Okay, notice the first thing it says. It says let Us make man in Our Own image and likeness, or make man like Us. Now if we are made in the image of God and God is creative, we must be creative as well. You have a creative ability. The ability to - because you're made in the image of God, you have the ability to bring into this world things which haven't yet been seen, because you're made to represent God in the earth. When God made us He made us as His representatives in the earth. In Psalm 8 He says you have made him to have dominion over all the works of your hands, so you are made to have dominion. You're made to make your presence in this world be significant and be felt, significant and felt. In other words God has designed you first to represent Him, then secondly to advance His interests in the earth and because God is creative and we're called to represent Him, we have a creative ability. We have an ability to innovate.
Notice what the mandate was that God gave. He said there, He said in verse 28, God blessed them. Now that means God spoke creative words over them, or God gave a mandate. So when God blesses He not only says words; He says words and imparts life and power with those words. The words I speak are spirit and life Jesus said, so when God speaks over man God blessed them, that means He spoke prophetically and in a way that would impart destiny into man. This is what He said to Him: Let man be fruitful. In other words He's got the man and the woman in front of them and He's saying something like this, speaking be fruitful! Multiply! Fill the earth! Subdue! Have dominion! Now you see that's how He spoke. He's speaking words that are to empower man to do something, and you notice He said be fruitful and multiply. So we have two realms where creativity operates. We have two realms where our creativity operates; number one is sexually. Be fruitful and multiply, so man is created a sexual being. We can create an eternal being, eternal - we can work in partnership with God and an eternal being comes into existence. What an amazing thing.
Your sexuality gives you power to create a person who can be connected to God and live and represent God for eternity. Our ability to be sexual, to be intimate, to have sexual relationships and to enter into covenant relationship and bring forth children is a great gift of God, a creative gift of God. That's why it says the fruit of the womb is the Lord's reward. He gave us the gift of being able to create sexually through an intimate covenantal relationship, and then He gets the reward. He gets a family increasing in the earth, so God puts His - His part is to put His spirit, put the spirit into man, see? The spirit of man comes from God. You don't create a spirit, but you create the being within which God puts the spirit. So we work in partnership with God in creating a life. Number one, the way that we can create or be creative is sexually by having children. It's a wonderful thing, a wonderful thing to be able to do that - but we're not limited there.
Not everyone's call in life is to be married, so we're definitely not limited to that area of expression of creativity. The second area that God has given us the capacity to be creative is our imagination. Notice what God said: Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. That's clearly speaking there about man recreating, producing children in the world, filling the whole earth. But then the second thing He says, subdue it and have dominion over it. Now to subdue something means you have to apply force or you have to bring pressure around it to shape it or bring it to what God wants it to be. Implied in the word subdue is there's something out there that isn't right, the way God wants it, and we're called to work with Him to subdue it. Now you just think about life around you, there's heaps of things all around you that aren't right. You and I are called to partner with God to make it right, and to do that we have to be creative. You have to be creative because you're going to face challenges in your life, you don't know what to do. You need to come up with something new, come up with an idea, come up with a way.