Subdue The Earth

Sermon: “Fill The Earth and Subdue It…” - Borden

Introduction

I came across an article this week that was both encouraging and sad at the same time. The author was trying to draw attention to the fact that, worldwide, things have gotten enormously better for most of the human beings on the planet over the past 50-70 years. Average income per person has quadrupled since the 50s and the number of people living in extreme poverty has plummeted. Life expectancy has gone up by over 20 years and deaths from war and natural disasters have massively decreased in that time. Same thing with education, which is now much more widely available at all levels. If you could pick any time in human history to be born, without knowing where you would be born, all the statistics say you would be a fool not to pick today – things are the best they have ever been for the human race and they keep getting better. (https://humanprogress.org/why-are-we-so-gloomy/)

But it doesn’t feel that way to a lot of people. In 2021 a major poll was conducted in Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, the UK, India, Nigeria, the Philippines, Portugal, and the United states and it found that the young people they surveyed believed things were very gloomy. Seventy-five percent thought “the future is frightening.” Fifty-six percent – more than half - thought “humanity is doomed.”

Thirty-nine percent also said they were hesitant to have children. Now, 2021 was in the middle of the pandemic, so that must had some impact, but it’s been a trend for twenty years or more that people are generally reporting lower levels of happiness or well-being than was true in previous decades.

The author of that article I was talking about thinks it has a lot to do with negative news dominating our attention – that we are quite literally scaring ourselves to death. Researchers studying young people point to social media, helicopter parenting, and lack of face-to-face social time with friends. And yes, there are real things to be concerned about – we all know about our community’s housing shortage, fragile health care system, and the financial squeeze of inflation. These are not the best of times.

But there’s another element that I think needs more attention that also pops up when people are asked about how they are doing: meaning. More and more people, once again, especially younger people, don’t feel that their life has a purpose, or that what they do is meaningful.

This is where belief comes in. Last Sunday I starting talking about the importance of belief and the value of seeking for deeper meaning and truth in a pretty superficial world, and I shared a couple of stories of people whose search had led them to Christian faith.

Today I’m going to carry on into a hugely important area of belief – one that shapes people and our culture. This includes some of the most fundamental questions, like “where did I come from” and “what is my purpose in life?”

To dig into this I’m going to look at two key chapters in the Bible: Genesis 1 and Romans 1.

Let’s start at the beginning: Genesis 1:26-31:

Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.

This is one way of seeing humanity and the world we live in – as created, good, and full of purpose.

There are a couple of literally civilization-building concepts in here, the first being the idea that God created humankind in His image, which is the foundation of the now common belief that all human life has equal worth and dignity and that people are deserving of certain rights simply because they are human. That’s not the way pre-Christian civilizations thought, it is the fruit of Jewish and Christian theology.

Another big idea here has to do with our purpose – that our creator made us to do something. Three times in this short passage we are told that God intended humanity to rule over the rest of what He had created:

“Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Now when you read the words like “rule” or “subdue” here don’t think of a king, think of a farmer.

Humans weren’t given the role of sauntering around, exploiting whoever and whatever they can for their own gain. Rather, the master who owns the whole world said “I’m putting you in charge of all this. Tend it. Look after it. Make it a thriving place. Make it the best place you can imagine.”

That’s a compelling purpose. How can you contribute to helping this world thrive? What can you use to benefit other people and the rest of creation – its animals and plants and environments? What can you build? What can you fix? Who can you serve?

God gave us the capacity and authority to carry out this important purpose. There are a lot of ways to do this within a family, community, business, institution, or one-on-one with people you come across. But the point is that there are ways that you – and every human being God has made – can live according to this purpose that we were created for.

I find it interesting that people seem to sense this even if they’ve never read a word of Genesis. Give people a plot of barren land and they’ll plant a garden or build a park. People are drawn games where they are in charge of building a city or town or managing a farm, figuring out exactly how to lay things out and manage all the little details so that it gradually becomes a better and better place for their fictional people to live. We resonate with this purpose.

So that’s one way of seeing the world and our purpose within it, it’s a Christian theistic (God-believing) worldview that dominated western civilization for a long time.

But not so much anymore. This worldview isn’t gone, but in many ways and certain places it has been pushed out by the opposing worldview of materialism.

I don’t mean materialism as in “Ooooh I love to go to go to the mall!” – in philosophy materialism is believing that there is nothing beyond nature. There is only matter and energy. So there is no God, and humanity is a surprising accident that came about through a random, unguided process. And consequently, things like meaning and purpose and beauty are illusions - just useful ideas we invented that have no basis in reality. It’s pretty much the opposite of Genesis 1.

