Clough Manhood Series Lesson 1
The Humanness of Man – Genesis 1:26-30
Tonight we’re going to begin a new series, a series when I asked for some feedback on the part of many of you of what you’d like; most of the men said why not have a course that describes the role of the male in Scripture. And I think this is an excellent and needy topic for the reason, try and find in the Christian book store, for example, written on the man’s role. You’ll find eighteen hundred of them written on what the woman should do but you won’t find any written on the role of the man. There’s just a tremendous over balance in our own generation.
You can look out in the average fundamental church and all too often you see an over abundance of women. And pastors, when we get together professionally, it’s just common knowledge that this just prevails in one group after another. It’s not any one denomination. There are some that are better than others. For example, many of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Churches are better for the reason that they demand that the men hold offices and refuse to grant any man office holding position until he has worked his way up, so to speak. And for that reason they tend to have a stronger male leadership. And in some of the other churches that stress this the men are stronger. But generally, as an observation, the women outnumber the men. I’ve notice on the tape orders that we get the ratio of women ordering tapes to men is seven to one. That tells you something.
I have on my desk, occasionally, a letter from people asking about starting a local church, looking around for a young man that would be a pastor; they’ve heard that we have men in seminary, in fact we have 16 or 17 from this church at Dallas Seminary and they want to know, can we use any of those to form a local church. One out of every two letters that I get on forming a local church is written by a woman. That tells you right there it’s a problem, because if the woman is the one who’s writing the letters and making the contacts to establish a local church there’s something wrong with the whole structure right at the start. Going back in ancient history, when Jewish people wanted to start a synagogue they didn’t send seven women out to start one. They waited until they had a certain number of males and then and only then did they start a synagogue. Statistics on the mission field say that women outnumber men three to one. Why is that? And so we find, wherever we go, the men not really leading like they did at one time in history in ancient Israel and in the ancient early church.
One of the amusing articles that I run across to sort of set the tone for the entire series is Taylor Caldwell’s little tract to mothers, entitled How to Make Men of Your Boys. And I thought enough of this, even though it’s not, technically speaking, a biblical document, she reflects a lot of good divine viewpoint in her thoughts so we’re going to make this available in the tract rack. Tonight I’m going to read some sections of Taylor Caldwell’s little tract and those of you who happen to see her novel portrayed on televisions recently, Of Captains and Kings, will recognize her as a great novelist of our generation. Apparently a Christian, Roman Catholic, but apparently a Christian, one who has written an excellent novel on the Apostle Paul, and has done a lot of excellent writing.
But she speaks to the mothers and she says: “We women know that real honest to God men hardly exist any more; that homosexualism has vastly increased and become overt in America and that it has now, in Washington and New York, taken on respectability {?}. We know now that the student body of our colleges and the faculties too reek with feminine males {?}. How can you be certain that your son or sons will escape the emasculating pollution,” she asks. “It is well known that both sexes possess latent characteristics of the other and that environment and companions of evil intent can bring out the submerged tendencies. To become a man,” says Ms. Caldwell, a boy must be treated as a man from the very cradle. But first of all, his mother must be a woman whose husband is her dearest treasure above all else, whose children are clearly secondary to her mate in all things. A woman must be womanly, not just feminine. She must have the strong instincts of a woman and a love for her home. A mother whose first concern is sex and clothes and personal indulgence and hairdos will not produce a manly son. I’ve known dozens of these women, and invariably their sons have been lightweights. How could they escape the incessant picture of self-indulgence and self-love when they saw every day of their lives as children in their mother. How could they not see with what indifference their fathers were treated, and how they were regarded as provider of goodies and not as beloveds. The mother was the queen, arrogant, svelte, greedy, perfumed soaken, demanding all things, and so the little boys began to identify with these creatures, these heartless, stupid, selfish, grasping, inane and pretty things. Mamma was everything; she implied that firmly herself. And boys want to be everything too, so they identified with mamma. There is the root of this emasculation, far beyond what the headshrinkers call ‘smother-love.’”
And she goes on to describe the raising of a boy, and says, “So no matter how delightful your baby is, look at him with respect and never but never use comfy, cozy, chintzy language to him. Give him your love and gentleness and tenderness, of course, and hug and kiss him when you wish, and you’ll wish far more often than he will. But again, treat him with a dignity he deserves. Let him know at all times that you are on to him and he’ll be delighted and amused, in the dark little realistic heart of him, and he’ll respect you and honor you. Always be one step ahead of Johnnie and two steps ahead of his plotting. He’ll not only regard you with consideration when he is a baby but will be considerate of you when he is older, even during adolescence. No man, whether ten days old, ten years old, or twenty, has anything but contempt for the soft touch. When he is a man, then, properly brought up by a proper mother, he will detest the whining and the deliberately helpless, the {?} and the faker, the maligner and the feeble liberal. He will be brave and proud and truly masculine, scornful who live as those who live as Samuel Butler put it, ‘only to lick the platter clean and leave a pile of {?}.’ He will demand of others that they be men too and so will be a force of strength in a world which sadly lacks true men in these days. His voice will be loud and clear before politicians and he will never be guilty of betraying his country. Best of all, as Solomon says of true mothers, he will rise up and call his mother blessed, and say of her, all her way is a pleasantness and all her paths are peace. What more can a mother desire.”
Again reading excerpts of it: “Let us get firmly in mind, children are tough and resilient and hardnosed. They are not petals in flowers as Dr. Spock once insisted to me in a letter. They are saner and colder of heart and more adaptable and tougher than they ever will be when they reach adolescence. They have no illusions; the dreams of small children are violent dreams, not concerned with gardens and fairies. Their aims are strong, sturdy and ruthless, and are concerned with self. And that brings me to another point, corporeal punishment. Dr. Spock and company think children are too innocent and to lovely to be slammed and slammed hard. Nonsense! Again, children are primitive men; primitive man knew that his parents wanted to protect or warn him of danger and if speech was rare the blow did the work thoroughly. Watch animal mothers; they do not croon over their young ones and try to persuade them not to do naughty things or dangerous ones; they slam and the youngster immediately learns that some things are forbidden. They love and cuddle their infants but when a lesson in the realities of life is needed, animal mamma lifts her paw and lets go painfully, and does not comfort the culprit when he howls. In fact, he learns he has to work hard to get into her favor and into the kitchen.”
“Boys do understand the swift punishment and they respect pain. Don’t wait for papa to come home to slam your boy child. Slam him the moment he commits a crime and slam him hard. He may yell and say some incredible things to you but he will respect the lessons of that good right hand which deals out immediate justice as well as cookies and caresses. Oh, says Dr. Spock, you will only teach them physical violence. Well, we have had two generations reared on Dr. Spock and company and who has been more violent on the campuses? And who has been more savagely murderous on the streets? Our juvenile delinquents are the result of Spock philosophy. The assaulters of teachers and the old, and the helpless were given gentleness, ala Spock, in their home. Imply to a boy that no matter what he does he will be loved, and he is the most important creature in the world, and he will become even as a youth and a young man cruel, arrogant, selfish, demanding and fierce. And when he comes up against the real world of life, unsheltered by pampering mamma, he will be outraged, for no one there will comfort him and defer to him and listen to his {?}. And he will take revenge on it; he will shriek ‘police brutality’ when he is given the blows he ought to have had in the playpen. He will be uncontrollable, savage, resentful, believing that everything should be granted him and nothing demanded of him. He has been treated democratically by his parents and so he will believe as a youth that his callow opinions are as good as anyone else’s, and that authority is something to be derided, isn’t he the real authority; he has been taught so by Spock and company.”
“Now no one advises maltreating a child or beating him insensible or giving him cruel and unusual punishment, but a good firm palm can be used without permanently crippling a child, though when one looks at some of the young hoods on the street today the thought does intrude. And teach your boy children to work, and work arduously, even when toddlers. The three year old can help set a table, though not with your best china as yet. He can pull out chairs, he can dust, he can put away his own clothes and toys, he can dig weeds, he can hose lawns, straighten furniture and carry out garbage. He must learn that if he has a place in the family, an honored place, he also has responsibilities. All money he receives must be earned. He should not be given an allowance just because. His father earns money therefore his children must earn it. And by the time a boy enters his teens he should have a summer job no matter how affluent his father.”
And then she goes on to describe in the conclusion a lot of different things, just really good writing. But at the end she says: “You want your son to be a man when he enters his teens, and not a girl in a boy’s body, not the sort of male who will be a boy until the day his weary wife either shoots him or divorces him or leaves him, or the kind who will whimper that he won’t defend his country nor his house, nor his family, but will only love the aggressor.”
Tonight we’re going to turn to Genesis 1 and we’ll study, beginning in Genesis 1:26 our referring verse for this area. I don’t know how long this series will take, there’s just a massive amount of material and Scriptures. I have the benefit of some of Barbara Bier’s research on her Womanhood class where she has graciously loaned me some of the observations she’s noticed so I can develop them, go back to the original languages and work on some of those passages from the male point of view. But we’re going to start in Genesis 1 tonight with the creation of man. This time we’re treating the male, not as the male or the female as the female, but just as a human being. And Genesis 1 gives our genuine humanness of both sexes. And we’re going to study what this humanness is and then we will discuss later the differentiation of the male and the female, but tonight Genesis 1.
Genesis 1:26-30, “And 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 fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth. [27] And so God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. [28] 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 moves upon the earth. [29] And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. [30] And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing creeps upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food: and it was so.”
Now in these verses we have the basis for defining what man is. And we approach Genesis literally interpreted; we approach Genesis as not only literally interpreted but reliable under the control of literal interpretation. Why do we do this? Why are we so bold to do this when there seems to be an overwhelming onslaught against it? Simply because Jesus and the apostles believed in a literal Genesis. And we dare say that Jesus probably knows a little bit more about Genesis than the critics of Genesis. Jesus did not consider, for example, Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 to be two contradictory accounts of creation. He quoted both of them in harmony and logical compatibility, obviously unaware of the great results of higher criticism. Jesus went on to build massive amounts of doctrine on the basis of a literally interpreted Genesis, and by literally interpreted I mean literal days also. This is the only source of information on what we are.
Now you can go out into the human viewpoint world where men start autonomously and try to build out from themselves, with no reference point, no absolute plot to anchor where they are, where they started, where they end, and you’ll always find guesses, guesses at what the man’s role is, guesses at what even people are. So if I’m really to know who I am, from eternity to eternity in the plan of God, where I fit in that eternal plan, then I have to go back to Genesis. It’s unavoidable; Genesis is the only source of information and properly interpreted no scientific fact ever conflicts with a literally interpreted Genesis.
Let’s look at Genesis 1:26. God says, “Let us make man in His image.” Now that image and that likeness we discussed in the family training program, and we said it at least refers to conscience… at least it refers to conscience. And moreover, in verse 26, since it’s “man in our image,” and since in verse 27 it’s very careful to add in summary that man means male and female, [says Hebrew words] in the Hebrew, because it says both, then it must mean that the imagehood is equal in male and female. The imagehood, though may be sexually differentiated, still is there. Women are not low class or last class. The male and the female both share the imagehood of God.
