Work According to the Bible
Genesis 2-3
We’re beginning a three-week series today on work according to the gospel. One of the questions I get asked the most frequently is, How do I know that I’m doing what God wants me to do, professionally? How can I know God’s will for my career? That question doesn’t bother me, because the answer’s easy: I have no idea. The Bible doesn’t really talk about that. The Bible focuses much more on our holiness than on what particular career we should go into. It says to obey God’s commands, to pray for wisdom, and to make the best decisions you can, that are in line with God’s character.
So the Bible’s not going to tell you whether or not you should be an auditor. Or a teacher. Or an architect. It just doesn’t talk about that.
But it does talk about work in general, and how we should go about thinking about work. And we need to think about it.
We never say it like this out loud, but we often live our lives as if we have our professional lives on one side, and our Christian lives on the other. And I don’t think it’s because we never ask ourselves how our faith should interact with our careers, but rather that we don’t know how to answer that question. We’d like to work heartily at whatever we do, as for the Lord and not for men (as Paul says in Colossians 3.23-24), but we just have a hard time understanding what that looks like.
That’s what we’ll be taking the next three weeks talking about.
Today, we’re going to remain fairly broad, to cover the basics. Next week Joe is going to talk more specifically about how the gospel should change our interaction with our work. But before we can begin to consider that question, we need to have a certain framework in mind; before we can build up a biblical vision of work, we need to tear down the unbiblical vision of work we already have.
The foundation for a biblical vision of work is found in Genesis 2-3, and in these passages we see two very simple truths.
Work Is Good (Genesis 2.15-20)
The first thing we see in the Bible on the subject of work comes in right at the beginning—and that is that work is good.
If we read Genesis 1, we see that God creates the world. I won’t go into detail, but almost every day of the seven days he spends creating the world, at some point God looks at what he’s created and we read, And God saw that it was good. In v. 10, v. 12, v. 18, v. 21, v. 25—And God saw that it was good.
Then he creates the man and the woman—the last thing he creates—and he takes a step back and in v. 31 we read, And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
So what we should take from all of this is pretty simple: God created everything, and everything he created is good. That’s how the earth starts out: everything is good. There is nothing bad here.
And it’s in the context of all this good creation that we pick up the thread in chapter 2. Now, chapter 2 isn’t the chronological follow-up of chapter 1; it’s more of a step back. In chapter 2, the author (Moses) takes a look at the creation of the man, called Adam (which literally just means “man”) and goes into more detail about how that happened and what it looked like.
We’re going to read starting at v. 15, and at this point God hasn’t created the woman yet.
Genesis 2:15–20 (ESV)
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.
Now there are a couple of different things we see in these verses, but for today let’s look at one aspect in particular: the fact that before sin came into the world and messed everything up—while everything that God created was still fundamentally good—God gave Adam a job.
V. 15: The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
I’ll be honest: my instinct is to think that this might have spoiled things a bit for me. Adam’s in this perfect paradise, where everything is just as it should be…and God says, “You see that shovel? Get to it, we need to put a trench right here.”
If I were Adam, I’d respond, “Can’t you just create a trench, like you just created everything else out of thin air?”
To which God would respond, “Trust me—work is good.”
And then God gives him another job, which is to name all the animals. Can you imagine how hard that job would have been? Zadie asks me to make up bedtime stories for her sometimes—my brain hurts after five minutes of that. How exhausted must Adam have been at the end of that day?
Again, if I were Adam, I’d point at the hedgehog and say, “God—come on, surely you know what this thing is called.”
To which God would respond, “You give it a go—trust me, work is good.”
The reason work is good is because God is a God who works. God is never inactive; he is always working. God is constantly active, and that is just as much a part of who he is as love, or holiness, or wrath. He upholds the universe by the word of his power (Hebrews 1.3). The only time he didn’t work was on the seventh day, during which he rested. (But we’ll get to that in a couple weeks.)
