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- Six days you shall labor and do all your work...
Labor or Work is the tasks we do for a living: our occupation. The word Εργον, just like the English word 'Work,' can be used to say "picking up rocks is hard work" or "I put a lot of work into your birthday card." We mean it in the same sense in Psalm 104:23.
Contents |
False Dichotomy
- see Secularism
What we labor at, like all of our lives, falls under God's authority. There are not some occupations (like pastors and theologians) that are holy and the rest are merely necessary. Everything must be done for the glory of God and everything is either enhancing or detracting from His reputation in the world. Our labor must be made holy because work is holy. Work is from God and it is to be done for God. Work is to be part of that worship of our lives by which we do all things to the glory of God.
That, however, is a fundamental biblical conviction that the church has all too often let slip from her grasp. Too often she has come to think of the ordinary work of ordinary Christians as, if not positively unholy, at least less holy. Farming and guarding, such as Adam was called to do, became "secular" work, of much less importance, certainly much less Christian than other sorts of work, the kind of work that ministers do, for example. Compare two well-known pieces of early Christian writing. In the first, the early Christian letter Ad Diognetum, usually dated in the middle of the 2nd century, Christians are viewed as sharing the lot of other human beings but living very distinctive lives among them. They did not draw apart to live a separated life. They shared a common life but with a difference. They had a sense of vocation. They lived in the same world but according to a different set of convictions, a different set of standards, and a different set of purposes and intentions. Their holiness was found in the way that they lived the life that unbelievers had to live as well.
"For Christians cannot be distinguished from the rest of the human race by country or language or customs. They do not live in cities of their own; they do not use a peculiar form of speech; they do not follow an eccentric manner of life. This doctrine of theirs has not been discovered by the ingenuity of deep thought of inquisitive men, nor do they put forward a merely human teaching, as some people do. Yet, although they live in Greek and barbarian cities alike, as each man's lot has been cast, and follow the customs of the country in clothing and food and other matters of daily living, at the same time they give proof of the remarkable and admittedly extraordinary constitution of their own commonwealth. They live in their own countries, but only as aliens. They have a share in everything as citizens, and endure everything as foreigners. Every foreign land is their fatherland, and yet for them every fatherland is a foreign country. They marry, like everyone else, and they beget children, but they do not cast out their offspring. They share their board with each other, but not their marriage bed. It is true that they are "in the flesh," but they do not live "according to the flesh." They busy themselves on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws, but in their own lives they go far beyond what the laws require.
There is no specific mention of occupations in that statement, but it is obviously the assumption. They work the same jobs as their neighbors, but with this difference; that they are decidedly and unabashedly followers of Christ in the way they do their work. In this early Christian writing Christians are seen as working out their holiness in the ordinary callings of their lives.
But come forward a century and a half to Eusebius, the great 4th century church historian. The picture here is very different.
"Two ways of life were…given by the law of Christ to his church. The one is above nature, and beyond common human living; it admits not marriage, child-bearing, property nor the possession of wealth, but, wholly and permanently separate from the common customary life of mankind, it devotes itself to the service of God alone in its wealth of heavenly love! And they who enter on this course appear to die to the life of mortals, to bear with them nothing earthly but their body, and mind and spirit to have passed to heaven….Such then is the perfect form of the Christian life. And the other, more humble, more human, permits men to join in pure nuptials and to produce children, to undertake government, to give orders to soldiers…; it allows them to have minds for farming, for trade, and the other more secular interests as well as for religion; and it is for them that times of retreat and instruction, and days for hearing sacred things are set apart. And a kind of secondary grade of piety is attributed to them, giving just such help as such lives require, so that all men…have their part in the coming of salvation, and profit by the teaching of the gospel." [Demonstratio Evangelica, I, viii cited in W.R. Forrester, Christian Vocation, 43]
Jerome, in the 4th century would go so far as to say, "A merchant can seldom if ever please God," and Augustine went further to say, "Business is in itself evil," a necessary evil perhaps, but not the higher calling of a Christian. [Cited in Scott Quatro, Business Practice and Human Resource Management as God's Creation, 1]
By the time of Eusebius the occupations of most Christians, their working lives if you will, had become not the sacred sphere which Christians answer the divine call to be workers, but a kind of second class living for those who could not aspire to higher things. And the truly Christian form of work was found not in the way and purpose for which work was done but the kind of work that was performed. Adam the farmer was no longer adequate. Now Adam must be a monk or a nun. Other work was secular, comparatively unimportant and had little bearing on the eternal issues of life.
