Imago Dei Series: Cultivating The Garden - Genesis 2:8-13

Turn to Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

Hopefully you have a Bible with you.

And if not, you're welcome to grab one from the pew there in front of you.

Genesis chapter 2.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

We're going to read verses 8 down through verse 15.

This is God's word.

The Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he placed the man he had formed.

The Lord God caused to grow out of the ground every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden, as well as the tree of the knowledge, good and evil.

A river went out from Eden to water the garden.

From there it divided and became the source of four rivers.

The name of the first is Pishon, which flows through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold.

Gold from that land is pure.

Delium and Onx are also there.

The name of the second river is Gihon, which flows to the entire land of Cush.

The name of the third river is Tigris, which runs east of the Euphrates, east of Assyria, and the fourth river is the Euphrates.

The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.

Let's pray.

God, we come to you again acknowledging we we need you, and we want to attend to all of your word, even parts of your word that may seem more removed to us or not on the front of our minds, yet it's given by your inspiration.

And we want to know all of our responsibilities and privileges and joys as people made in your image.

So help us to understand that even more tonight.

In Jesus' name, amen.

The title for the message tonight, if you happen to look on the bulletin, is Cultivating the Garden, Stewards of Creation.

That's the title for the message tonight.

Now, some of you might come away a little disappointed tonight.

If you came thinking, this is great.

I'm going to find out once and for all whether fracking is glorifying to God or whether it is a sinful degradation of God's good earth.

You're going to be disappointed.

Sometimes people hear that phrase, creation stewardship, but all they can think about is public policy.

Well, those questions are important, but we want to first set the groundwork by looking at the bigger picture from God's Word.

And the bigger picture is God does call us to be stewards of His creation.

The verses I read explain that.

We'll see that theme in Scripture.

But God calls us to be His stewards.

We're going to look first tonight at the basis of our stewardship.

Then we'll look at the essence of our stewardship.

Third, we'll consider the priority of our stewardship.

And then fourth, we'll look at what I'm calling the place of our stewardship.

So let's let's start first.

What's the basis of our stewardship?

The basis of our stewardship is that we're made in the image of God.

Turn back to Genesis chapter 1.

Genesis 1 · chapter mention

I know I had you read from Genesis 2, but just turn back one chapter.

Genesis 1, verses 26 to 28.

Genesis 1:26–28

God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.

They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.

So God created man in his own image.

God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.

Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth.

Basis of our stewardship is that we're made in the image of God.

And that's where we tie into this whole series, because this whole series is on the image of God.

If you can remember, this is going back a few weeks now, when Pastor Doug first introduced the series, he talked about how people have different ideas and emphases about what it means to be made in the image of God.

Some people stress human reason, that we have a capacity to reason that is godlike in a way that animals don't have.

Other people stress righteousness.

We as humans have a moral capacity to make moral and ethical choices that reflect God in a way that animals and the rest of creation doesn't.

Some people stress relationship.

We can relate to God and to others in deep and meaningful ways that move beyond the kinds of relationships that animals have.

And some people stress rule.

God rules and we rule.

Now, those those four different, if you want to think of them as the four Rs, they're not mutually exclusive.

You could combine those.

And while the image of God might not be directly identical to any one of those categories, the image of God has implications for all of those categories.

And what I want to show you in connection with our message tonight is that idea of rule and how the image of God has implications for our rule in the world.

So, verse 26, if you look in your Bible, again, Genesis 1, we have God saying, Let us make man in our image, then it immediately says, and let them have dominion.

Some suggest this should be translated so that they may have dominion.

We won't track that down tonight.

But the point is there's a very close connection.

Verse 27 repeats the idea that God created man in his image, and then verse 28 repeats the command to rule.

Do you see that there?

So we've got image of God, rule, image of God, rule.

It's not a coincidence that those ideas are so closely intertwined together.

If we think about a call to reflect God's glory, to image something of his glory as our destination, as our purpose, how can we do that?

There's a lot of ways we can do that.

One of the ways we can do that is to reflect the way that He rules in the universe by the way that we rule over planet Earth.

Have you thought about that before?

We sometimes think of reflecting God's glory as uh our characteristics.

God is gracious, so we should be gracious.

God is loving, so we should be loving.

And that's absolutely true.

But one of the ways we reflect God's glory is doing what He does.

Not in the exact same way.

God spoke and worlds came into existence.

We can't speak and just worlds come into existence.

But we get to model what our Heavenly Father does and the way that we rule in His world.

