Created to Work (Faith & Work Series 1 of 6)

In the beginning, God worked. In the first chapter of Scripture God is at work in creation. The Old Testament Hebrew word used to describe God’s acts of creation is the same word used for human work.

And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. Gen 2:1-3

God not only works but takes great delight in his work. The Scriptures tell us when God saw everything he made, he declared that it was good.

On the final day of creation, God made man the pinnacle of his workmanship, saying, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen 1:26). The Psalmist praises God for man’s exalted place, “You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor” (Ps 8:5).

God created a majestic paradise on earth. The Hebrew word “shalom” gives us a glimpse into the goodness of this paradise. Shalom is the biblical word for complete fulfillment, happiness, and joy.  In Paradise, everything was the way it was supposed to be.

It was a perfect environment including perfect relationships with God, self, others and creation. There was no pain, suffering, disease, sickness or death. Adam and Eve loved and obeyed God’s will in thought, word and deed. This is the picture the bible paints for us of ultimate flourishing as his image bearers on the earth. It’s heaven on earth.

We often envision paradise as an ideal place to experience leisure and pleasure with no responsibility or work. But when we look again at the biblical picture of paradise, it doesn’t look like that.

In Genesis 2:15 we read, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” After God completes his work of creation, he puts man in paradise to work. We’ll explore the fuller meaning of the phrase “to work it and keep it,” later in the course. But for now, our focus is on the Bible’s positive view of work. 

In the beginning God worked and then he created us in his image to work. God put man into paradise to work before sin entered the world. The fall of man into sin and the curse on humanity and creation doesn’t happen until the next chapter, Genesis 3.

Therefore, work is not part of a curse from God and a necessary evil because of sin. Instead, it’s a blessing from God he means to help give our lives purpose so we will flourish according to his design. Work is God’s gift to us that needs to be redeemed and restored to its original purpose in our lives by Jesus Christ.

In these articles we’re studying a biblical view of work. Our focus is on integrating our faith with our work, thus the title “Faith and Work.” We’ll see how our work is not only a means of personal benefit but also a contribution to the common good for the glory God.

The essential biblical truth we’re exploring in this course is that all human work is not just a job but a calling from God.

In the Medieval age, most churches saw human work as only a physical necessity for sustaining life and putting bread on the table. Work was a hardship to endure. It had no real spiritual value. Being called by God became synonymous in most circles with being called to be a member of the clergy – a priest, monk, or nun.

However, the Protestant Reformers recovered a biblical view of work as a calling from God at the very center of God’s purpose for all followers of Jesus. Luther and Calvin argued from Scripture that all work is as much a calling from God as the ministry of a priest or monk. They denounced the false, unbiblical dichotomy between faith and work.

Luther once wrote, “a farmer in the field or his wife in the kitchen doing their work by faith to the glory of God is as high and holy a calling as a preacher in the pulpit.” Luther saw our work as the instrument through which God works to care for us and provide for us. So when we work, Luther wrote, “We are the fingers of God.”

Also the Reformers saw work as the instrument God uses to provide for others in the church and society as a common good for the glory of God. In one of Luther’s open letters in 1520, he writes:

A cobbler, a smith, a farmer, each has the work and office of his trade, and yet they are all alike consecrated priests and bishops, and every one by means of his own work or office must benefit and serve every other, that in this way many kinds of work may be done for the bodily and spiritual welfare of the community, even as all the members of the body serve one another.

The Reformers also recovered the biblical view of work as continuing God’s creative work of building a world that brought glory to God.

In the beginning, the paradise God created was perfect, but it was not complete. Everything was good. However, God’s purpose was to make everything even better through the work of his image bearers. God’s good creation still had deep, untapped potential for development that humans were to unlock and cultivate through their work.

The Scriptures teach that God’s work in the world did not stop at creation. Rather, it began there as a majestic display of his providence. When God “rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done” (Gen 2:2), that doesn’t mean that God just sat back, folded his arms, and watched man work.

Instead, as soon as God rested from his original work of creation, he immediately began his sovereign work of providence.  This work includes developing his purposes for creation through his image bearers as his “sub-workers.” God continues his work on earth today through us as we align our work with his.

Even after the fall of humanity in sin, God continues his work in the world today through Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “My Father is always at work to this very day, and I too am working” (John 5:17). In Jesus’ prayer to the Father at the end of his earthly ministry, he prayed “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4).

The good news is that God’s creation, ruined by humanity’s sin, is being redeemed by Christ and restored by his Holy Spirit into the Kingdom of God. The heart of this good news is God restoring all things lost in creation because of sin.

This good news includes not only restoring our broken relationship with God, ourselves, and others. It also includes restoring our broken relationship with creation by recovering God’s original purpose for our work.

So in the next article, we’ll take a deeper look at God’s original purpose for work in Scripture.