In all toil there is profit….
Proverbs 14.23
“Help Wanted” signs are up all over the country. Businesses are struggling, not only to find competent workers, but warm bodies who will show up. Jobs are available, but many people don’t want to work. On his November 2, 2021 show, Matt Walsh reported that three out of four unemployed able-bodied men of working age simply don’t want to work. Some of the biggest industries hit are the leisure and hospitality sectors. Vox, drawing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, reports that there are 1.7 million job openings in the industries, ten percent of the entire industry, with another one million quitting. Theories concerning the loss of drive to work, especially among able-bodied men, are many. Some attribute it to low pay (although some places are paying higher wages than they ever have). Others attribute it to the government’s quantitative easing through printing money, extending and expanding unemployment benefits, and sending out stimulus checks, disincentivizing workers who make more staying home than they would at work. Walsh attributes the problem to despair and purposelessness.
A perfect storm is brewing that has been created between the factors mentioned and many more that has already and will leave devastation in its wake. But all of this gives us the opportunity to ask ourselves, “Why do we work?” If work is only about getting a paycheck and the government provides that, why shouldn’t I get on the dole like everyone else and ride this gravy train until the last stop? The sheer mechanics of God’s world tell us that this is unstainable. You have to engage in some level of work to continue to survive. Remove producers from society and soon we will be covered with a fruitless, unkempt world that will be our death.
Work is necessary. But why? The answers are in the opening pages of Scripture and are presupposed and built upon throughout.
In the opening line of Scripture, we meet the Worker, God himself: “In the beginning God created….” God works. The crown jewel of his creation is man made in his image. Reading only the first chapter of Genesis and seeing a God who is working, we can’t miss that if God is a worker then his image must be a worker as well. Some of the first words spoken to man confirm this: “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’” (Ge 1.28). Subdue it. Exert effort to manipulate and dominate the creation.
Work, therefore, is not the result of the fall. Arduous, frustrating, and fruitless work is the result of the curse (see Rom 8.20), but work itself is a part of our being and calling as the image of God. To refuse to work and to discourage work de-humanizes us, becoming less than animals and insects who instinctively reflect the glory of our working God. Even ants know that they need to work (Pr 6.6-11).
Work as God intends us to work is effort that seeks to fulfill our calling to bring proper order and productivity within the creation. Even before the fall, man was called to develop the unformed and unfilled creation outside of the Garden so that it would image God’s heavenly throne room.
God’s heaven is what everything should be. Everything from personal lives to society is in right relationship with God, one another, and the surrounding creation. We know, for instance, that in the resurrection, when our bodies are completely united to and reflective of God’s heavenly city, we will be made completely whole; no more sickness and death. Caring for physical bodies, whether caring for myself or being a medical doctor who cares for others, is work that seeks to shape the world properly. It is good work. God’s throne room is also beautiful, a reality that we can see in its earthly shadows, the Tabernacle and Temple. The creation of beauty, whether in interpersonal relationships or the arts is good work, seeking to bring God’s order to the world. God’s heaven is a dwelling place, again a truth reflected in the Temple. Building buildings that are beautiful and provide shelter is working to bring order. God’s heaven is filled with his hosts, his armies. His command to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth is part of the mission to establish proper order. This fruitfulness is more than mere numbers. It is that, but it is also that all the hosts of heaven do the will of God. We desire that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Because the world is always changing, there will always be a need for work, and much of that work will be repetitive. There will always be fields to be plowed, houses to be cleaned, patients to be cared for, automobiles to be repaired, and many other things. Because the world still suffers from the effects of sin, there will always be a need for hard work, fighting ourselves to take up our responsibility to work as well as fighting the thorns and thistles out in the world.
This work, however, is not an endless cycle moving to nothing. All of our work, wherever it is in creation … the boring and mundane to the spectacular, the preaching of the gospel to the digging of ditches … all of our work is building the world God intended from the beginning. God’s salvation does not remove us from the work of the world. Salvation in Christ restores us as the image of God and, therefore, as workers. In saving us as workers, he also saves our works; that is, he redeems and establishes the work of our hands to build a kingdom that will never be destroyed. We are not saved by our works, but our works are saved in Christ. The curse that makes work frustrating and fruitless was reversed when Christ Jesus suffered under that curse at the cross and overcame it in the resurrection. The resurrection proclaims that work, even work that ends under the curse’s death, is being used to make a new creation. For this reason, we work in hope. “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1Cor 15.58).
