Work Hard And Rest Satisfied (Genesis 1:28-2:3)
Work does not receive the honor that it deserves in this world. And it makes sense. It really does. Work is not as it was created to be. It may be better to say that the Fall has really made a mess of work. God created work and it was good. Human beings have been working from the beginning, but in the beginning, it was good and today it is not always good. Today we work with other imperfect people who can at times cause real problems in the workplace. And our work can sometimes seem futile. In other words, work was incredibly fulfilling and a complete blessing before the Fall. All of work after Genesis 3 has been affected by sin.
Now, as creatures created in God’s image, we are to be people who take dominion of the Earth. And we do that as representatives of God on Earth. This should change the way we think about work in this life. In “The Gospel at Work” Sebastian Traegar and Greg Gilbert beautifully say what I hope that you pick up today.
“No matter what you do, your job has inherent purpose and meaning because you are doing it ultimately for the King. Who you work for is more important than what you do. The world will tell you otherwise. The world will tell you that life finds its meaning in success at work, or that work is just a necessary evil on the path to leisure. All those ways of thinking are lies. You do work for someone beyond your boss. You work for Jesus. That fact is the most important thing you can know and remember about your work. It’s much more important than the job itself, regardless of whether you’re a homemaker, a banker, a political staffer, a construction worker, a barista, or a corporate executive. No matter what you are doing, you are doing it to glorify Jesus.”[1]—Sebastian Traeger and Greg Gilbert
You are a representative of God on Earth. We work, not just to pay the bills, but to honor Him. As Christians, we seek to honor King Jesus in all we do. And this includes your work where you will spend vast amounts of your time on Earth.
Today we will see that work is good and something we should take pride in and rest from.
Today we will be in Genesis 1:28-2:3 and see that work is good and something that we should take pride in and rest from.
Work Is Good (Genesis 1:28 and 1:31)
This is difficult to discuss in our day. In a time when a judgment of what is good and bad comes directly from navel gazing and thinking about feelings it is hard to convince people that work is good. And the reason is simple. Work doesn’t conjure up the best of feelings.
Everybody’s working for the weekend and the long weekend called retirement. It doesn’t seem as if anybody is working because it is just good to work. Of course, there are exceptions to this rule. I have known people who would retire and then go work another job because they understood this idea whether they could express it that way or not. But, for the most part convincing someone that work is good is a difficult task.
But you should notice here that man was commanded to subdue the Earth when created.
“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.” (Genesis 1:28 ESV)
This command to work predated the Fall of man. And it was in existence on the Earth when God declared everything to be “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
And I know that this may seem a bit different than watching people work, which is fun to do. But the entirety of this chapter has been us watching God work. He worked for six days and created the world. Work is itself “very good”.
This is before the Fall and that says a lot. It tells us that work itself is “very good.” I have oftentimes heard people speak of work as if it is going to go away when we are in the New Heavens and New Earth, but I do not believe that will be the case. I believe that we will go back to a time when work is completely and totally satisfying. It will be without the curse. It will be without the sense of futility that oftentimes come. After I mow the grass and I see that it has been done well I look at it with a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. When I have gardened in the past I have been very happy to get to see and eat the fruits of my labor. When I have built things it has brought me great satisfaction and joy. That is what work will be like in the New Heavens and Earth, perfectly fulfilling without the hardships that the Fall has brought.
We will work until Jesus comes and then we will work in a more fulfilling way when He comes.
There is a worldly belittling of work in our day. Most people see work as not being good and that it is just something that must be done. But that way of thinking is not for us. Neither should we think that we should work hard to fulfill our lusts. We are God’s representatives on Earth and we should be people who think Christianly about work.
It is Christianly thinking about work that made the country that we live in so prosperous. It is Christianly thinking about work that brought prosperity to the Western World. Max Weber wrote a book called “The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” in 1904. In it he pointed out that prosperity followed every place that the Protestant Reformation spread. Ideas have consequences and back in the 1500’s Martin Luther was teaching people something that we Baptists affirm and that is the priesthood of every believer. He showed from Scripture that everything we were to do, even our work, was to be done as unto the Lord. And this had a tremendous affect on the world.