So what is this imagehood of God and what does it show about our value? The Bible doesn’t approach history like most of us try to approach history. The reason we always get in trouble is we always put the cart before the horse. This is the way most people think of history: here you have ancient history, here you have Christ dying, you have modern history and so on, you have the universe is history back here, and this is the flow of history. And then God looks down at that stream of history and asks Himself how is He going to reveal Himself into the stream of history? How is He going to accommodate Himself to the history that’s already going on. And you read theological journals and you read some of the stuff, for example, on womanhood, it’s very, very weak theologically, the few books I’ve seen on the role of Christian men are written by Christian businessmen who apparently have no theological training whatever, it’s just pathetically weak, pathetic. Very unprofessional. And all the point is that here’s man and here’s woman and now what can God do with them. That’s putting the cart before the horse. Just a minute. That’s putting the cart before the horse. Who, in eternity past thought of the design of man and woman? It was God.
Turn to 1 Peter 1:20; [“Who verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you.”] there’s just a fundamental reversal in the way we think about things that has to occur to appreciate Scripture. In 1 Peter 1:20 it clearly states that before the universe came into existence, in eternity past, Jesus Christ was foreknown, “before the foundation of the world.” Now in the immediate context of verse 20 is verse 19, [“But with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”] and if you look in verse 19 you’ll see that the particular aspect of Christ’s character that is revealed there is His being the Lamb, and the Lamb is the symbol par excellence of sacrifice, blood sacrifice, sacrifice for sin. Angels can’t be sacrificed because they don’t have a life to give, only mortal creatures have a life to give. And therefore what verse 20 is telling us is that Jesus Christ, as God, Jesus Christ as man in one person was on God’s mind for all eternity. It means, therefore, for all eternity God had humanity on His mind, and therefore, the design of the human being, his spirit, his soul, the various features of his anatomy are all designed from eternity past, designed with a long-term goal in mind of incarnation.
That means that we are made to be the temple of God. It doesn’t mean that God now has to readjust and oh, what am I going to do now, I’ve got to squeeze myself into humanity. God doesn’t have to think that way because God generated humanity ahead of time with a purpose of showing Himself in the person of Jesus Christ and then the nature of Christ by regeneration in individual believers. So God doesn’t have to squeeze Himself and bend Himself out of shape to fit inside man. Man was created as a vessel of incarnation from all eternity. Therefore, what does this say? It says that humanity is the result of an eternal plan. The design of the human body is a result of an eternal plan, with due apologies to Saint Darwin it is not due to natural selection and random mutation. It is due, completely to God’s sovereign eternal plan.
All right, that’s eternity past; we want to get our perspective, what we’re doing here, before we get in the fine details. That’s eternity past, so we can clearly say as Bible-believing Christians we are designed in our humanity with God’s eternal plan, therefore there’s no inherent weakness in men; there’s no better man that will somehow pop out of the evolutionary stream in the future and replace and supplant homosapien. Homosapien is the epitome of creation, there isn’t any evolution.
Now that’s from eternity past. For eternity future we go to Revelation 21:3 and this looks into eternity future and again marks out the boundaries of humanity and homosapien. “And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself shall be with them, and be their God.” That’s not talking about God dwelling with men in eternity as He is dwelling with men today invisibly. This is talking about a visible theophany where God physically dwells with men.
All right, that’s for all eternity; what does that mean. In the present literary vernacular that means that God, when the bell finally rings and the game of history is over, when the dust settles and the smoke clears, it will be man and wherever man is, the redeemed men, there God will be. God will not concentrate on some (quote) “higher life form” in galaxy 444 some place. God, in fact, has designed His eternal future to be with men on planet earth. The earth may or may not be the geographical center of the universe or the geometric center, but the earth is the theological center of the cosmos. The earth is the place where man is and where man is God will be.
So this introduction to God’s making man in his own image should anchor us on the line from eternity to eternity; from eternity past God has always conceived of man. God had eternity to think out the design, to reevaluate the design, though of course in omniscience He doesn’t reevaluate it but from the human point of view He had all eternity to perfect the design before He pulled it off. And so therefore the design of humanity is a perfect design and from Revelation 21 we know that humanity is going to succeed. The human race, in other words, will not be destroyed or annihilated.
That’s the eternal setting for man, man is to be God’s creature. Of all the parts of creation, there is no part of creation more complicated than man himself. Now just a little footnote to apply this, a very common way for most college students. This is why, of all the courses that you will ever take on the university campus, this is why the course that will give you more human viewpoint per second than any other course are the courses that deal with the nature of man, specifically psychology and sociology for the reason that those two areas of study are tying to describe what man is, and they’ve picked the hardest area to describe. If you think the physicist has a hard problem with his quanta and his nuclear substructures and the whole problem of modern quantum physics, the parity rule and its so-called overthrow, these and other things, if you think that’s complicated, those are just the building blocks, the trivial things. But when we start talking about man we’re talking about something that from eternity to eternity was created for the incarnation, that complicated. And autonomous man thinks he’s going to generate his various doctrines and dogmas of man’s soul. And therefore this is why psychology and sociology has been giving you some problems, and why it always will. Those are the last areas that man can dominate; his knowledge of himself because he is the most complex of all being.
Let’s look further in Genesis 1:26. After He said, “Let us make man in our image,” the Trinity speaking, as we have discussed in the family training program, then it says, “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea … and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing….” Let us have dominion, the word is radah in Hebrew and it means to reign. There are several words used throughout Scripture to reign, malek and other words, but these words occur with a very interesting frequency. Tonight we want to turn to some verses of Scripture and just note how, from one end of the Bible to the other, if you haven’t before, I hope you will notice the frequency of the usages of the verb to reign and to rule, to have dominion and to dominate.
Notice in Psalm 8; Psalm 8 is the biblical amplification of Genesis 1:26. It asks the question in verse 4, “What is man, that thou art mindful of Him?” And answers the question in verses 5-9, man is God’s dominion ruler. He is the one who is going to dominate the universe, therefore in verse 5 it says, “You have made him a little lower than the angels, but You have crowned him with glory and honor. [6] You have made him to have dominion,” notice that, the key verb, “to have dominion over the works of thy hands….” Psalm 8 is important because some people think that the cultural mandate was knocked out by the fall. It’s very strange, then, that Psalm 8, written after the fall repeats the cultural mandate. “…to have dominion over the works of thy hands, You have put all things under his feet: [7] All sheep and oxen…” the beasts of the field and so on and so on and so on. So once again the role of humanity, we’re just talking about humanity, not the male and female difference yet, just the things that male and female together share; common humanity. And the common humanity is linked with the verb to dominate.
Turn to 1 Corinthians 15:24-28, “Then comes the end,” this is talking about Christ, but when it’s talking about Christ in 1 Corinthians 15 one of the keys to that chapter is that Jesus Christ replaces Adam as the fountainhead of the new humanity. So what is ascribed to Jesus Christ in 1 Corinthians 15 is not meant just for the individual Jesus Himself but for Jesus and his corporate union with the redeemed, the new human race, born again. In verse 24 Paul speaks of the coming, the end, the resurrection. “Then comes the end, when he has delivered up the kingdom to God, the Father,” now notice, and notice the vocabulary and see if you don’t see a repetition of Psalm 8 in here? “…when He shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. [25] For he must reign, until He has put all enemies under His feet. [26] And the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. [27] For He has put all things under His feet. But when He says all things are put under Him, it is clear that He is excepted which did put all things under Him,” that is the Father. [28] “And when all things shall be subdued, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.” That’s the eternal reign of the Triune God, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. But notice it is the role of God the Son to carry out what? The creation mandate.
Now look at this for a minute. Let’s start off here before the fall, before there is evil. The first thing we notice the human race is to do is to have dominion. Now when the fall occurs and you begin to have evil and rebellion, the evil and rebellion doesn’t erase that first command, it only makes the command more difficult. The work ethic, or the dominion or subduing ethic is not a result of sin. Some people think work is the result of sin. It’s not the result of sin; the frustration in work is the result of sin but production, it goes back to our creaturehood. We are made to produce and to create and the dominion is resisted by sin; sin resists man’s dominion and man is helpless to carry on with his dominion mandate and so Christ comes, and part of the salvation of Christ is to make man a dominion maker.
As we said before, there’s too much of this in Christian circles; why are you saved? So I can tell someone else how to be saved. Why are they to be saved? So they can tell someone else to be saved? What are, all saved to be witnessing machines? Now witnessing is a vital part, obviously, evangelism, personal evangelism is mandated in the New Testament but let’s get our perspective here, just a minute. When we are redeemed we’re not redeemed into something new than we were before in the sense of our creation order; we’re still mortal creatures, even Christ Him self’s role, right here in this section, His role is described in Psalm 8 terms, which shows you that though sin resists the dominion, Jesus Christ in His grace removes the block and carries dominion out. So in Christ we conquer and in Christ shall humanity one day have dominion over the universe. In other words, Christ frees men once again to be men. Don’t just confuse salvation to be the fact that we now have our little church life. That’s true, we do. But your spiritual life in the church is just one phase of your life as a creature. Remember our divine institutions, the church is the sphere of grace but we’ve got human responsibility, we’ve got marriage, we’ve got family, we’ve got nation, we’ve got justice, these other areas, and when we are redeemed the redemption should show up in those other areas, and not just in church life. That’s what we’re talking about.
Let’s continue with this dominion and this rule; turn to Hebrews 2:5, describing
the role of Christ, and once again, what do we notice about the language? It’s borrowed once again from Psalm 8. You see how frequently Psalm 8 comes up? Again and again and again. It obviously must be an important section of
the Word. Why does Paul bring it up in 1
Corinthians 15? Why does the author of
Hebrews bring it up here? “For unto the
angels has He not put in subjection,” and it’s a word in its etymology that’s
meaning, its word meaning here is subjection is related to the word dominate. The angels have not been given the task of
dominion over the universe. Man has, and
verses 6, 7 and 8, if you just read it real quick you’ll see very quickly, all
it is is a requite of Psalm 8. And then
it describes how Jesus Christ is going to carry that out in personal
history. [“For unto the angels has He
not put in subjection the world to come, of which we speak. [6] But one in a certain place testified,
saying, What is man, that thou art mindful of him? Or the son of man, that thou visitest
him? [7] Thou madest him a little lower
than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honor, and didst set him
over the works of thy hands; [8] Thou hast put all things in subjection under
his feet. For in that he put all in
subjection under him, he left nothing that is not put under him. But now we see not yet all things put under
him.”
Finally we look at Hebrews 2:10, “For it became him,” or it was fitting, “from whom are all things,” that’s God the Father, “by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make the captain of their salvation mature” or “perfect through sufferings.” Now look at that verse carefully. What is the goal announced in verse 10? The final goal for men? It said, “bringing many sons unto glory.” Now let’s just stop using Jesus words for a minute and lets just stop using words when we don’t really know what they mean; these are good words but they’re not to be just flippantly used. The glory is a manifestation of something. Remember the mount of Transfiguration, Peter, John and James up on the mountain and all of a sudden they saw the glory of Christ manifested. Well, what’s another way of saying that, put in other words, so we really make sure we know what’s going on and not just fooling ourselves.
What we could say is that on the mountain top when Christ was glorified they saw what Christ really was like. They saw His deity shine out. So when we say that somebody is glorified, another synonymous way of saying it is their character is revealed. Their character shines forth. So in verse 10 when it says “bringing many sons unto glory,” it relates the entire plan of salvation back to the creation mandate. Humanity will be glorified in Christ, meaning that in Jesus Christ those who are “in Him,” those who have believed in Him, in eternity will show the entire universe what God’s design for man really was meant to be. We’re not going to talk here about the fulfilled woman or the fulfilled man, we’re talking about the fulfilled human being and that’s what it means, the “glory,” when the creature finally lives like God designed the creature to live, and it’s going to be true and it’s going to actually happen.
