Work and How It Began
(The following is the text of the video, “Work and How It Began,” found HERE.)
The work tree grows in any climate. Its thick branches reach into every country on earth. But what about its roots? Where does work come from? How did work begin? Some say it started as God’s curse, his punishment for the sin of Adam and Eve.
But wait. God assigned work before Adam and Eve sinned. And even after they disobeyed, God did not curse work. He cursed the ground. “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.”
So the roots of work go deeper than the sin in the Garden of Eden. In the Bible, the word “work” appears for the first time in Genesis 2. In fact, it turns up three times in verses 2 and 3. “By the seventh day God had finished the WORK he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his WORK. Then God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the WORK of creating that he had done.” God, then, is the first Worker. The roots of work lie in God himself.
Further into Genesis 2 God’s work brings some surprises. In his sermon title, one pastor speaks of “A God with Dirty Hands.” Can that be true? Can the holy, working God do so with dirty hands? In creating light, sky, oceans, land, plants, and animals, God did so by speaking: “And God said . . . and there was.” No dirty hands are involved there. Just voice. But God’s method changes in Genesis 2:7.
To bring human beings into existence, God does not simply speak. “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” He “formed” human beings. That Hebrew verb pictures the kind of hand-squeezing a child might use in forming a donut out of Play-Doh. And his material? Dust. Dust leaves hands dirty.
Much later, Isaiah would describe God as a potter doing handwork with clay. Clay, of course, comes as dust from clay soil. This too encourages us to think of God as willing to get his hands dirty.
Back in the account of Creation, we discover yet another pointer to God’s work that involved getting his hands dirty. “Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden.” Planting a garden means hands getting into the soil.
Moving on into Genesis 3, we find the guilty couple hiding from God—both naked and afraid. But once again, God was not afraid to get his hands dirty: “The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.”Just in Genesis 2 and 3 we have seen that God did the work of a gardener, a potter, and a leatherworker. All of it involves getting the hands dirty.
This truth of the God who works stands in sharp contrast to the gods of the Greeks. As one writer puts it, ““The Greek gods did not work; they banqueted, intrigued, fought, and loved women.” Naturally, this contempt of their gods for work spilled over into Greek culture. As Roger Hill explains, “The Greeks . . . regarded work as a curse. . . . Manual labor was for slaves.” And “Aristotle . . . viewed work as a corrupt waste of time.”
Yet throughout the Bible, God reveals himself and what he does through working roles familiar to us. Consider these examples. Architect (Heb. 11:10). Teacher (Is. 54:12). Shepherd (Ps. 23:1). Government Official (103L13). Guard (Is. 27:3). Homemaker (Ps. 90:10). Landlord (Lev. 25:23). Writer (Ex. 32:16).
When God came to live among us in the person of Jesus, he came not as a tenured university professor, not as a politician, not as a military general, but—in today’s terms—as a blue-collar worker. With calloused, dirty hands.
And now for the greatest wonder of all. If God dirtied his hands in the original Creation, think of how much more so in the New Creation. On the cross, with bleeding hands, Jesus took the filth of our sin into his own body.
Near the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus made it clear that he had come “to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” And on the cross, just before he died, he said, “It is finished.” What was finished? The work his Father had sent him to complete. The dirty work it took to open the door so that we may enter into God’s Kingdom and into life eternal.
The roots of work lie in God himself. Work is good because he started it.
From Chapter One:
Knowing God as First Worker can free us up. Why? Because seeing him that way corrects a lot of disabling ideas about work.
