“And God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.’”
When God creates the inanimate objects, He simply speaks a command and matter responds to His wishes. God speaks ‘impersonally’. When He speaks to man ‘in the image of God’, He says ‘to them,’ addressing fellow subjects, spiritual beings with the gift of understanding. The fruitfulness of human existence is not completely ‘natural’ in the sense of impersonal forces obeying laws inscribed in their very essence. Human beings have the choice of listening, obeying and cooperating with God’s blessing and creativity, or of disregarding the commandment. From the moment of creation, human beings have been given autonomy, the freedom of taking responsibility for their own responses or failure to respond to God’s offer of friendship.