Glorious and Depraved (7): Humans as Workers/Creators

From a scientific standpoint, “work is the energy transferred to or from an object via the application of force along a displacement” and its International Systems Unit (SI unit) is the joule (Wikipedia). We often think of work more in terms of Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, “to exert oneself physically or mentally especially in sustained effort for a purpose or under compulsion or necessity,” often with emphasis on the compulsion or necessity aspect.

Yahweh Elohim took the man and placed him in the garden in Eden to work it and to take care of it. (Genesis 2:15)

Before humans fell into rebellion and disobedience, the second the result of the first, work was given to mankind by God and was focused on caring for the garden God had planted in Eden. You might say it was done by compulsion or necessity because God required it. But we must conclude that mankind, made in God the Worker’s image, needed to work and wanted to work. God is a worker and so are we. And we must conclude that man’s and woman’s work (she was given to help him, 2:18) was always satisfying and successful. We conclude this because it was only after the Fall that human work was purposely made fraught with frustration (3:17-19).

A friend of mine, Sue Bohlin, has done some excellent work for Probe Ministries summarizing Your Work Matters to God, by Doug Sherman and William Hendricks. They give five major reasons why work is valuable: Through work we serve people, meet our own needs, meet our family’s needs, earn money to give to others, and love God. They counter four wrong views of work: the secular view of work, where our work is in one corner and God is in the other, the soul vs. body view, that thinks our souls only matter to God and not our bodies, the temporal vs. eternal view, that thinks only work of a “spiritual” nature is really valuable, and the work as a platform for evangelism, which thinks evangelizing our co-workers is alone what makes work valuable.

What is the right view? She writes:

Here’s a startling thought: we actually work for God Himself! Consider Ephesians 6:5-8, which Paul writes to slaves but which we can apply to employees:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but like slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men, because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.