why we don't build restaurants on the rim of the Grand Canyon

Not long ago, I traveled with a friend of mine to the Grand Canyon in Arizona, the first time for me to see this natural wonder.

As we walked the edge of the canyon at night, we could see the canopy of stars, not obscured by neon signs and strings of electric streetlights. Is this because there is no market for commercial real estate there at the lip of the canyon?

Of course not.

Instead, it is because the area has been protected as a natural park, zoned to maintain the integrity as a wild place.

This is dominion.

A cultivation of space according to its purpose and protection. In another place, a restaurant cooking food and feeding a neighborhood would be an example of dominion. In another, tending goats or the construction of a medical clinic or the building of a dam might be an aspect of dominion.

Starving to death because you can’t cultivate land to provide food for yourself and your community is not dominion, but neither is over fishing a stream so that your grandchildren can’t feed from it, or paving over the land the next generation could use for growing grain, or wiping out the entire population of honeybees so the future generation don’t see the glory of God in their flight, in the taste of the honey...

These are extreme examples. But this principle is seen in the way that God establishes human accountability not just for nature, but also for time.

Humanity is to be active in labor for six days of the week. But a limitless activity isn’t dominion at all; it is slavery. God establishes that we follow his model not only in activity but also in inactivity, in Sabbath rest.

In the cultivation of land and animals, likewise, we are to take into account the best interests not only of ourselves but also of nature and of the generations to come. We then, give the land Sabbath rest. We do not mistreat animals. This is husbandry, not tyranny, and it isn’t a contradiction of kingship but an explanation of it.

From the very beginning, lordship is defined not “like that of the Gentiles,” but in ways that will ultimately manifest themselves in a basin and towel.

Humans are designed to thrive as they express creativity and dominion, in the image of their Heavenly Father. That will look differently from person to person, but it does not change the fact that every human was designed to create and to steward.

- Russell Moore