Marriage and the Great American Baby Shortage

Marriage and the Great American Baby Shortage

Jan 28, 2026 | Parents and Family

The decline of Christianity with the rise of secularism in America has had disastrous consequences. At the center of this sad state of affairs is the decline of the family from which all civilizational and human flourishing emerges, as I wrote about recently. Sadly, not only are families increasingly dysfunctional, but many young people are no longer even getting married, let alone having families. The latter likely contributes to the former, given many people never experience or witness families that work and are blessed as God intended them to be. American, and Western culture in general, is like a dense secular moral English fog people negotiate every day pretending it’s a sunny day at the beach in the south of France. Like a wet blanket, the morass of secularism clings to people who aren’t even aware it exists. Secularism has infected Christians as well, often when it comes to having children and how many to have.

For secular people having rejected God’s revelation in creation, Scripture, and Christ, they walk through life virtually blind, stumbling into things they can’t see, wondering why they are so miserable. Christians, on the other hand, have been given the user’s manual directly from the Creator, and having children, bringing other beings into this world, giving them life, is the greatest blessing we as those created in God’s image can have. Hearing about the blessing of having large families, lots of children (let’s say five, six, seven kids), is something I’ve never come across in any church I’ve attended in 47 years as a Christian. It wasn’t until I embraced postmillennialism in August 2022 (as anyone who reads my work consistently knows, and is getting tired of hearing) that I came across a Christian community that extols large families.

Over the years I’ve heard sermons on raising kids, but not having more kids. I don’t remember, but I’m sure I’ve heard sermons that on Psalm 127 where Solomon proclaims the blessing of lots of kids.

3 Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
    the fruit of the womb a reward.
4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior
    are the children of one’s youth.
5 Blessed is the man
    who fills his quiver with them!
He shall not be put to shame
    when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.

I’ve long wondered why so many Christians seems to want fewer rather than more rewards, or who don’t seem to want to seek God’s blessing by filling their quiver full of them. There are several reasons for that, not least is that it’s hard and scary. The sacrifice can be immense. My daughter and her husband had three under three this entire year, and their oldest turned four in just last week. It’s exhausting, but they wouldn’t give it up for the world. My daughter already laments how fast it’s going, and as many of us already know, in the blink of an eye it’s over.

Another reason is that most pastors, let alone Christians, do not believe having large families is in fact a biblical imperative. Rather, the mindset is that having children is just another “lifestyle choice,” as marriage itself is increasingly for secular young people. I argue that it is in fact not a choice but something God expects of his people if He’s given them the ability to do it. Which brings us to culture.

The Importance of Culture
We went to a church for a number of years and seeing so many families with just two children distressed me. Such parents have no idea how much that secular fog I mentioned influences them and their decisions to have children and how many. I knew a Christian guy some years ago and he and his wife decided not to have any children, and he thought that was okay! That blew my mind. I know this fog influenced us when we were younger and starting to think about having children. My wife wanted two because she came from a family of two, and I insisted on three, given that’s what we had in our family. I got my way, but it never occurred to us that 5 or 6 kids was even an option. With the old 20/20 hindsight that is life, if I knew then what I know now . . . . We were caught in the secular fog like most others.

Given we live at the end of 300 to 400 years of secular cultural development in the West, the great Everest challenge today for the Christian church is not being subsumed by that culture, and in turn developing a distinctly Christian culture. Not a sub-culture which is easy and often done, but transforming the secular culture into a Christian one. That’s where the Mount Everest metaphor is apropos. As the tallest mountain in the world at 29,000 feet, for all but the most seasoned and expert climbers Everest is an insurmountable challenge. The culture can appear just as formidable given secularism has been the dominant plausibility structure in America since the 1960s. Plausibility structure is a phrase I’m confident you’ve never heard in church before, or even outside of it. Plausible is a word we are familiar with, “having an appearance of truth or reason; seemingly worthy of approval or acceptance; credible; believable.” It’s something that seems real or true. The structure is the culture in which we live, and the meanings the culture conveys in all its myriad ways will seem real or true to us. Whether these things are real and true or not is irrelevant, only that the culture makes them seem so.

At its most basic level, culture is whatever human beings create, but for our purposes culture is an amorphous set of influences. Christian sociologist James Davison Hunter in his book, To Change the World, states that, “culture is a system of truth claims and moral obligations,” and that, “culture is about how societies define reality—what is good, bad, right, wrong, real, unreal, important, unimportant, and so on.” Culture affirms certain values and propositions, while it denies others, it embraces certain beliefs, while it eschews others; culture is never neutral. Our modern concept of culture derives from a term first used in classical antiquity by the Roman orator, Cicero: “cultura animi.” In Latin, cultura literally means cultivation. We could say culture cultivates. Culture is an indoctrination factory.

This seems obvious, but most people, including most Christians, don’t realize the extent that culture shapes not only what they believe, or what they like, or how they behave, but literally shapes who they are. If we don’t think in a discerning way about the culture we inhabit, we will be merely reactive rather than proactive. Culture is something we cannot take for granted or escape.

This sociological fact of human existence is why “the culture wars” are so important, and in fact crucial for obeying Christ’s injunction that his kingdom come, his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. If we don’t fight against the secular culture that influences us every moment as the water influences the fish, we will be determined by it. Even at that it can’t be fully escaped, but we can become aware of what it is communicating to us, how it is shaping us, and push back in any number of ways, including children. Having a large family is an act of cultural rebellion.

