GENESIS 2:18, 21-25 - The Engine of Dominion

Over the past few weeks, you may have been hearing about NASA’s latest plan to return astronauts to the Moon--it’s called the Artemis program, and it was in the news recently because of two separate attempts to launch an unmanned mission that would fly to the Moon, orbit and return to Earth. The launch was scrubbed on August 29th because they believed one of the three main engines was overheating (which turned out to be a faulty sensor…), and the second launch attempt was cancelled on September 3rd because of a leaky fuel line. At this point NASA engineers are saying that they may make another attempt at a launch this Friday. Without a working engine system, the rocket is nothing but a big expensive explosive skyscraper that can’t carry out its mission.

In the same way, we saw last week that Adam had been given a mission—a mission greater than just swinging a crew capsule around the Moon; it was a mission to subdue and order the entire planet Earth!

Genesis 1:28 (ESV)

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.”

Consider for a moment that, as we saw last week, Adam and Eve were placed into a Garden—but the rest of the planet was yet untamed, wild, inhospitable. Not fallen yet, but uncultivated and unsubdued (almost 197 million square miles of untamed earth!)

Notice what God says about how Adam and Eve were to go about subduing the earth: “Fill the earth, and subdue it...” In other words, Adam and Eve needed to multiply in order to carry out God’s command to exercise dominion over the Creation. As Foster and Tennant put it:

“The union of male and female in one flesh drives mankind forward in their created purpose of bringing heaven to earth by establishing God’s rule” (Foster, M., & Tennant, D. B. (2022). It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity. Canon Press., p. 29)

And so the way I want to say it this morning—what I want you to see and take away from God’s Word today is that

Godly dominion is DRIVEN by the fruitful ONE-FLESH union of MALE and FEMALE

God did not just command Adam to be fruitful and multiply; He wired him to be that way. The male libido is such a powerful influence in a man’s behavior because it is the means by which God has designed him to subdue the earth!

In order to unpack this, let’s look again at the creation of man as recorded for us in Genesis. Look in Genesis 2, starting in verse 20. I want us to look at these verses to understand

I. The POWER of the engine to DRIVE dominion (Genesis 2:20-25)

Verse 20:

Genesis 2:20 (ESV)

20 The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.

One of the results of Adam’s naming all of the animals in the Garden was the recognition that “there was not found a helper fit for him.” Remember, Adam’s mission was to exercise dominion over all of the earth. so while there would have been creatures that could be helpers in some way—oxen to help him plow the ground to extend the garden, for instance—there was no helper suitable to multiply him. There was no way Adam could reproduce himself until he met Eve:

Genesis 2:21–24 (ESV)

21 So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. 22 And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. 23 Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” 24 Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

It is that fruitful one-flesh union of male and female (and only that one-flesh union of male and female) that produces more human beings, making it possible to “fill the earth” to subdue it. That one-flesh union is a powerful engine of dominion because

It is a FORCE MULTIPLIER (cp. Genesis 1:28; cp. Proverbs 31:2-3)

Why did God give Adam a helper? Because He was sending him into 197 million square miles of untamed wilderness! By himself, Adam could only do so much. Adam with his wife Eve could then do more together—and Adam and Eve and their children (and grandchildren and great grandchildren) could fill the entire earth!

The sex drive that God has given you, brothers, is designed to multiply your strength in this world. We see this connection between a man’s strength and his sex drive in Proverbs 31, where King Lemuel’s mother said to him,

Proverbs 31:2–3 (ESV)

2 What are you doing, my son? What are you doing, son of my womb? What are you doing, son of my vows? 3 Do not give your strength to women, your ways to those who destroy kings.

Think of it this way: This past summer Dad and Caleb had a running battle with the hydraulic hoses on the high lift on one of the tractors. The hoses would randomly pop off of their connections and spray hydraulic fluid all over the ground (as well as whoever happened to be standing nearby!)

When the hydraulic fluid is pressurized in its proper channel, you can lift a half-ton round haybale off the ground with one hand; but when the hoses fail, you have no strength to do your work. God’s design (as we see in Creation) is for a man to give his “strength” to one woman, not to “women”—a man who goes around being a “baby daddy” to several women is wasting his strength, not channeling it as a force multiplier. A man addicted to pornography is draining himself of the strength God has given him to subdue the earth. The drive for one-flesh union that every man is born with is meant to multiply his strength through the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren that go out into the world and represent his influence and strength far beyond his own life.

