Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Today we’re talking about conquest.

It is one of those themes running throughout the pages of the Bible.

It’s part of our continuing look at the Big Picture of the Bible.

We’ve seen the flow of Creation to recreation.

We saw the Unfolding covenants that end with our everlasting unity with Christ.

We heard about the Garden temple of Eden that was copied through history and will be renewed in the end where we’ll live with God forever.

Today we’re talking conquest.

That might set off some alarm bells for you.

If you walk into a religious building and start hearing about conquest you might think of Islamic jihad, or the crusades, or inquisitions, or perhaps the Buddhist militants of SE Asia.

There are no shortage of horror stories about religious wars and conquest.

I think that’s partly why modern western Christians shy away from talking about this topic.

We’re afraid of what other people might think of us.

We’re suffering second hand guilt from the crimes committed by other people because we may share some of the same worldview.

We don’t want to be tarred with the same brush, or fall into the same trap.

You can put your mind to rest, I’m not going to make any case for anyone literally taking up rifles and invading somewhere in the name of Christ.

That’s not what the scriptures reveal as the plan of God for us.

However, this is your reminder that the God of the Bible is a God of Holy War.

You may have tried to “sanitize” God by not thinking about his campaigns to conquer the world, but they are in the Bible all over the place.

And it’s not just an Old Testament thing either, some of the most confronting conquest stuff is in the NT, such as in Revelation.

We either have to come to grips with who God is so we can serve and worship the true God as He is.

OR we reject Him because we don’t like what we hear.

If we do that, we’re setting ourself up in judgment of God, and that’s not a good game to play.

Rejecting the LORD presented in the Bible either leads to idolatry (making up a god to suit ourselves) or atheism.

So what is the Big Picture of this conquering God?

The are 6 main episodes in the unfolding story of conquest as far as I can tell.

It is infused across the pages of the Bible, but we can only get so deep in such a sweeping overview.

There’s a few repeating ideas and themes that keep popping up, including

Conquest is about the creation, or restoration, of a place for God’s people to live with him.

Conquest is about overthrowing evil and replacing it with holy image bearers of God.

No conquest in here is “unfair” - there’s no innocents who unjustly suffer when God takes over.

God is the one who directs and completes Conquest.

As ever, the first place to start is in the beginning...

Dominion under God

God’s making the world is in some sense presented as the first conquest.

Although He could have snapped his fingers and everything jumped into existence in a moment, God chooses to make something of an unrefined, untamed world, and then He brings order out of it.

You see that in the creation narrative over the course of the 6 days.

Now although the world is created, God doesn’t bring completion to it.

It was Very Good, but God creates humanity and invites them to be part of the ongoing process of taming and ordering the world.

He installs humanity as regents over the creation who must have dominion.

Dominion is a word we don’t use much.

But if shows up early in Genesis:

Other translations say “rule over the earth”.

It is being in charge, in control.

Being responsible.

Now in case you thought this was just a throw-away line, the same thing is basically restated a few verses later:

We should be under no allusions about the fact the God expected humanity to take charge as his agents on earth.

In fact, the first Job that Adam is given was in the Garden of Eden, Adam was to work it and keep it, guarding it and creating in it.

SO then, we’re presented with the picture of humanity as God’s appointed leaders on earth, who start their work in God’s Garden temple guarding, maintaining and cultivating, from there humanity is to spread out into the whole world filling and subduing it.

They are to have dominion under God.

Lets take a moment to think about this creation mandate.

“be fruitful and multiply” - Multiplying is easy to understand, but what does it mean to be fruitful for humanity?

A tree is being fruitful if it creates good fruit in season.

The right fruit of the right quality at the right time.

Humanity is to do the same!

But is is a metaphor for how we are to live.

I will include having kids if we marry, but it also means the other things - dominion, subdue, “tame” the world.

Doing the thing that God designed us to do.

This dominion is not evil crushing and humiliating.

Not the cliche of a tyrannical overlord crushing his subjects into the dirt.

No, a good dominion.

We see the benefits of this in managed land - farms, forests, etc.

It is the loving care and management of creation so that it can flourish.

The best kings and leaders use their authority to create the environment where their subjects thrive.

This is humanity's job.

We were made for dominion and protection.

God designed us this way from the start.

He built-in desires to protect and nurture.

And he made us as two sexes with different advantages and proclivities to enable us to do our job well.

When it comes to conquering and guarding and subduing, God especially wired men to be able to do this.

Most little boys want to play with swords and guns.

We love the stories about defeating the bad guys, slaying the dragon, restoring order to the world.

We want to save the girl, we want to build, we want to make, we want to protect.

It’s built in.

The addictions of our modern age hijack men’s God given desires and make us impotent.

Porn takes our desire to be fruitful and multiply in a loving union, and directs our energies into a fruitless selfishness.

Video games take our good desire for conquest and construction and directs it into made up worlds that are ultimately empty.

Now, video games are not in and of themselves evil, but they can hijack our good desires and turn them into a fruitless addiction.

War games are part of what it looks like to train for battle, and they can be kids playing with swords, or young men doing battle on the football oval, or even virtual combat.

But we must never let the training become an end in itself.

If we put half the energy we put into video games into fulfilling our purpose in the real world we would live in a much better place.

Instead, due to the disarming of masculinity by things like these, and the cultural erosion of the value of men, we are running headlong into a pit chaos.

One that many generations of men have striven to pull us out of.

Men & Women hold our society together, but when the male half of us shirk our duties and reject our design to become fruitless shells of men, then there is not much the other half can do except be dragged down with us.

Speaking of men neglecting their duty...

Infiltration & Separatists

Adam had a job to do and he failed.

He didn’t guard the garden, or protect His wife.

He went along with her disobedience and together they plunged the world into sin and death.

How did it happen

Serpent in the Garden

Undermined God’s word

Results - God cursed them to make their job of dominion & fruitfulness hard.

Cultivation would be hard, childbearing would be hard, sitting under authority would be hard, life would be hard.

But there was a promise hidden within the curse.

God promised that Satan would be crushed by the woman’s offspring.

Even though the task of dominion was made all the more difficult, there was some hope that there would be some kind of restoration.

The infiltrator Satan had caused great harm, and he needed to be taken down.

This Fall marks the start of a cascade of rebellion.

Instead of increasing good dominion over the world, the infiltration by Satan into humanity’s good leadership had lead to rebellion and evil.