Thank God For Work, Pt 1
Mar. 5 2008
Have you ever seen a TGIM (Thank God It’s Monday) bumper sticker? I haven’t.
As Americans—and Christians usually aren’t much different—we spend many years and thousands of dollars getting an education, all to prepare us to get a job. Then once we get a job, we spend many years and thousands of more dollars awaiting the soonest time that we can retire! In the meantime—we live for the weekend.
As Christians we should view work differently, because God views work differently. Work is a gift from God and can be a source of meaningful fulfillment—and at the same time, it can make us weary and full of frustration. In what follows I want to sketch a few points about work that I think are important in building a biblical theology of work.
What Is Work?
Leland Ryken, in his insightful book, Redeeming the Time: A Christian Approach to Work and Leisure, identifies six dimensions of work. (I’ll number them in case you, like me, find that easier!) “Work (1) provides for life’s needs and wants and is (2) a means of economic production. It carries with it (3) a constant possibility of being a curse or drudgery, but positively it has the potential to supply a sense of (4) human achievement, (5) psychological satisfaction, and (6) service to humanity.”
A Biblical Survey of Work
When thinking about our own work, it’s helpful to take a fly-by look at redemptive history. There is so much more that could be said, but this will at least give us a glimpse at a few important points:
1. God himself is a worker. Gen. 2:2 says that “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.”
2. Man was created in the image of God the Worker and was created to work. A lot of people think work was only the result of the Fall, not something from the beginning. But that’s not true: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” (For an advanced defense of this translation see this paper by Gordon Hugenberger.) This divinely commanded and divinely blessed role of working was tied in to God’s image-bearers filling the earth, subduing it, and having dominion over it (Gen. 1:28).
3. Man brought about a curse upon the blessed task of work. See God’s pronouncement in Gen. 3:17–19. It’s interesting to note the role of food in the fall. God set forth a banquet of fruit for Adam and Eve to eat—every food was permissible (with just one exception). But by eating of the forbidden tree, the ground became cursed. The act of eating—so easy and so pleasurable—would now come about “in pain” and “by sweat.” Ruling over the creation would now be met with resistance (“thorns and thistles”). We should think of the effects of the fall when we think about the struggles we experience at work—it started in the Garden.
4. Jesus had a vocation prior to his public ministry. It’s amazing to think that Jesus spent most of his life working a common trade. If he began a carpentry apprenticeship under Joseph at age 12 then he probably spent at least 20 years (!) as a carpenter before he was baptized by John and began publicly declaring his messianic message. Think of it—six days a week, year after year after year, getting cuts and blisters on his hands, wiping away the sweat mixed with sawdust from his brow, carefully measuring and cutting and filling orders, etc.
5. Christian freeloaders are worse than unbelievers and should starve instead of receiving handouts. Now some of you may think that’s unkind to say—not to mention unbiblical! But I’m just paraphrasing the apostle Paul, who wrote, “If anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim. 5:8). “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living” (2 Thess. 3:6–12). Working is that important!
The Church’s View of Work
Unfortunately, many of the theologians in the early Christian tradition lost sight of this biblical perspective and developed an “intense distaste” with regard to work. Alister McGrath, in his Reformation Thought: An Introduction, summarizes:
“For Eusebius of Caesarea, the perfect Christian life was one devoted to serving God, untainted by physical labor. Those who chose to work for a living were second-rate Christians. To live and work in the world was to forfeit a first-rate Christian calling, with all that this implied. The early monastic tradition appears to have inherited this attitude, with the result that work often came to be seen as a debasing, demeaning activity, best left to one’s social—and spiritual—inferiors. . . . A spiritual aristocracy appears to have developed within early Christianity, with . . . negative and dismissive attitudes toward manual labor. . . .”
This is not to say that medieval writers denied the importance of work; rather, it is to note that it was seen as necessary, but demeaning. Christians who committed themselves to living and working in the everyday world were, by definition, second-rate Christians. . . . Work was, in short, not a serious option for a real Christian. (p. 266)
As McGrath notes, “The Reformation changed such attitudes, decisively and irreversibly.” As Luther said: “The whole world could be filled with the service of God—not just the churches, but the home, the kitchen, the cellar, the workshops, and the field.”
In my view, we are due for another reformation with regard to our view of work. Although it’s much more subtle, many of us can still perpetuate a sub-biblical view of work. I remember once hearing a student leader suggest that the norm was for Christians to consider themselves called to vocational ministry—and that a calling to a so-called “secular” vocation was the exception. In other words, the default for Christians should be to go into vocational ministry unless they feel compelled to do something else. But I don’t find that idea taught anywhere in Scripture. The result is that we sometimes have people in vocational ministry, not because it is where they have been called by their church, or equipped by God, but simply because they never prepared to do anything else.
We need to recover the reformational understanding of vocation: all of life—in every sphere and in every calling—should be lived to the glory of God and in obedience to his Word. Abraham Kuyper wrote, “there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” If that’s true (and it is!), isn’t it worth our time and effort to think through how to glorify God in the area of work to which he has called you?
______________
This article continues with helpful encouragement about how to work for the glory of God and how to determine your calling in Part 2.
This entry is not accepting comments.