Sometimes it seems like everything shakes down out of the first three chapters of Genesis.
In the book of Genesis the Bible presents the story of our first parents that is packed with meaning. In his essay, “What Happened to Dominion?” Dean Ohlman writing at Wonder of Creation takes a slow walk through those first three chapters and pulls out some of those meanings in regards to work and the charge humankind has been given to steward the earth. He writes,
“We do virtually everything we can do with the dominion power we have instead of doing everything we should do with dominion responsibility given to us as a gracious gift of the Creator. … Wouldn’t it be wonderful for followers of Christ to return to our role of being good kings of things and help restore the balance between man and nature, as Francis Schaeffer urged us forty years ago, and begin to help bring about ‘a substantial healing of all the rifts created by the Fall.’ ” Read the rest of the essay here.
Ohlman points out how easy it is to get things backwards this side of the fall. Rather than using our role on the earth to cause the earth to flourish we overexploit it. Rather than viewing work as an expression of our humanness, it becomes toilsome and to be avoided. We ought instead to be “good kings of things” (a wonderful phrase) and work to make a substantial (meaning, not perfect, but very real) healing of this place we’ve been given.
For further study browse Wonderofcreation.org,and listen to lectures from Francis Schaeffer and many others on ecology at the L’abri Ideas Library.
{ 2 trackbacks }