Creating A Marriage and Baby Culture in the Church
I started thinking about this when I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the connection between declining marriage rates and their correlation to the decline in the number of children couples are having. Chalk this up to the indoctrination of the secular culture of expressive individualism and personal fulfillment as “the chief end of man” (a la the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q1). While conservative Christians have higher marriage rates and more children than secular couples, it’s not close to what it should be, at least in my humble opinion.

Then I read a piece in the New York Post by an American Jewish Woman with the click bait title, for me, “I took our six kids overseas — and saw a ‘family-friendly’ nation in joyous action.” I learned that prior to going to this “family-friendly” nation, they first spent a week in Greece, which is most definitely not “family-friendly.” She explains the differences in these two cultures and their people to their “large” family. I put the word large in quotes because I want to emphasize how rare six children in a family is today; it shouldn’t be, especially in the church. I encourage you to read the piece, but here’s how she starts:

If you’ve ever wanted to feel like a celebrity, turning heads everywhere you go, I recommend taking a gaggle of children to a country with a plunging birth rate. Across the European Union, birth rates are far below replacement level — and Greece is among the lowest, with the average woman having 1.3 children in her lifetime.

Touring it with six kids made me feel like I was traveling with a circus troupe. Everywhere we went, people stared. They counted the children aloud (I learned the number six in Greek, éxi,  because I heard so many people tallying how many kids we had). They smiled politely and encouragingly, but with a kind of stunned disbelief.

Greece’s birth rate has collapsed so dramatically that a family like mine, once utterly normal, now looks like a moving museum exhibit.

America, if not quite there yet, is on its way. The birth rate currently is at 1.6, which is well below the 2.1 replacement rate. In other words. Women need to have over two children on average just to tread water. If that doesn’t happen, then in several decades that country will have some very serious problems, if it even exists as all.

Now let’s look at the country they next travelled to, and as she is Jewish you probably already guess that country is Israel, a nation where “large” families are not unusual.

Then we flew to Israel. It’s only a short hop on the map, but culturally it felt like crossing a continent. Suddenly, we weren’t an oddity: We were — wonderfully, refreshingly — unremarkable. In Israel, where the birth rate is not just stable but rising, a family with six kids isn’t an act of rebellion.

Walking around Jerusalem, no one turns to gawk because families with three to even eight children are everywhere. Babies in carriers, toddlers on shoulders, siblings zipping ahead on scooters; the streets are alive with them. This isn’t a place where children are squeezed into the seams of adult life. They are the fabric.

Oh how I love this! This should be like walking into a church on Sunday, children everywhere. I know, that’s not possible at all churches, but churches with a lot of young people should be a little Israel. How does this happen? How does a culture change, go from Greece to Israel regarding marriage and children? It starts from the Pastor and leadership of the church, that’s how. Since the secular culture mitigates against life and the sacrifices it takes to raise that life, conservative Christians culture should be radically counter cultural. This is not only because civilization is at stake in the current demographic crisis, but because God wills it!

Let’s see if we can make a biblical case for natalism. That word comes from a French word meaning birthrate, and simply means having lots of babies is good! It is in fact, a moral imperative. I know this will be “controversial” to some Christians who will immediately, in the toxic empathy that is endemic in our day, point to the poor couples who can’t have children and want to, or to single people who can’t seem to find a spouse. We don’t want to make them feel bad, but truth and blessing are no excuse to feel bad. If we do we should repent because God is the sovereign Lord of marriage and the womb, as he is the sovereign Lord of all of reality.

The Biblical Case for Having Children
This case should not have to be made, but given the secular captivity of the church on this issue, it must be. There are only three express commands to have children in the Bible, the first in Genesis 1 from a passage most Christians are familiar with, but unfortunately ignore:

28 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.”

I recently did a post on the Dominion Mandate, so I won’t repeat what I said there, but this command was not abrogated after the fall, or after Christ. This is the NIV, and other versions translate it as, “Be fruitful and multiply.” After the flood and before God’s covenant promise in the rainbow to Noah and his sons, he twice commanded them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth” (Gen. 9:1), and “As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it” (Gen. 9:7). The only other place where a command to have children is found is to the exiles in Babylon (Jer. 29:6):

Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease.

The reason these are the only direct commands in Scripture to have children is that nobody would have conceived of a need to be commanded to have children, and as many as one could. That’s what families did! And to think otherwise would never have occurred to anyone in the ancient world. While industrialization diminished the incentives to have large families, until feminism, and especially until the dreaded 1960s, having children was seen as fulfilling and natural, not a burden to keep people from living their best life now.  

Contrary to our current historical moment, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and became an adult in the 80s, when the environmental hysteria de jure was overpopulation. Masses of people were supposed to die of starvation by the 80s, and the overpopulation predictions proved to be the lie they always were. God would never have created a world that could not sustain the apex of his creation. I even had Christians over the years argue that God’s command to Adam and Eve no longer applies to us because the earth is pretty much already filled up. Nobody would say such a thing now. In fact, I see Elon Musk on Twitter/X posting all the time about the demographic apocalypse that will happen if people don’t start having more children.

