What does the Bible say about work? by Mark Legg for Denison Forum
- Eden Work
- The Fall’s thorns and thistles
- Unique problems facing modern work
- How to redeem modern work
- Respond to God’s call
- The mysterious worship of work and art
- Remember Sabbath rest
- Practical steps to glorify God in work
- Conclusion, and a handful of stories
In the creation story, Eden is not an ethereal realm. Rather, it is a garden on earth, a place where the spiritual and physical blend together.
In Johns’s vision of the “end times,” God unveils a city, the new Jerusalem, and a “new heaven and new earth”—a sanctified rebirth of the universe, basking in Christ’s glory (Revelation 21:1; Isaiah 65:17; 2 Peter 3:13). When we die, we join in perfect union “with the Lord,” but we will do so with resurrected, renewed physical bodies (Philippians 3:21).
In other words, “the Bible ends where it begins—on earth,” united with heaven.
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We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
God will not judge the earth to leave it void but to create something new.
If God’s story for humankind begins and ends with earth—“good” in the beginning, broken in the middle, and “new” in the end—what does that mean for what we do in the middle, fallen period?
We should return to Genesis to see what we were designed for and what is good.
Eden work
“The Lᴏʀᴅ God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. . . . Now out of the ground the Lᴏʀᴅ God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:15; 19–20, emphasis added).
“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” (Genesis 1:28, emphasis added).
