The High King delegates to us the shaping of life on Kingdom Earth as the population grows and diversifies, developing the earth’s resources. But we are to rule our portion of the kingdom FOR him, in alignment with the moral law of God written on every heart (Romans 2:15).

As we pursue a clear mission target, which is the goal of this podcast, Christians today can inadvertently be shaped by a “lifeboat” view of our mission in this fallen world. We can subtly act as if the created world and its culture were the Titanic, and now that we’ve hit the iceberg of sin, there is nothing left for us to do but get ourselves and others into lifeboats. The ship is sinking rapidly, God has given up on it and is concerned only with saving those who will respond to the gospel and get in the lifeboat. Any effort we make to improve life in this world through vocation—building a bridge, producing a movie, designing cell phones, teaching secular kids in public schools—has no real meaning. It is just “rearranging the deck chairs” on the sinking ship of our fallen culture on its way down to ruin.

But such a view of Christianity is very flawed. This world is not sinking down to ultimate destruction like the Titanic; to the contrary, it has been boarded by the builder and designer of the ship who at great personal cost is patching the giant hole caused by sin, restoring everything damaged by the toxic sea water, and sailing that renewed ship right into the golden waters of a perfect, eternal world. The lifeboat understanding of Christianity ignores two fundamental biblical facts.  The first is the goodness of God’s creation, a mirror of God’s glory, upon which God Himself will one day dwell in its renewed form with his people forever. The second is the reality of God’s nature as a delegator. In the first chapter of the Bible, God is revealed not only to be the great creator and ruler over his good earth, but also to be the great delegator—having fashioned Adam and Eve in his own image to continue the creating and ruling process that He began. His delegating words were, “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.” This episode examines how God delegated to humans the process he started, i.e. creating and ruling the material order and why such an understanding gives everyday life great meaning.

Today we continue our series, Life Is Knowing God, by examining God’s role as delegator. The chief way God chooses to rule his creation is by delegating that rule to humanity, and the chief way Christ brings renewal to his fallen creation is, likewise, by delegating his rule to the new humanity commanding us to seek first the spread of Christ’s kingdom rule into every sphere of our lives and ever corner of the planet. The word, delegate, means “to entrust to another,” “to appoint to act on your behalf.” God’s plan to delegate his task of creating and ruling the material world to mankind seems to have shaped how God recounts his creation of the planet, providing a pattern for humans to continue. Two aspects of this process stand out.

1. In the creation narrative, God first makes the stuff of creation. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then the creation narrative reveals God following a distinct pattern for Adam and Eve to later follow, separate and rearrange: Vs 4 And God separated the light from the darkness. Vs 7 And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. Vs 9 And God said, “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” God, the Master Craftsman, recounts his actions in creating the cosmos not as simply speaking every sparrow, giraffe, and oak tree directly into existence. This would be a pattern no human can follow! Rather, he describes his creative work as separating and rearranging the stuff of creation because that is a pattern that he wants his delegates, human beings to follow, as they continue his creative work of developing the material world he entrusts to them. They are to separate the sound waves into notes and rearrange them into music, separate the light waves into colors and rearrange them into art, separate iron ore from the ground and rearrange it into bridges, separate rubber from trees and rearrange it into balls.
2. The second pattern in God’s creative process that leaps off the page is creating four kingdoms first, the heavens, the air, the water, and dry land (days 1-3.5) and then the rulers of those four kingdoms (days 4-6): 1) The ruler of the heavens: And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. 2) The ruler of the waters: God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm. 3) The ruler of the air: and every winged bird. 4) The ruler of dry land: And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth.” The connection of created beings to the kingdoms (realms) they rule sets the stage for the creation of man.

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.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. Notice how closely being God’s image bearers is linked to exercising dominion. That is what the High King of Heaven does. He rules. That is what he designed his image-bearers to do—rule. God delegates his rule over Kingdom Earth to humankind.

After linking the likeness of humans to himself as the ultimate ruler, God then issues the First Commission to the first man and woman. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Jordan Raynor, in his book, The Sacredness of Secular Work rightly observes that a correct understanding of our mission as Christ-followers begins by realizing that God’s work of creating was never completed by God. He argues, “God never intended creation to be a product we passively consume. He intended it to be a project we actively participate in.” The sixth day of creation has been mistakenly viewed as the end of creation, when it is actually just the beginning of the next chapter about humans creating:

“You might think that our story is ending, but in fact it is just the beginning. God made you to look like Him—to act and work and create with Him. Because while in six days God created a lot, there are so many things that He simply did not—like bridges and baseballs, sandcastles and s’mores. God asked us to create and fill the planet with more” (The Creator in You).

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