CONFLICT & AGRICULTURE

 

Conflict & Agriculture

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Robert Burns wrote To A Mouse, On Turning up Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785. In the second stanza we read, I’m truly sorry man’s dominion/ Has broken Nature’s social union,/ And justifies that ill opinion/ Which makes thee startle/ At me, thy poor earth-born companion,/ An’ fellow-mortal! Burns here is alluding to the fall of man. ‘Man’s dominion’ is in reference to the Dominion Mandate God gave to Adam, as mankind’s covenant head, pre-fall (Gen. 1:26-28). As God representative, mankind was to have dominion over everything God has made. However, something went wrong. Thus, Burns’s poem.

Conflict began on Earth when Adam, as humanity’s federal representative, broke the covenant God had graciously entered into with him (Hos. 6:7; Isa. 24:5). We still have dominion, but creation tends to work against us (Rom. 8:20-22). When Adam ate the forbidden fruit, he did more than disobey that test command. He went against God’s law, (i.e., the Decalogue God had written on humanity’s heart, Rom. 2:14-15). For ‘Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness’ (1 John 3:4). This is why Jesus perfectly kept God’s law as the new Adam and covenant head of all who believe, and died to pay for their sins of breaking God’s law, to save them from God’s everlasting punishment. Therefore, any conflict we experience is on account of breaking God’s law.

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The Dominion Mandate is also called the Cultural Mandate. Adam (with Eve and all their posterity) were commissioned by God to cultivate the earth, beginning in the Garden. Adam was ‘to cultivate it and to keep it’ (Gen. 2:15, LEB). Thus, the whole world was to become an extension of the Garden. Alas! ‘Nature’s social union’ became broken. Burns, (along with the rest of us) became a mouse’s ‘fellow-mortal’. In other words, ‘The wages of sin is death’ (Rom. 6:23). ‘Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’: “Cursed is the ground for your sake; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you, and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Gen. 3:17-19). We may think our sins are not serious, but God begs to differ!

It's not hard to see what the Cultural Mandate has to do with Aussie-culture or agri-culture etc. It has to do with how we humans cultivate God’s creation. If we remember that sinning is the breaking of God’s law, as Christians, we ought to be searching the Scriptures to see what God has revealed about cultivating our lives as individuals, as families, churches, states, indeed, as nations. A farmer asked me how to serve God with crop planting, harvesting, raising cattle, i.e., all that farm stuff. What about shipbuilding? City planning? Food and drink? Clothing, economics, banking, architecture, art, teaching and learning, medicine, mining, weather, crime, punishment, raising children, etc., etc., – it’s all in the Bible.

Our first great need is salvation, then, to be equipped. ‘The Holy Scriptures … are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work’ (2 Tim. 3:15b-16).