Be fruitful and multiply, but why?

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

Gen 1:28 ESV

I was curious to learn its meaning, Gen 1:28 is called the creation mandate, mandate to me sounded like a law - we must be fruitful otherwise we aren't fulfilling what we are meant to be. I often heard Gen 1:28 in talks about how to use resources to make yourself fruitful. That really didn't sit well with me; it made me anxious that I wasn't doing what was required of me because I didn’t see myself as fruitful.

To deconstruct the verse for me I split Gen 1:28 into three parts. The first part I focused on was ‘God blessed them'. I believe blessings are words spoken to invoke the divine within us or a gift you haven't worked for. The blessing was the first to be given to humanity; it emphasises how natural being fruitful should be to us.

Secondly, to be fruitful basically means to produce fruit, very simple. Your fruit can mean many things for example the energy you give out, your friendships, or anything that comes from inside you. Being fruitful and multiplying is a concept seen throughout nature from our cells that divide and multiply to ideas that spread around the world, we multiply naturally. In my opinion, anything that can multiply has power/energy whether good or bad.

The third part of Gen 1:28 is to subdue the earth. Often, I feel people confuse subduing with overpowering. Subdue is defined as, to overcome, to calm down, it's a way where you can control something while not harming it. Let's say for example I wanted to subdue a snake. To do this I would need to distract the snake and grab hold of its neck to tame it subduing must not turn into abuse.

We are given control over the earth however, the power blessed upon us must function together with us. I believe we, as humans, are fruitful and multiply naturally through a blessing upon our lives. When we abuse this power by forcefully making the Earth work for us, we turn the power corrupt. An example of this is climate change, where we have abused our power which has led to nature working against us. I hope that my painting serves people as a reminder of the blessing upon our lives and how natural it comes to us. Through our service to one another, fruitfulness comes full circle, so we don’t have to be fruitful; we are fruitful.