By Jerry Batson, Th.D.
Special to The Alabama Baptist
The calendar suggests the timeliness of interrupting the series of studies about the personhood of Christ in order to approach Labor Day by refreshing our minds about the Bible’s teaching concerning work in the lives of believers. So we turn our thoughts to some basic aspects of a theology of work.
A good place to begin is at the beginning, that is, with God’s creation of humankind as recounted in Genesis. From the beginning God intended that humans would work. Before sin entered the picture amid the perfections of the Garden of Eden, God intended that the man whom He had created would work in that garden. The record says it simply, “Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15).
Adam had the assignment to be the tender and keeper of that garden. What happened when disobedience entered the picture was that human work outside the garden would entail sweat and toil, according to God’s declaration. “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground” (Gen. 3:19a). God’s original intention that people work took on a different character. It would become laborious and exhausting in order to be fruitful.
Principles about work
In the New Testament we learn several principles about work. The most basic of the principles is that God’s creative intention was that humans should work in order to supply their basic needs. Later, God stipulated in the fourth of the Ten Commandments that His people should honor the seventh day by keeping it holy, but He also included a companion commandment, “Six days you shall labor” (Ex. 20:9). Not to work is to be disobedient.
Of course the underlying and very practical assumption is that a person has the mental and physical ability to work, along with the opportunity or availability of a place to work. The striking declaration of 1 Timothy 5:8 clearly tells us that Christians who have the ability to work and the opportunity to do so but choose not to work has denied the faith and are themselves “worse than an unbeliever.” Work is part and parcel of God’s intention for us.
Another principle is that believers should work for the sake of their testimony before others. From the just cited passage in 1 Timothy it is easily seen that believers who choose not to work besmirch their Christian testimony by choosing to identify themselves with the world of unbelievers. Lazy and trifling believers ruin their witness in a world where many unbelievers are committed to hard work.
Be fruitful
A third principle is that believers should work in order to be able to give to the needs of others. Ephesians 4:28, in admonishing Christians to forego stealing, calls for a believer to labor, “working with his hands the thing that is good, that he may have something to give to him who has need.” Titus 3:14 sets forth the same idea, “Let our people also learn to maintain good works for necessary uses that they may not be unfruitful.”
In this Labor Day season, let us reflect anew on the dignity of honest work, keeping in mind that God Himself chose to send His Son into a working class family and that honest work, as well as all life’s activities, is enfolded in the sweeping admonition of 1 Corinthians 10:31, “Whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
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