That drive for fruitful one-flesh union between male and female is a force multiplier to drive dominion forward, and

It is the FOUNDATION of all CIVILIZATION (Genesis 3:20)

Later on in Genesis, we read

Genesis 3:20 (ESV)

20 The man called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living.

This one-flesh union between a man and wife is the building block of all civilization. The call to exercise godly dominion is carried out as a man takes a wife and with her forms a home. And then, as the home is formed, he fills her with life, and in turn she fills that home with life.

And the man who has a household full of life is a man who works. Go down to any shop floor and ask one of the guys why they are working, and they will pull out a picture of their wife and kids. Societies are built—cultures are built—by men with mouths to feed. The family as God designed it—a man and wife together raising children—is the basic building block of society. As Foster and Tennant put it:

“As households multiply.... cities are formed. Soon the relationships of this network of households must be managed and protected, and so the natural role of the patriarch is extended into the office of magistrate; civil government is established. Cities form alliances with other cities and form states. States covenant with other states and form nations. Thus it is that commonwealths, kingdoms, and even great empires spring forth from the natural, God-ordained sex drives of men.” (Foster, M., & Tennant, D. B. (2022). It’s Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity. Canon Press., p. 36)

Godly dominion is driven by the fruitful one-flesh union of male and female. And this is why Satan hates it so much. On the surface, it may seem like the Devil is all about sex—but in reality, all he wants to do is prevent that one-flesh union from driving godly dominion. Starting in Genesis 3, we see

II. The SABOTAGE of the engine to DESTROY dominion (Genesis 3:1-7)

About a decade ago the Iranian nuclear weapons program suffered a severe setback when a computer virus (known as STUXNET) infected the centrifuges designed to aid in purifying uranium to weapons-grade fuel. The virus caused rapid changes in the centrifuges’ speed, ultimately wrecking about 900 centrifuges in 14 Iranian facilities across the country, severely curtailing their ability to create weapons-grade uranium.

This is very much like what Satan tries to do with sex. He has sabotaged that engine of dominion in every way he can to prevent God’s plan for dominion of the world (and therefore forestall his own defeat.) Instead of fighting against that drive for one-flesh union between one man and one woman, he infects it so that it is twisted out of its original purpose for good to make it destructive.

And so the first step in sabotaging the engine of dominion was for him to

Confound God’s ORDERING of CREATION (1 Corinthians 11:7-9)

Throughout the first two chapters of Genesis, we see that God had taken the shapeless, formless chaos of the world and divided and ordered and separated everything into its kind—night from the day, heavens from the earth, land from the sea. And then He filled those separate realms with a hierarchy of creations: Greater and lesser lights in the sky, greater and lesser beasts on the land and in the sea—each one of them fulfilling a specific purpose. And this culminated with His creation of Adam as head and Eve as his helper—

1 Corinthians 11:7–9 (ESV)

7 For a man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. 8 For man was not made from woman, but woman from man. 9 Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.

God intended for His glory to be revealed through Adam and Eve—Adam was meant to be the crowning glory of God, which then means that Eve was meant to be the crowning glory of God’s glory! As Adam in submission to God glorified God, then Eve in submission to Adam was to glorify God’s glory in Adam! And Adam and Eve together were created to rule over the created world as they carried out His command to go into all the earth occupying the place God had assigned them in the creation order, fulfilling their roles in the engine of one-flesh union.

But Satan attacked that engine by turning that whole created order on its head. Look at Genesis 3:1-5:

Genesis 3:1–5 (ESV)

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2 And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

Instead of the created order of God - Adam - Eve - creatures, the serpent completely confounds it— Serpent (creature) - Eve - Adam - God! The Fall itself can be aptly summarized as woman not knowing her place, and man not keeping his (ibid., p. 47). (And notice again how our culture is so thoroughly ingrained in this subversion of God’s order that those tripwires in your head are going off again! “How dare he say that woman should submit to man?? Where does he get off??”)

Satan has to confound God’s order of creation in order to sabotage the engine of dominion. And one of the results of that sabotage is that we see sex twisted to

Create ISOLATION instead of UNION

Instead of one-flesh union between male and female, Satan has hijacked sex to be a source of division and loneliness. Hookup culture leaves its victims alone, scarred, broken and ashamed. They feel like “damaged goods”, like they are not worth anything to anyone. Instead of creating children who will carry forward the mission of filling the earth with God’s image-bearers, sex is now so divorced from fruitfulness that men and women voluntarily choose to make themselves barren rather than bear children. And any children that are brought into existence against their parents’ will are murdered in the womb—causing even more guilt and shame and hopelessness.

