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.
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