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You have worked 40 hours in the past week. You’ve just finished a long and interesting project with a cohesive team under the guidance of your trusted manager. You feel relieved and satisfied. With the weekend ahead, you can take a break from work. When you get home, you work outside in the snow and eat a tasty dinner in enjoyable company with your family: a Karelian roast with potatoes dug from your own field. The meal is finished with a pie made from blueberries picked in the summer. You’ll visit a wood-fired sauna, heated by birch wood felled on your father-in-law’s property. You’ll still remember with gratitude the timber work in the woods together. After an enjoyable moment with your wife between the sheets, you fall into a deep sleep with a book in your hand. You sleep so soundly that you wake up an hour later than usually, refreshed and well rested.
So what are you doing on Saturday? Domestic work, of course, which feels meaningful after a long working week. Maybe tending the garden, forestry, renovating, or painting the roof. Resting your mind, working with your hands.
The work goes on. In fact, it never stops.
Work before the fall
God created man in his own image to work. That’s right. To govern, protect, and guard his creation (Gen. 2:15). This DNA is inscribed into every human being. Work is therefore about shaping God’s creation and creating culture so that the end result is beautiful, good and true. One that honours the Creator and enriches the neighbour.
Leisure is not the absence of work. It is an attitude of mind that allows one to enjoy the thing itself without the utilitarian benefits it provides. Jean Calvin aptly asks, “Did God create food only for nourishment? Was it not also for pleasure and contentment?” Indeed, the purpose of growing and cooking food, or any work for that matter, is not only to efficiently achieve maximum utility in the future. Its purpose is deeper and better.
Work is therefore about shaping God’s creation and creating culture so that the end result is beautiful, good and true. One that honours the Creator and enriches the neighbour.
This does not mean that our work should become the purpose of our lives. After all, then it has become idolatry. The horror of which, unfortunately, we all know.
Work after the fall
You’ve worked 50 hours this past week. Your work was badly unfinished, your relationship with your difficult supervisor is problematic and the atmosphere in the workplace is unpleasant. The collective output is anything but high quality. You are frustrated. For the last few months you have been waking up in the middle of the night, and you are sleep-deprived. Exhaustion is knocking at your door. Even though the weekend is coming up, it doesn’t give you a sense of rest. On the contrary. Too many chores have been left undone. You feel anxious. You just want to rest. But you can’t really do that either. You’re tired, but sleep is intermittent. Monday is coming too soon and promised tasks at home and at work are constantly on your mind.
As a result of the fall, work as a blessing from God has become a burden and a curse. Burnout, unemployment, idleness, laziness, disdain for simple work, or envy of “fancy” work are our daily misfortunes. Rest from work is a distant utopia.
Inactivity and over-entertainment have passivated many, turning them into lazy people. “The sluggard dies to his own desires, when his hands refuse to work” (Proverbs 21:25). For others, behind the endless overtime hours lies a desire to show off in the eyes of others, to toot their own horn at the expense of others. Behind this workaholism, there are idols that do not help in the dark hours of the night.
The Lord’s work
The second Adam, Jesus Christ, lived the life of man without pretending to other men. It is hardly a coincidence that this carpenter’s son worked himself. But he did his work for the Lord, not for men. He learned obedience by growing up before his Lord. And when the work of his life came to its perfect end (John 19:30), he took the curse that belongs to us who have exchanged the blessing of work for idolatry. God accepted the work of his beloved Son, and as a sign of this he raised Jesus from the dead. That is why Jesus says today, “Come to me, all you who are weary with work and burdens. I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). The idolater is delivered from the bondage and curse of work.
As a result of the fall, work as a blessing from God has become a burden and a curse.
The gospel of Jesus Christ frees us from the pressure to strive to prove our existence through work. The day of rest reminds us of this in a concrete way. It frees us from scorning the simpler or envying the finer works. It also frees us from the sin of laziness. Work becomes a way of loving God and enriching the lives of our neighbours with truth, beauty, and goodness.
Everyone’s work will end one day. If not with retirement, then with sickness or old age, then finally with death. The ‘hellish’ experience of the exhausted person of not finding peace from work, undone or done, is but a foretaste of an eternal hell where there is no rest. Those who, by God’s grace, have received the gift of faith in Jesus, the Lord of rest, will be raised in a new body on the morning of the resurrection to rule, cultivate, and guard the new earth. To do the work in which rest is fully present through the perfect work of Christ for the glory of God and the enrichment of neighbour in a true, beautiful, and good way.
For further reading
Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Work (Penguin Putnam Inc, 2014)
Gene Veith, God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Crossway, 2011)