THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE BLESSING OF THE LORD !

THE KINGDOM OF GOD AND THE BLESSING OF THE LORD ! By anyone's standards, The Garden of Eden was massive, and it was, without a doubt, an exquisite place to live. Filled with gorgeous trees that provided food fit for a king, it has a river running through it to keep it lush and green, plenty of gold (good I gold, the Bible says) and other precious stones. It was, indeed, a BLESSED place--- full of everything good and nothing bad. The rest of the earth, however, was not in the same condition. God has created it with plenty of potential, but it has not yet been cultivated. It still needed to be developed and brought into line with God's perfect will. That's why He included in THE BLESSING, the power to subdue the earth and have dominion over it. The untamed earth needed supervision and direction. It wasn't yet finished. God could have done the job Himself. He could have turned the whole planet into A Garden of Eden in an hour, but He had something else in mind. He wanted it to be a "family project"--- to which His sons and daughters became His co-- creators and finish out the planet. So He gave them the Garden of Eden as a pilot project to get them started. God's plan was for them to expand it until the earth became the garden spot of the universe. Once earth was finished, they could go to work on the rest of the planets. I'm convinced that's why there are so many barren, empty planets out there. God made them to be future sites for His family to develop. No wonder human beings dream of exploring the galaxy ! No wonder we figured out a way to go to the moon and said spaceships to Mars ! We were created to take dominion over the universe and fill every square inch of it with the glory of God. NOT JUST WEED--PULLERS: Because God created mankind in His image and likeness, by His Word are dominion, Adam sensed within himself, the desire for dominion the moment he took his first breath. From the beginning, ruling and reigning was a part of his DNA. He wasn't just a read: in the Garden of Eden. (Someone once said those very words to me, referring to Adam as "God's weed puller ! I had to exercise great resistance to keep from telling him what an ignorant statement that was). In the first place, there were no weeds in the Garden of Eden. If there had been, God would have pulled them Himself before He put Adam there. In the second place--- and this is much more important--- God didn't create Adam to be a servant of the earth. He made him to be a lord over it. I realized that ideal makes religious people nervous, but I don't apologize for it. It upsets people in Jesus day too. The religious people wanted to kill Him for speaking and acting like He had dominion on the earth. When He called God His Father and operated in THE BLESSING by using the same authority the first man Adam had before he fell, it aggravated the Pharisees to know end. But, He didn't back down to make them feel better. Instead, He said: is it not written in your law, I said, You are gods ? If he called them gods, unto whom The Word of God came, and the Scriptures cannot be broken; say you of him, whom The Father has sanctified, and sent into the world. Thou blaspheme; because I said, I am the son of God ? (John 10:34--36). Jesus left no doubt about man's authority over the earth. He said that when God spoke His Word Of dominion into mankind, He made us "gods" (little "g") over all that He has created. He gave us authority over everything that flies, walk, crawls, swims and creeps. (I'm especially grateful the creeps are included in that list because flu virus and cold germs qualified as creeps, so when they tried to get on me, I can use my God-given authority to get rid of them !) Well, I'm just not convinced I can operate in that kind of dominion, Brother Bobby. Most of the time, I feel more like a weed puller than a lord."