It is also the first indication, when combined with Genesis 2:7 and 15, that when God confers a responsibility, He also confers the powers to carry out that responsibility.
Here God clarifies what the powers are given for. Again, at first glance, it only appears to cover that which is physical and material. But with God's spiritual revelation, in other parts of the Bible, it tends to take a far greater implication.
If you have a King James, the word that I have in my Bible, tend or cultivate, is dress. The Hebrew means, to work at. In 1611, when the King James was translated, the word dress meant, to set in order. (Remember, government.) But gradually, it was applied to putting decorative details upon, to embellish.
So when we say today that we are going to dress, we include both parts of that definition. We are going to put ourselves in order. It also means that we are going to embellish what we look like.
The word in the modern Bibles has been now translated tend or cultivate. They have subtle meanings that are a little bit different than the word dress. Tend means to pay attention to or to serve. I am going to tend to the dishes, or I am going to tend to my clothing. It means to apply oneself to the care of or to manage the operations of.
Cultivate, which I think is the best of the three definitions, means to put through a finishing process, to foster the growth of, or to further or encourage. Dress is not wrong. Tend is not wrong. But I think cultivate most accurately applies the Hebrew meaning of that word.
Also there is the word keep there as well. We are to dress and keep or tend and keep. That word means to watch, guard, protect, save, retain, preserve, be faithful to, take care of, maintain.
Let us not forget we are talking about the powers that man has been given. He has been given dominion. God has given him powers to carry out the responsibility that has been given into his hands, that is, to have dominion.
Here is what he is to do. He is to put this that has been put into his hands through a finishing process, and he is to watch over it, guard it, protect it, and preserve its beauty.
Remember this was all given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, which surely must have been a beautiful place to be. God was already letting them know and us know that as beautiful as this place was, it was not going to stay that way. It was going to be subject to natural law and it was going to begin to degenerate.
It was going to need maintaining. And it was going to continually need someone to cultivate it, to continue to dress it, and to keep it. That was going to take a great deal of work. Man was not only to preserve it, control it, and direct it but also to strive to even ennoble the Garden of Eden through his work.
It begins to become very clear that mankind from God's intention is to make more of his environment than he has been given. And God gave us the powers to do that. Let us never forget that the Bible is first and foremost a book of God's instructions regarding God's spiritual purpose. He is giving these concepts to us in a material and physical environment, but we are to transfer that into the spiritual because that is the primary focus of God's work in and through us.
He has shown us here the fact that one works, and the reason one works, and the way one works have very much to do with one's spiritual development. Notice I did not say salvation. I said development. We are saved by grace. But if there is going to be development from what God begins with whenever we first receive His Spirit, then it is going to require something on our part to enable the fullness of development to take place. That is going to involve work.
God gives everybody who reads His Book very early indications that work is going to play a major role in what He has created. Dominion! That is rulership, or maybe a better word would be management. Management of our own personal environment requires work. (We will show why a few scriptures down the way here.) Let us go to chapter 2 and verse 15, where He reinforces this concept of dominion.
Tend and keep - we might say embellish and guard, add to or keep from deterioration. Anybody who has taken care of a piece of material equipment of some kind - a garden, a house, an automobile, clothing, it matters not what it is - knows you can embellish it, you can dress it, and that takes work. And it also takes work to maintain, to guard it from falling into a state of disrepair.
We know that God's real purpose here has something to do with the material things of life, but God is looking upon something that is much greater than that, and that is the spiritual. And He is indicating to you and me that the things that are spiritual in our lives are also going to have to be embellished, added to, dressed; and they too are going to have to be kept from deteriorating. And so they are going to have to be guarded, and there is work involved in those things. There is work in the proper management, or dominion, over the things that God has put within the scope of our authority. So both of these are indicating work.
Remember God's instruction at the very beginning of the Book, to Adam and Eve? How He told Adam and Eve - and, of course, now us - that we are required to 'dress' and to 'keep'? There is a very logical and scientific reason for this, and that is that all matter has been designed to run down, to oxidize, to deteriorate, and to disintegrate. It must be maintained. It must be kept. And that, we just found out, includes organizations and relationships.
We’ve read this so many times that maybe your mind went on autopilot just now. We typically come here to be reminded of what God is doing, but notice that He gave man something to do as well. An integral part of God’s creation of man is for man to have dominion. Dominion means rule or authority. Even more broadly, it means responsibility. If we separate that word into its parts, it means the ability to respond. It means the ability to use the spirit in man to make choices in responding to conditions, circumstances, and events.
God goes on in verse 28 to instruct the man to subdue the earth and exercise dominion, but this is about more than just animals. It sets an overarching pattern for man’s responsibility in general. In Genesis 2:15, we see another responsibility: Man is told to dress and keep the garden—to do battle with entropy. This was before sin entered the world. God created mankind, and almost in the same breath, God gave mankind responsibility. This pattern is fundamental to God creating man in His image.
Thus, we see that mankind’s ability to choose—that is, his free will or his free moral agency—is given at the same time as God’s declared purpose at the beginning that He will make mankind into His image. God has dominion and rule, and He imparts a measure of that to mankind. However, it is not typically in the sense of kingship, at least not yet, but in responsibility over what has been given.
Now the words, dominion and subdue, might inject to us a sense of foreboding because those words have a tendency, among us English-speaking people, to think of negative uses of power. That is, abuses.
This has to be put together with dominion and subdue so that we understand that God is showing that His intent in giving mankind governing powers is only good and positive. Mankind is to use his governing powers to maintain. That is what the word keep means. To preserve from decay is another application of that same word.
To tend means to edify, to cultivate. It means to promote growth toward the perfection of beauty. So God's conferring governmental power and authority, and all the gifts that were necessary, were intended by God to be used in a positive way, not in any negative sense at all. The power was intended to be used in a positive way - for the good of creation, which God had just reformed and shaped.
Notice here that God placed man in the Garden to beautify it, to make it better than it was when he had been given it. The Garden does not disappear. The Garden grows in beauty through the efforts of men within the God-given gifts He has given. At this point, it was not backbreaking labor, but a joyful joint effort with the God of creation to beautify His creation.
