Humans were Created to Work

An introduction essay to a series on God's purpose of human work.

When we don’t understand the purpose of work, it makes deciding what to work on nearly impossible. This is amplified by the number of career options, and the overwhelming amount of family members, advertising executives, influencers and algorithms trying to influence your decisions. With so many factors trying to guide your life, it becomes important as a Christian to rediscover a biblical view of work. 

Without that clear view of God’s purpose for work, it also makes it easy to work for the wrong reasons. In fact, there is one common reason to work that has invaded the Christian mind, working to provide. While many Christians would agree that you should “Work as unto the Lord”, this is quickly followed up with statements like “and that means being responsible and providing for your family.” This move is a sleight of hand that unfortunately equates “Working as unto the Lord” with an idea of work contrary to God’s purpose for work. This not to say that you shouldn’t provide for your family, but putting your focus in the idea of working to put food on the table acts as an idol that distracts from our true calling. The Bible is clear that God’s purpose for work was never for us to slave away to make ends meet, but to participate in His creative, and now redemptive plan for the world. 

Over the course of several essays, I will explain God’s original purpose for work through the lens of Genesis; how work was transformed from a way of participating with God into a way of providing and surviving; and finally, I will round out the essays showing how Jesus redeems us from working to provide and calls us back to God’s original purpose. 

In the first couple essays, the focus is going to be on God’s original purpose for human work. I will attempt to show that God created humans to work, that the work we are called to do is tied to being created in God’s image, and that God originally enlisted humans to participate in His plan for the world not just as stewards, but as co-creators. 

When trying to understand God’s original purpose for things, there is no better place to start than the book of beginnings, Genesis. When we look at the early pages of Genesis, what we find is that not only did God create humans to work, but the work He created them for is intricately connected to our call to be His images in the world.

The first thing we need to understand is that God created humans to work.

There are many Christians who would argue that work is a consequence of the fall, but that is a misreading of Genesis. Man was created from the beginning to work. When God creates man in Genesis 1, He tells him to replenish the earth, subdue it, and have dominion over it. This is followed up in Genesis 2 when God puts Adam in The Garden to dress and to keep it. Further, God brings the animals to Adam to name them. All of these indicate that man is not a passive bystander who should spend his time laying back eating grapes and watching the sunset, but is supposed to be an active agent in creation; a worker. (However, the fall does change the nature of work significantly and this is something I will argue in a future essay.)

Work is how you worship God.

Some might argue that man is not created to work, but to worship God. While there is some truth to this, it fails to recognize that work is the manner in which man is called to worship. This is something J. Richard Middleton points out in his book A New Heaven and a New Earth: Reclaiming Biblical Eschatology. In the book, he points out that when people say man is created to worship God, they aren’t really saying anything “unique or distinctive” about humans. Why? Because it is not just humans that are called to worship God, but all of creation (Psalm 148.) What he calls for is a redefinition, or better yet, a more biblical understanding of what it means to worship. According to Middleton, worship is not just the utterance of joyful praise, “Rather, our worship consists in all that we do.” He goes on to say that the sun, the moon, the stars, the mountains and all the other aspects of creation obviously don’t worship by words that they verbally speak, but being what they were created to be. So what does that mean for humans? As Middleton says,

If mountains worship God by being mountains and stars worship God by being stars, How do humans worship God? By being human in the full glory of what that means.

Work is how you glorify God.

Others might argue that the purpose of human life is to glorify God. This statement faces the same problem as the statement about worship. To say humans are created to glorify God, along with everything else in existence (Rev 4:11), is not to give us much clarity on what humans are created to do. So what does it mean for humans to glorify God? This quote from St. Irenaus of Lyons sums it up beautifully, and echoes Middleton’s view of worship; “The glory of God is a human person fully alive.” We can also see that the way we glorify God is directly tied to the manner in which we work based on the words of Christ, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” (Matthew 5:16)

What we can see in both of these is that being human and doing what we are created to do (work) is not different from worshiping or glorifying God, but is actually the manner in which we do both of those things. It is by being what we are created to be, images of God, and embodying that vocation in the work that we do, that we both worship and glorify God. 

But that begs the question, what does it mean to be an image of God, and how is that related to the work man is called to do? In the next essay, I will show that being made in the image of God is directly related to the work we are called to do. God gives us a pattern of work, creating and sustaining, that humans are to model on a smaller scale.

Thank you for reading,

Alec Neff