Turn over to Genesis chapter 5.

Genesis 5 · chapter mention

Genesis 5.

We're gonna be mostly in Genesis tonight.

This is one of the few places that the Bible explicitly mentions the image of God.

Genesis 5, verses 1 to 3.

Genesis 5:1–3

This is the document containing the family records of Adam.

On the day that God created man, he made him in the likeness of God.

He created them male and female.

When they were created, he blessed them and called them mankind.

Adam was 130 years old when he fathered a son in his likeness, according to his image, and named him Seth.

So God created humans in his likeness.

There's our image category.

And the writer tells us Adam had a son named Seth in his image and his likeness.

So there's something about the father-son relationship of Adam and Seth that teaches us about the relationship we have as image-bearers to God who made us.

So, how does a child image their parents?

We tend to think of physical features.

He's got his daddy's nose.

She's got her mother's eyes.

Or as the child begins to grow, we sometimes think of character qualities.

She's so happy and joyful, just like her mother.

He's so ornery, just like, well, we'll leave that alone for now.

Realize that in the ancient world, and really in most cultures throughout history, one of the ways that children image their parents is by taking on their vocation.

The idea that a kid just chooses to do whatever they want to do independent of what their parents do, that's a pretty modern and Western idea.

In most of world history, if your dad's a potato farmer, guess what?

You get to be a potato farmer.

If your dad's a blacksmith, hope you enjoy being a blacksmith.

And I'm not making a comment on that morally good or bad.

I'm just pointing out that in this in this framework here of the way the Bible was first given and would have been received by the people, they would have understood that part of this Seth imaging his father is by doing the kind of things his father did.

So we image God, just as the Bible says, Daniel 4.17, the Most High is ruler over human kingdoms.

We get to be like our Father in heaven by ruling in the world he made.

That's the basis of our stewardship.

We're made in God's image.

How about the essence of our stewardship?

Um, what exactly is it?

Genesis 1 uses the word rule.

Adam and Eve were called to rule over the earth.

Take dominion, some of your translations use that term as well.

So why am I using the word stewardship?

Well, because that's the word that Doug gave me for the title of this message tonight.

And no, here's how the word stewardship helps us to understand something very important about the kind of rule that God's calling us to.

Let me give you an example.

Let's say the summertime rolls around.

And I look out at the youth group and they've all got their video games and their phones.

I'm like, what do you guys do in the summer?

Doesn't anyone have a job around here?

You guys need to get some responsibility.

Look, what someone how about how about how about how about how about how about Aaron?

Can you clean you gotta clean the organ once a month?

That's your job.

Can you do that?

I gave him responsibility, gave him a job.

Now let's say something different happens.

Let's say Ted comes to visit the youth group.

And he says, Listen, I'm going away to Kentucky for a month, and I need someone to help me take care of that organ while I'm gone.

This is something that's helped our church worship for many years.

It's something I love.

And who can I give this?

Aaron, can you help me with this?

Do you see what happened?

A job became a stewardship.

God is not just giving Adam and Eve a job so that they can learn about taking responsibility.

He's entrusting something very precious to them.

He's entrusting his own creation to them.

It's a little bit, you know, if your parents they're trying to get the house clean and they say, now you go clean your bedroom.

That's your domain.

Go be like us.

That's how we're going to do it in this household.

That's that's a kind of stewardship, it's an apprenticeship, it's a training for how we can live in life.

Turn to Genesis 2.

If you go back to Genesis 2, those are the verses we read at the beginning.

Verse number 15.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it.

Here's how I'm going to try to summarize the essence of our stewardship with the word cultivation.

Again, when we hear the word rule, it's a very appropriate word, but we might think of that only as giving commands.

Like, what does that look like?

All right, sharks, no more taking advantage of the minnows.

You mind your own business, I'm going to be watching you.

We don't rule like that.

God has called us to cultivate the earth.

Um, look there at verse number 11 to develop his world.

Verse number 11 tells us about a place called Havilah where there is gold.

And I think it says uh pure gold in the CSB.

It's literally good gold.

There's some good gold in Havilah.

How do you get gold?

You have to mine it.

I mean, I maybe there were gold bars just lying on the ground in the Garden of Eden.

I don't know.

But probably not.

God created Adam and Eve to work.

And how can we find the beautiful and rich things in God's world and put them to beautiful and good uses?

That's a stewardship from our Father in heaven given to our original parents, Adam and Eve.

To work the garden and watch over it.

God has called us to be his royal priests.

The specific Hebrew words there for work and watch over or guard and keep, maybe different translations, those two words are only used together in the Old Testament when it's talking about the job of the priests in the tabernacle or in the temple, to work it and keep it, to guard it and watch over this holy sanctuary of the Lord.

That's a pretty amazing sacred privilege and trust that God has given to us.

And God wants Adam and Eve, and by implication, humanity, to extend that rule and reign in the world, to expand.

It's not enough simply to guard, we have to cultivate.

Remember the parable of the talents?

The man who said, Oh yeah, I kept this one talent here.

And the Lord didn't say, Great job, as long as you just kept it the way it was, that's all that I was expecting.

He wanted him to take what he had and cultivate it, to put it to use.

So that's how God wants us to rule in the world, to cultivate his world.

Third, what's the priority of our stewardship?

If the basis is that we're made in the image of God and the essence of our stewardship is cultivation of God's good world, how do we that's that sounds really big and grand and glorious?

How can we prioritize what that looks like?

I'm gonna summarize the priority of our stewardship as a priority of human beings.

And let me explain what I mean by that.

First, the work of cultivating God's created world is a big task.

It's a big task that needs a lot of people.

The Bible says that God formed man from the dust of the ground, and then he formed Eve to be Adam's helper.

Some people hear that and they think it only means, or they tend to emphasize, Eve was only a romantic companion for Adam.

Like they just sat around all day looking in each other's eyes.

That's a part, a significant part of the beauty of that relationship.

But they had a job to do.

Having and raising children is a great way to carry out God's stewardship.

God doesn't give everyone children, but for those who have children, this should be a huge priority in life.

And it's a beautiful opportunity from the Lord.

I think it's maybe more the case.

Sometimes mothers are made to feel bad that they're not doing more things, you know, like amidst all of the diaper changing, you couldn't also become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

What's wrong with you?

Raising little ones, cleaning up their mess, and helping them learn how to clean up their mess so they can go out into the world and help clean up the world's mess, that's a big job.

Nourishing little ones so that they can go out and grow up and be a part of a world and bring wholeness, hopefully, and order to a world, that's a big job.

So it's it's not about, you know, um just having children merely for the sake of having children.

You know, if you're if you're bragging about your five kids or your 15 kids, you're not actually raising them and instructing them.

That's key here.

But it's a glorious calling.

So if we're going to prioritize human beings, we do have to prioritize human life.

We should want to protect human life in the womb, on the streets, in the nursing home.

And I don't want to get too far ahead of us.

There's this is a free preview.

We've got a whole nother message on defending the dignity of every human life.

So I'm just wanting to flag that now.

So many of these application points for life connect into these early pages of Genesis and the role that God's called us to as his stewards.

When I say that humans are a priority, uh, I don't just mean human life and raising children.

I also mean that God has called humans to be the capstone and pinnacle of his created order.

It's humans alone that are said to be made in the image of God, not the rest of his creation.

Look at chapter 1 of Genesis, verse 29.

God also said, Look, I have given you every seed-bearing plant on the surface of the entire earth, and every tree whose fruit contains seed, this will be food for you.

Genesis 9, God tells Noah, Every creature that lives and moves will be food for you, as I've given the green plants, I've given you everything.

God it's a it's grace, we not that we deserved it.

God has designed the world for us, not designed us to have the world be elevated above humanity.

That inverts God's created order.

So what about PETA?

You have to say they they were very shrewd to get that domain name, right?

People for the ethical treatment of animals.

Who's going to stand up and say, you know, actually, I'm for the unethical treatment of animals?

The more unethical treatment of animals, the better, right?

So they they got us on the name there.

If you go on the website, right at the right at the about page, PETA opposes speciism, speciesism, a human supremacist worldview.

Now anything with supremacists on the end, very bad, obviously.

I I wasn't familiar with the term species ism, but it's good to learn some things, right?

So you keep you keep reading.

Speciesism is the misguided belief that one species is more important than another.

So maybe someone here tonight works for PETA and you're like, look, I'm just I'm trying to stop undercover dog fighting.

Can you cut me a break here?

That's a good thing to do.

So there's there's good things that PETA is.

Doing.

That's not my intent.

My point is that our way of viewing the world has consequences for our life.

And that organization has made it very clear that their worldview, their way of looking at the universe, is to say animals and humans are just two different species that are equivalent.

That runs fundamentally contrary to what Scripture itself says.

