From Demolition to Construction
It’s Saturday morning. You’re out the back, in the shed, working on a half-finished job you’ve been meaning to get to for a month. You’ve got the 18V Makita gear working, and you’ve already used up one battery. And for a few hours, nobody’s watching.
Now here’s a strange thought to have with a splinter in your finger.
For five weeks, I’ve been knocking things down. Van Drunen’s common kingdom. His natural law. His exile. Torn down and ready for the dump.
Demolition feels good for a while. But you can’t live in a demolished building.
So today the wrecking ball goes back to the tool hire shop. We break out the mixer and pick up the trowel. Today we build.
And here’s where we start. Somewhere along the line, you picked up an idea. That the work in your hands right now doesn’t really count. The garden. The shed. The job. The business. The career.
It’s fine. It’s allowed. It keeps you off the welfare rolls. But it’s not kingdom work. It’s just life. It’s just a lot of stuff. It’s just passing the time until the real thing starts in heaven.
And Van Drunen has a sophisticated argument for exactly that feeling. It’s his cleverest move. He says Adam was given a cultural commission. A dominion mandate. Be fruitful, fill, subdue. And Adam failed. And Christ, the last Adam, fulfilled it perfectly.
So, he says, the job is done. Finished. Completed in Christ. You are not a little Adam. Your work doesn’t build anything eternal. It doesn’t extend anything. It doesn’t usher in anything.
And if that’s true, then the drill in your hand is just a drill. But if it’s wrong, then the most ordinary work you do this morning is an act of dominion stretching back to the first words God ever spoke over a man.
My name is Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk. And this is Exiles No More.
What This Foundation Gives You
Here’s what we lay out. First, the last great Van Drunen argument. The Two Adams. Why he says Christ finished the job and left you nothing to do, stated fairly, in his own framing.
Second, the verse that breaks it. Hebrews chapter two. Written years after the resurrection. Where the writer looks at the dominion mandate and says, out loud, “we do not yet see all things put under him.” Not finished. Not yet.
Third, Genesis one, twenty-six to twenty-eight. The foundation. Where you’ll see that the image of God and the dominion of God are not two things. They’re one thing.
Fourth, the proof it was never cancelled. We’ll trace the mandate from Adam, through Cain’s own children, through Noah, all the way past the Cross. It survives everything. Because it’s not a job God gave you. It’s what a human being is.
And you’ll understand the one Hebrew word that tells you what you are. Adamah. To become.
Van Drunen’s Two-Adams Argument
Let me put it the way Van Drunen would put it, because this is genuinely his best argument.
He starts with Adam. Adam was given a job. The dominion mandate. Genesis one. Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, have dominion. And there was a test attached. Obey the rules, have dominion, don’t touch the fruit, and you’d be blessed forever.
Adam failed. He took the fruit. He abandoned his dominion task for godhood. He forfeited the prize.
Now enter Christ. First Corinthians fifteen, verse forty-five. “The last Adam.” The last Adam. Not the next Adam. The last one.
Christ does what the first Adam failed to do. He passes the test. He lives the perfect life. He earns the world to come. And He’s already entered it. Through the resurrection and the ascension, He’s already there.
So here’s Van Drunen’s conclusion. And listen carefully, because it’s tight. If Christ is the last Adam, and He’s finished Adam’s task, then there is no more Adamic commission left over for you to pick up. The cultural mandate was Adam’s test. Christ passed it. The test is over.
You’re not a little Adam resuming the project. The project’s done. So your work isn’t building the kingdom. It’s just to write a thank-you note for a kingdom that’s already been won.
In his own words: “Christians are not little Adams. Our cultural activities do not in any sense usher in the new creation.”
Now feel the weight of that. That is a real argument from a real theologian, and it’s aimed straight at everything this series is building toward. If he’s right, then dominion theology is a category error. You’re trying to re-run a race that’s already been won.
So we can’t just wave it away. We have to answer it. And the answer is sitting in a single chapter of the New Testament, written years after the ascension Van Drunen is leaning on.
Van Drunen says the dominion mandate is finished in Christ. There’s a man who wrote a whole letter after the resurrection. And he looked at the dominion mandate. And he said: “not yet.”
Let’s go and read him.
Hebrews 2 Says “Not Yet”
Open your Bible. Hebrews chapter two. Verses five to eight.
The writer is quoting Psalm eight. The great psalm of man’s dominion. “What is man that You are mindful of him?” And he quotes the dominion line. “You have put all things in subjection under his feet.”
Now read the very next sentence. Verse eight. “For in that He put all in subjection under him, He left nothing that is not put under him. But now we do not yet see all things put under him.”
Read that last clause again. “But now we do not yet see all things put under him.”
Not yet. Written after the Cross. After the empty tomb. After the ascension. After Christ sat down at the right hand of God. And the inspired writer says: we do not yet see it all under His feet.