Finally, in Revelation 5, that passage of the new song that’s sung, the song of the Lamb, that depicts the ultimate goal of history as glorifying God. But have you ever noticed in that hymn the word “dominion” and “reign.” In Revelation 5:10, they thank Christ for their salvation, [9, “And they sang a new song, saying,] You are worthy to take the book, You are worthy to open the seals; for You were slain, and You have redeemed us to God,” and now notice in verse 10 what is the praise, “You have made us unto our God kings and priests, and” what? “we shall reign on the earth.” See, you never get away from Genesis 1:26, even in the book of Revelation.
And finally the last verse of Scripture that speaks of this topic is Revelation 22:5, the very last time the subject comes up in the Scripture. What is the verb? You guessed it, reign. After the curse is removed, no more evil, no more sin. “And there shall be no night there; and they need no candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God gives them light, and they shall reign forever and ever.” Now unless you’re a student of the Old Testament you’re never going to guess what that reigning is all about; that reigning means to be creatures dominating the universe. Man as given to dominate angels, animals, plants and all things in the universe. And that goal is never dropped. The fall doesn’t mess it up, Satan never can stop it, Jesus Christ is going to see that that mandate is carried out. Now that’s one of the fundamental things, the powerful things you want to see about man. We’re not little cowards that have to beg on our knees against a chaotic universe, afraid of every adversity, of every pressure. We have dignity in the Scriptures and as men we ought to act like we have dignity in Scripture and treat other people like they have dignity.
Let’s go back to Genesis 1:26 and look at that verse some more. We’ve seen the eternal setting of man, he’s part of God’s eternal plan, not just a piece of history, he’s the key to history. Now let’s get a little bit more fodder under our belt, what it means to have dominion. What are we going to do? What does it mean to dominate the creation?
When God created the universe He left certain things undone. Now it says in Genesis 2 that the universe is finished; that is, finished as far as God’s work is concerned but not finished as far as man. And so God has made it that man is going to order things. Here’s some examples of man ordering things to give a picture to it. When the Jewish people went into the land, Palestine here, the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan Sea, the Mediterranean Sea, Moses led it from an eastern assault across the Jordan valley and when Moses was about to commission, the book of Deuteronomy, he was about to commission the people to go, dominion, have dominion over the land God gave you.
There’s a warning in that passage and it goes like this, it says: I will give you the land only bit by bit, lest the animals in the land multiply and come against you. And so therefore part of this dominion-izing in Scripture is a gradual thing through time. Man dominates nature gradually, more and more through time. Because this is a mandate given to all men it means all men do this. The non-Christian doesn’t want to do it unto the Lord but he’s trapped because he’s trapped as a creature operating under God’s sovereign plan for history. So even the non-Christian unregenerate man, though he doesn’t want to, winds up having to dominate the creation. Think, for example, of the advances in science and technology that have been made by non-Christians. They didn’t deliberately do it as a service to God, like they should have done it, but they did it. They couldn’t help but do it. There’s a {?} welling in the soul of every man that wants to dominate, wants to find new things, wants to order and be creative.
So this is a fundamental characteristic of our soul, whether male or female, it’s not that the male has this and the female doesn’t, though I think some of you women might be interested in the ratio of questions that the men dropped into the feedback situation; most of the womanhood questions have been on marriage and finding the right man, etc. etc. etc. and what do I do with the home situation. But it’s interesting that if you plotted all the questions that the men handed in, the ration is about 11 to 16 having not to do with women at all, it has to do with their job. Sorry to put you down girls, but that obviously shows you what is most on a man’s mind. Now we’re going to see why that’s more on the male’s mind than the female’s mind when we get in Genesis 2 but at this point we’re not making the difference that strong; we’re simply saying that ultimately both male and female have this in their heart to do; the urge to rule. Let’s draw some practical applications before we go any further in this verse.
Here are some practical applications of this undeniable urge to dominate. There should be out of this, if we really believe this, a respect for property. Property can be two things; it can be the man’s tools and the resources he has to dominate and to rule, or it can be the result of his ruling, the things that he has made, his house that he has bought, his land that he has purchased, the equipment that he’s bought, in order then to produce more. A person who holds the biblical idea of manhood will always respect a person’s property; he will not be fooled by the modern liberal who says, oh, we don’t have to worry about property rights, it’s human rights that count. In the Scripture there is no difference. When you rip somebody off you’ve ripped part of their soul off.
There was a good illustration in the paper last week, a man who had saved and saved and saved until retirement to buy tools so he could retire and be a craftsman, and some clod came along and ripped off all his wood carving tools as well as his wood carvings; sweet little brat, probably one of Dr. Spock’s cute graduates. But this is what goes on. And if you follow the Scriptures you will have respect for property, and it’s probably because men abandon Scripture they have no respect for property. So there’s always a concern for property, both male and female in the Scripture. Not because the matter, the property, is worth something in itself, but because it’s a result of someone else’s work, their soul. The word “soul” in Scripture is not the Greek idea of some immaterial thing that you kind of see in a super X-ray machine. The word soul in Scripture means the product of my hands as well as my life. And when you touch somebody… for example, in kidnapping in the Mosaic Law, if you steal a man’s child the way the Mosaic Law reads in the Hebrew text it says you stole his nephesh, you stole not the child’s nephesh, you stole the father’s nephesh. In other words, the child is an extension of his soul, and so is his property. If you rip of someone you rip off part of their nephesh.
Another application of this and it makes a very powerful application and we’ll see how powerful later on in the specific applications to the man, and that is the urge to be creative. Wherever the Word of God has gone and really been imbibed by human beings, say northern Europe’s culture 400 years ago, there was always great creativity. After all, how did the Anglo Saxon culture survive and become superior? It wasn’t because the Anglo Saxon race is superior, it simply because that race had exposure to the Word of God longer than other races, and therefore has had a superiority. Not because of its race, this is not racism, it’s just simply because they have been creative. Why is there this urge for creativity and ought to spring out of your soul? Why ought you to encourage your own creativity? Because God told you to have dominion, and you’ve got to be creative to have dominion. Is there a better way of having dominion? Is there a better way of running my office? Is there a better way of running my home? Lord, You made the creation, show me the wisdom to do it better. Just because somebody else did it and they may have been a godly person, doesn’t mean that that’s the cut off and there can be no progress after that. You know, as the old refrain, “in the beginning, is now and ever shall be,” well some Christians operate along that line on the job and everything else, just because it’s always been done this way. But that’s wrong, that’s not scriptural. There’s progress in history of the right sort.
Another application, this has pertinence to the woman in the home but also has great pertinence to the man on the job. I was watching some of the TV programs over the holidays and they had a refrain, it’s a sound biblical refrain, it must have happened by accident. It said: Making machines do more so men can do more. That’s very soundly biblical; making machines do more so men can do more. In other words, this third application out of Genesis 1:26, for the man particularly, is make work humanitarian in the right sense. Humanize the job. What do we mean by humanizing work? And the Christian man ought to be the one that does this. You can’t count on the non-Christian, the non-Christian can’t even figure out who man is, leave alone humanizing the job. But the Christian who has biblical insights, that knows Christ, ought to look at the job and say how can I make this job more meaningful to the people that do the job?
Well, there are some ways this can be done. One of the frustrations of any job, whether
it’s the woman in the home or whether it’s the man on the job, is that you keep
doing a little piece of work, visualize in the extreme the poor guy on the auto
assembly line, turning the nuts on the right rear tire of the car as it goes
by; great accomplishment, I turned 5,000 nuts today on the right rear tires of
cars. Every time he goes outside he sees
the right rear tire of a car driving down the street, that’s mine! In other words, the job cuts out in its
significance; it doesn’t really turn the guy on because he never sees the
result of his handiwork; he’s just one little cog in a gigantic machine. That
is dehumanizing. So the problem is, can
this be rearranged somehow. Well, Udo Middelmann,
one of Frances Schaeffer’s son-in-laws wrote a book a while back called Pro
Existence, in which he speaks of the interesting case of a Swedish automobile
factory where they had precisely this problem; men were quitting, they had high
turnover and everything else. Now as
non-Christian they were looking at it strictly from the pragmatic point of
view. But the Christian would look at it
more perceptively. And so these men are
made in God’s image. How can we get
these guys on the assembly… because you’ve got to have an assembly line, at
this level in technology we don’t have robot machines created at high enough
sophistication to do this kind of work, so we’ve got to have people on assembly
lines. But can we make the assembly line
more human. So the Swedish automobile
factory conceived of a way of doing this.
They broke the different craftsmen up in teams of ten men each, and they
assigned them to the car and the men would actually follow the car down the
line, each man doing his work on the car as it went down the line until they
saw the finished product. And the
marvelous result was they had much higher production, less discontent on the
job.
Now what was the magic trick? By accident, probably, and common grace, these people, probably not Christian, just lucked out in going back to man made in God’s image; he wants to see the results of his work, otherwise he’s not a fulfilled creature. He’s not a fulfilled human being; we are made to have dominion and if we can’t see it we can never convince our self we’re worth anything. All the time you read in psychology books about bad self-image, the Bible never once talks about bad self –image. That’s what’s wrong with a lot of the evangelicals in this area: what can you do to improve your self-image, as though this is the number one question of the universe. Funny, if it’s the number question of the universe the Scripture have nothing to say whatsoever about self-image. The Scriptures have only one thing to say: if you obey God and do His Word you’ll have self-image; it’s a result. It’s not a goal you see, it’s like happiness, you never get it by trying to get it. It’s a by-product of doing something that you ought to be doing, and that is if you function as a creature along the lines that you were created then you will have a proper self-image because you’ll be a proud confident producing creature.
There are some other ways; suppose you have a job that is just totally frustrating and you are somewhat flexible economically; what can you do about it? Quit and get a job where, for a while at least in your life, you see the immediate results; wood craftsman, metal work, something where you can see the immediate results of yourself, your plans and your handiwork. And it may be that some, some men in particular, have to go through that phase in their life where they’re going to have to get a job that they may not like, but for one time they are going to see the results of their handiwork and they will be fulfilled creatures. And then later, after they’ve got the big picture they can work their way into sort of a cog situation.
Another way this can be done; if you’re locked down to a cog type job that’s dehumanizing like this, you can’t get out of it because of family obligations, economic problems and pressures, there are some other things. Make sure that on your leisure time you are producing something with your hands; literally and physically, to make sure that you see the results of your productivity and creativity. Something after hours; some men work with wood, some men work with something else, but it’s not just an avocation, it’s very vital to their imagehood, that if they are jammed in a cog in a machine that somewhere they have a creative outlet where they can see the results of their handiwork.
Now before we go back into Genesis, we’ve made some of these applications. At this point in the manhood course these applications apply both to the woman in the kitchen, in the home, and it applies to the man on the job. And the man who is in the home ought to ask, does the woman in my home have the pleasure of seeing the creativity of her hand? Or is it just the usual case, you know, clear the dirty diapers so tomorrow it can get dirty again… tremendous significant result of creativity! Well, there are other areas that ought to be emphasized and these are the things that ought to over in our mind… have dominion, we are made to have dominion. If this text means anything it means we can’t avoid it. God’s law says we’re made this way and we may fight Him, we may say no we’re not made that way, but we are made that way. He said so, and therefore we honor His word when we act as though we believe we’re made the way he says the way we’re made.