The promises of God in the Pentateuch are the foundation of God’s redemptive plans on earth, and they always included children. If we do a Bible word search for words such as offspring, seed, child, we’ll see that children are integral to everything God does with and for His people, and more children was always better than fewer. And in the first Christian sermon by Peter in Acts 2, he affirms the centrality of children to his redemptive plans in the New Covenant, as he says to the three thousand people assembled, “the promise is for you and for your children.” Children are assumed as part of the deal. They are not a burden, they are not an inconvenience, they are to be a natural part of Christian families and God’s church, the more the better. My prayer is that we become more like Israel so we don’t become like Greece.

The Wide and Narrow Road Reconsidered

The Wide and Narrow Road Reconsidered

Jan 21, 2026 | Theology

If you’re not active on Twitter, you likely won’t know about the big blow up about Kirk Cameron that happened some weeks back. On his podcast he was having a conversation with his son about the topic of Hell. They questioned the concept of Eternal Conscious Torment (ETC), and Christian Twitter went nuts. Words like heretic and apostacy were thrown around like confetti at a New Year’s Eve celebration. The other option for conservative Christians who believe in hell but question or wonder about the eternality of conscience torment is annihilationism. At some point after God’s “judgement of the living and the dead,” these people will cease to exist, they will die, forever. So the punishment is eternal, forever, but the person is not consciously being punished in misery forever. They’re dead.

I have no desire to debate or explore the topic because I believe God is just, and whenever difficult issues arise in life, or death, I lean on Moses’ declaration in Deuteronomy 32:3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.

3 I will proclaim the name of the Lord.
    Oh, praise the greatness of our God!
4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect,
    and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
    upright and just is he.

That is the hill I live and die on, and to which I give my life, my fortune, such as it is, and my sacred honor.

One of the many comments about this was regarding the wide and narrow gate and road Jesus speaks about in Matthew 7:

13 “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. 14 But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.

The person who commented was affirming that most people will go to hell and not be saved. For all of my Christian life until August of 2022 and my embrace of postmillennialism, I believed that too. From Jesus’ words it seems obvious this is the case. I’ll never forget hearing for the first time the idea that more people will be saved than damned to hell. It sounded so strange to me, but it sounded so right given everything I was learning about my newfound optimistic eschatology. I’ll get into that below, but first let’s see why a la Vizzini in The Princess Bride, I don’t think that passage means what you think it means.

The Context of Matthew 7 and Jesus’ Ministry
People forget that Jesus was a Jewish Messiah sent to “the lost sheep of Israel,” and not to anyone else. When a Canaanite woman came to Jesus to heal her daughter (Matt. 15), first he ignored her, then replied: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” Her response to Jesus’ rejection so impressed him that he healed her daughter. Here we see both dynamics in play. On the one hand he is telling us his first mission was to Jews only, but also confirming the Old Testament witness of the blessings of God extending to all peoples and nations. Jesus used the same phrase in Matthew 10 when he sent out the Twelve, “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. 6 Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.” We get off track when we think Jesus’ words always apply equally and always to all people in all times. That is not the case.

We must remember that Jesus came in fulfillment of 2,000 years of redemptive history through the people of Israel. The promises and commandments while in some sense universal, were as Paul says about the gospel, “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile” (Rom. 1:16). As we know, he would always go to the synagogue first when he visited a city, and if they rejected him, which they often did, he would go to the Gentiles. Many Jews didn’t like that, at all. But God’s plan of salvation was never only to the Jews. It took a while for early Jewish Christians to figure this out. Even Peter had to see a vision from God and then be reminded, and even be rebuked by Paul, because he so easily forgot that it may have been the Jew first, but it was always also to the Gentile.

From the beginning, the blessings of salvation from sin were intended for Gentiles, as can be seen from God’s first calling of Abram in Genesis 12. He picked only one man on earth and said to him, “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you,” and this promise is reiterated two more times to Abraham, and then to Isaac and Jacob. In Genesis 46 and 49, the Lord tells us that his servant will be “a light to the Gentiles” (42:6 and 49:6), and the latter passage adds, “that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” The same word translated Gentiles in these verses is also used in the great Incarnation passage of Isaiah 9. We’re all familiar, in the elegant language of the King James Version, with verse 7:

6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.

We’re generally not familiar with the verse that introduces the transforming life of this child, which talks about God now honoring “Galilee of the Gentiles.” As we know Jesus was from the Nazareth in the region of Galilee. Most translations, for some reason translate Gentiles as nations, but it’s the same Hebrew word as Isaiah uses the in the previous two verses. The point is that the Gentiles are part of God’s redemptive plans, but their salvation will only come through the Jews. In the metaphor Paul uses in Romans 11 of the olive tree, the Gentiles are the ones needing to be grafted in. In another conversation with a non-Jew, although not a Gentile, the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4), Jesus tells her that “salvation is from the Jews,” but because of that encounter with her, many of the Samaritans came to believe in him. Salvation is from the Jews, but not only for the Jews. It is for all peoples and nations.

When we come to the context of Matthew 7, the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is speaking to Jews and for Jews. Yes, there are universal principles throughout, but he is communicating to Jews in a Jewish context because that’s why he came as their Messiah. They are the lost sheep he is going to find. Chapter 5 very much has a Jewish flavor as he directly discusses the law of Moses, the Ten Commandments and other laws from that period of their history. Chapter 6 is mostly universal, but in the last passage about worry he contrasts the Jews he is speaking to with the pagans. Chapter 7 again is more to the Jews because he speaks of false prophets and disciples, and it is here that we read of the wide gate and the broad road that leads to destruction.