Satan has to sabotage the engine of dominion because he hates the prospect of image-bearers of God filling the earth. He hates the fact that God is a God of order and not confusion 1 Corinthians 14:33:

1 Corinthians 14:33 (ESV)

33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace...

And so in his attempt to sabotage the engine of dominion he seeks to

Cause the DESTRUCTION of all DISTINCTIONS (cp. 1 Corinthians 14:33)

C. S. Lewis writes about the men of the Middle Ages: “There was nothing which medieval people liked better than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index...” (C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Kindle Edition, p. 11) I would submit that this is because medieval man was much more consciously Christian than our age. God is a God of “sorting out and tidying up”—He is a God who has precisely ordered all of Creation in such a way that it brings Him the greatest glory—including His design for one-flesh fruitfulness as the engine of dominion.

When God had completed dividing and filling and ordering the Creation, He pronounced it “very good”. The order and hierarchies and harmonious working of the Creation was very good—and this order and harmony and organization of the Creation was precisely what Satan was attacking when he inverted that order when Adam fell. He seeks to sabotage the engine of dominion—sabotage sex—by destroying the distinctions that make it work. In order for an engine to work, all of the parts have to function in their place—but when an engine block has been melted down or crushed into an undifferentiated lump of metal it is no longer very good!

Look around you today, and you see this everywhere. Gay and lesbian couples insist on being considered “married”, even though their sexual activity will never ever produce offspring—in order to have any resemblance at all to a “family”, they have to take children from the one-flesh union of other people. For years, gender roles have been under attack—Black Widow effortlessly dispatches a dozen bad guys with her bare hands while Harry Stiles flounces around in a dress. Even the Artemis moon mission I mentioned earlier makes it a point to brag about how many women are involved in the project (the name itself comes from a Greek goddess, after all—enough with the masculine toxicity of Greek mythology already!)

And now we see the attack on the very concept of gender, attempting to destroy the distinction between male and female with drag queens, hormone blockers, genital mutilation surgeries, brainwashing children or even coercing them into confusion about their God-given gender. Satan is raging against God’s design for the engine of dominion through male and female fruitfulness because he hates God’s good created order, and because he knows that when that dominion is finally established and God’s Kingdom has come and His will is done on earth as it is in heaven, his damnation awaits him in the eternal lake of fire. And so he rages against fruitful one-flesh union between male and female as the engine of dominion.

He began that attack when he inverted the order God created by his temptation of Adam and Eve. In Adam’s fall, the good order of God’s creation was attacked and the engine of dominion sabotaged. But the Second Adam, Jesus Christ, came to fulfil the task that Adam abandoned; He came to make possible

III. The REBUILDING of the engine through HOUSEHOLD dominion

The family is under attack in our day because it is through families, through households, that God has called mankind to exercise godly dominion. The home is the central battlefield in the war for dominion—Satan wants to destroy it, and so that is where we must take our stand.

And so we must rebuild what he has tried to destroy—we must right what he has tried to pervert. Instead of the confusion and destruction of gender and sexual distinctions and the inversion of God’s order, our homes must be characterized by

Well-ordered ROLES (Ephesians 5:22-25; Matthew 28:19-20)

And here, as in everything else, we find our pattern set for us by the Second Adam, Jesus Christ:

Ephesians 5:22–25 (ESV)

22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. 25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her,

Jesus Christ makes His Bride fruitful; He fills her with His love and orders her fruitfulness, and then He leads her into the world to bear frutiful Gospel witness to all creation:

Matthew 28:19–20 (ESV)

19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

And in the same way husbands and wives are to order themselves rightly in their household dominion; living out a flesh-and-blood demonstration of the glory of God revealed in the fruitful one-flesh union of one man and one woman for life. And a household founded on those rightly-ordered roles leads to the creation of new image-bearers of God—force-multipliers of a godly husband and wife that will magnify their impact on the world.

It’s been well-said elsewhere that you can’t fight an air war without air power, you can’t find a naval war without a navy, you can’t fight a war of words without words—and you can’t fight a culture war without a culture. A godly household that rightly submits to God’s design is where that culture is forged. The children who are raised in such a household are powerful weapons in that war—in Psalm 127, Solomon puts it this way:

Psalm 127:3–4 (ESV)

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.