That idea has, alas, been very deeply rooted in the Christian psyche, even the Protestant evangelical and Reformed psyche. And the results of this way of thinking have always been the same: Christian people in their working lives have sunk farther and farther from the influences of God's Word and they live two lives, one for church and one for the world. Very often their two lives had little to do with one another. Genuine Christianity, the real work of the kingdom of God, was for a spiritual aristocracy. The rest of the church worked to make a living. Perhaps they never thought to be Christian mobsters, but they did not think carefully about what it meant to be a Christian in their job and how they might serve the Lord in their work and how it might become a ministry in as true a way as gospel preaching is a ministry.
That such a view gained currency in the Christian church is especially sad for two reasons. First, it is a view that wholly lacks biblical justification, as we will see. And second, it has kept generations of Christians from bringing the gospel to bear in a powerful way on the affairs of the world. Efforts were made from time to time to contradict this false distinction – as in the life and work of Francis of Assisi – but with little success. True Christian work became church work or the work of those who were separated from the common life of the world to the life of contemplation, prayer, and charity. It took the Reformation and the rediscovery of the Bible's viewpoint finally to make an effective attack on this spiritual/secular dichotomy.
Martin Luther began the attack and carried it out with vigor.
"When a maid cooks and cleans and does other housework, because God's command is there, even such a small work must be praised as a service of God far surpassing the holiness and asceticism of all monks and nuns." [Cited in Forester, 148]
Or again:
"The idea that the service to God should have only to do with a church altar, singing, reading, sacrifice, and the like is without doubt but the worst trick of the devil. How could the devil have led us more effectively astray than by the narrow conception that service to God takes place only in church and by works done therein… The whole world could abound with services to the Lord. Gottesdienste – not only in churches but also in the home, kitchen, workshop, field." [Cited in R.P. Stevens, The Other Six Days, 77]
Here is Calvin.
"It is an ancient error that those who flee worldly affairs and engage in contemplation are leading an angelic life… We know that men were created to busy themselves with labor and that no sacrifice is more pleasing to God than when each one attends to his calling and studies to live well for the common good." [Com. on Luke, at 10:38; vol. ii, 89]
I should say that scholarship does detect a difference between Luther and Calvin on this point. Here is one description of the difference.
"It must be admitted that Luther did not follow out the implications of his revolutionary view of the common life as a 'calling' ... It was left to Calvinism to discover the close connexion between the actual callings with the work they entailed, on the one hand, and the love and the wisdom of God on the other. To Lutheranism these vocations were forms, within which a man did his Christian duty. To Calvinism they were the very means through which love and faith could become realized. As Max Weber says, Luther sees the Christian serving God in vocatione, not per vocationem. [R.N. Flew, The Idea of Perfection in Christian Theology, 252]
So, consider this from the Calvinist, William Tyndale.
"There is no work better than another to please God: to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a [cobbler], or an apostle, all are one; to wash dishes and to preach are all one, as touching the deed, to please God." [Parker Society, vol. 42, 102]
Jobs
Work, in this time, is often at a job, but can include homemaking, what women do at home with their children. In every case, however, we are to see our labor as something we do unto God and one of the main avenues through which God provides for us. It is also the typically best means we have in our modern economies of reaching the unsaved. Some jobs are not possible for the Christian, like prostitution or burglary, but, as John the Baptist explicitly said, a Christian could be a soldier of imperial Rome pacifying a conquered country, such as Judea.
Jesus himself was a carpenter and so sanctified all manner of occupations. If the perfectly righteous life of the Son of God was a life of work – and not "spiritual" work, but the ordinary work of ordinary human beings – if the only perfect human life ever lived in this world was a life of a working man, then plainly that is to be our life as well. Imagine what the church would have thought about ordinary work – the work of the first Adam, for example – if Jesus had been a rabbi instead of a carpenter. But he was a carpenter and, by being so, sanctified every sort of ordinary occupation: made it holy.