Seeing how Jesus’ life and ministry played out, his declaration about the few definitely applied to the Jews. After his resurrection and just prior to Pentecost, there are only 120 among what Luke calls “the believers.” That means every other Jew in the Roman Empire did not believe in Jesus as their Messiah. You can’t get much smaller and narrower than that! The road to destruction for the Jews was indeed broad and many entered through that gate. Even after 40 years of the ministry of the Apostles at the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in AD70, Christian Jews were a tiny minority. Taking Jesus’ prediction about only a few finding life as applying to Gentiles cannot be inferred from this text. It may be true, but Jesus isn’t saying that here.

To me, whatever the nature of hell, and it exists, God would never allow Satan to win more souls to send there. No way, no how. I used to believe that He did allow that because I didn’t understand the context of Matthew 7.

The Redemptive Plan of God and His Mighty Saving Power
Many Christians, most I dare say, believe God is stingy with his mercy and grace. I’ve often heard Christians referred to as a remnant, a reference to the few Jews saved from Israel’s rebellion in the Old Testament. I get it, the world can be a horrific place, and if we do the math in our head solely based on appearances, and history up to this moment, Satan definitely has the lead. However, we’re not at the end of the story yet, and instead of judging by what we see, I suggest we go to God’s word to see what he says about the salvation Jesus accomplished for His people on the cross.

The first thing we notice is that multitudes will be saved, and in the word God used with Abram, be blessed. The Lord uses three images to give us a sense of the magnitude of His saving work as he communicates his covenant promise to His people: stars, dust, and sand. We read of stars in Genesis 15:

4 Then the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but a son who is your own flesh and blood will be your heir.” 5 He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.”

And dust in Genesis 13:

16 I will make your offspring like the dust of the earth, so that if anyone could count the dust, then your offspring could be counted.

And after the Lord changes his name to Abraham and introduces him and his household to circumcision, he adds sand (Gen. 22):

17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.”

The Lord reiterates his multiplication promise to his son and grandson. To Isaac he says (Gen. 26):

4 I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed.

And then to Jacob (Gen. 28):

14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring.

And He further clarifies the nature of these peoples (Gen. 35):

11 And God said to him, “I am God Almighty; be fruitful and increase in number. A nation and a community of nations will come from you, and kings will be among your descendants.

We can’t necessarily infer a majority from these passages, but images of stars, dust, and sand don’t exactly bring to mind God as a grinch miserly with his saving grace. Why do I, and specifically we postmillennialists, believe God will in fact save more people than he allows to be lost? Because the word that best describes God’s redemptive plans on earth is what his mighty saving power is accomplishing—victory.

An Eschatology of Victory
That is the title of a book by J. Marcellus Kik I read in the early days after my embrace of postmillennialism. I found this new theological journey I had embarked on after almost 44 years as a Christian changed not only my perspective on “end times,” but on everything. In 2024 I had the privilege of being invited to do a podcast on a YouTube channel called Eschatology Matters, which says it perfectly. What we think about “end times” shades our perspective on everything in life—past, present, and future. Eschatology, the study of end things, does indeed matter, a lot.

Prior to this shift, not only did I think more people would be lost than saved, but I believed the devil had the upper hand “down here” in this fallen world. When I was born again in the Late Great Planet Earth late 70s, I naturally embraced the dispensationalism that was everywhere at the time. Rapture theology was common. Things were getting worse, and Jesus was coming back soon. Not exactly an “eschatology of victory.” After I got burned out on such “newspaper eschatology,” I became an eschatological agnostic, what I came to call pan-millennialism because everything will pan out in the end. The Bible, or so I thought, doesn’t give us clear guidance on “end times,” so why worry about it. By the way, I put that phrase in quotes because it became dominant in the 70s to refer to what happens at the end of time, to the end of the world as we know it, as the end times. The 90s into the 2000s had the Left Behind phenomenon, so “end times” became even more engrained in the culture.

I’m generally not a negative or pessimistic person, so for most of my pan-mill life I believed we could change the world for the better, and even though I thought the devil would win on earth, Jesus would come back to save the day and usher us into eternity. As the creed says, “He will come again to judge the living and the dead.” When I embraced amillennialism in 2014 because I learned the Bible does indeed say something about eschatology, I found that it turned me into a pessimist. Either I learned or came to believe that sin and man’s rebellion were a more powerful force in a fallen world that I mistakenly believed belonged to Satan. In August of 2022 I started to understand just how wrong I had been. On this earth, in this fallen world, the gospel declares in the words of another book I read early on, Victory in Jesus. This one by Greg Bahnsen, and the subtitle says well the nature of this new eschatological perspective I now have: The Bright Hope of Postmillennialism.

I had for decades believed postmillennialism was a secular distortion of the biblical record, turning it into a belief in unending human progress, and specifically because of man’s efforts. It had nothing to do, or so I thought, with the gospel. Given the track record of us humans over the millennia, I considered it unworthy of even considering, a joke. What really surprised me was that it only took me listening to a YouTube video on a walk one Saturday afternoon to convince me it was likely true, that I had been wrong all these years, pre, pan, or a-mill.

