Grace in Advance of Dominion Rejected

Another instance of God’s grace in creation was His declaration: “let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”  By this decree God gave us dominion to rule over His creation as His chosen agents.  Psalm 8 speaks to the remarkable nature of this divine pronouncement: “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet” (Psalm 8:4-6).  David recognized that there is nothing in us that would merit God’s favor to entrust us with such a tremendous responsibility.  This is sheer grace.  By this gracious declaration God gave Adam authority to rule over the earth as His representative. God demonstrated the reality of this gracious declaration to Adam when He brought before him all the animals that God had created and had Adam name each one of them.  This was living proof of God’s grace in granting Adam dominion of His creation.

Sadly, Adam and Eve despised God’s gift and decided to trade their God-given dominion for the lie that they could be “like God” and rule in their own right, apart from the grace of God and without being subject to Him. Their fall into sin is the first instance of anyone despising the grace of God, and thereby rejecting it.  But even though Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s trap, God did not cease to grant them grace.  In fact, God understood that because of sin they would need His grace more desperately than ever before, so He continued to show them grace in numerous ways.   

Genesis 1:29 says that God “blessed” them.  The Hebrew word used here means to speak words invoking divine favor, with the intent that the person who is blessed will have favorable circumstances or live in a favorable state in the future.  In other words, God blessed Adam and Eve with hope for the future.  This divine favor for the future was completely underserved, because we know that God realized in advance that Adam and Eve would rebel against Him and disobey His command.  Paul wrote in Ephesians chapter one: “he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will—to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:4-6).  Even before God blessed Adam and Eve He chose them to be His own in spite of the fact that they would despise His grace.  He chose them in hope to be His own, even though He knew that they would forsake Him.  God blessed them and told them to “be fruitful and multiply” even though He recognized that through their offspring sin would be multiplied and spread over the whole earth.  But God also understood that He had a plan to conquer sin and the resulting death, through the seed of the woman, and so God blessed them anyway.  That’s grace!

Copyright by the Author.