God told Adam to name the animals.

God didn't go to the hippos and say, hey, I'm making this dude with two legs.

What should I call him?

Sometimes you hear thank you for that laugh.

I appreciate that, Audrey.

Sometimes you hear people talk in glowing terms about Mother Nature.

And that's not a wrong expression.

I've used it before, but sometimes when people say that, they say it in a kind of sacred way, as if to suggest that nature is a person that must be honored as a person.

Or even that nature is God, has some divine-like quality.

No, God didn't make trees in his image.

Now, let's let's go to the other side of that of that idea.

So we have to prioritize humans because the Bible prioritizes humanity.

But that doesn't take away our responsibility and stewardship.

Sometimes, some some Christians, whenever they hear the word creation, cultivation, or stewardship, they have this allergic reaction and they they just want to rush to their favorite verse on the subject.

2 Peter 3 10.

Anyone know what that is?

The day of the Lord will come like a thief.

On that day, the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, the elements will burn and be dissolved, and the earth and the works on it will be disclosed.

It's all gonna burn up, anyways.

You can only do so much to save the world.

It's gonna burn.

Yes, it's gonna burn, but that doesn't mean that we can help it burn, and that's what God would desire, right?

We live in a world of hot takes and extremism.

The only two options you have are not worship nature as divine or treat it like your personal trash can.

There's other options besides those two options.

Let's say that Doug gives his eight-year-old son Ben a$200 Schwin bicycle.

He says, I want you to take care of this, I want you to keep it running, I want you to work at it, and when you turn 18, I'm gonna get you a$10,000 Cannondale racing bicycle.

Doug's like, maybe for myself, not for Ben.

But think about this.

Would Father Doug want his son Ben to conclude, well, yeah, I have this bike, it's okay, but he said he's gonna get me a brand new one anyway, so I might as well ride this thing into the ground.

That's that's not the point.

He entrusted the stewardship of the small thing temporarily.

Yes, we've got a new heavens and a new earth coming.

Hallelujah.

This world's not eternal, but it's still valuable, and God calls us to care for it.

Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God.

The expanse proclaims the work of his hands.

Day after day they pour out speech.

Night after night they communicate knowledge.

Psalm 104, my soul blessed the Lord.

Lord, you are very great.

You're clothed with majesty and splendor.

He wraps himself in light as if it were a robe, spreading out the sky like a canopy, laying the beams of his palace on the waters above, making the clouds his chariots, walking on the wings of the wind and making the winds his messengers.

He established the earth on its foundations, it will never be shaken.

That's how much God cares for the world, and he's told humans, you're my royal priest to guard this good possession.

Lastly, the place of our stewardship.

What does this look like in our lives?

Again, I know it's a little abstract.

Think, well, I'm not a marine biologist in the Amazon.

Like, okay, what does this look like in our lives?

Here's some suggestions.

First, we need to enjoy God's creation.

Yes, God's given us a job.

He wants us to enjoy that job.

God made the world, and he took time to rest on the seventh day and contemplate his good works.

Yes, he's embarking on keeping the world moving on its foundations, ruling among the galaxies.

Creation gives him delight, and it should give us delight that will help us do our job better.

Listen to the birds, marvel at sunsets, take a walk in the woods.

This is an amazing world that God has given us.

Second idea about the place of our stewardship, we need to show charity to Christians who may not always agree on every single application of policy questions.

And this ties into a few things I've been saying.

If humans are alone made in God's image, if they have a priority, then think about to go back to the earlier comment, is our opinion on fracking?

Is that so clear and urgent that we need to treat people who disagree with us like they're complete idiots rather than people that are made in the image of God?

And especially if there are brothers and sisters in Christ, we'll be spending eternity with them.

So we can show, we can show charity in some of those areas.

Yes, God gives us principles that speak into every single domain of life, but we don't have every detail in God's word spelled out with perfect clarity.

So we want to be thoughtful and loving in how we engage others.

What's the place of our stewardship?

Start by cultivating the place God has you in right now.

1 Corinthians 7 17.

Let each one live his life in the situation the Lord assigned when God called him.

This is what I command in all the churches.

The internet world makes us think if you're not involved in so many different things, then you're failing.

If you're not giving to world hunger organizations, you don't care about world hunger.

If you don't sign this petition to help protect wallabies in New Zealand, you don't care about God's world.

Start wherever God has you.

Start in your own home, your own church, your own place of work, your own neighborhood.

