As the cost of living skyrockets, what are young men desiring to establish themselves financially to do? Rather than shrink in fear, they should make the most of whatever tools God has put in their hands—in hopeful pursuit of the Dominion Mandate, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). 

 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Isaac Botkin, discuss exciting opportunities that exist in practical fields such as hand-on trades and manufacturing. Drawing from his personal experience with T.Rex Arms, Isaac notes that Christians who know how to bring order out of disorder and create an increase from the assets they have will be in demand—whether they own their own company or work for others. His message: Don’t lose heart as a young man trying to make it. Trust God and take dominion with hope! 

Welcome to Church and Family Life podcast. Today we've got with us Isaac Botkin. I've known him since he was really young. And this is a man who really has been a person who's taken dominion with whatever tools God put in his hands, whether they're electronic tools or physical manufacturing tools. And what we want to talk about today really is the Dominion mandate, but particularly we want to end up dovetailing down on what should young men do.

We're going to encourage young men to take dominion, to buy machines, to get involved in technology, to make improvements, and not to be afraid of the bad guys and not to be afraid of the economy, but to go for it and take dominion. Hope you enjoy the discussion. Jason, so here we are, we're going to talk about technology and taking dominion. And it's such, it's actually an incredibly thrilling idea that God has given a mandate to take dominion and you know the dominion mandate is is so explicitly hopeful it's so optimistic that God puts you in the world to take dominion, to improve everything around you, to create better solutions in every area of your life. You know, what a calling.

It's so wonderful. It comes from Genesis 1.28, 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 air and over every living thing that moves on the earth. That's pretty sweeping. That's pretty sweeping. What does that not cover?

And, frankly, what's even more wonderful about it, it's really a manifestation of the heart of God that Jesus Christ seeks to make his imprint on absolutely everything. And that just opens everything in life up to the believer. In fact, it was two atheists, Alfred North Whitehead and Robert Oppenheimer, who were philosophers and scientists of their era, Whitehead said this, that Christianity is the mother of science. And the reason Christianity is the mother of science is because of the dominion mandate and the lordship of Jesus Christ, that every square inch of creation belongs to him. So Isaac, Isaac Botkin, we've been banging around for a long time.

Isaac, you've always been playing around with technology. Ever since you were really young, and it's been a joy to watch you do that in the various ways that you've manifested really the the dominion mandate. It's in your bones, it's in your soul, you can't help yourself. It's true. It is true.

Whatever Isaac touches He seems to make it more beautiful, and it's really neat and I've just seen that On on so many fronts ever since you were in your teens. So praise the Lord. Anyway, so. I was gonna say everything I touch, I take apart to see how it works, and it doesn't necessarily end up working. Thank you.

Eventually it might, right? So let's talk about this, Isaac. We wanted to have you on the podcast because, you know, I think you get the dominion mandate, and I've just so appreciated it. So what are your thoughts? Well, they've actually changed a little bit.

So I've read about the dominion mandate, been in churches that have taught the dominion mandate for a long time, appreciated technology for a long time. But about 10 years ago, eight or nine years ago, I did less video production and less art and moved into more manufacturing. And at T-Rex Arms, I do some product design and some engineering stuff. And I've just been really encouraged by the opportunities that come from local manufacturing, when you actually make stuff. Make stuff.

So you're singing my song. You know, I love factories. I used to own a factory. I used to have an electronics factory. And there are just so many things about a factory that are glorious.

So what's glorious about a factory for you? There's a whole bunch of different aspects to it. One of them is you are creating a product that helps people. So you are, obviously your customers are purchasing something from you, so you get a benefit, but they're getting something that accomplishes a goal for them or does some work for them. Being in the service industries is great.

I don't want to demean that, but when you make a product for a person, you're giving something that helps them to accomplish a job or solve a problem. But then as you build out your factory, you're employing people. And when you're in a small county, a small town like Centerville, Tennessee, that plugs you into the community in a way that as much as I love small business and cottage industry and working from home, I actually have come to really appreciate having a bunch of people in a building working together that represent, I think, a dozen churches, many families. And then eventually, you know, We are now a pretty sizable chunk of the population of Hickman County works at 2XR. So there's that aspect to it as well.

But then as you get more people together and you can do division of labor well, you end up in a place where we are solving problems inside with manufacturing. So we're more efficient, we're making stuff out of other stuff, we can make tools that make other tools. You can just see more parts of the Dominion mandate happening all at one time, and that is really fun for me. And I think other people appreciate it too. Yeah, so tell us a little bit about T-Rex Arms.

So we started off making plastic holsters, and we still make plastic holsters. We started off real simple. We'd heat the plastic in a toaster oven. We'd squish it between two pieces of foam with a blue plastic gun inside. We'd cut it out on a bandsaw.

We'd drill it with a hand-tail drill. And then later, we upgraded to drill presses. But there have been a lot of things that have changed over the last few years. So we have computerized CNC machines drilling and cutting the holsters. Now those same machines can make vacuum forming molds.