Now think about what that does to Van Drunen’s argument. Van Drunen needs the dominion mandate to be complete in Christ. Finished. Over. Nothing left to do. But the writer of Hebrews, standing on the other side of the resurrection, says the subjection of all things is real, it’s begun, it’s guaranteed. And it is not yet finished. It is in progress.
So if it’s not yet finished, who’s finishing it? Does Christ rule from heaven with His arms folded? Or does the Head work through the body? Does the King who has all authority sit on a throne over an empty field? Or does He send labourers into it?
What Christ Earned and What Christ Applies
Here’s the mistake Van Drunen makes. He confuses two different things that Christ accomplished. There’s what Christ earned. And there’s what Christ applies.
Christ earned the whole thing. Outright. By His perfect life and His death and His rising. That part is finished and you can’t add a thing to it. Hallelujah, you don’t need to.
But what He earned, He now applies. In history. Through His people. By His Spirit.
You don’t earn the kingdom. That’s done. You extend it. That’s ongoing.
And here’s the proof that you’re built into the applying. Romans eight, verse twenty-nine. You were predestined “to be conformed to the image of His Son.” Second Corinthians three, eighteen. You are “being transformed into the same image from glory to glory.”
You are being made like the last Adam. So if the last Adam is the true dominion man, the true image-bearer who takes the ground for God, then being conformed to Him is not the cancelling of your dominion calling. It is the restoration of it.
This is Joe Boot’s point about the Great Commission. Matthew twenty-eight. “All authority has been given to Me. Therefore go.” Notice the word “therefore.”
The Commission is not: “I’ve done the cultural work, so you can stand down.” The Commission is: “Because I have all authority, go and extend that authority over all the nations.” It is expansive. Not contractive.
The Two-Adams argument shrinks the job. The Great Commission widens it to every nook and cranny of every part of creation.
So the answer to Van Drunen is this. Yes, you’re not a little Adam re-running a failed test for a prize. You’re something the first Adam never was. You’re a son of the last Adam, who passed the test, who holds all authority, and who has sent you out under it to take the ground in His name.
The race for the prize is won. The work of the harvest has only just begun.
Genesis 1: Image and Dominion Are One Gift
So now we go back to the beginning. To the foundation under everything. Genesis chapter one, verse twenty-six.
“Then God said, Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion.” Stop there.
Read it slowly and watch how God builds the sentence. “Let Us make man in Our image.” And in the very same breath, no full stop, no pause: “Let them have dominion.”
Image. Then dominion. In one sentence. One thought. One breath of God.
Now ask yourself. Are those two separate things? Did God make man in His image, and then, as a second item on the list, hand him a job called dominion? Or are they the same gift? Is dominion what the image of God looks like with its sleeves rolled up?
Here’s the truth that breaks the back of exile theology. You were not created first, and then given a job afterwards. You were constituted as a dominion-taker. It’s not your task. It’s written on your DNA.
To bear the image of God is to be the kind of creature that takes ground, names things, builds, orders, fills, and rules under God. Take dominion away from man, and you haven’t given him a holiday. You’ve opened his chest and ripped out the essence of what makes him a man.
The Covenant Constitution in Three Verses
And Gary North shows you the whole shape of it sitting right there in those three verses. The entire structure of a covenant.
Transcendence. God created. He is over everything. He owns the field.
Hierarchy. Man is made in His image, set as His representative, given authority under Him. You’re the foreman, not the owner.
Ethics. “Subdue it.” Not however you like. Subdue it according to God’s standard. Dominion by His law.
Sanctions. The tree in the garden. Obey and be blessed. Disobey and be cursed. Real consequences.
Succession. “Be fruitful and multiply.” This is multi-generational. You build what your grandchildren will inherit.
That’s not a vague poetic blessing. That’s a constitution.
Priestly Work in the Garden
And where do we find what the work itself is for? Genesis two, verse fifteen. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to tend and keep it.”
Tend and keep. The Hebrew is abad and shamar. And here’s the thing that should make you sit up. Those two words turn up again later in the Bible. They’re used of the priests. Serving and guarding the tabernacle.
So Adam’s cultural work, his gardening, his ordering of the world, is described in the exact language of priestly service.
Do you understand what that means for your Saturday morning? The work in your hands is not beneath the spiritual life. The work in your hands is priestly. To till the ground, to build the thing, to order a corner of creation under God, that is an act of worship.
The man in the garden was a priest. And so are you.
But you might be thinking: that was Eden. That was before the Fall. Surely the Fall cancelled all that. So let’s test it. Let’s see if the command survives the worst things that ever happened to the human race.
The Mandate Was Never Revoked
Here’s the test. If the dominion mandate is really built into what a human being is, then it should survive everything. The Fall. Murder. The Flood. The whole catalogue of human disaster. So let’s check.
The Fall happens. Genesis three. Does God repeal the mandate? No. He curses the ground, He makes the work hard, but the work is still there. Adam still tills. Eve still bears children. The commission carries on, now with sweat and pain.
Then it gets worse. Cain murders his brother. And look what the line of Cain does. Genesis four, verses seventeen to twenty-two. They build a city. They raise livestock. They forge tools out of bronze and iron. They invent music. The harp and the flute.