My objective here isn’t to convince anyone of my now optimistic eschatological convictions, but to convey that how we interpret something like Jesus talking about wide and narrow gates is not only determined by the context as I argued above, but also by our eschatology, even if we don’t think we have one. We do!

 

 

The Dominion Mandate for Today

The Dominion Mandate for Today

Jan 14, 2026 | Theology

For most of my Christian life the Dominion Mandate was not something I gave any serious thought to. For me what counted was what some call the Cultural Mandate. From early in my Christian life, I always thought we should bring our Christian worldview and thinking to bear upon all of life, but that didn’t have anything to do with “dominion,” or so I thought. Both of these mandates come from the same place, Genesis 1, but they are two different perspectives based on two different theological understandings of the church’s role in the world. For those focused on it as a cultural endeavor, it is primarily an intellectual exercise of applying a Christian perspective to the world and what we do in it. Dominion, on the other hand, implies rule and authority, not just influence. it’s taking over, becoming the boss, so to speak.

There is a third option where neither culture nor dominion is relevant, and that is the basic Pietistic Christianity of the vast majority of Evangelical Christians. For most Christians their faith is primarily a personal affair with little relevance to the wider world. I’m not talking about being personally pious, but a movement in 17th century Germany as a reaction to a dry scholastic form of Christianity. Eventually through the two Great Awakenings, revivalism, and fundamentalism, by the mid-20th century Evangelical Christianity became culturally irrelevant. Christianity was now about personal spirituality, and cultural or societal transformation was beside the point. Plus the world would get increasingly worse and Jesus would come back soon to consummate all things. This is slowly changing, but it still dominates the church. What I’m talking about here is a completely different orientation for the Christian life.

I was inspired to write this because of a book I’m reading by a new friend of mine, David Bostrom, Get Dominion: You’ve Been Called to Fulfill a Mission. The paradigm shift from a personal, Pietistic Christianity to a dominion mindset is dramatic. As I discovered, it can also be dramatically different from a worldview, cultural influence perspective. I like David’s definition of dominion: “to fulfill a mission,” a mission to accomplish. Speaking of which, the movies, and the old TV show, Mission Impossible, give us some sense of the momentous task before us. When he was given a mission, Peter Graves would listen to a small reel-to-reel tape recorder which would self-destruct after it explained the mission. He was told, “You’re mission, Jim, should you decided to accept it . . . .” and then the tape would self-destruct in five seconds. Finally, he was wished good luck. We don’t need luck! We have a mandate from the Living Creator God, Christ having redeemed the world and taken it back from Satan, and the Holy Spirit living in and through us to transform creation as Adam and Eve were supposed to do. Most importantly, the Dominion Mandate is theologically grounded in the ascension of Christ now sitting at the right hand of God “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come” (Eph. 1).

What Exactly is the Dominion Mandate?
The Dominion Mandate comes from the charge God gave Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1.

26 Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

27 So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

28 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 the NIV translation which uses the word rule, as do most modern translations. The term dominion mandate comes from the King James which translates rule as “dominion over.” According to Strong’s, the word means, “make to have dominion, prevail against, reign, bear; to tread down, i.e. Subjugate.” Like I said, become the boss.

For most of my Christian life I didn’t think this mandate to rule, to “have dominion over” applied to Christians; it fell after the fall, never to rise again until the second coming. This is because like most Christians I tended to over spiritualize my faith, even as a worldview Christian. Basically I thought the world belonged to the devil, and only at Christ’s second coming would he take it back. I was wrong. In fact, Christ came at his first coming to take the world back. He began an inch by inch, step by step, brick by brick process of transforming the world by extending his reign over it, and advancing his kingdom in it. Both John the Baptist and Jesus said the exact same thing as they were declaring his coming ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” At his death, resurrection, ascension, and Pentecost, it fully came. His life on earth was the foundation upon which his kingdom would be built, and his church, his body, would carry out his reign throughout the earth, just as we’ve seen over these last two thousand years.

But that doesn’t get to the question of exactly what this mandate is, how it works, how we are involved. David in his book does a great job of making it practical for every one of us, and it is for all Christians. When we trust Christ, our salvation from sin doesn’t just reconcile us to God, but it gives us a mission to fulfill on this earth, to “have dominion over” it. Because of the rise of both secularism and Pietism, people today are adrift in the world. They are looking for meaning, hope, and purpose, but are stuck as Henry David Thoreau said, leading “lives of quiet desperation.” As Christians that shouldn’t be us! Not only has Christ given us a holiness mandate, but a dominion mandate in his creation as well. Here is how David begins his introduction:

Are you having a hard time figuring out where you fit in this world? Are you frustrated because your efforts don’t seem to have a significance you think they ought to have? Do you know deep down there’s more to life than what you’re experiencing, but can’t seem to get a handle on what it is? Does a lack of meaning or vision for your life make you feel like you’re dying inside?

It doesn’t have to be this way because Jesus imbues everything we do in this material world with spiritual significance.

The Priesthood of All Believers
In the Middle Ages prior to the Reformation, there was a stark societal dualism between the clerical class and the laity, what Martin Luther called the “temporal” and “spiritual” orders. The religious professionals, priest, monks, nuns, etc., did the spiritual stuff, and everyone else just survived and did their spiritual stuff on Sundays and holy-days. Martin Luther changed all that. The Reformation he unwittingly started began a transformation of the lives of everyday, average people, and ended up transforming the world. The dominion mandate for the most part had been lost, and now was found. We need to find it again.

