IN THE BEGINNING
When you first open your Bible, the first person we meet is God. Here we read that God was the one who created everything we see today. He spoke and creation came to be. He defines what is good and what is not good. In other words, He alone is King and has the authority to influence every aspect of the universe. But then as the pinnacle of God’s creative work He makes humans and calls all of them image of God. He creates them in His image and likeness and gives them permission to rule and reign on the earth as His representative.
HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO RULE?
If humans were supposed to rule and reign as God’s delegated authority, how are we supposed to rule?
The picture we get is gardening. We are to rule by cultivating it and making something new and something more out of it. This looks like growing families, that becomes a neighborhood, and then a community where they are taking care of each other, building businesses and cities that expand to new places. Ruling is really the day to day acts of work and creativity.
This is humanity’s divine and sacred task: to move the world forward and take it somewhere as a family of God.
OUR CHOICE
God gives humans a choice of how they are going to rule. Are they going to use the authority for the benefit of others or are they going to turn away and define good and evil for themselves and use their authority for self-advantage?
In the story, they chose to define good and evil on their own terms. Even though we do see good in the world we always end up making a mess of things. But this is not where the story ends.
This is where we meet Jesus. All the problems are eventually resolved when God bound Himself to humanity through Jesus showing us what it truly looks like to rule as a human.
So in following Him and becoming His disciple, we are slowly transformed returning back to our divine purpose.
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