“Then God blessed them, and God said to them,
‘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.’”
Genesis 1:28
Ultimately, the Dominion Mandate from Genesis 1:28 defines what is economically valuable and what is not. Value comes from ruling the earth and subduing it, from being fruitful and multiplying. Conversely, activity that does not preserve or increase dominion isn’t economically valuable. The topic for this article is economic value and intends to speak to providers, those responsible for creating economic value to sustain themselves and others in their household.
Christian providers must understand that value is measured in dominion. Knowing this changes your entire approach to work. Of course you must work for a living, but if your work is not steadily taking dominion, you will soon find yourself “out of work.” This biblical wisdom for work as taking dominion directs and motivates us in our labors away from just being active toward a truly productive work ethic.
Work Ethic from a Dominion Mindset
While you can be active in many good things, only activity that rules and subdues is economically valuable to human existence. You are a creature, not self-existent like God, so you continually spend down resources in order to exist, and you will only thrive in your work if you obey the Lord’s Dominion Mandate to rule and subdue the earth. Thus, every day when you go to work, go to take dominion. This cultivates a work ethic from a Dominion Mindset.
Keeping a Dominion Mindset about your work points you to value and it exposes how many things can pass for work that are not truly valuable. For Christian providers, advice to“Work while you’re working” translates to: Make sure everything you do as “work” contributes toward taking dominion. If you do not keep a Dominion Mindset about your work, you will end up active, but not valued. You will be spent, yet have nothing to spend. If your business is not to be busy solving problems for your neighbors on a daily basis, your problems as a provider will be multiplied.
Valuable Work
A workplace adage says, “You get paid for the value you create.” A variant adds, “You get paid in proportion to the problems you solve.” Taken together with the Dominion Mandate, value is something created by the worker who takes dominion over problems. If your work provides relief from problems or advantage over chaos, then it is valuable because it grants the economic benefit of taking dominion over what was previously unruly. Thus, when you turn unruly, complicated, problematic situations into a benefit for your community, the economy rewards these actions in proportion to the benefit you offer.
Whether working for yourself or someone else, the value of your work corresponds to the benefit it yields your neighbor. Self-employed business owners know you cannot just set any price for your labors in the marketplace. It doesn’t matter what the work costs you in effort and energy expended. The only thing that matters is whether what you do benefits your neighbors. If your work helps them solve problems, they will pay you for that benefit. The bigger the problem solved, the bigger the payday, because solutions to big problems are more beneficial, more economically valuable, than solutions to small problems. It is also true that solving a small problem for many people can be more economically valuable than solving a big problem for a few people. The value of your problem-solving skill all depends on how much dominion your solution can offer.
Gainful Labor
“In all labor, there is profit.” (Pr. 14:23) Thus, if your work is not culminating in gain, then you must evaluate why it is not gainful. Is the problem with you or with factors outside your control? If it is with you, govern yourself better. Take dominion over your laziness and inefficiencies by the Spirit’s fruit of self-control. If the problem is outside of your control, involve someone with a skillset that can turn the problem back into an opportunity for you to produce value from that work, or else find work that someone with your skillset can better convert into value. You must always be working in a field where someone like you can steadily take dominion, which stacks up to daily gains.
Worthwhile Work
Since the fall, you work by the sweat of your brow for daily bread because the earth no longer easily yields up its fruit. In general, you gather value slowly by labor (lit. “on the hand,” Pr. 13:11), steadily increasing what you have after a while. So providers know you rarely blitz into windfall gains. Rather, you extract value from the marketplace by offering a refined work product made through patient time in your toil. Valuable work is worthwhile work, which means a provider should expect to accumulate value only after taking time on task.
A day’s work should at least be worth the time you put into it, otherwise, it is not worth your while. Also, factor into the requisite worth of your day’s work as a provider that the Lord commands you to take a full day rest before each six days’ work. Such rest cannot be enjoyed in a subsistence household. Thus, a provider must prioritize work that produces enough extra value for himself and others to comfortably keep the fourth commandment’s ratio of rest and work. As a minimum standard, you are commanded to fetch seven days’ value from six days of work. Looking ahead to lean times, you do even better when you can produce seven days’ value in only five days of work, the provident scale of hedging that Joseph recommended to Pharaoh.
Conclusion
An economy sometimes measures dominion in dollars, yen, euros, or pesos. Other times, it denotes value in precious metals, bartered services, skins, or livestock. Throughout economic history, the unit of exchange has not mattered. Economic transactions ultimately exchange one unit of dominion for another.
With this in mind, you, as a Christian provider, cannot merely work for a living. You must take dominion for a living.
Phil Bozarth pastors Christ Church Pace of Pace, Florida. His wife, Rachel, homeschools their five sons, who all team together to raise chickens, ducks, rabbits, and a dog. Phil enjoys grazing in books, beginning home improvement projects, waking for sun rise, visiting the beach with family and friends, and participating with his sons in a Christian outdoorsman program.
