Work is a Good Thing! Let’s all get that straight in our minds. It is not a curse (though it is associated with a curse that makes it harder – we’ll cover that in a couple of posts’ time). The Bible begins and ends with God’s work of Creation. The Bible begins in Genesis 1 and 2, with God creating everything and we know it was work (Genesis 2:2 “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work”) and that it was good (we’re told this over and over again – see Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31). These verses are full of action, creativity, thoughtfulness and purpose – full of work of the highest kind.
The Bible ends in Revelation 21-22 with God’s creation of the new heavens and new earth – a restoration of Creation to the potential and vision that God had in the first Creation (but with a solution to our propensity to mess it up!) “I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:5) He says, and a glorious vista of His new Creation opens up to us.
Surely the fact that work frames the whole Bible like bookends is enough to prove that work is indeed a Good Thing and extraordinarily important to God! But what does this have to do with us? If God presents Himself to us as Worker, and shows how good work is, then there’s a message for us. And in the midst of His creative burst in Genesis, He creates us – not just like the other animals, but with the most extraordinary difference. He says "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness”. If we’re made in His likeness then we’re also made to be workers, and our work is to be a Good Thing.
More on this in the next Theology @ Work post (an occasional series of posts that will try to lay out the foundations of my conviction that work is God’s precious calling to every one of us, and that our work life is something that is profoundly interesting to Him, and that He is intimately involved in it)
Hey Graham! I sent your link to my friends I was telling you about at 4.20.21. I don't have your email address to give them, though. I will forward it on if you want to send it to me. Travis - nichols2116@hotmail.com
ReplyDelete(From Sara Goetz) Hey Graham! Good stuff here. The more I read Genesis 1, the more I love it, for so many reasons. I do find it interesting that the first thing we learn about God, as you articulated in this post, is that He is a Creator. THE Creator. As someone who earns money through a creative endeavor (photography) I find it interesting, though, that God never referred to His creative process as "work". Do you think that, as a result of our sinfulness and our capitalistic/pull yourself up by your bootstraps culture, we have come to grossly misunderstand & misdefine the concept of work? I'm curios, what is your (Or your readers) definition of work?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comments, Sara. Actually I think Gen 1 does refer to God's creativity as "work" - see Gen 2:2-3. What I'm not so sure of is what the Hebrew concept of "work" was - at some point soon I'm planning to research that a bit. For sure the Fall led to the loss of vision, joy, and valuing of work. I'm going to address that in a Theology @ Work post soon.
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