Work is fundamentally a good thing: it is a part of God’s intention for humanity that we work. And anyone who has ever done a good job at something knows that work is good. We live in an apartment now, but one of the great pleasures I had when we lived in a house was to mow the grass. I loved mowing the grass—there was something about the fact of working with my hands to make the lawn look nice that made me feel like I was doing the right thing.
It’s weird to say it like this, but that’s exactly the job God gave Adam to do: to work and keep the garden. It was manual labor, and that work is good.
A lot of us need to realize this—need to realize that work is a gift that God has given to humanity—because a lot of us run away from even the suggestion of work. That’s me: every time I have a day off, Loanne has a job for me to do. Or rather, she wants me to find a job to do. Wash the windows, or organize the bookshelves (which I still haven’t done), or go to the dump to drop off things. And I can’t complain about it, because she’s right—it needs to be done, and at least according to Genesis 2, work is a good thing.
So I get to washing the windows, and I’m never happy about it. But when I’m done, every single time, I’m happy I did it, because God gave me work to make me more like him. When I wash the windows because they need washing, I’m acting like our God who always works; I’m fulfilling his command to work and keep what he has given me.
In Genesis 2, God’s command that Adam work and keep the garden wasn’t a chore. He wasn’t saying, “This is going to be terrible, but you’ve got to do it anyway.” No—he was saying, “Look Adam, there’s a lot to do here. And you get to do it.” That’s the resounding theme of these verses: we get to work! Work is good.
Work Is Hard (Genesis 3.16-19)
But of course this doesn’t last long. The first thing we learn about work in the Bible is that work is good; the second thing we learn is that work is grim. Not in itself—it wasn’t grim before, but it’s grim now.
In chapter 3, we see that God gives Adam and his wife Eve one commandment, in the passage we read earlier. And they disobeyed anyway. They didn’t trust God who’d given them all these amazing things, and wanted the one thing he said not to go near.
That was the first appearance of sin in the Bible. Sin is rebellion against God, and rebellion against God poisons everything—all of creation.
But especially the man and the woman. God came down, he called Adam to come out, and he told them what the consequence of their rebellion would be: because they rebelled against God, everything would rebel against them—their bodies, and their work.
Genesis 3:16–19 (ESV)
To the woman [God] said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be contrary to your husband,
but he shall rule over you.”
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
Because of sin, work is now really, really difficult. For the woman first, God says that she has one particular job that the man can’t do—and that is to bear children. Obviously, that’s not the only work a woman can do—don’t go on Facebook and say that I said a woman’s only job is to have babies. That’s not true.
But I think we can all agree that having babies is one job you women can do that we men cannot.
So God says, this is one particular job you have, and it’s going to be very painful. Having babies is going to hurt. And everyone in here who has kids knows that God was correct.
In addition, working at your marriage is going to be difficult. Of course, that goes for both the man and the woman, but I think he says it to the woman here because he knows it will often be harder for her. Before, the man was a sinless leader—the exact kind of leader you’d want to follow. Now, he’s selfish and childish—Adam already showed that, when God came down and asked what happened, and he said, “It was her fault. She made me do it.” Husbands will now tend to be selfish; and if they decide to be violent, it will be hard for you to protect yourself because most of the time, he’ll be bigger than you.
To the man, God’s statement is more global. He says that everything you try to do is going to fight you. The man’s one job was to work and keep the garden; now, the ground is cursed. In order to eat, you’re going to have to work for it, and that work is going to be miserable. You’ll plant tomatoes, and thorns will grow instead. You’ll have the pressure of providing food for your family, and you won’t be able to produce enough to feed them. They’ll sometimes go hungry because of you. They’ll sometimes suffer because of you. You will let down the people who depend on you, because your work will be hard.
And it will be like that until you die—as long as you are on this earth, if you want to eat, you’ll have to sweat. If you want to provide for your family, you’ll have to work until you bleed.
If the message of Genesis 2 was, “You get to work!”, the message of Genesis 3 is, “You have to work.”
Now I don’t believe that the difficulty of work negates the goodness of work we saw before. We see it elsewhere: the world God created is still good and beautiful, still shows signs of God’s creative power. We are still created in God’s image; that didn’t go away because of sin. And work didn’t become fundamentally bad because of sin.
Sin didn’t change everything about creation, but it did add a lot of pain to the mix.
Work is still good, but it’s really hard now.
That’s the situation. And if you’re thinking it sounds a bit paradoxical, you’re absolutely right. In some ways, it would have been easier if sin had totally ruined work, to the point where God tells us not to do it anymore. But that’s not what happened.
In the book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon laments over the futility of work—at the end of chapter 2, he says:
Ecclesiastes 2:18–19 (ESV)
I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity.
Work is hard.
But just a few verses later, he recognizes that work is also good. And the good in work isn’t necessarily what you get out of it, but rather, the good in work is found in work itself.
Ecclesiastes 3:9–13 (ESV)
What gain has the worker from his toil? I have seen the business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil—this is God’s gift to man.
It’s not one or the other; it’s both. And as long as your job isn’t openly sinful, this applies to whatever job we end up doing. Whether you’re a pastor, or a teacher, or an auditor, or a risk analyst, or a wedding planner, or a graphic designer, or a stay-at-home mom—whatever your work is, it will be really, really difficult; but it’s also really, really good.
And we need to keep both of those ideas in our minds at all times, because we’ll almost always tend to drift toward one of two extremes—or even both, depending on what stage of life we’re in.
On the one hand, because work is hard, we’ll tend to abandon it.
I started working when I was sixteen; I’ve had a lot of different jobs in my life. Some of those jobs were awesome—being a projectionist at a cinema, especially in the late 90s or early 2000s, was probably the most fun I’ve ever had at a job, ever. But some of them were way less fun. I was a janitor for a few years. Cleaning toilets isn’t fun.
And even when it’s a job you love, you don’t always love it. I’ve never loved a job more than the job I have right now. I can’t imagine doing anything else. But I’ll be honest with you: there have been some days over the past couple years where I’d honestly rather be doing something else. Anything else. Some days, going back to being a janitor sounds pretty good.
Because of sin, work is now very hard.
Our spontaneous reaction, when work is hard, is going to be to abandon it.
And by that I don’t just mean that we’ll quit. We’ll abandon it in our hearts first.
We’ll become like every other French person complaining about their jobs around the water cooler. We’ll grit our teeth while we work, constantly weighed down by stress. We’ll find ourselves cutting corners in order to make it feel better; we’ll do a sub-par job because really, what does it matter? We’ll become defeatist in our thinking, and we’ll start to look for something else—because it just feels too hard.
Of course there are good reasons to leave a job. But statistically at least, people born over the last three decades don’t leave their jobs because they have to; they leave because they just want something better. They leave because they’re bored. They leave because they’re stressed. They leave because it just feels like too much work.
But work is hard. Difficulty is baked into the DNA of work in this fallen world. And the fact that your job is hard does not in itself mean that it’s not good for you to be doing it. The fact that you don’t like the work doesn’t in itself mean that the work isn’t good for you, or that God isn’t glorified when you do it well.
The apostle Paul says:
Colossians 3:23–24 (ESV)
Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
Do you know what the context of that verse is? He’s talking to families—wives and how they interact with their husbands, husbands and how they interact with their wives, children and how they obey their parents—and he’s talking to slaves and their masters. If you are a slave, that’s not a good place to be in, but if you are in that situation, how are you going to work? Masters, how are you going to treat the slaves who work for you?
Whatever you do, he says, do it as if you’re doing it for God, because in reality, you are. You’re serving the Lord Christ. Don’t abandon the work because it’s hard—don’t abandon it in your hearts or in your actions. Whatever you do, do it well, because you’re doing it for him.
That’s the first problem the Bible corrects for us: because work is grim, we’ll tend to abandon it.
The second problem—the second extreme we can fall into—is this: because work is good, we’ll tend to worship it.
Worship is not fundamentally what we do on Sunday morning when we sing songs. Worship is what we do when we give our lives to something. It’s what happens when we decide what is most important to us.
If we worship our work, that doesn’t mean we’ll sing songs of praises about our jobs. Rather, worshiping our work means that we’ll place our hope in it: our hope for fulfillment, our hope for meaning, our hope for satisfaction.
Now that may sound perfectly reasonable: who doesn’t want to find meaning in their work? Who doesn’t want to be satisfied in their career?
Here’s why it’s dangerous, though: no matter how much you love your job, no matter how meaningful and important it is, it will not satisfy you.
Like I said, I love my job. I kind of can’t believe that I get to do what I do for a living. But my job does not satisfy me, in the ultimate sense of the word. It does not fulfill me. I love it, but it’s not enough. Just like I love my wife, but she’s not enough. I love my kids, but they’re not enough.
Solomon talked about this in Ecclesiastes as well. He was wealthiest king Israel ever knew, with absolutely everything at his disposal. He boasted of everything he had done, and all the wealth he accumulated. And then he said:
Ecclesiastes 2:9–11 (ESV)
So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem. Also my wisdom remained with me. And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil. Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.
It’s not as if we’ve never heard this: stories of people getting everything they always wanted, and still being unsatisfied with it.
There’s a reason why that’s the case. As C. S. Lewis famously said, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”
Your work will not satisfy you; it can’t satisfy you. Nothing on earth can, because we weren’t made to be satisfied by anything created; we were made to be satisfied by the Creator.
God alone will satisfy us. He alone can bear the weight of our desires. Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t desire anything else. But it does mean that those other desires we have are not ends in themselves—they are means by which we come to know God better and see God more clearly. God should be the goal of every other desire.
To paraphrase A.W. Tozer, if there is anything in your life more demanding than your longing after God, then you need to rethink your priorities.
So one last question: given these are the two extremes we can fall into, how are we to approach work instead of those two extremes?
We’re going to spend the next two weeks answering that question, but we can sum it up for now in one sentence:
Work hard to know the God who is good. In whatever work you undertake, even if you don’t like it, work with one goal in mind: to know God better through the way that you work.
Let me give you an example of what I mean—and I’m going to use a non-professional example, because not all our work has to do with our jobs. Most of you know that the first six years of my marriage to Loanne was an absolute nightmare. Turning the corner on that was incredibly difficult. It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t fulfilling, and we didn’t understand why God had put us in this position where we had to work this hard at something that was supposed to be a joy.
But we learned far more in the hard years of our marriage than in the good years. Without that experience, my understanding of grace would be lacking; my understanding of what it means to sacrifice for another would be lacking; and we wouldn’t be able to do a lot of what we do today. We speak to so many couples who are going through hard times, and we are able to do it because we’ve been there. Those awful years over a decade ago were God’s way of preparing us for today. And as hard as it was, I wouldn’t change it.
So we thank God for the hard work he gave us during that time. It was hard work, but it was good work, because God was building something in us, through it.
Now I know that may seem like a lot for God to ask: it may feel like that’s a lot to throw on us.
But we need to remember that he’s not asking us to do anything he hasn’t done himself.
Go back and look at Genesis 3 this week, when God tells Adam what the consequences of his sin would be. He said the ground would be cursed because of him, that when man worked, his work would sometimes produce thorns and thistles; he said that the man would see the fruit of his labor by the sweat of his brow, and that this would go on until he died.
I’m speculating here, but it’s not a crazy speculation, I don’t think. I wonder how often Jesus thought about Genesis 3. My guess is, quite often—it is, after all, the story of why he was doing what he was doing. In his ministry, although he brought forth incredible “fruit”, there were quite a lot of thorns and thistles that came up too. He suffered persecution, and ridicule, and ultimately a false condemnation by his own people.
When he was carrying the cross to Golgotha on his wounded shoulders, dehydrated under the sun, the sweat and blood dripping down into his eyes, I can’t help but wonder if he thought of Genesis 3.19: By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
I think it’s pretty likely; it was to rectify that consequence of sin that he was carrying the cross on his back.
When God asks us to persevere and to work diligently, as if we’re working for him, despite how unpleasant or painful or hard our work might be, he is not asking us to do anything he didn’t do first. He knows how hard it is. And he’ll give us what we need to keep going.
