Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

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: