Pride Month and The Cultural Mandate, Part 2

In the previous post, (ie don’t read part 2 until you’ve read part 1),

I introduced 5 things:

1. A tweet rebuking Christians for trying to “out-month” the culture.

2. A working definition of culture

3. An Introduction to the biblical cultural mandate

4. D. A. Caron’s observation about the spectrum of responses that Christians have to culture

5. Bavinck’s assertion about the effects of the Gospel on society, through Christians.

For the sake of ease, here again is the tweet being critiqued:

Lets now take a moment and consider the opening sentence of the tweet:

As Christians, our responsibility is not to try to “out-month’ the culture.

I would agree that we have responsibilities, as Christians. And he has done well to use careful language by speaking of our duties as “Christians” and not as the Church, as these are often conflated. Remember, Churches are called to do things that you and I as individual Christians are not called to do, and you and I are called to do things that the Church as a body is not called to do.

The ultimate reality, however, is that it is our duty to be engaged in producing, directing, and reforming culture. That is literally what we “do,” like it or not. There is no way to avoid it. We are, by definition, both shaped by, and shaping culture. And we already belong to several cultures.

Let’s return to Scripture for a moment.

As mentioned in the last post, God’s instruction for all mankind is to full the earth. Thats exactly what man does. By Genesis 6, we are told, “the earth was filled with violence.” So God floods the earth and starts over. Then in Genesis 9, God re-states the cultural mandate to Noah and his sons,

“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth.”

Once again, man is to fill the earth with culture. But what does that look like?

Genesis 4 answers that question. There, we see the initial development of human culture, albeit under Cain’s line.

“Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain, and she said,

‘I have gotten a man with the help of Yahweh.’ And again, she gave birth to his brother Abel. Abel was a keeper of flocks, but Cain was a cultivator of the ground,” (Genesis 4:2).

Here we start to see specializations of interest and employment. Every parent has observed how each of their children has their own God-given interests, skill and inclinations.

Here Abel focuses on zoology, and Cain focuses on horticulture or agriculture.

Then, “Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and gave birth to Enoch; and he built a city and called the name of the city Enoch, after the name of his son” (Genesis 4:17).

There is some disagreement as to which man the pronouns are pointing back to, but nevertheless Enoch and Cain are involved in city building.

We have the men engaging in the observational sciences, discovering what God has made, and discovering the laws that govern what God has made, and then learning how to manipulate and use what God has made (we call this technology).

This is the move towards urbanization. The would include planning and design, the utilization and allocation of resources, etc. This again is human culture.

Within a few more generations we read,

“And Lamech took for himself two wives: the name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other, Zillah.

And Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and have livestock. 

And his brother’s name was Jubal; he was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe.”

• Genesis 4:19-21.

Here culture has really taken off. Jabal’s vocation has become increasingly specialized, like a rancher. Living in tents will come with its own processes of making tents, maintaining tents, the cooking, the sanitary issues, etc. Livestock will need to be cared for and fed. Anyone that has done any farming or ranching has some insight into how advanced man has to be at this time to employ such specialization in a meaningful way.

Jubal appears to be very different. He specializes in discovering and applying harmonics, inventing the lyre, a stringed instrument, and the utilization of the wind and harmonics for the wind-instruments. Simply, Jubal is filling the earth with music.

Then we read, “As for Zillah, she also gave birth to Tubal-cain, the forger of all implements of bronze and iron; and the sister of Tubal-cain was Naamah” (Genesis 4:22).

Tubal-cain goes a different route than his two half-brothers. Jabal is a rancher, Jubal is a musician, and Tubal-cain is a blacksmith. He specializes in metallurgy. He takes the natural resources in the earth, studies them, and them manipulates them and forges them into tools. The word translated as “forger” has the idea of a “sharpener.” He is likely making weapons…

After telling us about what Lamech’s children has accomplished, Moses goes back to talking about Lamech:

“And Lamech said to his wives,

‘Adah and Zillah,

Hear my voice,

You wives of Lamech,

Give ear to my word,

For I have killed a man for striking me;

And a boy for wounding me;

If Cain is avenged sevenfold,

Then Lamech seventy‑sevenfold.’”

Note how Lamech’s words are put into poetic structure. That is because it is poetry. It has meter. Many Old Testament commentators speculate that we are told about Lamech’s poem, after being told about his sons’ vocations, because it appears that from the poem Lamech writes, he is using the cultural tools that his sons invent.

Lamech is a murderer. He writes a poem about it, and then sings it for his wives.

Was it accompanied by one of his son’s musical instruments?

Did he use one of his son’s implements of bronze or iron as a murder weapon?

Quite possibly…

What Moses narrates for us is how mankind naturally carries out the cultural mandate. We are programmed to do this very thing. Children begin building (and destroying) before they can even walk.

Mankind is always, everywhere, creating culture. Mankind is not only creating culture, he is being confirmed by his culture, and then informing that culture, which then continues to conform him. Each individual joins together in forming, and being formed by culture.

So, what is the responsibility of Christians, as it relates to culture? It is surely not to assume that culture exists outside of us. Nor is it our responsibility to pretend that we are not formed by it, or that we do not help share and form it. It is not to walk away, and watch the God-haters have absolute free reign on our Fathers’s creation. No, we are commanded, just like them, to “fill the earth.” We can expect them to fill the earth with violences, and lo and behold.

But what does God expect us to fill the earth with?

We’ll return to the question in the next post, which you can read HERE

You can catch my entire 40-part sermon series on God and Government on the following playlist: