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Adam, Noah, and the Kingdom: The Edenic World and Biblical Eschatology The Commission to Adam All of this was implicit in the way that God created the world. But Adam was not left to speculate on who he was and what the meaning of his existence might be. God revealed to Adam the meaning of his life by giving him a mandate: "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth" (Gen. 1:28). The mandate includes two of the three tasks that God had performed during the six days of the creation. Adam was to fill the world with people, just as God had worked to fill the world with plants and animals. If we assume that God created animals in a manner similar to the way that He created man, the animal world, too, would need to increase, and Adam's dominion probably would have included aiding in the multiplication of domestic animals. However that may have been, he was clearly responsible for the propagation of the human race. Fill the earth! His work also included work that would have been analogous to God's work of separating the various aspects of the created world to order and glorify it. Adam was to subdue the world as its ruler. To the modern mind, the notion of bringing the world into submission to man may be offensive, but the meaning of Adam's dominion is further explained as serving and guarding the Garden (Gen 2:15; KJV has "dress" for serve and "keep" for guard; NASB has "cultivate" for serve.). To have dominion means to serve, not to subjugate. In order to serve the world, Adam would have to have some idea about the order of the world. Naming the animals in the Garden was an aspect of service and the beginning of Adam's analysis of the created order. He would have to categorize the creation in order to care for it. The third aspect of God's six-day creation, removing the darkness, is not explicitly mentioned with regard to man, but there is no question about the fact that Adam is accustomed to fire already from the time that he was in Eden. The offering of sacrifice at the time of the fall and as a rule of life thereafter expels myths about man discovering fire late in the history of human development. Adam knew and used fire from the beginning. The spread of human culture, therefore, meant the spread of light.
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