Chapter 18: The Dominion Mandate

Eastern and Western philosophies differ in one very fundamental way, and these different ways of thinking affect not only the social order but also economics and politics.

It goes back to the story of Creation in the early chapters of Genesis. There we read that God created the heavens and the earth. It started out as chaos (“without form and void,” Gen. 1:2, KJV), but God then labored to bring it into an orderly cosmos. Though sin later reversed this course, man was called to shape what God had created and to give it form. The ultimate goal was to restore all things back to reconciliation (harmony) with God and His nature.

Dominion and Rest

Man was given dominion—the authority to make the earth productive, useful, and beneficial to humanity. God creates; man shapes or forms things that God has already created. We can view this as a two-step part of the creation process itself.

The idea of man’s dominion in the earth came from the Bible. This principle, of course, has often been abused by those who overstepped their God-given authority. The idea of dominion brought about a work ethic and the belief that wealth is accumulated by working hard for a season so that one may enter into God’s rest.

Work without rest is a sign of slavery. When sin entered the picture, work became toil. The curse on the ground made it more laborious to produce food (Gen. 3:18, 19). This toil made work less productive and more difficult, and it also reduced man’s times of rest.

Slavery is an Unlawful Solution

Carnally minded men then sought an unlawful solution to this problem. Men sought slaves to do their toil so that the slave masters could increase their times of rest and leisure. Their form of slavery can be termed unjust dominion. Man misused his dominion (authority) by creating a class system, where one group of men usurped power over others. By doing this, they established a dual system of justice that denied the rights of their slaves to benefit a privileged class of slave owners. This denied slaves the right to own the fruits of their labor and also the right to rest at the end of their labor.

The Apostle Paul says in Gal. 3:28,

²⁸ There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

In other words, there is no class system in God’s Kingdom, no upper class and lower class, based upon race or gender. “There is no partiality with God” (Rom. 2:11; Acts 10:34), and even Moses instructed the judges, saying, “You shall not show partiality in judgment” (Deut. 1:17). Many have tried to restrict this principle to mean that we should be impartial toward Israelites, thus retaining class distinctions. But that is not what it says. Moses said in Num. 15:15, 16,

¹⁵ As for the assembly [kahal, “church”], there shall be one statute for you and for the alien who sojourns with you, a perpetual statute throughout your generations; as you are, so shall the alien be before the Lord. ¹⁶ There is to be one law and one ordinance for you and for the alien who sojourns with you.

This is how we are to understand Deut. 10:18, 19 as well,

¹⁸ He [God] executes justice for the orphan, and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. ¹⁹ So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.

Further, God says in Lev. 19:33, 34,

³³ When a foreigner resides with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. ³⁴ The foreigner who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.

This is why Jesus treated non-Jews with respect and justice. This is why God poured out His Spirit upon the “gentiles” (Acts 10:45)—which even surprised Peter, who had thought that the promises of the God were given only to the biological descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But the law itself commanded the aliens to keep the feast of Pentecost (Deut. 16:10, 11). It appears that Peter did not understand this law until he saw for himself how the Spirit of God was being poured out upon the Roman soldiers in Acts 10.

Biblical Slavery Supports Justice

Slavery, as the world has practiced it for thousands of years, is one of the worst forms of partiality and is a violation of the law of God. The Bible allows for slavery, but the law of God uses it as a means of re-establishing justice. Biblical slavery is a judgment for sin whose purpose is to pay off a debt. As an enforceable sentence of the law, it is involuntary slavery. Involuntary slavery was never meant to be a permanent condition but a means to an end. The Dominion Mandate in Gen. 1:26 did not give men the right to enslave others apart from an actual cause—such as a way to pay a debt.

But the Dominion principle was perverted by carnal men and their misunderstandings to bring about slavery and colonialism. It was even used to claim the right to pollute the environment.

How the Bible Shaped Western Culture

During the first few centuries, while Christianity was yet growing in popularity, Roman law and Greek culture dominated the Roman Empire. After the fall of Rome, illiteracy spread, and the culture degenerated. The Roman church gradually filled the void, but it too was steeped in Roman thinking. Some changes were made with Justinian’s Corpus Juris Civilis in 529 A.D., but his Church law only partially replaced Roman law with God’s law.

Illiteracy brought about the Dark Ages, and Church law resulted in the Feudal System, bringing near slavery to the vast majority of the common people. Chaos and insecurity forced most of the people to pledge their allegiance to a lord in exchange for protection from thieves or from other lords. The serfs had to give a third to one-half of the produce from their own land to the lord, and they had to work a set number of days in their lord’s field just for the privilege of owning their own land.

Church law did little or nothing to eliminate slavery, because it was based upon man’s understanding and application of God’s law. After a thousand years of this, during which time the common people were largely ignorant of the Bible, the Reformation began to dawn. Certain learned men saw that the priests had failed to teach the word to the people, and they felt the call to spread the word of God to others.

When the people began to read the word for themselves, this new knowledge turned Europe upside down, as men discovered the discrepancy between the Bible and church traditions.

In the fifteenth century, Dominion thinking began to be enculturated in Western society as the Bible began to be read widely. The printing press made this possible, beginning in 1452, when the first Bible was printed. Although the Roman church fought vigorously against the Bible’s dissemination, the people’s desire to learn the Scriptures for themselves prevailed.

The Bible is the single most important factor that shaped the modern world. It was the basis of science as well, as theologians wanted to better understand God by the study of creation and natural laws. Prior to the Bible’s influence, science as we know it had been virtually dead since the days of Solomon and the Scientific Method was largely unknown.

Socialist and Atheist Opposition

Socialists arose later in the 1800’s, followed by Darwinism’s idea that man is just an animal that is ruled by the law of the jungle, where right and wrong is replaced by the might makes right. Men fought God and recruited followers by pointing out the corruption in the Roman church. Because the church was corrupt, men were able to blame God—as if the Roman church was God’s spokesman, and as if church law was God’s law.

As men misread the problem, they began rooting God out of government and all public life, leaving the culture with no firm basis for justice or a social order that promoted good. Even these people did not cast out the idea of dominion; they merely used it for selfish purposes to enslave all of mankind in the name of “liberty, equality, and fraternity.”

To a secularist or atheist, the world is built upon random chance, rather than order. They must exercise great faith in the accidental formation of their own eyeballs. Their faith is rooted in Time, for they say that, given enough time, very complex organisms have evolved apart from any divine mind or direction. They have even replaced the moral laws of God with the laws of the jungle, where survival of the fittest is the only real truth that matters.

The idea of man’s dominion under God has had to compete with the promotion of man’s dominion in a chaotic jungle. Hence, chaos has replaced an orderly cosmos in the minds of many, and the result is a selfish pursuit of power in the attempt to enslave others for personal benefit. If there is no God, then there is no divine purpose for man. Man’s greatest purpose, then, is to seek power and fleshly comforts (or indulgence) for as long as possible.

Secular science cannot deny the order in creation but tries to explain it in terms of random selection and accidental improvements. Its mission is to explain its faith in a godless nature, giving all credit for the orderly cosmos to the creation itself. Out of this rose the idea of nature being a god unto itself, an impersonal god that does what it must to survive and rebalance itself and defend itself against the sins of men, but which has no particular love for the individual.

Such an impersonal god seems largely unconcerned with the problem of sin, except as it might threaten the life of the universe itself. Those who believe such philosophy of the universe tend to define sin as ignorance rather than as an offence against God or man. Herein is one of the big differences between men’s religious philosophies and biblical truth. The solution to ignorance is found in a classroom; the solution to sin is found in a courtroom.