In his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation (1520), Luther criticized the traditional distinction between the two orders—the laity and the clergy— and he puts his argument this way:

It has been devised that the Pope, bishops, priests, and monks are called the spiritual estate, princes, lords, artificers, and peasants are the temporal estate. This is an artful lie and hypocritical device, but let no one be made afraid by it, and that for this reason: that all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them, save of office alone.

The Apostle Peter agrees:

9 But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.

In other words, there is no difference between the religious professionals and everyone else, except the calling we’ve received from God and how we serve others. Luther says it beautifully:

A cobbler, a smith, a peasant, every man, has the office and function of his calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops, and every man should by his office or function be useful and beneficial to the rest, so that various kinds of work may all be united for the furtherance of body and soul, just as the members of the body all serve one another.

In our current day this could be expressed as, “A plumber, a doctor, a lawyer, a builder, a homemaker, has the office and function of his or her calling, and yet all alike are consecrated priests and bishops . . . “ In 1520 this was insane. No wonder the church and the government of the Holy Roman Empire wanted him dead. This would turn the world upside down! Just like the Apostle did.

Most of us in the daily grind have difficulty perceiving what we do as a “spiritual estate” of any eternal value. Part of the reason is that we have reverted to a Middle Ages mindset before Luther’s Nobility address, mainly because of the Lutherans who came in the century following his death who developed the Pietism I referred to above. Building a house, or selling a product, or fixing a car, doesn’t seem “spiritual” to us, but everything human beings saved by Christ do is spiritual! Everything we do, every single thing, is done unto the Lord (Col. 3:23). Paul puts it this way in I Corinthians 15:58 in a verse I used to read dualistically:

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Certainly my work as a carpenter, or sales guy (what I do five days a week), or nurse, or trash collector, or you name it, is not “labor in the Lord,” right? The labor that will last forever are things like evangelism, or prayer, or Bible reading, or church, or fellowship with other Christians, but surely not grubby old work. Nope, it’s all spiritual, all labor in the Lord, and none of it is in vain. The reason is the Dominion Mandate tied to the life, death, resurrection, ascension of Christ, and Pentecost.

The Fall to the Ascension, Pentecost, and Dominion
Lastly, let’s see how the spiritual significance of everything we do is rooted in Christ’s mission on earth, and how that connects to the Dominion Mandate. At creation, Adam and Eve had everything they needed to fulfill the mandate the Lord had given them, but at some point Adam allowed Satan to slither his way into the garden as a serpent, and he broke it into a million pieces. Christ came to accomplish what Adam couldn’t. Two thousand years later and a very lot of water under the bridge, God became a man because as he says through Isaiah (63:5):

I looked, but there was no one to help, I was appalled that no one gave support; so my own arm achieved salvation for me, and my own wrath sustained me.

I write this in the season of Advent in which we celebrate the incarnation, God the Son coming down from heaven, born of a woman, becoming man, to be “pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities.” In that prophecy from Isaiah 53, we’re told that although “he had done no violence, and there was no deceit in his mouth,”

10 Yet it was the Lord’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the Lord makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand

In other words, because of what Christ accomplished, the Dominion Mandate can now be fulfilled. We are his offspring, and because of his accomplishment, his obedience unto death, the Lord’s will for us to rule, to have dominion, will prosper in his hand. Dominion is not our work, but the Lord’s will working through us.

Most importantly, is what the ascension means for us, his people on earth, those he left behind to fulfill his mission, and to take dominion over the earth. Before Christ ascended to heaven, he told his disciples (Matt. 28) that “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Therefore go . . . .” Paul tells us in Ephesians 1 that when Christ was seated at God’s right hand in the heavenly realms, he had achieved a position “far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come.” This authority is what gives the Dominion Mandate its power. Christ ascended that he might send his Holy Spirit at Pentecost that he might be with us always, to the very end of the age (Matt. 28:20)

What the ascension enabled was God the Holy Spirit acting through His people to do and accomplish significant things for the advance of God’s kingdom on earth. But what cements this concept in the heart of God’s people is what Paul says a little later in Ephesians about our own spiritual resurrection from the dead (Eph. 2):

4 But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. 6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, 7 in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

Think about that. We are seated with him, meaning we partake of his authority in this age, and in the age to come! When we’re trying to hammer the 2×4 on the frame of that house, it’s not just a hammer and nail and a piece of wood—it’s us in Christ taking dominion! Serving that customer? We’re taking dominion!

The ancient world became the modern world because of Jesus enabling his people, his body on earth, to accomplish what Adam could not. This has profound spiritual and material implications because these are one and the same. Whatever God accomplished spiritually for His people as he reconciled them to Himself in Christ, will always have material implications. Rejecting any kind of false dualism, we need to be about fulfilling the mission we were given when we placed our trust in Christ. Everything we do is imbued with profound eternal meaning and purpose and hope. As Jesus said in John 10:10:

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.

 

 

What is Sphere Sovereignty and Why is it a Necessity?

What is Sphere Sovereignty and Why is it a Necessity?

