Genesis 1:28 reads, “God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” This is a beautiful and powerful calling for humanity – yet it is also one of the most misused verses in the Bible. Understood in its context, Gen 1:28 is a calling for human beings to rule over creation with the love, care, and justice of the Creator whose image they were placed on earth to represent. We are here to express God’s heart towards His Creation. Yet too often this verse is used by Christians to say that God has given humanity permission to use Creation however we see fit in order to advance our own cause.
But the reality is that Genesis 1:28 is not an invitation to use Creation like a slave – rather, it’s an invitation to dance with Creation in a way that makes her grow and flourish. Even more than this, the calling is to marry human life, culture, and creativity with her in such a way that she becomes even more beautiful. We can see this in the trajectory of the Biblical story as a whole. In Genesis 2, human beings are set in a Garden to care for it. After the whole story of the Bible – the fall, the saga of Israel, the arrival of Christ, and the age of the Church – we arrive at Revelation 21-22, when the New Heavens and New Earth have been established, God and human beings are living together again, and all is made right. What do we see here? God’s story for humanity does not end in a return to the Garden of Eden – rather, it culminates in a garden CITY. The New Jerusalem is a place where the artistry of human beings (the city) has merged with the creative beauty of God (the river, trees, leaves, and fruits that run through the city) in a new way that has made everything even more beautiful than it was in the beginning.
This, then, is the Gen 1:28 calling for humanity. It’s to steadily, and with great service and care, marry human creativity with God’s creativity into a new tapestry where both are honored and both flourish even more together than they would apart. A healthy human society that is pursuing this calling will weave throughout itself traditions that honor, integrate, showcase, and protect Creation. As it develops technology, laws, health systems, and art, it will do so in a way that elevates the beauty and health of the natural world – and through this the two will flourish together.
So the question is: how well are we living out this vocation? The deforested and concrete jungles of our cities, the trash strewn about our blocks, our polluted waterways, our poisoned air, the great Pacific garbage patch, and the ever deepening climate crisis (to name a few things) all speak to the perversion and dysfunction of our way of life. Rather than dancing with God’s Creation, we have oppressed her and harvested her like a slave, abusing her, extracting from her, depleting her, poisoning her, and in many ways deconstructing her. We have been a profound and highly effective agent of death in God’s beautiful world – and that death is beginning to spread back over us. Because of what we have done to her, we now need to restore her to health before we can even consider dancing with her. This, then is the urgent calling of our time. Wherever we are and in whatever way we can, we need to orient ourselves towards healing and restoring the living system around us. We need to plant new plants in our neighborhoods, clean poisoned lots, protect our waterways from pollution, slow and stop all the trash we’re throwing into her, and stop pouring fossil fuel emissions into her atmosphere. In many cases, we need to just try to leave more and more of her alone so she can start to heal herself.
We’ll engage the practicalities of this calling in later posts this month. But for now, consider the Garden of Eden of Gen 1 and the Garden City of Revelation 21. Our calling has always been to dance God’s creation from Gen 1 to Rev 21 but instead we have enslaved her, used her for our own purposes, and ultimately left her bleeding on the side of the road, just like the robbers in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Yet despite the fact that we are the robbers, through the grace of Christ and the power of the Spirit we have been invited to change direction and participate in the work of the Good Samaritan. We’ve been given an opportunity to join God in healing the damage we’ve caused. This path is set before us – and it is urgent, because the Creation is bleeding heavily from the wounds we have inflicted. But there is a real path of new life, if we are willing to take it.
RESOURCES:
“Regreening the Desert” Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDgDWbQtlKI
“Kiss the Ground” documentary – you can find it on Netflix, Apple TV, Google Play, and Amazon Prime
Homegrown National Park: www.homegrownnationalpark.org
Tree Tenders (PHS): https://phsonline.org/programs/tree-programs
HP Community Garden – Contact Mike Wilcox at huntingparkgarden@gmail.com
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