Why the Mona Lisa is going to Heaven

God’s Cultural Mandate

by Greg Johnson

God’s Instructions: Build Civilization

We focus a lot of attention of the Great Commission to “make disciples of every nation”—and rightly so. What few realize, though, is that there are two great commissions in the Bible. The more familiar one is in Matthew 28. But Jesus’ Great Commission is but an addendum to an earlier set of directions, one given not to the church, but to all humanity. In the beginning, God gave mankind its marching orders. He spoke to our first parents and told them what he wanted them to do:

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” (Gen 1:28)

It’s easy to miss to force of God’s words. Every good appliance comes with instructions. These are God’s instructions for humanity, the Father’s vision of life for us. It’s a call to establish human culture upon the earth. We were created to rule the earth, to make our mark upon the land. The picture isn’t merely one of man being placed in the garden, but of man changing and completing the garden. We were created to create, designed to design. This is the first great commission. This is the foundation for human civilization. This is the Cultural Mandate.

Civilization = Dominion + Creativity + Nature

Western society has become so specialized that we miss out on the simple fact that dominion and culture go hand in hand. We think of nature romantically as untouched forest. But right now as I’m typing, I’m sitting on forest. I’m sitting on one of those old-fashioned wooden teacher’s chairs with castors on the bottom. Such chairs ultimately come not from a factory in Malaysia, but from the forest.

Three things are necessary for me to have my old-fashioned teacher’s chair: trees, human creativity, and human dominion. Man subdues the earth to get the wood, and then impresses upon the tree his creative power as an image of God, yielding a chair that looks gorgeous, even if it feels like cement. The chair is forest too—forest under dominion.

God’s marching orders for humanity? Make chairs, construct houses, build cities, plant orchards, damn up rivers, harness electricity, turn the silicon on the beach into microchips, turn roots from the field into potato chips.

Human society isn’t something neutral that God ‘regulates’ in the sense that God regulated slavery and divorce in the Old Testament. No. God doesn’t simply regulate human culture; he establishes it. He is the trunk from which the various branches of civilization grow and spread outward.

Made to be Worldly

To miss out on the Cultural Mandate is to miss the reason God created us. No Christian should feel guilty for engaging in ‘secular’ matters if that’s what God’s designed him for! God called Adam to work the garden before sin had even entered the world (Gen 2:15). Even Jesus spent thirty years as a carpenter (Mark 6:3).

The doctrine of creation is the great neglected doctrine of Christianity. Just think of all the passages in the Bible that never show up in Bible studies. “Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart, for it is now that God favors what you do” (Eccles 9:7). I’d like to put that one on a plaque in my office. Are such worldly pursuits as farming, architecture, and cooking a waste of time? No. “A man can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in his work” (Eccles 2:24).

The Mona Lisa is going to Heaven

At the end of this age, when sin will be done away with and the nations walk by the light of God’s Lamb Jesus, the best of human culture will stand. Of God’s city, we are told, “The kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it” (Rev 21:24). From what I know about Louis XIV, I doubt he’ll be there. But I have to think some Christians in his court might present Louis’ palace and gardens at Versailles (his splendor) as an offering to God at the end of history.

God is not going to destroy his creation, but free it. “The creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay” (Rom 8:21). God made it good, and he’s going to fix it.

In actual fact, there’ll be quite a city in the age to come. Picture the Arc de Triumph, the Mona Lisa, Shakespeare’s sonnets, the ’57 Chevy, the Taj Mahal, Thai food—all the glories of human civilization, only purged of their sinful histories, imperfections, mixed motives, and negative byproducts. The Bible says that all of them will come into God’s eternal city as offerings to the LORD who is the fountain of all goodness, truth and beauty.

“The glory and honor of the nations will be brought into it” (Rev 21:26). A nation’s glories are its greatest accomplishments. Such glories will survive forever as monuments to the God who made man in his image. When all is said and done, the plan God gave in the beginning will have been a success. The Cultural Mandate, despite humanity’s sin and rebellion, will be brought to fulfillment. We’ll have dominion, society will flourish, and God will receive all the glory for it.