Jan 7, 2026 | Politics & Government

Secularists, including Christian secularists, which is most Christians, unfortunately, have a problem with Christianity exerting power in the political sphere of life. Because of a kind of Pietistic dualistic thinking, they believe that messy political stuff has to do with this world, not Christianity. But Scripture declares Jesus King of Kings and Lord of Lords, meaning he has ultimate authority and power over the politics and governments of nations. Before his ascension, Jesus declared that “All authority in heaven and on earth” has been given to him, and because of this he says:

19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Notice, and I’m not sure how people miss this or explain it away, but it’s nations that are to be baptized, not merely individuals in nations. And everything Jesus taught, entire nations are to obey. What that looks like is up for debate, and Christians disagree, but what is not debatable is our obedience to Jesus’ command.

We do know, however, that a discipled nation, or a Christian nation, is not what its detractors say it is, a means of forcing people to believe and behave as Christians. That’s what liberals, progressives, and leftists (i.e., Democrats) do, not Christians. Rightly understood, a Christian nation is a self-governing nation with maximal liberty, like the United States of America for much of its history. Because America was a Christian nation, created because of Christian assumptions and beliefs about the nature of man, its government was limited. In the early 20th century with the rise of progressivism and secularism, government expanded its control over every area of life. That kind of totalitarian instinct is what secular government will always produce, and it is Christianity alone that stands in its way. Unless the state has a higher authority to which it is accountable, it will always tend toward Babel.

This brings us to the topic of this post, and a phrase most Christians are unfamiliar with, sphere sovereignty. I recently heard someone use a phrase which describes what this is: Kuyperian jurisdictional theology. I’ll get to Kuyper below, but in short, God has created different spheres of responsibility and authority, or jurisdictions, even as He has created hierarchy within those spheres to work out responsibility and authority. The person who used that phrase also said, the church is the government’s conscience, which means the pulpit, as well as the people, must address politics. Notice the church isn’t the government, a claim of the secularists, but the church keeps the government accountable. The government has a very narrow lane, and if it starts expanding its lane it begins to go outside of its jurisdiction and becomes tyrannical and unbiblical. The founders with few exceptions got this right, and modern America has veered far from their intentions. The concept of sphere sovereignty is a way to bring America back in line with those intentions.

The Necessity of Sphere Sovereignty
The concept of sphere sovereignty is critical in the never-ending battle against the spirit of Babel (Gen 11). All things without God in Christ tend toward a concentration of power, a profoundly unbiblical concept. That concentration is what Babel represents. God said if allowed to do this, then “nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” It is this hubris of fallen, sinful man that Christianity and sphere sovereignty confronts with the dignity of the liberty of the children of God and all his creatures. And fallen, sinful man will do everything in his power to avoid having his power limited. Thus the ever present battle over the size and scope of government. Thankfully, the founders of America gave us a solid foundation upon which to build a Christian republic, and I think post Charlie Kirk’s assassination, more Christians than ever are realizing that our faith isn’t just personal or for church, but for all of life, including government and politics.

The concept of sphere sovereignty, while directly not found in Scripture, can be inferred from it. It was first introduced by the great Dutch theologian, statesman, and journalist Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920) in a public address at the inauguration of the Free University of Amsterdam (Oct. 20, 1880). The question comes down to authority and who wields it. Absolute sovereign authority rests in God alone, and He has delegated His authority on earth to human beings.  As Kuyper explains, “so that on earth one actually does not meet God Himself in things visible, but that sovereign authority is always exercised through an office held by men.” In this he asks two pertinent questions:

And in that assigning of God’s Sovereignty to an office held by man the extremely important question arises: how does that delegation of authority work? Is that all embracing Sovereignty of God delegated undivided to one single man; or does an earthly Sovereign possess the power to compel obedience only in a limited circle; a circle bordered by other circles in which another is Sovereign?

These circles (i.e., spheres) interact and overlap in society, but one sphere must never usurp the authority of the other. The only way this possibly works, and thus the only possibility of true liberty in any society, is the acknowledgement of the absolute Sovereignty of Christ. Kuyper explains why:

But behold now the glorious Freedom idea! That perfect and absolute Sovereignty of the sinless Messiah at the same time contains the direct denial and challenge of all absolute Sovereignty on earth in sinful man; because of the division of life into spheres, each with its own Sovereignty.

Stephen Wolfe explains it well in his book on Christian nationalism:

[I]t follows that every sphere of life requires a suitable authority, with a suitable power, to make determinations. For this reason, God has granted specific types of power by which the authorities of each sphere make judgments. The family has the pater familiar with patria potestas (“fatherly power”); civil life has the civil magistrate with civil power; the instituted church has the minister with spiritual power, and the individual has a power unto himself. The nature of each sphere dictates the species of power required. These powers and their differences are not arbitrary but arise from the nature of each sphere.

Although as a Thomist he attributes this to “natural law,” there is nothing natural about it. It is only when those in power acknowledge the power of God in Christ as the ultimate authority that the state will recognize its limits.

If we go back to ancient Israel, we can find the concept of religious freedom. The state has no authority to compel anyone to believe anything against their will. The religion of Israel was never imposed on the foreigner or alien. Jesus is a wonderful example of this because he went out of his way to discourage people from following or believing in him; it was their choice. Prior to Martin Luther at the Diet (assembly) of Worms in April 1521 declaring the freedom of conscience, Christians should have known better, but when the church got mixed in with the state, both became tyrannical. The individual in his thinking and actions has his own sphere of sovereignty within the confines of the law. While there were glimpses of this in English history, it wasn’t until the Puritan inspired first Great Awakening, and the American experiment in self-government coming in its wake, that true religious liberty was codified in the law of a nation.