Don’t be influenced by worldly thinking about work. Think Christianly about work. We understand that work itself has been changed by the Fall and that work is harder now. We understand that we work with sinful people that make work more difficult. All of these things must be understood, but Christian work itself is good. And when we think Christianly about work big things happen. And though we live in a fallen world tainted with sin, we have been redeemed. And so we can work for our livelihood and our neighbor joyfully knowing that we are doing this as His redeemed representatives on this Earth.
Let us work and let us work hard. Let us work and honor the Lord. Let us work and help our neighbor. Our friends recently paid this church a tremendous compliment as they discussed the help given at the drop of a hat. And it’s a beautiful thing to get to be a part of a church that loves and works in that way.
Take Pride In Your Work (Genesis 1:31)
As Creatures created in God’s Image we are to honor God with our work. If you think about it, you spend a lot of time at work. If you take the typical 8 hour work day and 8 hours of sleep at night then you understand just how much of your time is spent at work. For those working 40 hours a week, about half of their time for 5 days of the week is spent working. So, what are we to do with it.
My Dad used to tell me to take pride in my work. And what he meant by that was that I should do my work well. The work that I do is a reflection of myself. It says something about who you are. If you do your work halfway then it says something about who you are as a person. Take pride in your work.
You should take pride in your work, but I do want to make a slight correction to that way of thinking about the statement. You should take pride in your work, but not because of what it says about you but what it says about God.
We are to honor God with our work. We are His vice regents. We rule in His stead. We are to work and honor God in our work because He has given us this task. He told us, as His image bearers to go forth and subdue the Earth. And our response to that has been glorious. We have built skyscrapers, cell phones, and rockets that can carry people to other planets.
I believe that those people inadvertently honored God in their task. We live in a day when the world’s wealthiest people are having their own space race amongst themselves. Billionaires are fighting to see who will exalt their self the highest. But, like the skyscrapers that we have seen built throughout the years, and cell phones God is glorified in the innovation of His image bearers throughout the world. As people go forth and take dominion, they glorify God even when they do it with a horribly self-centered attitude. I do believe that one day God will set the record straight and inform them that He is to receive glory and honor far above them, but He is still glorified by the innovation of His image bearers throughout the world.
The point is that we should be people who work and honor God with our work. When we build the big things, our aim is to honor God. When we maintain things such as our homes and our yards, we aim to bring glory to God. Whatever your job is, as long as it is a God-honoring profession…don’t try to honor God and work in the mob, then you’ll need a new line of work, your aim should be to bring glory and honor to God.
In the last verse of the first chapter of the Bible we see God looking at what He has made. His work is complete and He casts judgment upon it. And God Himself looked at His work and saw that it was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). This says a few things about creation before the Fall. One, it was perfect. If God judged it “very good”. It was perfect. And second, God did not do this halfway.
I want to emphasize to you that this was before the Fall. God was commanding work and working Himself before the Fall and it was “very good” (Genesis 1:31).
There are wrong reasons to go to work. I think we can see this easily enough. It is obvious that we are doing the wrong thing if we are doing a job that is sinful, such as drug dealer or prostitute. But you can also do things to bring glory and honor to you alone. We were created in the image of God and because of that we should take pride in our work so that the work we do brings glory and honor to the Lord. As Christians we have double the reason to do so for we want to glorify the Lord who redeemed us.
Christian, God has made us His representatives, so we work and we do so to honor the Lord. Do your job well, whatever that may be. This does not mean that you have to remain in the same job you are at until you retire, but it does mean that you arrive and leave honorably. There is something good about being faithful to a company over the course of many years. But sometimes that is not possible and sometimes the sinful decisions of others or the sinful mistreatment of employees means that you can go honor the Lord in a different job. Wherever you are, honor the Lord with your work.
Parents, teach your children to value their job well done. Let them know that they did a good job when they do a good job. And don’t accept work that is halfway done whether it be school work, work around the house, chores, or a job they are working. Too many people don’t have any idea how to work today. I believe that we have allowed todays abundance to create atrophied children. It’s no longer necessary for children to work with their parents out in the fields or around the house. The advent of washers, dryers, dishwashers, and other appliances as well as other conveniences has made it less necessary for children to do a lot of work around the house. Your children need to learn how to work and you may need to get creative in figuring out how you are going to do that.
