From that moment onward, stewardship-dominion-has to account for the fact of ongoing human rebellion. I presume it is not a spoiler to observe that humanity did, in fact, rebel. One of those costs is risk, including the risk that human beings might choose not to love God.

Love, however, must be freely given or it is not, in fact, love. God made mankind in order that He might love mankind and that mankind might love him. Immediately following the mandate to exercise stewardship is the human refusal to do so. That, of course, is merely part one of the Edenic plotline.

Human authority is a vehicle for the proper exercise of stewardship. Instead, human authority is always marked by responsibility and a participant in Divine Law. Human beings were never meant to simply lord over creation and to bend it arbitrarily toward their will. Some of it, however, is quite plain and can be found in the clause that immediately follows: “Let us make mankind in our image and let him have dominion over all the earth.” Dominion is not domination. God says to Himself, “Let us make mankind in our image.” Precisely what this means is multi-faceted and complex. We see this at the very beginning, in the cradle garden. The previous essay on proper authority took its bearings from the fact that human beings, as human beings, have a divinely appointed responsibility to care about order and justice.

We All Fall Down by Eric Walters