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

After the fall of man and after the flood that wiped the earth clean, God comes to Noah and says something that sounds incredibly familiar. "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." On the surface, Genesis 9 looks just like Genesis 1 all over again. God blesses, God says be fruitful, God says multiply, God says fill the earth.

But something is missing.

In Genesis 1, God told Adam to "subdue" the earth and "have dominion" over every living thing. In Genesis 9, there is no call to subdue or command to exercise dominion. Instead God says, "The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth," and that the animals are "delivered into your hand" (Genesis 9:2).

So what we see is the relationship between humanity and creation shifted from stewardship to survival. In the garden, there was harmonious rule and man was given a garden to tend, a creation to oversee, and a purpose that extended God's own authority into the physical world. After the flood, that harmony was replaced with fear and dread. Animals were no longer entrusted to humanity's care, instead they were delivered like provisions.

So the multiplication engine was still running, but it was running without its proper purpose.
And multiplication without dominion produces expansion without transformation.

Now watch this, because this is something we see all across the church landscape today. We multiply attendance, we multiply programs, we multiply buildings and budgets, but where is the transformation? Where is the authority over sin? Where is the dominion over darkness in our cities and communities? We have been living under a Genesis 9 framework and calling it success... just trading surviving for subduing. And here's what makes that so dangerous.

When all we measure is expansion, we stop asking whether anything is actually changing.

If all we ever do is multiply without purpose, we are just expanding and never transforming. Just like Noah's descendants who multiplied across the earth but eventually gathered at Babel to build a tower for the glory of their own name (see Genesis 11:4), multiplication without purpose always drifts toward self promotion rather than Kingdom advancement.

So the question is not just whether we are multiplying. The question is whether we are multiplying with purpose, multiplying with dominion, or just getting bigger while everything around us stays broken. I mean, are we consumers of the gospel or carriers of it?

This is the tension of Genesis 9. God still blessed and He still commanded fruitfulness, but the fullness of the original design was fractured, and humanity was left to multiply in a world where the authority to subdue had been lost to sin. The command to multiply never went away, but the power to transform through it was gone. Expansion continued, but transformation stalled.

And that fracture lingered for thousands of years... until Someone came to reclaim what had been lost.

Tomorrow we will see how Jesus didn't just issue a new command. He restored the original one, and He handed it to us.

Take an honest look at one area of your spiritual life where you may be operating in a Genesis 9 framework... expanding but not transforming. Ask God to reveal where purpose and dominion have been missing, and invite Him to restore what was lost.