What else does it say of interest to us in Genesis 1:26. It says, “Let us make man … and let them have dominion,” and it list certain things, and if you look carefully in the middle of this is a very strange thing listed there. You can understand why it says the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, but did you ever notice that stuck in the middle of verse 26 is have dominion over the earth itself. Have dominion over the earth itself! Now that includes all the chemicals in the soil of the earth, there’s your mandate for inorganic dominion, not just farming, not just working with plants and animals but working with the chemical structures and the physical structures of creation… have dominion over the earth. God says I planted a reservoir of resources under your feet; don’t be like the modern liberal who whines and cries that our resources are going; create some more. God ordained that we live on this earth until Christ returns; we’re not going to run out of resources, we’ll just run out of creative people is the problem but we don’t run out of resources. So we look around and we look for new energy resources. God is not going to permit us to just disintegrate on the earth because somebody forgot to put enough dinosaurs in the antediluvian world so we have enough oil. There are other sources of energy besides that so let’s look for them.
We might add at this point the reference of Psalm 115:16 [“The heaven, even the heavens, are the LORD’s; but the earth has He given to the children of men.”] which says that man’s proper dominion is the earth, not heaven. And it seems to indicate that man will be bound until Christ returns, basically to this planet, though this is not to say all outer space exploration is anti scriptural.
Let’s look at two areas where this is not being followed out, have dominion over the earth; have dominion over the animals, and later on in verse 29-30 have dominion over all green herbs, food. In our own day there are two areas where we are compromising our Scriptural conviction. It’s very subtle, it comes to us in such a pious moral guise that most Christians are suckers and fall for it every time. The first thing that all children are taught is that horrible thing called overpopulation. If you want a balanced treatment read Professor Rushdoony’s book, The Myth of Over-Population. The command to have children has never been retracted by God; it was given in Genesis 9 after the flood and God nowhere said we need zero population growth. If zero population growth was a pressing moral issue it would be stated so in Scripture. It is not stated, therefore it’s irrelevant. Have as many children as you can care for and leave the crybabies to their own milk. You are Christians, you are ordained to have families as large as you can that you can support well. Have them, and let the zero population people go talk in their beer if they want to, but we will have families and we will dominate because this is what the Scriptures tell us.
The reason there is a problem of overpopulation isn’t the number of people, there is plenty of room, just drive on the cap rock, you’ve got plenty of it. The problem is not the number of people, the problem is the lack of food, and why do we have the lack of food? Because God hasn’t given us enough green herbs. Oh no, no-no, not at all; because men are too stupid to use the resources that He has given. Why are men starving in India. Because there’s not enough food in India? Nonsense; it’s because of the apostate religion of India that keeps men from eating meat. Why are people starving in Sri Lanka, or Ceylon, you saw in the movie, The Incredible Bread Machine why. We have a socialist who took over there, and we have free food, and as the movie so put it, the freer the food the less there was, as always is the case in a socialist economy. So the reason for “overpopulation” (in quotes) is lack of efficient use of resources, and that is not due to the problem of fertility and birth control, that is due to brain control. It’s a different part of the body that’s the problem.
The other reason is because people are stupid in the use of government. Socialized agriculture is the greatest enemy of man on earth today. Madagascar was at one time the great supplier of food to South Africa. Today Madagascar is starving to death because the Chi-coms came in there and they socialized their agriculture, and now they don’t produce a thing. As I’ve said again and again the Ukraine was the bread basket of 19th century Europe; today the Russians import wheat. Why? Bad climate? Nonsense. The climate is no worse in the 20th century than it was in the 19th. It’s because they have collectivized agriculture, that’s why. So socialized agriculture has caused the problem. Superstitious religions with apostate food and social practices… take the Arabs of Palestine who thought it was their religious duty to chop down trees which led to the horrible, horrible erosion all over Israel. And when the Jews come into the land what do they first do, as their mandate to subdue the earth, whether they’re regenerate or not? They’re operating, unconsciously at least, according to these laws. And that is they plant trees, and they build soil, and on the soil they farm the land and they feed themselves stop crying and whimpering that we’re starving to death because we have too many children. Those are the cries of weak stupid people and as Christians you have no business entertaining stupid arguments and spending a moment’s attention to the crybabies for zero population growth; it’s nonsense. God commands us to have as many children as we can care for.
A second area in which we are scared is this problem of world peace. We’re going to be urged very shortly, I am sure, to give up certain of our national sovereignty because of this horrible dilemma of nuclear exchange. God said for man to have dominion, not to be a cowering slave giving up his freedoms to some international group of men who want to run the world. You are to be a free people, and therefore to assert your biblical Christianity you be a free people; you don’t give up your sovereignty and your freedom to international bodies because they are going to take care of the peace problem; they’ll have pieces but it will not be peace; there always is a situation.
So under the pressure of overpopulation and nuclear exchange we are going to be hounded and hounded to compromise this mandate to dominate. If we’re truly biblical Christians, loyal to God’s Word, we won’t even give them the time of day. We’ll go on our own Christian biblical ways and ignore them, and go on and produce while they’re the crybabies.
Let’s look at Genesis 1:18 in connection with the population growth. Notice particularly in verse 28… particularly in verse 28; what does it say? How to dominate. After God makes man in his own image in verse 28 and verse 29 God speaks to the couple. “And God blessed them, and God said unto them,” now notice the order of the verb; the last verb is to subdue the earth and have dominion; that was their original mandate, the purpose. But before you read “subdue” and “have dominion” what else do you read? The first command that God gives, “Be fruitful, and multiply,” not replenish but fill the earth and then you subdue it. The implication is the means of subduing the earth is by generating a godly seed, by generating a godly family and by letting the godly children have godly grandchildren, and letting them dominate. In other words, it’s familial domination and it’s not just the individual dominating; this is where, when we come to the question that many men ask, what is my priority, my job or my wife, how do I fit these two together, we have to establish the framework. It’s not an either/or, it’s a both/and. The dominion is exercised through divine institution two and divine institution three; through marriage and family. This is why those verbs are in that sequence.
