Did He Say Octuplets...Or What?

Did He Say Octuplets...or What?

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:28

Be fruitful= to bear, bring forth, beget [In modern times we understand nine months to be our pattern of carrying or bearing young.]

Replenish= contextually: populating sea and earth

Subdue= contextually: dominate, the earth

Dominion= contextually: to have dominion, rule, dominate (Dominate: lord, master) [We could think of them as stewards of this household.]

Populating the then no-ocean earth would mean their task was to keep multiplying, keep bearing octuplet kinds of belly-fruit until the earth was full of people living and settled around the globe. If we think today’s population is about 7 billion—with water everywhere—what would be a fair estimate of the extent of population, i.e. a good number to stop the populating process, and thus complete the command to replenish. We’re thinking about 67% [minus that percentage of the sea that existed for the whales, etc.] more land, trees, rivers, etc., than heretofore known by humans today. So we could imagine maybe 21 billion humans could easily populate that extent of real estate.

And with their purity of love, righteousness, light and good nature of God filling the land, think of the joy and the family love, gatherings and grandchildren occasions; not to mention how they would communicate over those distances.

The moving creatures were to be dominated, mastered, Lorded over (in love, righteousness, and with light and the good nature which they had gotten from God their Father.)

The Earth, land, dirt, rocks, etc. were also put under their stewardship, but as these were largely inanimate, the word subdue is used. Again, in this command, dominion is the word used in connection with the moving category of the fully sentient creatures, and subdue for the inanimate category which were not sentient and absent to some degree of response to love and righteousness and other intellectual expressions of God.

As in our normal course of civilization, we dig into the earth, push, and deposit garbage into it. Those kinds of things we would never do to a moving creature which responds to us as a pet. We would never dig into their flesh and deposit waste, for example.

Man was created with the purity of Love, Righteousness, Light and Life after God’s own nature. Their rule at the time was a pure, loving, fair judgment, and equal shining of light and life to all in their domain. So, in the grand restoration of the Eden by God, we should see this condition established again, and come to know what it was like for Adam and Eve in their time.