Culture. Technology. Art. Industry. In the line of the first murderer.
Now that tells you something enormous. The drive to build, to make, to develop the world, is so deep in humanity that it carries on even in the family under a curse. The mandate doesn’t run on whether you’re righteous. It runs on whether you’re human. The Fall corrupted the direction of the work. It bent it. It did not delete the work.
Then the worst thing of all. The Flood. The world wiped clean. Genesis nine. What’s the first thing God says to Noah on the far side of the water? “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.” Word for word from Genesis one. The mandate survives the Flood.
And the last stop. The big one. The Cross and the empty tomb. Surely now, with Christ risen, the old mandate is retired? But we just read Hebrews two. After the resurrection. “We do not yet see all things put under him.” The mandate survives the Cross too. It is not yet finished. Which means it is still running. Which means it is running through you.
Man, the Creature Made to Become
This is what Willem Ouweneel means when he calls man homo culturalis. The culture-forming creature. To be human is to work, to build, to name, to draw out the hidden possibilities God packed into creation.
A bird builds the same nest its ancestors built ten thousand years ago. A man builds a hut, then a house, then a cathedral, then a city. The Fall corrupted what we point our building at. It never touched the fact that we build.
And here’s the picture that ties it all together. Myron Golden’s point about the Hebrew. The animal is called behemah. And the meaning buried in the word is roughly, “in it is what it is.” An animal can only ever be what it already is. A cow will never be more than a cow.
But man. Man is adam. From adamah. And adamah carries the sense of “to become.” A human being is the one creature on this earth made to become. Made to grow. Made to improve. Made to take what is and make it into what could be.
The animal stays. The man becomes.
So put it all together. The image and the dominion are one gift, given in the garden. The work was priestly from the first morning. The mandate survived the Fall, the first murder, the Flood, and the Cross. And the very word for “man” means the creature who is made to become.
Where in any of that is the passive exile, sitting on his hands, waiting to be evacuated? He doesn’t exist. He was never in the text. He was fabricated out of fancy words to keep you small.
What You Do This Week
I’m not going to leave you with a foundation and no instructions on how to build on it. Four things. For this week.
Read Genesis 1 and 2 in one sitting
Open your Bible. Read both chapters out loud. Slowly. Watch for the moment in chapter one, verse twenty-six, where image and dominion arrive in the same breath. Watch for abad and shamar in chapter two, verse fifteen. Tend and keep. Priestly words.
And ask yourself one question. Does this God create a creature to sit still and wait? Or does He create a creature to take ground in His name?
You’ll see it for yourself. You were not made for the waiting room. You were made for the workshop.
Memorise Hebrews 2:8
The last clause especially. “But now we do not yet see all things put under him.” Get that “not yet” into your bones.
Because the next time someone tells you Christ finished the cultural job and left you nothing to do, you say: “Then why does Hebrews two, written after the resurrection, say we do not yet see it finished?”
Not yet means in progress. And in progress means there’s a job with your name on it.
Name one piece of ground and take it
Don’t start with the nation this week. Start with one square foot of your own life that you’ve let go to seed. Maybe it’s a skill you abandoned. Maybe it’s a corner of your home. Maybe it’s a habit, a debt, a relationship, a piece of work you’ve been avoiding because nobody made you do it.
That’s your garden. And it’s gone wild because you believed it didn’t matter. Pick one. And this week, take dominion of it. Subdue it. Order it under God.
Because a man who can’t take a square foot will never take a square mile. And the man who learns to rule a small thing well is the man God trusts with a larger one.
Sit with the next question
We’ve cleared Van Drunen’s last argument. We’ve laid the foundation. You have a commission, and it covers all of life. But that raises a problem. If the whole world is your assignment, how is the world actually organised?
Van Drunen said there were two kingdoms. One sacred, one common. And we said no. So if not two kingdoms, then what?
Because this matters enormously. If you go out and try to rule every sphere of life the same way, you’ll turn the church into a state, or the state into a church, and you’ll wind up building a tyranny. There has to be a structure. A right way to understand how Christ rules the family, and the church, and the business, and the nation, all at once, without collapsing them into one another.
So this week, open your Bible to Matthew twelve, verse twenty-eight. And read what Jesus says about the only two kingdoms that actually exist. Because the Bible does talk about two kingdoms. Just not the two Van Drunen sold you.
The Command You Were Told to Leave on the Floor
Let me leave you with this. Van Drunen says you’re not a little Adam. And he’s right. You’re something more dangerous than that. You’re a son of the last Adam, who has all authority, and who sent you out under it.
The image of God and the dominion of God are the same gift. To bear His face is to take His ground.
So the question was never whether you were handed a commission. The question is whether you’ll bend down and pick it up off the kitchen floor where they told you to leave it.
I’m Nathan Conkey, with RestoreChristianity.co.uk. This is Exiles No More. If this helped you, share it with one other man who needs to hear it.