there is a different type of beauty and glory that is displayed when humans responsibly order and place the plants in a garden (see Peter Leithart’s https://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2016/08/making-nature-more-natural/). With a garden, there can be more flourishing because now people can get tomatoes and squash for a meal.
Responsible to Others
Secondly, subduing has responsibility to other people. This is the aspect of flourishing that involves labor to make life better for others, not worse. Humans have the responsibility, the call to love our neighbors as ourselves.
Soon after the biblical passages we studied, the author Genesis tells the story of Cain murdering Abel. Cain, a gardener like his father, failed to subdue the world rightly. He should have heeded God’s warning to rule over the serpentine weeds growing in his envious heart (Genesis 4:7). But instead, his act of violent domination against his brother was a failure to exercise righteous dominion over his passions. The result was a failure to love his brother as himself.
A responsibility to other people is inherent in the commission that God gives to humanity to subdue the world. Long before the Ten Commandments codified the wrongness of killing, God called humanity to work for the good of others.
Subduing the physical creation serves the needs of our fellow humans. I wear glasses almost every making moment of every day. These lenses in my glasses are made up of ten cents worth of plastic. Someone took a dime’s worth of plastic and figured out that if they polished them in a certain way to a certain depth, it allows people with terrible eyesight to see. The value which is created out of ten cents of plastic is amazing! Taking the chaos of a plastic disc and bringing order to it, polishing it until the depth of the lens allows my eyes to focus and my life to flourish. Praise the Lord for the people who work to bring order to chaos for the purpose of flourishing!
Many other illustrations make the same point: changing a child’s diaper brings order to chaos for the flourishing of creation (that child’s skin) and of others (the olfactory reality of the home). Making a meal brings order to the chaos of creation (the ingredients) for the flourishing of a home (the nutrition and sustenance of a family). That’s what all human activity is called to do.[*]
Responsible to God
And then third, maybe most obviously, subduing as a responsibility to God. Humans are responsible to God because he’s the one who created us. Since humans did not create themselves, but were created, that means that they have responsibilities.
In my house, we call this the “Law of the Legos.” Who owns a tower or a car made out of Legos? The answer is “whoever made it!” In the world of Legos, you own what you make. That’s the world of Legos, and that’s the real world. (Who owns that song? The person who made that song is the one who owns it.)
So, follow that logic to this unavoidable conclusion: God owns everything. Because God made everything, he owns everything. And because he owns everything, he rules everything. God made us, and so he owns us, and we have responsibilities to him. We’re responsible for properly acknowledging him—praising him and celebrating the magnificence and goodness of what he’s done—and for trusting him to care for us. Those are our responsibilities.
When we receive his good world and follow his command to laboring in it to bring order to its chaos for the flourishing of the creation and other people, we glorify him.
NEXT WEEK: we take this discussion of subduing and apply it to artistic pursuit, including MUSIC!
[*] If you’ve followed the footnote, let me add this: we are especially called to labor for the good of people who have less capacity than we do. As human beings made in the image of a responsible God, we have a responsibility to care for weaker people (see Dr. Albert Mohler’s recent chapel message on Lazarus and the Rich Man). We are tempted to selfishly order our circumstances and environments in ways that improve things for ourselves.
For example, a father should not order his home in a way that makes life for him and easier his own preference. If his ordering of his home and his world causes the withering of his wife and children, that would not honor the Lord, but would be irresponsible and judged by God. A dad should use his capacity as the head of that home (both his greater physical capacity and his God-given authority) to structure his home, to order his home, to place things in his home, to buy things for his home that help the weakest people in his home to flourish.
This does not mean a father should abdicate his responsibility and just pass out, say, lollipops, giving his kids whatever they want. Instead, a father should order a home in a way that causes the flourishing of a child, not just things that make it easier for him.
The Lord gives each person capacity for meaningful activity, with different people having different amounts of capacity in different seasons over different aspects of life. Consider the shifting dynamics of an aging father and his growing adult sons. Godly stewardship of that capacity for meaningful activity means the careful use of that capacity to allow for the flourishing of the most vulnerable.