Brother, your home is where your weapons for the culture war are forged! The children your wife bears are your

Well-sharpened ARROWS (Psalm 127:3-4)

that will fly to lengths far beyond your reach! Just as your arm draws back a bow and releases it toward your target, so the children borne of your urge for one-flesh fruitfulness will multiply your strength. Your home is where you will raise sons who will take on your role as dominion takers, where you will raise daughters who will take on the role of dominion fillers—arrows that fly from your hand, sending them to accomplish godly dominion far beyond the reach of your years!

Godly dominion is driven by the fruitful one-flesh union of male and female—brother, you have been made for this. Your sexual desires are not shameful or unspiritual; they are a powerful force meant to multiply your strength as you obey the mandate of your Creator to take dominion in this world. It is not given to you for your own amusement; it is not given to you to fuel the pursuit of your selfish lusts. Do not be like a faulty hydraulic line that pours out all of that power in uselessness.

If you are a husband, that power is meant to drive you forward in taking dominion; working hard to feed and shelter and protect and nurture the wife and children the engine of dominion has produced. If you are unmarried, then that engine drives you to become the kind of productive, mission-oriented man that a woman will want to join for a lifetime of establishing God’s kingdom.

Whether you are married or unmarried, you are called to fight in this battle by defending God’s good creation order. That means that you don’t play the pronoun games, you stand firm on the good and beautiful distinctions God has created in male and female, you reject the blurring of the lines between the sexes, you gladly and openly delight in the way God has made this world!

That well-ordered household where fruitful one-flesh union between a husband and wife takes place is the means by which God is creating more eternal image-bearers who will extend your reach for His kingdom far beyond your own ability. So, parents (and especially fathers), sharpen those arrows. Teach your sons about the dominion they are called to exercise, teach your daughters how God has called them to be the crowning glory of His glory, do the hard work of teaching them the Scriptures and demonstrating a well-ordered household and a lifetime of watching a faithful Christian mother and father love one another and exercising the dominion God has called them to.

And to the rest of you here who have no children, I say to you that you play a powerful role in sharpening those arrows; when they are sitting here in these pews on those alternate weeks, sitting with imperfect stillness and listening with imperfect attention and imperfect silence, your role is not to gripe and inwardly complain about their sometimes tumultuous presence in worship; your role is to praise God that they are being raised by godly households who understand how important it is to sharpen those arrows! And you pray for them as they carry out that task, because there is not a nuclear missile in any superpower’s arsenal that can come close to the power of one of these little ones to utterly transform this world through the power of God at work in them!

And to you who sit here this morning who have been snared by Satan’s twisted scheme to destroy the engine of dominion, who have poured out your strength in lust or porn or hookups or selfish sexual activity; to you who have bought into the Enemy’s attempts to confuse and destroy those distinctions between male and female; you who have succumbed to his temptation to be a soft man or a hard woman; to you whose sexual sin has resulted in disaster for you and those you love: hear the Word of God for you today:

Psalm 103:9–14 (ESV)

9 He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever. 10 He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities. 11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him; 12 as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us. 13 As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. 14 For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.

When Adam’s wife fell into sin, Adam should have exercised his office as ruler of his family, and offered himself to God to take Eve’s punishment in his place. But instead he abandoned his place and joined Eve in upending the created order, submitting to her as she submitted to the Serpent. Jesus Christ, the Second Adam, came here to do what Adam did not—He offered Himself in place of His bride, the Church,

Ephesians 5:26–27 (ESV)

26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

Friend, the Second Adam offers you that very purity today. His death on the Cross purchased your cleansing when you come to Him in repentance. The forgiveness He offers you will cleanse every spot of lust, every wrinkle of impurity, every blemish of guilt or shame, and replace it with His own righteousness. He knows your frame; He remembers you are dust, and He offers the compassion of His Father to you when you come to Him in holy fear and sorrow. He is waiting to remove your transgressions as far from you as the east is from the west. He did not keep His anger forever; He poured it out on the Cross so that you can have His steadfast love poured out on you. So come—and welcome!—to Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION:

Jude 24–25 (ESV)

24 Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, 25 to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

How is the drive for one-flesh union that God has given men the “engine that drives dominion?” How is a man’s sex drive meant to make him fruitful?

How have you seen God’s design for male and female fruitfulness attacked in our society today? Why is God’s design for male and female so bitterly attacked in our day?

What are the two elements of household dominion that were mentioned in the sermon? Why are these two elements so important?

Consider the circumstances God has placed you in today (e.g., married/unmarried, children/no children). How do your particular strengths, abilities, interests, and limitations help you understand where you can be most greatly used in God’s mandate for His dominion in this world?

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