Think about it this way. Where did you learn how to work?
For my own part, it was primarily by working with my Dad. I cut wood with my father and brother because we had wood heat. I learned to work in the garden. There are a lot of rocks to gather every year in a garden in North Arkansas. I learned to work as I shoveled chicken litter into the wheel barrow from the chicken house and chicken pen. I learned to work as I mowed the grass. And I also learned on the basketball court, the football field, and the weight room.
And here is my point. How are your children going to learn to work in this world? It’s going to be through you teaching them.
And, as a church we should take pride in our work. God has given us a task, a mission to make disciples of all nations. We are to baptize and teach them to follow all of Jesus’s commands. As a church we should be a people who are at work.
Rest
By the time we get to the end of our text today we realize that rest is a beautiful and God ordained thing. God has worked for six days to create the Earth as He wanted it to be and now He rests from His labor. There is a picture here of God doing His best work and creating a beautiful and perfect world for us to inhabit. Then, when it was all finished and all good He sat down with His job being completed. And when this happened, by God’s act, He consecrated the seventh day. It was a day of rest.
What we need to see here is that resting from labor is good. But you must work to truly rest. If you are resting after resting that is laziness.
This comes down to one of those balancing acts that we maintain in life. We are to have a rhythm of resting and working built into our schedule. We were not made to rest all the time, nor were we made to work all the time. We are creatures and as such we need a rhythm of work and rest.
The Sabbath command was given for this very reason.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.” (Exodus 20:8-11 ESV)
There were six days for the people of the Lord to labor, but one day was set aside for two purposes. The first, was to devote the day wholly to the Lord. Six days could be devoted to meeting earthly needs and acquiring wealth. One day, however, was to be set aside for the Lord. The second is that there was one day to rest in the trust of the Lord.
In an agrarian society it would have been difficult to spend a day resting. A simple garden in the backyard is an illustration of this fact. If you have tomatoes on the vine that are ripe, what will happen if you leave them on an extra day. Well, it might get eaten by something. The sun might blister it. Or it might get overripe. For them to set aside one day was an immense act of trust and faith in the Lord. They worked hard throughout the six days they were allowed to labor and rested in the Lord on the seventh day.
Though I do view this commandment as being something that has passed away with the advent of Christ, you likely remember this discussion if you were for that Wednesday Night discussion, the need for rest is not gone. I might be wrong. And I might chance my mind in an attempt to discern the truth in the future a few more times, but you need to know that you are a creature and need rest.
And so, we are to imitate God in our lives. We are to be people who work well as we subdue the earth. And then we rest.
The world and your sinful desires never want you to rest. Or it comes up with ways that you will always be at rest. You are inundated with tremendous amounts of information through your cell phone that will cause you to never shut down and truly rest. And that thing will likely cause you to waste a lot of time and not be productive. We are also inundated with commercials and appeals for more and more things, that we just have to have. So we order our lives around the accumulation of stuff.
Christian, we work because we want to honor God. Yes, we work to provide for our needs and the needs of our family, but we are redeemed image bearers of the Lord. And because of this we want to honor God with our work. And we rest because we trust Him. That’s what the Sabbath rest was all about.
I will say that at this moment, most Americans have not set themselves up to rest. We have cell phones that keep us from resting. Some of you likely lose track of time at night because of that cell phone. And we have debt that keeps us from resting. What happens when you have too many bills to pay? Or when your bill paying becomes this incredible balancing act? You are in a constant state of worry over the bills and you end up needing to either get another job or downsize your life. And as Americans who love to have their stuff, the choice is most often to work more in order to get more stuff. But that pushes us out of a good and healthy rhythm of work and rest.
Now, I want to emphasize that I am not saying that you must work only 40 hours per week. If I were simply to think through the life of an Israelite in this time there would have been weeks that he worked around 70 hours. If he is up to work at daylight in his field and finishes at sundown, this would be the case. And I am sure that at around harvest time that is exactly what happened. But there were times of the year when his work would have been dramatically decreased due to less needing to be done. He had a natural rhythm to life that changed with the seasons. Today we have electricity and are dominated by the clock in ways that an ancient Israelite could never have dreamed of. Today you can take your work home and never really be away from work. And so, we must order our lives to give us the ability to rest.