Work is the sphere of man's service to God, every man's, every Christian's. From the time of the Reformation through the Puritan period, the first and foremost biblical text employed to prove that occupations are divine callings to be fulfilled in faith, love, and obedience, was 1 Corinthians 7:17.
Only, as the Lord has distributed to each man, as God has called each, so let him walk. So I command in all the assemblies.
Now, it is to be admitted that the issue Paul is dealing with is not occupations per se. The passage up to that point has been about marriage, the single life, and divorce and the matters mentioned afterward concern circumcision and slavery. But slavery was an occupation even if it was also a station in life. However, it is also to be admitted that the text can be translated in different ways and that Luther's use of it to justify the sanctity of every Christian's calling is certainly not the main point that Paul is after. However, what the reformers took from this text and the Puritans after them was the notion that God calls us in concrete life circumstances and that we can give answer to his call in those circumstances. That does seem to be the clear implication of Paul's statement. If our occupations are not explicitly said to be divine callings here, they are the setting in which we work out our calling from God. God had called them to this. We have an assignment from God in the circumstances of our daily life. A man could view his work as a divine calling, something God himself had summoned him to do, give him to do, and so in doing it he was both obeying God's command and fulfilling his purpose.
Of course it is also clear in that same passage that a man does not have to stay in the station or occupation or situation he was in when he became a Christian. Paul says to slaves there that, if they can gain their freedom, by all means they should do so. The idea of God having called you in a particular set of circumstances does not mean that you must remain in those circumstances. That has sometimes been thought. In the medieval church, in the Victorian English church with its strong sense of social class, in the Indian church today with its residual sense of caste, one encounters the idea that God has fixed one's place in life, perhaps including the occupation that goes with that place.
The rich man in his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
He made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
But that is never taught in the Bible. It is never said or implied that a man or woman has but one occupation or station and is to remain there for life. A calling is not a man's lot or fate, it is, rather, the set of circumstances in which he finds himself and there he is to serve the Lord. [Paul Helm, The Callings, 47-48]
Origins
God made man to work and gave him work to do. In the Garden of Eden, at the beginning of time, man was given two occupations. He was both to till the garden and to guard it (Genesis 2:15). He was both farmer and watchman. He had a calling and that calling was his work. And in the account of all that in Genesis 2 we are obviously dealing with representative facts. We are not finding out about the life of Adam only, but about the life of mankind. In that early material we have Adam as worker, as steward and vice-regent of creation, we have Adam as husband and Eve as wife, we have Adam in relationship to God and as worshipper of God; we have all of that in this early material. There Adam is every man, every human being. And as every man he is homo laborans, working man. And, the Bible develops or elaborates this identity of human beings from that point.
Rhythum
Work – that kind of work (farming and being a watchman, for example) – is the divine calling of every human being. Man was not made first to recreate but to work. That God gave him a day of rest is directly related to the fact that, in imitation of God, man would work the other six days of the week. His was to be a laboring life. It was to have a rhythm, but that rhythm was six days of work and one of rest. God worked and then rested and man's life is to be lived in imitation of his creator. Work originates in God himself and to be a worker is part of what it means for man to have been created in God's image and likeness. So we are not surprised as we read the Bible to find man working everywhere we look. Work – work conceived as an occupation, as a living – is God's will for our lives. Work is what God created us to do. And so work is holy. It has a divine purpose and is a divine calling.
In Eternity
Work will be our calling in the world to come as several texts make a point of teaching (e.g. Isaiah 65:21,22; Micah 4:3). So much is work the calling of a human life, so much is it what we were created to do, that it will continue to be the business of our life when sin is conquered and mankind has risen to a perfect state. Work was assigned to man in Eden; it will be required of him in heaven.
| Words | |
| Greek | ΕΡΓΟΝ |
|---|---|
| Hebrew | פעל |
| Latin | OPUS |
| Concepts | |
| Super | Life |
| Sub | {{{sub}}} |
| Related | Work, Effort, Job, Occupation, Task |