In the beginning matter and energy came to exist somehow, a universe formed and life began on this planet against impossible odds, there’s no reason for any of it, and no there’s no real right and wrong beyond what your culture values. Maybe you can find a mission for your life, but just remember that anything you do will soon be forgotten and have no real lasting significance.

I’m sure someone can make a more compelling case for materialism than I just did, but it’s still not going to be a very attractive worldview in most ways. You came from nowhere. There is no reason for you to exist. Your life is of little consequence. You are just your body and when it stops working that is the end of you. You probably don’t even have any free will, because your brain is just an organic computer programmed by evolution to survive – in fact, why should you even trust what you think and perceive?

As far as answering the big questions of where we came from and what our purpose is, those are not very pleasant answers compared to the Christian story of being created by a loving God, being given incalculable worth, provided a good purpose to thrive and help the world thrive, and offered the guidance of God and the gift of eternal life. So why is materialism gaining so much ground?

In some cases it’s because of bad experiences or negative impressions bout religion, the Church, or Christians, and I’ll get into some of that in February.

But when it comes to people defaulting to a materialistic way of thinking there are, I think, two main reasons.

First, I’ve heard quite a few prominent materialists say that it doesn’t matter if you think materialism is unpleasant or not, because it’s true. And why is it true? Because science says so.

I have worked very hard to make this rant as short as I can, but there is a rant coming now about Christianity and science.

There’s a story that many people have bought into that says “Once upon a time the Church was in charge of everything in Europe and it was the Dark Ages where there was no progress and everyone was superstitious and things were bad. Then smart, rational people got together, invented science even though the Church tried to stop them, disproved God, and improved the world with technology and advancement of all kinds.”

And that’s just wildly untrue. Science is largely a Christian invention, and it matured in the midst of another Christian invention – universities. And, contrary to the mis-telling of the story of Galileo you might have heard, the Church was not trying to put a stop to the development of science – Christian belief was a key reason it could happen at all.

The early Christian and Jewish natural philosophers – which is what they were called before we started calling them scientists - reasoned that science could be done successfully because there was an order to creation and predictable natural laws that could be discovered because they believed there was a law-giver.

They believed that it was possible to actually understand the natural world because they were created in the image of God and gifted with the ability to comprehend what God had done.

And they believed that it was important to do science because it is part of the purpose that God gave people – to help the world thrive by figuring out how things worked.

Most of the great early scientific minds like Isaac Newton or Robert Boyle held Christian beliefs that informed and motivated their work. The great astronomer Johannes Kepler famously said that his job as a scientist was to “think God’s thoughts after Him”, which is a fantastic way of putting it.

But over time, and especially after Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution came on the scene, science has increasingly been taken over by materialists and materialist thinking. More recently, famous scientists like Richard Dawkins have declared that you cannot be an intelligent scientific thinker and a person with religious beliefs at the same time.

There are so many reasons that this is nonsense:

· If so many of the giants on whose shoulders modern scientists now stand could believed in God and see design in nature and yet still did extremely important science, why can’t that still be true? It’s not like there aren’t prominent and influential scientists of Christian and other religious faiths today.

· And where did the idea come from that nothing can be real or true unless there is an abundance of scientific evidence to prove it? Is there any scientific evidence for that belief itself? No! It’s a tenet of faith in materialism.

· Also, science doesn’t really ever “prove” much of anything – what it can tell us is what possibilities are the most likely based on the ways we’ve been able to observe the natural or world or test different theories with the tools available to us. When I studied geology at Dalhousie we were only the second generation of students to grow up with the knowledge of plate tectonics, which explains a huge amount about where different rock formations come from and why earthquakes happen, and why continents move. If I’d been in that program fifty years earlier I would have been taught a lot of things that were about to be shown to be poor explanations for what we see in nature. What will we have learned in another fifty years, or a hundred and fifty? A certain amount of what we think we know is destined to turn out to be wrong – all truth-seekers need to have a great deal of humility.

· And I’ll just add that that scientific knowledge isn’t a nearly strong enough foundation to build a life on. Science is an incredibly valuable tool, a process for understanding how the natural world works that has hugely benefited society. It can be an amazing and inspiring thing, revealing insights into the great mysteries of the universe. I really like antibiotics and MRIs and airplanes and weather satellites and the internet! If it’s not your first Sunday you know I’m not anti-science in the least. But not only can science not currently answer many of the big scientific questions about how we came to be here and how the universe works, it is simply not intended to answer the deeper questions of how people ought to live, or what is good and right. If you want to have a good life you need wisdom, and that’s not what science was created to provide.

