Work and Our Labor in the Lord

James M. Hamilton Jr., Dane Ortlund, Miles V. Van Pelt

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781433549984
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The Short Studies in Biblical Theology series is designed to help readers see the whole Bible as a unified story—culminating in Jesus. Insightful, accessible, and practical, these books are perfect for readers looking for bite-sized introductions to major subjects in biblical theology. The third volume in the series, Work and Our Labor in the Lord explores how work fits into the framework of the whole Bible—looking at the original creation purpose for work, how it was affected by the fall, and the hope for lasting good offered to all who toil and labor in the Lord today.

1

Creation

Work in the Very Good Garden

The stories we tell reveal our understanding of the world, with our hopes and fears, and the songs we sing are poetic crystallizations of the deep longings of our hearts. The deep longings of our hearts correspond to what we envision as the good life. Our vision of the good life can be understood as our vision of “the kingdom.”1

God’s Design for Work

The soundtrack to the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? includes the song “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”2 The lyrics celebrate handouts that grow on bushes, trees that sprout cigarettes, and bulldogs that have rubber teeth so their watchdog bites are harmless. This song’s idyllic landscape includes streams of alcohol beside a lake of stew, and whiskey too, because those who sing it want to escape reality by means of intoxication and to be fed though they have not worked. They want mountains made of rock candy. They want no tools such as shovels, axes, saws, or picks. They want to sleep all day, and they want to hang the jerk that invented work. I wonder if the songwriter realized that would put the noose around God’s neck!

The song’s sentiments fall significantly short of the glory that God intended when he created man in his own image and gave him work to do. Life at the Big Rock Candy Mountain would not result in true and lasting happiness or satisfaction. The Bible says there is a primal mountain that is our destination, but it’s not one that will rot teeth and indulge character deficiencies. Contrast “Big Rock Candy Mountain” with Psalm 128:

A Song of Ascents.

Blessed is everyone who fears the Lord,

who walks in his ways!

You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands;

you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you.

Your wife will be like a fruitful vine

within your house;

your children will be like olive shoots

around your table.

Behold, thus shall the man be blessed

who fears the Lord.

The Lord bless you from Zion!

May you see the prosperity of Jerusalem all the days of your life!

May you see your children’s children!

Peace be upon Israel!

This song is addressed to a man who works, and the blessing comes to him because he fears Yahweh and walks in Yahweh’s ways. The blessing of Yahweh takes the form of this man enjoying the results of his work, which he has done to provide for his wife and children. Psalm 128’s depiction of the good life, then, entails hard work done to provide for others, dependents, whose growth and fruitfulness are evidence of God’s favor and blessing. Prosperity here includes godliness, responsibility, stewardship, and awareness of God, prompting fear and obedience and virtue.

The man blessed in Psalm 128 is a God-fearing man (v. 4), and in the context of the whole book of Psalms, the mention of Zion in verse 5 evokes the Davidic king Yahweh set there (cf. Ps. 2:6).3 The references to the prosperity of Jerusalem and children and grandchildren in verses 5 and 6 hint that what has resulted in this individual blessed man experiencing the joys of Psalm 128 has spread to the wider culture. Jerusalem prospers because its men fear God, obey his Word, and work with their hands for the benefit of their wives and children. Psalm 128 is a poetic depiction of the blessings of the Mosaic covenant (cf. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28).

“Big Rock Candy Mountain” and Psalm 128 sing different versions of the good life. In the Bible, the land of promise is not the place sought by freeloaders and slackers who long for an El Dorado where theft is easy, the hills are made of sugar, work is abolished, and handouts are freely distributed to tramps and bums who have neither responsibilities nor families.

The Bible’s songs are rooted in hopes seeded by its wider story, watered by God’s promises. What is the role of work in that story? We begin our answer to that question by looking at what God created the good life to look like, when the world was without sin. We will start with work in the garden in Genesis 1–2. From there we will seek insight on what life in Eden could have been like from the blessings of the covenant in Deuteronomy 28:1–14. We will then consider how the judgment on God-given tasks in Genesis 3:16–19 subjects work to futility (cf. Rom. 8:20).

Work in the Garden (Genesis 1–2)

The Bible’s story of the world opens with God doing work, six days of it. Once completed, not from weariness but because the work was done, God rested on the seventh day (Gen. 1:1–2:3; Heb. 4:3–4). Given that man is made in God’s image and likeness (Gen. 1:27), with Christians called to be imitators of God (Eph. 5:1), the fact that the Bible opens with this scene of God doing the work of creation by his powerful word calls for reflection. God works by speaking words. Among other things, this validates all kinds of knowledge work in which the hard work of thinking and communicating accomplishes what those made in God’s image have set out to do. But what words are like God’s words? What words could make worlds?

In addition to being able to marshal his army of words to accomplish his purposes, then, we see from this vast and splendid universe that God is a skilled worker who completes his tasks with unparalleled excellence and creativity. Work is neither punishment nor cursed drudgery but an exalted, Godlike activity. Nor should we think that once God completed the work of creation he was finished with work—as though he made the watch then simply left it to tick away the seconds. As a justification for his right to heal on the Sabbath, Jesus declared, “My Father is working until now, and I am working” (John 5:17). The Bible opens with a depiction of God at work, and the operational understanding throughout the Bible is that God continues to work, guiding, upholding, loving, judging, and saving.

The first thing the Bible shows us about God is that he is a creative, competent, efficient, caring worker, whose work provides for others, blesses others, meets the needs of others, and makes life possible for them. Surely this is meant to inform readers of Genesis as they confront the idea of man made male and female in the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26–28).4

The creation of man and woman is accompanied by a blessing and a task, a charge and commission, which spring from God’s intention for man as he made them, male and female. Genesis 1:26 presents God intending to grant dominion, royal rule, over the animal kingdom from the moment he decides to make man in his own image and likeness—indeed, dominion because made in God’s image and likeness. God made male and female in his own image (Gen. 1:27); then he blessed them and told them what he wanted them to do (1:28).

Man was created not for passive observation of the world but for an epic task, a worldwide venture. Genesis 1:28 recounts,

And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

God commands the man and woman in Genesis 1:28 to be fruitful and multiply and thereby fill the earth—the whole thing. Then they are to subdue it—the whole thing. God next charges them to exercise dominion over the animal kingdom—the whole thing. The tasks i...