So we vacuum form the plastic. Everything about it is faster and more precise and better. And we've grown to the point where we can make our own tooling in-house and figure out the best ways to make the best product for the customer. So as we have gotten more and more of these capabilities, it's really fascinating. And we're still pretty focused on holsters for guns, belts, plate carriers, armor plates, stuff in that space, but everybody in the shop that's involved in the manufacturing, we're learning skills.

And this is where some of the modern technology comes in. The tools that we're using, the CNC mills that we're using, the software that we're using, all that stuff is incredibly transferable skills. Those CNC machines could be used to make almost anything. Our next door neighbors on our industrial road make gigantic pieces of steel for the steel industry in Chicago. They have the exact same make of machines.

They're using the exact same software. Our guys can go over there and use their machines. Our guys can come over here and use our machines, you know, with slight differences in the materials we're working with. Our plastic that goes in the machine weighs a few ounces. They have gantry cranes that put giant chunks of steel into their machines.

But the machine programming language is the same and the skills are just so transferable across a bunch of different industries thanks to some of these new tools. That's really exciting to me too. What happened in North Carolina manufacturing in the 1990s is that by the time you got to the end of the 1990s, the big technology companies shipped all their manufacturing overseas. So North Carolina lost its manufacturing capability. I mean we had a significant manufacturing capability in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Textiles. And 90s textiles, electronics, and biomedical manufacturing. You know, all the big drug manufacturers are here. I viewed it as a tragedy that the manufacturing capability was kind of lost in North Carolina. And it happened almost everywhere.

But bringing that back, you guys are bringing it back. It's interesting, we saw kind of a similar trajectory. Jason and I worked in this factory together for the whole time. The Marr Electronics factory. And we started out with rudimentary tools and continued to buy more and more and more expensive, automated, you know, pick and place machines and stuff like that.

And it was so much fun. It was just fun to just continue to find better ways to do things, more efficient ways, and broaden out our market and relationships. It sounds like kind of a similar thing happened with you. Yeah. And it is really interesting to see.

So one of the reasons that Centerville is a small town at the moment is because we had big factories here that moved to China and one of them moved to Japan. But we used to have big factories, big production centers here in Centerville, and moving those things away did several things. Immediately, it cost lots of jobs and People moved away from Centerville, moved out of Hickman County. The people who wanted to work went and found jobs elsewhere. It had an instant economic effect on the town.

But I do think there is a larger sort of negative consequence over time. Those skills and those assets, those machines, those tools, even those buildings, some of those buildings have been sitting empty for so long that they are now worth almost nothing. You lose value and wealth. Ground that was taken, you kind of lose it if you're not exercising it, if you're not continuing to take dominion. And that is something that is really sad.

The good news is that some of the recent stuff that has developed in the digital manufacturing area, the short-term gains that you could get by shipping all your stuff to China, where there is, you know, the main draw essentially is slave labor. The slave labor that exists in the China manufacturing space is hard to compete with from a sheer economic bottom line short term gains perspective. Now, I think companies need to think beyond that. But in addition, there's the long term economic thing as well where we have now lost certain, if you're not doing your manufacturing, there's an element of R&D that you can't do. You can invent products and send them overseas to be made, but if you're not making them in-house, there are opportunities for improvement that you are missing.

And so there's a tremendous long-term value in making stuff yourself. And then there are, in 2020, there were massive supply chain issues. There's a tremendous resiliency that comes from being able to make stuff yourself and not have it be far away in fragile places. But it's just interesting to see as well, as some of these developments have happened with 3D printing and 3D scanning and cheaper CNC machines and better CAD software, the value in sending stuff away has become less. And the value in doing things locally in smaller, more decentralized ways, I think has increased.

And I think there's a lot of companies that are seeing that, not just little plastic holster companies in Centerville. So just to go to the theology of it for a minute, there's something about the Dominion mandate that sounds so Old Testament. And for anybody who has that impulse, I just want to address that two ways. One is just consider the parables in the New Testament. There are multiple parables where a master puts resources into the hands of a servant with the expectation that he'll come back and when he comes back he expects there to be gain, a multiplication of the resources.

In fact, the one that doesn't produce any gain just gives back only what was put into his hands is actually is actually condemned. So the thought of bringing order to things and producing gains is not an exclusively Old Testament thought at all, or theological point at all. And the Great Commission is, if there ever was a ground-taking commandment, it's not in the Old Testament at all. It's in the New Testament. It's in Matthew 28.

It's a worldwide ground-taking commandment. And so it really is a genesis to revelation notion that God intends to put resources into the hands of his people and he wants them to bring order and produce gain. Amen. Yeah, Christians bear fruit. They expand.

They bear fruit and they bring increase. Hey, one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation was I wanted to talk about particularly encouraging young men to get involved in manufacturing, in technology. One of the things that I've done over the years is I've really encouraged young men, go buy a machine. Go buy a machine and make money off that machine and then you can go to the next level of machinery and then you can go to the next level of machinery. When you buy a machine, you're selling that machine according to the time that it's used.

