One of the most frequently asked questions I receive about mantles is: can you inherit more than one?
And my response is: why would you want to? The unfinished assignment that any particular mantle carries is so titanically weighty that it’s more than enough for one lifetime. It would be almost irresponsible to try to fulfil the legacy of two mantles.
Having said that, however, there is an exception to this—and that’s Adam’s mantle. Everyone, I believe, is granted an inheritance in Adam’s mantle. Everyone is called to carry forward the divine mandate of ‘shomer’, the keeper, the guardian, the steward, the custodian, the caretaker, the watchman, the sentinel, the defender, the upholder, the protector.
Adam’s birthright was to protect the garden, the earth, its creatures and his wife. Moreover, he was called to safeguard a treasure God had bestowed on him: the gift of naming. The very word of appointment, ‘shomer’, the keeper, steward and protector, indicates Adam’s role in watching over and guarding names. Its first syllable, ‘shom’, is from ‘shem’, the name.
Now God had repeatedly used His own name in the act of creation and He passed on to Adam the essence of that creative act. While God reserved to Himself the right to give life, He granted to the man the right to speak out the course of that life. Through the privilege of naming, Adam was accorded the power to declare destiny, to ignite identity, to summon calling and to speak out vocation—to prophesy both purpose and meaning. All those elements are wrapped up in the power fuse of a name.
But this, it would seem, was the flashpoint that sparked the envy of the adversary, the satan. We learn from Ezekiel 28:16 NIV that the satan was cast out of Eden, when God speaks and reveals:
Through your widespread trade you were filled with violence, and you sinned. So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones.
The base of the word used for trade in this verse is slander, gossip, smear reputations, trade in names. And of course this makes sense: what use was money or property in Eden? But a power that enabled the wielder to determine the course of another creature’s existence—that was a reason for formidable jealousy.
When Adam fell, giving dominion of the earth into the hands of the enemy, he also lost his rights over naming. That came into the hands of the satan who was able to extend his trade in this most powerful of commodities. Many human societies recognised the effect of a name on destiny and so wanted to alter what their parents had called them. Some people went to God and were given a new name, but all too often that took decades. So others went to the enemy and arranged a trade. All too often that insidious bargain affects future generations, not just the negotiator.
Protection is lost.
Up until fairly recently in western society, it could be assumed that police protected according to the law, government protected according to the law, judges and courts protected according to the law, journalists protected according to the law, church institutions protected according to both divine and human law. Of course, there was rampant corruption from time to time but the law—imperfect as it was and is—was there to weed out vice when it was discovered.
But now the law is irrelevant. It’s only invoked when convenient to those in power, not as routine.
Protection is gone. We have police so afraid of being called racist that they have (I would like to say ‘had’ but I don’t believe it’s past tense) a policy of handing children back to rapists and torturers. We have governments so afraid of offending select minorities that they trample over the rights of the majority. We have courts passing down judgment, not on the basis of law, but on how the judges would like the law to be. We have churches still wounding victims while platforming perpetrators.
So, then, have we all become Cain who asked, ‘Am I my brother’s “shomer”?’ (Genesis 4:9) Or have we become even worse? Have we abandoned our humanity in tossing aside the mandate of Adam as the ‘shomer’?
The failure of Adam as a ‘shomer’ began with his silence. He was with Eve but he didn’t correct her mistaken statement about God’s instructions, nor did he challenge any of the suspicious remarks of the serpent. One of the Hebrew words for silence is ‘dumah’, a play on the word Edom or Adam. Edom, red, was Esau’s nickname.
Here we see the purpose of Esau’s mantle entwining with that of Adam: reconciliation and protection. We see both these qualities in Jesus, the Last Adam—reconciliation through the power of the Cross and protection through that of the Blood.
But there’s more still with Jesus. It’s important to note that, while we are all called to be protectors and, with the help of the Holy Spirit, carry forward the assignment of Adam, we are not called to be saviours. That role is unique to Jesus.
We are never called to usurp His office. Each of us is called to be a ‘shomer’, to protect and bless.
This is Grace Drops and I’m Anne Hamilton. May Jesus of Nazareth be your saviour and protector.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.
John’s gospel is an epic poem in the mirror-reflective style of Hebrew prophetic poetry. Many commentators have noticed this and shown how the matching pairs line up. However, they haven’t looked beyond the loveliness of the design to the clues offered by the clues embedded in the symmetry. John reveals the inheritance given to specific disciples—the mantles of the patriarchs, prophets and kings that were handed on by Jesus as specific legacies: Elijah’s, Joseph’s, Reuben’s, Jacob’s, David’s, Esau’s… and more! The Elijah Tapestry, The Summoning of Time, The Lustral Waters, The Inviolable Kingdom and Bathing in Bronze (coming late 2026) work verse by verse from the front, matching to various verses from the back to unveil the not-so-hidden secrets of the mantles.