Laying a few theology of work bricks

Let’s talk about work.

It’s really important to understand how work relates to God. That’s because, for one simple reason, you spend most of your life working. The lion's share of everyday life is dedicated to work. And so for the Christian it’s important to understand how you and your work relate to God. 

Some of you hate that you spend the majority of your life working. Others love their job and so they never feel like they work a day in their life, or so the saying goes. Some of you can’t work because of health issues. And others, maybe because of privilege, or maybe out of laziness, don't work at all. But no matter what your personal experience is with work you need to know what God thinks about work. Because when you see God’s design for work you have a shot at entering into good work. 

Growing up in Clinton I always saw myself cut from a blue collar cloth. I grew up listening to family members tell stories of working at Clinton Corn or hearing how grandpa was the son of a farm hand in Clearance Iowa where they lived in a house that literally had dirt floors. Work, especially hard work, is just something everybody does. And I came to appreciate the noble sacrifice it took to do it day in and day out.

This made me appreciate hard work. But I wanted to also discover what made hard work meaningful. That quest eventually led me to the Bible. I wanted to know if God had anything to say about work. I didn’t just want to work to feed my belly, I wanted to work to feed my soul. I wanted my work to matter. 

So I’m not going to attempt an exhaustive theology of work. I’m simply going to lay a couple theological bricks and then start spreading the mortar. You can use the theological principles as a starting point to build off of as you journey through the rest of the Bible with Jesus as you try and make sense of the work in your life. 

First, let’s define work. I believe it was Tim Keller who said work is bringing order out of chaos. I like this definition because it is biblical. The first couple chapters of Genesis we catch a glimpse of God at work. And what is he doing? He is ordering the universe. He is bringing oder out of chaos. He is separating and dividing light and dark, land and water, male and female. And he is ordering life on this planet according to his good design. And we see this good order everywhere. You see this in our DNA code, notes in a music scale, the predictability of seasons. As Jason Isbell says, God is a working man. 

The next brick of theology I want to lay is this: Because we were made in God’s image we too are working creatures. We are workers because God’s a worker. 

In Genesis 2:15 God explicitly says that the first humans are to work. This is one of the reasons they were created. 

So all this is before the fall, mind you. This is an important brick to lay in your understanding of work. Work was created before sin entered into the world. So the reality that every person has to work is not a product of sin. Work is a good thing fundamentally. You might say it is a God thing.

Well, what’s work’s purpose? Theologically speaking, the purpose of work is to bring glory to God and to create human flourishing. We see this in Genesis 1:28. The first humans were given a mandate by God to go and be fruitful and multiply. They were to fill the earth. They were to rule and subdue, to take dominion over the earth. They were essentially tasked by God to act like him and order the creation, cultivate the ground, and work to unearth its creative potential.

This is the point of all our ordering and organizing and rearranging of creation. You see this whenever two people make a marriage, make babies, make a home, and order their lives in such a way that brings glory to God and creates an abundance to be enjoyed by others. That could be an abundance of children. As any stay at home mom will tell you raising and nurturing children is hard work. And is a full time job in its own right. And out of the abundance of her womb the world is better for it. The mom is also joined by the banker, the lawyer, the boiler maker, the tin knocker, the teacher, the janitor, the police officers, all the vocations out there that work to produce something. Whether you're bringing order out of the chaos of a kids playroom, or ordering nails and wood together, or rotating crops in your fields, all work is to be done in a fashion that brings glory to God and flourishing to the community around us. 

The idea here is that God creates work and gives work its telos, which Fancy Nancy would say is a fancy word for purpose. Work, even small and humble factory work, can be done for the glory of God and for the flourishing of the world. And so the guy who works at ADM or the girl who stays at home with her kids both have an opportunity to labor in the dignity of being made in the image of God and labor in the confidence that as long as they are abiding in the design of God, even the lowliest tasks can become meaningful work. 

And I say abide in the design of God as an important caveat. There are some types of work that cannot be meaningful or done to the glory of God. Human trafficking is an obvious one. Prostitution, selling drugs, running a factory that uses slave or child labor, all are examples of work that must not be attempted from the start, let alone attempted to be done to the glory of God. 

This is where understanding our Bibles is helpful. God does give us a standard of morality that when applied to work becomes an ethic of work. And so there are forms of ethical and unethical work. I wouldn’t even try to list them all but just know that no work is neutral. No work is amoral. It is either moral and bringing glory to God or it is immoral and diminishing the glory of God. 

It’s also important to know that work has limitations. God worked for six days and then rested on the seventh. God then declared that that day is holy. There should be 6 days of labor and one day of rest. God has woven into the very design of creation that human beings need rest. We are creatures that need to stop for food and drink. We need sleep at the end of the day. We need a day of rest during the week. We need times where we stop our labor and toil and just rest in the fact that this world keeps on spinning because of the labor of God and not ours. 

This is hard in our current culture. Every piece of technology that we interact with on a daily basis lies to us that we are limitless. Lights that never turn off, social media feeds that never end, cities that never sleep. As a Christian it is very important to know that rest is a necessary component to human flourishing. A person, a community, the world cannot flourish if we do not rest. If we are unable to cease from our labors to the glory of God the world will languish. So do as Jesus did at times, go off on your own and take a nap. 

Genesis 2:15 teaches that not only do we have limitations, the creation has limitations. Adam and Eve were to not only work the Garden, they were to keep it. They were to honor the sacredness of God’s creation by watching over it, protecting it, preserving it. And so it would be bad work to use the creation as a raw material to plunder and destroy just to make a quick buck. To work in such a way that ruins your ability to keep and preserve the creation is to engage in bad work. 

Because to do bad work is to harm people. A farmer who destroys his land in the process of farming is not helping anyone in the long run. If all farmers did this we would literally starve because the land would not be able to produce. And so we see right from the start God knew that it would be a great temptation of sinful man that we would be tempted to burst the bounds of our creaturely limitations and try to become like God. We see that’s exactly what happened in the fall of man in Genesis 3. In a fallen world our appetites crave limitlessness. More money, more food, more resources, more more more until our own bodies and the creation are worn thinned and stripped to the bone. This sinful tendency to overwork ruins the possibility of good work.

So work is a good thing. Work is a God thing. Work is to be done as a way to create an abundance of flourishing for the world. And work is to be done within the limitations of God’s design. 

This isn’t everything to be said about work. But I hope it gets your imagination going in the right direction. I hope that it might inspire some of you to engage in your work with the creativity God gave you as an image bearer. You were endowed with brains and desire to go out into the world with a big vision for work. Some of you have started business, some of you will start business, some of you farm, administrate, nurture children, write sermons, push buttons, and the list could go on. My hope is that by seeing God’s design for work you will go out into the world with a vigor to work hard for the glory of God and the joy of your community.