And well, that's all we did in our electronics factory. We were just selling our time to our customers and things they didn't have machinery for. And I know we've talked about this, you know, encouraging, you know, particularly young men not to dismiss the trades, not to dismiss manufacturing, not to dismiss what machines can do. What are your thoughts about that? I think that's a really important one.

One of the mistakes that we have made as a nation, And Cotton Mather talks about this because it's a cycle. We talk about this cycle in modern secular terms Strong men create good times good men create weak times etc. It implies that Goodness comes out of strength, which is why it's probably not the best way Cotton Mather talked about faithfulness producing prosperity and then prosperity destroying faithfulness. And one of the things that when you have prosperity you have the the leisure, you have the option to stop being a producer and becoming a consumer and letting other people do your producing for you. And when you do that, I think part of the reason that you lose some faithfulness when you rest on your laurels and rest on your prosperity is you're no longer engaged in that dominion mandate.

You're no longer bearing fruit. You're existing on pre-grown fruit. And when that happens there are, biblically, I think it's pretty obvious when that happens, there are significant negative connotations to not producing fruit. But one of the things about manufacturing and tools and understanding things is I believe that it really also just connects you to God's reality in a way that, not to pick on young people, but young people all have these magical phones. These magical phones are incredible.

You can do so much stuff just with the touch screen, and yet you are so many levels removed from the underlying technology that it's very hard to know how phones work if You got a phone recently, but if you grew up in the early days of computers, you know like yes This is what RAM does this is what of the hard drive does This is what assembler code does You had to know that stuff because the operating system lived on a floppy disk or a cassette tape. So if you were connected to the fundamentals of the thing, your brain was in a little bit better place to figure out how to capitalize on that thing. If all you see is the shiny thing that comes from the app store, it's very hard for you to actually be proactively thinking about how you can utilize the thing. And so I love the idea of get your hands dirty, do something with your hands. You're designed by God to tend the garden and to bear fruit, and if you are doing something that is attached to reality in some way, You can be an apostate, but you are connected to God's reality in a way that will bear fruit if you just connect the dots to Scripture.

And if you just generate value, if you just make something and generate value, you are in such a better place than if you are a consumer or you are merely a user of somebody else's tools and technology. I just feel like they're very, very different worldviews, regardless of the underlying Christian worldview, which is incredibly valuable, if you are a producer or if you are a consumer, these are two different worldviews that do entirely different things for the way that you think about the world. Yeah, that's so true. And I think that's what makes the Dominion mandate so thrilling because it runs across everything in the world. And we think in terms of industries and technologies and things like that.

But I especially want to encourage young people to dial in to particular industries and technologies and and and do what they can to make a living to provide for their families to provide for their churches to provide for missionary activity and just to get better and better and better at it and to increase and to bear fruit kind of like what Jason was saying. And we live in a time right now, especially it seems like young people are afraid everything costs so much. There's no hope. I want to say, no, there is hope actually. But you've got to take the bull by the horns and you've got to take dominion.

And previous generations deprived themselves of lots of luxuries that the new generation doesn't, in order to get where they are today. But I just want to encourage young people to really go for it. Don't be scared about the economy. Don't be scared about the cost of housing. Go make money and figure out how to make it happen.

That's what wise people do is they look and they say, this is the kind of lifestyle that I want to have and I'm gonna go do what I have to do to make it happen. So, what does this have to do with God, the kingdom of God, and spiritual things? So I worked for almost 20 years in association with factories, and we were putting things out of the factory that had very little to do with God directly. But the game is the same for every company. Bring order where there is disorder and create an increase from the assets that you have.

So, Christians that know how to bring order where there's disorder and create an increase out of the resources that you have, make them more, companies will pay you for that. And when companies pay you for that, the things that you can do with your paycheck have a direct link to the kingdom of God. The things that you're doing in your home, the things that you're doing in your local church, all those require resources. Well, how do we get resources? We bring order and increase.

Not everyone will own their own company or be self-employed, but there's a company that needs you to do those things for it, and when they pay you, you can do things that are directly associated with the kingdom of God. So in those 20 years, I never felt like it was a waste because there wasn't a direct link to Bibles going to the nations. I knew they were going to pay me for my contributions to bringing order and creating increase and that I could use that to send Bible to the nations, etc. Amen. Amen.

Okay, so Isaac, may your tribe increase. Keep going for it. I'm really thankful that I have watched you over the years and I pray that I hope some young men will listen to this and they'll say, hey, I want to buy a machine. I want to learn how to run a machine. I wanna get involved in a technology.

I wanna go for it. I wanna go make things better everywhere that I am. And I wanna do it and I wanna have babies and I wanna put a roof over their head and I wanna bring them to church and I wanna tell them that Jesus Christ is the best shepherd. So there you have it. Amen.

Hey, thanks for joining us, Isaac. You're welcome. Good to be here. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope to see you next time.

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