In our increasingly materialist culture many people are under the impression that science is the key to all truth and that it has ruled out God. Science is reliable, faith is not. But all worldviews require faith – everybody relies on beliefs that are unproven or unprovable. What should wrestle with is which set of beliefs actually make the most sense of the world and give answers that help us live well alongside our experiences and the witness of other people.

Next Sunday I’ll share some of what Tim Keller calls “clues for God” including a number of scientific discoveries that point to design and intentionality in nature. Hopefully I can make a good case that when you actually know some of the best reasons to believe you find that it takes at least as much faith to be a materialist as it does to be a Christian.

But before I go way into overtime I want to bring up the other Bible passage I wanted to tap into today – Romans 1:18-25 – which tells us that there is a cost to moving away from understanding ourselves and our world as God’s creation.

Romans 1:18-25

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.

So this says a couple of big things. First of all, that God created the world and that you can learn things about God from what He has created. Not only that, but this passage insists that God’s handiwork is so recognizable that those who reject God do it willfully.

And now test these last few verses against what you’ve seen in your lifetime living in our Canadian society:

Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.

This was written about the Greco-Romans world, where people gave all sorts of invented gods and goddesses credit for the world they lived in and placed idols in their homes and on their streets hoping it would cause the gods to bless them, or at least leave them alone.

It was also culture that depended on slavery to function, where free men could, and often did, force themselves on just about anyone they pleased any time they pleased, and where newborns could be left in the wilderness to die if the family patriarch didn’t like the look of them.

There are moral consequences to denying God as our creator.

Now here’s the funny thing about a lot of the people in our society. We’re getting more materialist in how we think about the world and what truth is, but we’re still clinging to Christian morality in a lot of ways. We’ve never been more passionate about human rights and equality and respecting differences, or at least certain differences. Most people still think that there is such a thing as truly right and wrong, that these aren’t just personal preferences or cultural norms.

We think kindness and forgiveness and charity are good and proper. These ideas didn’t come from materialism - it's tough to make a case for them that way. Nature is pretty cruel and callous – the strong survive, the weak perish, and even cooperation is just a way for the individual to get ahead.

Morally, western people still think in a pretty Christian way. But that is changing as we increasingly reject God and deny that we are created and have a purpose in this world.

That’s the second reason I think materialism is steadily advancing – people don’t want the moral obligations that come with being accountable to God. If you’re an accident of nature you don’t really owe anybody anything. And that can feel like freedom – living your life on your own terms.

But it’s not actually freedom to try to live in opposition to your purpose. Imagine deciding that roads are too restrictive and you’re going to just drive your car right through a forest. That’s not freedom, that’s an expensive repair bill. There’s a way the car was designed to operate in the world, and there are consequences to ignoring that.

Take away God and there stops being as much reason to love anyone sacrificially, or value others simply as fellow children of God. I think the Catholic intellectual G.K. Chesterton got it right when He said that when people stop worshiping God they don’t stop worshiping, they just start worshiping the world. And they will choose the strongest things of the world like status, money, or power.

Those who think religion will one day fade away have been, and will continue to be wrong. When people turn away from traditional religions they just ending up turning to new ones – religions built on political ideologies or unhinged ideas of social justice, or new age spirituality, or whatever else they end up being drawn into.

They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.

Where does that lead? I think it leads to a society that seems less united and unwilling to sacrifice for one another. I think it leads to a decline in our care and concern for human life. I think it leads to greater manipulation and twisting of truth. I think it leads to confusion and despair and a lack of satisfaction as people become disconnected from their creator and the purpose He established for them. And if you don’t see those things happening in Canada and in the lives of the people around you I’m not sure you’re paying enough attention.

Conclusion

I’ll try to wrap this up with a reminder that when worship or pray or in some other way acknowledge God as our creator, there’s a lot that comes with that.

And I’ll add that when we have the privilege of holding a child dedication like we did earlier it is not some casual right of passage. It is a very significant thing to come together – parents, family, and church family – to commit to doing whatever we can to ensure that this little one has the benefit of knowing, from the start, that she is a child of God, His good creation, full of dignity and worth, and brimming with purpose.

Part of our purpose is to help her, and the others in our faith community, to find her way. Maybe we get the chance to do this directly, through teaching or encouraging, or it could be in indirect ways by living out that truth ourselves as an example.

Either way, let’s be sure that we don’t buy into the disenchanted spirit of our times, echoing the people saying “woe is me, everything is getting worse and worse and we’re probably not going to survive.”

Instead let’s hold on to the hope of people who believe that God so loved this world that He sent His Son into that world to save it.

If God is God and our faith hasn’t been worn down by the materialism around us until it becomes uselessly small, then we should be able to believe that we can thrive in this world, and help others do the same. That’s not a burden to bear, it’s what’s we were made for.