The “job”, or vocation, God gave Adam was primarily to be God’s image-bearer, His representation and reflection out into the world. Adam was supposed to be the place where creation could experience the presence of its Creator. Like the Jewish temple, Adam was the meeting place between God and His creation. One of the practical ways Adam was tasked with doing that was by ruling over, subduing, and having dominion over the created order. We can, therefore, conclude that if Adam is meant to be the reflection of God to creation then to “have dominion,” or to “subdue” it, means to care for and manage it in a way that is loving, faithful, productive, and beneficial to all involved. Because we know God is not a God that manipulates, exploits, or abuses, then we can also know that Adam’s job of caring for creation was never meant to be done in any of those ways either.

Adam’s calling was to care for the animals and the plants and the created order that nourished it and cared for it as it nourished and cared for him. God gave Adam this job because it is God’s desire that we, His image-bearing humans, would work with and alongside Him within His creation. God desires that His love be reflected and made known not just to us, but also through us. Love, by definition, expresses itself. And, if God is love (1 John 4) then God also wants to express Himself to others and through others.

Unfortunately, Adam let fear replace the love of God in his heart when we listened to the accusations of the serpant and ate the fruit. In doing so, Adam, instead of stewarding creation as a reflection of God’s glory, abused creation as a means of establishing his own glory. Ever since that fateful day, humans have been doing the same thing. Rather than stewarding creation from the standpoint that it belongs to God and He has entrusted it to us, we instead abuse and manipulate creation in the pursuit of our own glory, prosperity, and selfish gain at the expense of not only creation, but other human beings as well.

N.T. Wright famously said, “In Jesus, God puts human beings right so that through human beings He might put the world to right also.”

When Paul writes in Colossians that through Jesus, God reconcilied “all things,” he is telling us what the Good News, the Gospel, is really all about. For centuries, church leaders have proclaimed that the Gospel is simply about sinners being forgiven so they can go to Heaven when they die. And though that is true, it is only a piece of what the Good News is all about. It would be like receiving a ticket to the Super Bowl and the person who gave it to you telling you that ticket is for the purpose of you having access to the concessions area where you can choose from all kinds of different food options. Yes, that ticket does get you into the concessions area, but the whole point of the ticket is to experience something way bigger than just the chili dog you might be craving.

Yes, Jesus forgives our sins and yes that means when we die we go to be with Him. But, the larger experience is the idea of reconciling all things. God reconciles us back to Himself through Jesus so that through us He might reconcile the rest of creation back to His original design. He reconciles us back to the unconditional love of the Father so that we might now be an accurate reflection of that love out into the world. That shows up in how we love our neighbors, how we love ourselves, and how we love His creation. The point of the Gospel is to put things back to the way God intended them to be all along. And, when we function from that understanding we will steward creation as a reflection of God’s glory, not our own, and creation will once again begin to function according to the way God designed it to function.

The brokenness and decay of creation is the direct result of the curse handed down because of Adam’s rebellion and brokenness. Therefore, when the humans return to their original design of submission and worship of the One True God through the forgiveness of sins and the reconciliation made possible through the blood of the second Adam, Jesus of Nazareth, then creation returns to its original design as well.