Have Dominion – Genesis 1:28-31

Were Adam and Eve, and what we today call the carnivorous animals, all vegetarians before sin entered the garden?  We’re told that God gave as food all the green plants and fruit to humans and animals.  It doesn’t say He didn’t give them meat to eat, but that would have involved death, and that doesn’t seem to be a part of the original plan, at least not on the scale that meat eating would have entailed.  Unless God limited the birth cycles of humans and animals more than it is today, the earth would have filled rather rapidly without death as a normal course.  But death doesn’t seem to become “normal” until after Adam sinned.

28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “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.” 29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. 30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. 31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. (Genesis 1:28–31, ESV)

As with the sea and sky creatures, God blesses mankind and what follows is a command to multiply, to reproduce, and to have dominion over the world, something God had determined to be man’s purview when He made him (v.26).  This responsibility to subdue the earth has been called our cultural mandate (see here and here).  It is all mankind’s responsibility to develop the word and all its “latent potential” as faithful stewards of God’s creation.  It is incumbent on all humans, saved and unsaved.  Saved people should be those who take this responsibility the most seriously, though in current days we have not.

At this point in our history God only gave fruit and vegetables for our food.  It was not until after the flood (Genesis 9:3) that God broadened our diet to include animals.

At the conclusion of His creative activity God sees that everything is not only good, but very good.  His world is in total harmony with His will, everything working and thriving as He intended it to.  It is His kingdom and every member of it is in loving submission to Him and thriving as a result of that.  Can we imagine, given our extraordinary creativity, what we as humans could have accomplished if we weren’t so disobedient to God?  Utopian would have been a reality and not just the dream it is today.