The dominion is never given as state dominion. Government is given only as a negative divine institution to restrain evil so divine institution one, divine institution two, divine institution three can produce wealth. In the Scriptures government is never a productive… government is never involved in this mandate to dominate. It is only the family unit that is to dominate. But what do we do? We tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, tax, the rich families until they no longer exist, as if the acquisition of wealth is evil. We have inheritances taxes; oh, we’re going to get those people. Yes, we get them all right, and we break up the family; we break up the great families. Every country needs great families and we stupid Americans do everything we can to destroy our great families, to make them feel guilty because they’re great. This has always been a certain unbiblical streak to American character, and that is we have this democratic idea that all men are the same. No they’re not; there are some great men and then there are some duds and what you want to do is make sure society is run by the great people and let the duds have their fun in the boob tube or something and the great people can produce. Now that’s the way a nation survives, but we, obviously do everything we can to elevate the duds and put down the great people.
So the dominion of verse 28 is exercised first through being fruitful, multiplying, and then filling the earth. Now let’s look at this last passage, verse 29 of the potential of the herbs, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed,” notice “herb bearing seed,” every one of the herb bearing seeds. The implication is that this is too much for Adam; certainly Adam isn’t going to go eat of every single herb that’s there. Well, then why is every herb bearing seed given to man? So man can experiment with the resources that he has. In other words, the picture that we have in Scripture, far from running out of resources, it looks like this: here we are as men, and here is the area of nature that we’ve so far dominated. There is an infinite area of resources out here we haven’t begun to tap. A very common sense every day application; solar energy, there’s more sun energy that falls on the roof of a house in Lubbock than is necessary to heat that house all year long. Ever think of utilizing it? Well, solar energy is coming into the fore. We don’t cry because the Arabs are going to take away our oil. Now isn’t that a ridiculous way of handling the situation. Let the Arabs have their oil, they can drown in it, we’re going to have our own resources. That’s the way to handle that problem. That is the dominion-making man who doesn’t beg on the doorstep of some Arab sheik for his freedom.
At the end of Genesis 1:29 and 30, when God has given all the resources for food, God says it is good, we have the completion of what it means to be a human being. Now let’s summarize this first section that we’ve done, make sure we pull together because the next one we’re going to start separating the male and the female. Let’s pull it together with some applications, what we can learn from the man as a human being, and the woman as a human being, as a dominion exerciser.
The first application that we can make is in the area of our humanity, our area that both men and women share this. Dr. Ikrod, one of the famous Old Testament theologians of our day had this to comment about this Genesis text. He said, “the value thus said on the relation of the sexes is markedly different from the evaluation of woman generally attaining in the ancient world which regards her simply as an instrument of pleasure and procreation.” In this text, verse 27 says “male and female” He made them. And it means that females as well as males have the urge for dominion.” What does this mean practically? We can say at least two areas, for Christian men, since this series is addressed to Christian men, Christian men ought to look at their wives and female employees and ask yourself, are you treating them as fully as humanly you can? There will always be better ways, you may not be economically able to do anything at the moment, but ask yourself, are they being treated as human, are they seeing the results of their hand.
Turn to Proverbs 31:31, just to show you this playing out of Genesis doesn’t stay in Genesis; it leaks into every portion of the Scriptures. In Proverbs 31:31, what does it say that the man is to do for his woman? “Give her the fruit of her hands, and let her own works praise her in the gates.” Where did that come from? It came from the philosophy of Genesis 1:26 is where it came from. The woman, and this was a revolutionary statement in the ancient world, the woman was a human being…amazing point! And it’s precisely this point that the women’s lib is right. Women’s lib has a lot of wrongness in it, misdirection in it, but there’s one thing that’s right about it and that is that for a long time a lot of women have been put down as sub human, they don’t need to see the results of their hand, they’re just sort of men’s play things. And we just put them in the closet when we don’t need them. But women are going to be treated as human. That part of the women’s lib every Christian, Bible-believing Christian can go along with solidly. And so Proverbs 31:31 is a reflection of that philosophy.
But then Christian men ought not just to look at their women, they are to look at themselves and their own jobs and ask yourself about your job. Are you being fully a creature made in God’s image on your job? Are you reflecting the way God wants you to produce. Think of that Swedish automobile factory, they tried to do something. Think of the man who has a boring job and at least goes home and he starts his craftsmanship, because he’s going to have something come off his hands that he can see that he’s produced and created. Or as we’ll see later on, the man as the father/trainer of his children and they become his production, and they become his pride in the right sense of the word.
There’s another illustration of this for some businessmen who might be interested; Middelmann gives it in his book, Pro Existence. “A friend of mine, who was an American engineer and builds bridges, lost his job in his father’s company because of the way he tried to solve a personnel problem. What he found was the workers would come, dig ditches for bridges for a month, and then get so bored they’d leave. There was a tremendous turnover on the job. So my friend thought that as a Christian he ought to do something about it. He hatched an idea. He decided to travel across Europe and photograph Roman bridges that had been built 2,000 years ago and still stand. He took the pictures back to the ditch diggers and said look, here’s what you’re building, a bridge. And how long it will stands depends on the way you dig the ditch; your craftsmanship is involved. But his father said there was no job for a Vice President doing this so he fired him as inefficient, flying to Europe to take pictures of bridges. Use the men to dig the ditches instead of showing them how to be human, and how to be creative. Nevertheless, as a result of these pictures the ditch diggers did begin to say to themselves, we’re building bridges and if we build them well they’ll stand for 2,000 years, and they began to work better. And after a couple of months some of them moved up to the next higher level, and then to the next higher level, and the turn over was much, much less.”
But here was a humane solution in which the individual was encouraged to be creative. Nothing to do as a Christian man? Plenty to as a Christian man, right in your own back yard. Next week we’ll discuss the origin of the male and the female difference in Genesis 2; read that chapter, prepare to looking at it from the man’s point of view.