How can you bring some order out of chaos the way God brought order to the world?

How can you nourish and cultivate your home, people in your church, your neighborhood?

Some of you have a garden in your backyard.

Great.

You're not obligated to have a garden in your backyard, but that's a place that you can start and say, I love God and I want to do this for his glory.

We encourage you, brothers and sisters, to do this even more, to seek to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your own hands as we commanded you.

There's a pastor who tells the story about church, a lot of young people and some young guys in his church were you know on him that God tells us to take dominion in all the world.

We've got to do a better job taking dominion in the government and places like that.

And he said, you know, some of these guys, a lot of them, they're living with their parents.

Some of them don't even have jobs, and you know, they want to argue the fine points of theonomy with me.

And I told him, look, why don't you start by taking dominion of your own bedroom?

Get a job, get some responsibility, and then you can come back and talk about how Christians can go out in the government and you know change the world and all that kind of thing.

There's something biblical about that, right?

Lead a quiet life, work with your hands in the place where God has you.

Start right then and there.

Last suggestion.

And think with me, and I'm just gonna sound a little bit uh out of the box here, but participate in disciple making near and far.

How do we get from you know naming the animals to evangelizing for Jesus?

Well, there's some key parallels between what Christ tells his disciples when he leaves and what's called sometimes the Great Commission, go into all the world.

There's some interesting parallels between that instruction of Jesus and the original command here in the garden.

Both of those instructions have the idea of multiplication.

Go into all the world and make disciples.

Be fruitful and multiply.

So in the original command, there's an emphasis on biological multiplication, having children, bear the image of God.

In Jesus' words, there's an emphasis on spiritual multiplication, giving people the gospel, helping build others up in the Lord Jesus Christ.

But there's multiplication, there's a geographical expansion impulse in both cases, fill the earth and subdue it, go into all the world and make disciples.

Now, I'm not saying that that great commission replaces entirely those instructions in the garden.

Those instructions in the garden about being fruitful and multiplying and cultivating God's world in a lot of ways, those are still valuable and good for us.

But Jesus gives us that target as the people of God that we must include in our lives.

So you can reflect God's image by planting a tomato plant in your backyard.

You can.

You can, and people do, helpfully reflect God's image by going into a company that is in total disarray and helping get the books in order.

Those are good ways to reflect God's image.

That's that's a good thing.

If we're the people of God, we can do those things, and some will be more called to certain realms and walks of life than others.

Again, this is a free preview because we've got a whole nother message on the dignity and calling of every line of work.

So if you're a dishwasher, don't think I'm just washing dishes.

No, you're helping clean up a mess under God's kind providence in his world to make his world a cleaner place.

So we got a whole message on that.

But if we're children of God, we can do any number of those things.

We must, on some level, be engaged in cultivating people for Christ.

So I'm not saying the only way to glorify God is passing out a track or going through a Bible study with someone, but that should be a significant part of what we want to do to make eternal disciples.

Because yes, this world is good, it is temporary.

Human souls will last forever.

So participate in disciple making near and far.

Part of our heart should be that we want to see multiplication and expansion and cultivation, just like we prayed earlier for Sasha, right?

For more elders to help lead the church that it can grow and multiply.

That's a good desire.

Seth, Adam and Eve's son, he wasn't obligated to immediately move to Alaska and start a botanical garden.

But he was part of a call on humanity to extend into the world and do that.

We are not all obligated to pick up and move to Azerbaijan.

Well, maybe some of you want to do that.

But we are called to be about the process of making disciples.

Now, this is preview night.

I've got to stop because once again, we've got a whole message on to every tribe and tongue.

But I hope you see that as royal priests called to work and watch over the garden, there's a whole lot in scripture and a whole lot in our lives, and a whole lot more in this series.

That's all we have for tonight.

Want to encourage you as we pray and as we sing this week, how can you cultivate God's world for good and for his glory?

Let's pray.

Lord, there's there's just so much here, and it is easy for us to feel overwhelmed, but help us to start where we are, to look for that next way that we can see the good and beautiful things in your world and put them to use.

Lord, help us to do that with a special eye for humans, for those that are made in your image.

And what a wide variety of talents and gifts and places of work and opportunities you put, even within this one small room.

And this one small room is only one small part of your created world.

This is our Father's world.

We rest our hearts in that thought.

And we want to be motivated earnestly to be your faithful stewards, that you might say to us, Well done, good and faithful servant.

In Jesus' name, amen.