Another aspect of life in ancient Israel implies the concept of spheres of authority. The Lord never allowed the offices of prophet, priest, or king in one person, until the Messiah came. Indeed, those offices pointed forward to one who would accomplish what all three intended, truth, mediation, and rule. Christ fulfills them all. King Uzziah is an example of someone who would not “stay in his lane.” He entered the temple to burn incense on the altar (2 Chron. 26), and God punished him for it. We also see Jesus affirming limited powers to the state when he said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.” This was truly revolutionary at the time, and would take many centuries through English history to eventually come to full fruition in America.

Before we talk a little about the spheres themselves, we as Christians must disabuse ourselves of the notion that any kind of secular state is the answer. Many Christians dislike the concept of “Christian nationalism,” but I ask if a nation is not to be Christian (again, in obedience to the Great Commission), what is it to be? Since no Christian wants our nation to be a Hindu or Muslim or Buddhist nation, they assume the only answer is secular, the state having no religious affiliation whatsoever. The problem, as we’ve seen in our time, is that state always assumes some ultimate moral standard to back up its laws. If that standard isn’t God in Scripture, it will be anti-God. In America and the West that is woke, DEI, and all the tyranny associated with it. Christians are delusional if they think there is a way to have a secular nation without that, or some other form of tyranny. Liberty is only possible in a Christian nation.

Differing Aspects of Sphere Sovereignty

There are three assumptions that undergird the concept of sphere sovereignty.

  1. The kingdom of God and the church are not identical. Wherever God reigns, which is everywhere, is where the kingdom is. Kuyper put it memorably:

There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, “Mine!”

  1. The priesthood of all believers means, for example, we are as fully priests in our work as is any pastor at a pulpit. In addition, man is God’s viceregent over creation, called to exercise dominion to rule over everything in creation.
  2. Neither the church nor the state rules over other spheres since each sphere is part of the kingdom and under God. One sphere cannot interfere with the other.

The only place where the state interferes with the other two is for public justice. If laws are broken in the church or home, the state has the right to “wield the sword,” just as I said the church is the conscience of the state.

Since there is no chapter and verse command or explanation of it, there will always be debate about the nature of the concept and its extent. In addition to these three foundational spheres, other spheres might be businesses, community organizations, charities, educational institutions, etc., but conceptionally the three are the most important. If the boundaries of these are not respected, all kinds of problems develop, as we’ve seen throughout history. The primary danger comes from the most powerful sphere, the state, usurping its limited, well defined role.

Most importantly is the state usurping its role when people think it has the authority over the family, especially, but in the church as well. There are many examples, but one of the most egregious began in the early 1960s with Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Instead of families, private charities, and the church taking responsibility for the needs of the people, Americans allowed the government to take over that responsibility. As a result, all kinds of perverse incentives it created destroyed the black family. Black out of wedlock births in 1960 were approximately 25%, higher than white Americans, but far less than the 70% today. Sociologists agree that welfare created disincentives to build intact families, and the suffering that has resulted has been tremendous.

In fact, since the rise of progressivism in the early 20th century, the state has become not only a god but is seen as Savior as well. Think of what government now provides. The Bible says the state has the limited functions of justice and self-defense, but now government provides healthcare, food, clothing, shelter, unemployment wages, retirement, money, and tomes of books full of regulations. This is the battle of the modern age, and if we want the liberty bequeathed to us by America’s founding fathers, we must limit the scope and reach of government. The problem is that most Americans like their government to play daddy. The most pathetic example of this mindset was a video the Obama campaign put out in the 2012 election called, “The Life of Julia.” “The slide show narrative follows Julia, a cartoon character, from age 3 to age 67 and explains how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to mandated contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would provide Julia with a better life than Mitt Romney or Paul Ryan could.” I remember thinking at the time, is this what we’ve come to in America? Is this the land of the free, and the home of the brave, of rugged individualism? Indeed it is not.

A proper, biblical understanding of the state would see this for what it is, evil. Which is why it’s critical as Christians for us to be involved in politics and government to bring a Christian and biblical view to public policy. We can build on the growing awareness in the church that while we understand the unique spheres of state, church, and family, true human and societal flourishing can only come from insisting on a biblical orientation for our entire society in which Christ is acknowledged as the true king. This means, America must again become a Christian nation in obedience to Christ. Too many Christians denigrate this as “Christian nationalism,” and take all the worst examples of its proponents as evidence that it’s not biblical. We can debate what our Christian nation is and should be, and work toward that, but we should all agree, the goal of the Great Commission is that all nations should be Christian.

In America and the West we are fighting an uphill battle against Pietism and secularism, two sides of the same coin. Both view Christianity and religion as primarily personal, something for the home and church, but not to bring into the public square. Charlie Kirk’s influence, especially after his tragic death, has seemed to open many more Christians to this idea and how important it is. Secularism and the myth of neutrality, as if there could be a morally neutral public square, is being questioned by an increasing number of people. Sphere sovereignty is a helpful concept in convincing people that true liberty can only be had with a biblical understanding of the family, the church, and the state.