And this is what I am arguing for with this statement. Sometimes we see that we would better honor the Lord if we made changes in our lives. In this case we might set boundaries on when we can check our phones. I recently had some friends by wristwatches so they would not check their phone to see what time it is. I know that I have put my phone behind me in my office because if it is beside me I will check it entirely too often. If the accumulation of debt is the problem then figure out a way out of that problem. It might be that you need to downsize your lifestyle. Or, it might be that you need to be on the hunt for a higher paying job so that you can work less hours and make more money. Whatever the case may be, we need to order our lives in such a way that we can rest from our labors and trust the Lord.
Parents, we need to teach this to our children as well. There is a God ordained rhythm of work and rest that needs to be instilled in our lives. I struggle in this area in my own life and want for my children to better be able to do this in their own lives. We rest from our labors and trust in the Lord. But this means that we must instill a work ethic in our children. Their life cannot be constant rest. And again, this is an area that I am trying to work in. Our children work with their mom when they do school. We are giving our children more chores to do at home. Haddon is mowing the grass.
And I have to be completely honest at this point. This is very difficult at times. It is almost always easier to just do it yourself. But if we skip over the hard work of teaching our children to do certain tasks then they will never be people who learn how to work.
And when God the Son came to Earth He worked and achieved a rest for us. We rebelled against God. We have earned for ourselves God’s wrath and justice. And God the Son took on human flesh and dwelt among us. He lived a completely perfect life on our behalf. And He died on the cross as the perfect substitute for us. Jesus Christ offered up Himself as a sacrifice on behalf of His people so that they could enter into God’s rest.
And as a church we must be at work pointing people to the Lord. We call them to trust the Lord and find true rest in Christ. The rest in the Sabbath pointed forward to the rest that comes in Christ. And so, we encourage each other in the faith. And we call upon those outside the faith to enter the rest that is found only in Christ.
“For Jesus has been counted worthy of more glory than Moses–as much more glory as the builder of a house has more honor than the house itself. (For every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God.) Now Moses was faithful in all God’s house as a servant, to testify to the things that were to be spoken later, but Christ is faithful over God’s house as a son. And we are his house, if indeed we hold fast our confidence and our boasting in our hope.
Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says,
“Today, if you hear his voice,
do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion,
on the day of testing in the wilderness,
where your fathers put me to the test
and saw my works for forty years.
Therefore I was provoked with that generation,
and said, ‘They always go astray in their heart;
they have not known my ways.’
As I swore in my wrath,
‘They shall not enter my rest.'”
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. As it is said,
“Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.
For who were those who heard and yet rebelled? Was it not all those who left Egypt led by Moses? And with whom was he provoked for forty years? Was it not with those who sinned, whose bodies fell in the wilderness? And to whom did he swear that they would not enter his rest, but to those who were disobedient? So we see that they were unable to enter because of unbelief.
Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened.”
(Hebrews 3:3-4:2 ESV)
As a church we labor to help each other remain strong in the faith and God’s rest. And we labor to bring others into that very rest that we are in now and will find completely fulfilled in the New Heavens and New Earth.
Conclusion
Everything within us and outside of us wants to tell us that work is something to just be endured until we don’t have to endure it anymore whether that be a few more hours until it’s time to go home or a few more years until we can retire. But work is much more than that. Whether you are working as a stay-at-home-mother or driving a sewage truck your job is about more than just the job you are working. You are representing the Lord with your work, and it is good. You should take pride in your labor, but never let yourself think that your work is more important than honoring the Lord. We honor the Lord by working hard and taking pride in our work, but also trusting Him enough to rest.
And as a church, let us be at work sharing the gospel with a lost and dying world calling them to turn from ruling their own lives and enter into the rest that can only be found in Christ Jesus.
R. Dwain Minor
[1] Sebastian Traeger and Greg Gilbert, The Gospel At Work: How Working For King Jesus Gives Purpose And Meaning To Our Jobs, Zondervan, 2013, Pp. 16-17.