How many hours do you work each week? Ever totaled up a close approximation of the hours you will work in your lifetime? If you work for 45 years, 50 weeks per year, 45 hours per week, you will have worked over one hundred thousand hours in your life. Perhaps the only activity we do more than work is sleep.
Given the sheer amount of time we spend working, it makes sense that we would want to have God’s perspective on work.
Have you ever thought about that? That God might have a perspective on work? He does. In fact, God talks about work quite often in the Bible.
Right from the very beginning we see God working, creating, and then resting. In Genesis 1, we read about God creating all things, and in Genesis 2, verses 2 and 3, we read that “God rested from all his work…of creating.” Our God is a working God.
When God creates humanity, he declares in Genesis 1, verse 26, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
God works to create humans, and then he gives those humans a mandate to work. In Genesis 1:26, part of that work is to rule over God’s creation. That “rule over” is a reference to the idea that we are stewards of God’s creation. A steward is one who works to lead and guide and care for someone else’s property and possession. The fundamental understanding of human work is that it is stewardship work. We steward God’s creation, which means that we care for it like God would want us to.
Scan ahead to Genesis 2, verse 15, and we learn that when God creates the man, God “put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Then God decides that the man shouldn’t be alone, so he brings animals to the man to name the animals. More work on God’s part, and more work that the man does. God and man are working together.
But no animal is a suitable as an equal partner to the man. So God creates woman. Eventually, in chapter 3, the man and woman disobey God, and for their punishment, God declares that work will be difficult. The pain of childbearing. Farming the ground will be toilsome.
So there is a sense that God institutes work, he is a working God, and he invites us to join with him in working. Both men and women are workers. Work is generative, creative, productive. It is toilsome, laborious, and sometimes difficult.
To summarize, work is good, work is instituted by God, for the good of God’s creation. The primary way we view our work is that we are stewards of God’s creation. From that foundation of the goodness of work, we turn to 1 Thessalonians.
In 1 Thessalonians, we are reading a letter that an ancient missionary, Paul, wrote to a group of Christians in the Greco-Roman city of Thessalonica. In the letter he is urging them to continue living a life that is pleasing to God. Last week, Molly Stouffer blogged on some verses in chapters four and five that talk about brotherly love. This week, I’m also in chapters four and five, but my verses are about work.
We get started in the next post.
Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 