Stewardship Of WorkExemplo

Sin Distorted Work In The Fall

Genesis 1-2 tells us what God originally intended for us as His creatures. But Genesis 3 tells us what went wrong in the world. God created man to exercise dominion over the other creatures that He had created. But Adam instead permitted himself and Eve to be ruled by the crafty serpent.

As a result of man’s sin, work was now distorted. God declared in Gen. 3:17-19: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field; by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground.” 

Commenting on Gen. 3:17-19, Horton says, “God put a curse on the ground (not on Adam). What had been pleasant work would now become toil, often unrewarding, often difficult because of thorns and thistles” 

The curse came upon the soil, the work field that man is to cultivate, but as a commentator has said “In all work, manual, mental or spiritual, there is [now] an element of drudgery and monotony”

We also find that once God evicted man from the Garden of Eden, he had “to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.”(Gen 3:23) After Adam’s fall, it remained good for man to work. But due to God’s curse on the earth because of human sin, it became necessary for man not merely to work, but to work hard.

In today’s world, sin corrupts man’s attitude to work in two ways. Some people respond to the difficulty of working by hardly working. They have little ambition. They show little passion for serving others, making things that are good, or doing things that are helpful. Instead, they gear their lives toward leisure. They view work primarily to pay for rest and play. 

Another response to God’s curse on work runs in the opposite direction. They overwork themselves. Lusting for pride and gauging their value through ever-escalating achievements, they live for their work. Their passion usually is not work in the sense of helping people or accomplishing things that glorify God, but on demolishing the competition or feeling the thrill of the next accomplishment.

In both of these cases—caring little for work or caring only for work—we find that sin has corrupted something good. Human beings, after all, are designed by God to work. But now work involves either a duty to be avoided or an idol to be worshiped. This is a far cry from God’s design for Adam to “work and keep” the garden (2:15), serving for God’s glory as cultivators and protectors of God’s green earth.

God created man to find their identity in Him. He never designed people to find their identities or their ultimate delight in the achievements of their own hands. This is why one of God’s choicest punishments for sin is not only to make work difficult but to make success empty.

Quote: “When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.”  ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Prayer: Lord I pray that I will never shirk work or immerse myself in work. Help me to get my identity in You and not in my work. Amen