Work and Rest in the Image of God

To act rationally in a given situation, you don’t only need the facts about what presently exists, you need the facts about what has happened before, and what you hope will happen in the future. In other words, to act rationally in any given situation, you need a story. But, when we hear the word “story,” we tend to associate it with ideas like fiction, or subjectivity, or perhaps even an intentionally crafted narrative with an agenda behind it. In any case, we don’t tend to think of it as “something that is necessary for rational decision making.” But we should.

Otherwise, we end up doing things that seem feasible, given the present facts, but look stupid when you consider the whole story. Why is it a bad idea to put lipstick on a pig? Doesn’t that assume an awful lot about cosmetics, domesticated swine, and the potential value of any interaction between the two? My son Jojo got a toy guitar for his birthday and promptly attempted to install a muffler on it. That alone sounds funny enough, but you need a couple more parts of the story to properly appreciate it. First off, before you get too worried about his level of intelligence or access to auto parts, my son is 4, and the muffler was a plastic cup. Second, according to him, the guitar was a racing guitar, and mufflers are essential to the production of racing sounds. So this was clearly a necessary aftermarket modification. But have you ever seen somebody who isn’t 4 do something like that? Have you ever seen a fully grown adult person try to do something that is the rational equivalent of installing a muffler on a non-racing guitar? I worked long enough in construction to have some stories that I’ll save for another time. But that kinda thing doesn’t only happen in the workplace. It happens every time we take a part of God’s creation and try to use it outside of or contrary to God’s story.

Remember a couple of weeks back, I said that Genesis is a theological explanation? That’s not exactly the same thing as an owner's manual, but it is probably the first part of any good owner’s manual. A good owner’s manual doesn’t just tell you how to use a tool, it starts off by telling you what a tool is and is not to be used for. Use this drill with this type of material and bits, not to eat corn. I spent a couple of years working at Home Depot, and besides getting forklift certified, the main thing I learned was to always shop at Lowes. So I know that when you go buy a drill at Lowe's, you’ll make a decision based on their very helpful signage telling you what various sorts of drills, bits, and fasteners are supposed to be used on which sorts of materials. Woe to you if you ignore their helpful signage and use the wrong tool for the wrong job.

Genesis is like that signage. It is not the full owner's manual that some wish it were. It doesn’t tell you how everything works. You have to go to Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and a series of science textbooks for that information. But Genesis is the sign that tells you the purpose of the world and its major components. Better than just a sign that tells a purpose, it’s also the true story that makes sense of that purpose, as well as the current disparity between that purpose and the world we now live in. If you want to think well about the world both as it is and as it should be, then you need to know Genesis well.

Think of it a different way... the world right now is in a state of chaos that sometimes feels like you’re looking at your kid’s lego bin. You know the big tub where all the various sets and their components have all been mixed together over the years? Don’t get me wrong, you can make some incredible and creative things out of a mixed-up lego bin. We’re gunna come back to that idea in a big way for our last sermon in this series. But you look at that bin and you realize that the value of it is limited to your own creativity and enjoyment, because all the value of the original design seems to be lost. It’s no longer going to be a “complete collectors set” for $700 on ebay it’s going to be “miscellaneous legos” for “10 bucks/lb” on Facebook Marketplace. Good luck figuring out what any of this was supposed to be at one point. But Genesis is almost like Moses saved all the box tops from each of those sets. And you’re seeing picture after picture of what all these parts were supposed to make. Again, not the full set of building instructions, but a clear picture of what the pieces are meant to be used for. And with enough patience, just from the picture alone, you can actually start to piece some of it together.

Today I want to pull out two of those box top pictures from Genesis. One for work, and one for rest. But if I can press this metaphor even a little further, there’s at least a bit of good news about the lego bin. At least it doesn’t have Lincoln Logs mixed in. You ever run into a toy bin full of legos and like a bunch of other junk? Then the problem isn’t just stuff being mixed up and broken, now there’s actually stuff in here that shouldn’t be there. Well, Genesis is telling us something profoundly significant about the LEGO bin of a world we live in. As chaotic as it looks right now, I’m telling you at least it’s all legos. It’s all part of one story. It may be a mixed-up box of components from different individual models, all broken up and repurposed and combined in strange ways, but everything in the bin belongs in some way. Nothing in here is part of a different story. The enemy is the chaos and the brokenness of it all, but not any of the pieces.

As broken and mixed up as it may be, there’s nothing in here that needs to be thrown out - only stuff that needs to be reassembled. Do you realize how significant that is? So when I pull out two different box top images of work and rest, I want to be clear from the outset that they, like everything that exists, are all part of the same world. Part of the same story. Even if it’s all mixed up and broken, everything in here goes together in one sense or another. The value isn’t only in rebuilding the individual components, but also in seeing how they then work together in a larger story. So, in addition to considering both work and rest in their own right, we need to see that Genesis teaches they are both a part of the same story. And we need to understand that story in order to understand the purpose of these two things and how they work together. So, for our purposes today, we are calling the story “Redemption.” So we will look at Work and Rest in the story called Redemption.

• Work

It’s appropriate that we start with work before rest because that’s how the story goes - 6 days of work before the rest. And it’s what bridges the two parts of the story in our text today. Personally, I’m a big fan of what I call “preaching the seams.” Sometimes its better and necessary to preach a single section or story of the Bible. Just like sometimes you want to go and order a carefully trimmed prime rib medallion. But sometimes you want a porterhouse. Or a ribeye. Something where you get the best of two cuts on one plate. What I love about doing that in preaching and teaching is that it helps you see the structure of the book better. Remember, Genesis is a theological explanation. And today I want to add a layer to that… Genesis is a theological explanation… in narrative form. That’s because Moses and God understand that rational decision making doesn’t just require information, it requires a story. And all of Genesis is a story that provides all the information that Israel needs to make rational decisions in the promised land, but it does so in a narrative that gives them the context they need to make decisions that aren’t just rational, but also ethical. Not just logical, but also relational. Meaning decisions that don’t just make sense, but make the world better. And that’s why you need a story not just a spreadsheet of data. Because you need to understand a thing’s purpose in order to make it better.

Well, Genesis is so committed to the idea that you need a story to make sense of things that it actually starts with a pre-story story. The first chapter is a complete, cohesive narrative of God making the world out of nothing and establishing man’s purpose, then in chapter 2, it goes back and zooms in on that purpose, repeating some elements but also gaining new ground. It’s just increasing the magnification a level. The whole Bible is the story of God and the people of God, and that story technically sort of starts with the Exodus. At least in the proper sense. That’s the first time when the people of God are gathered together as such. Genesis is a prequel to that story. And the first 34 verses of Genesis, all the way up to chapter 2, verse 5, are even a prologue to the prequal. It’s a story that sets the stage for the story that sets the stage for the story. And our text is the “seam” between the first two pieces of this narrative fabric. Between the first and second creation accounts. And in it we can see the first of a series of 10 markers that Moses placed in the text to show us where the sections begin and end. These markers are the connective tissue of the Genesis narrative, called “toledots” in Hebrew, and they are genealogies. These toledots or genealogies always start with the phrase, “these are the generations of…” Those phrases, “these are the generations of” are the actual chapter headings in the book of Genesis. So circle those in your bible when you come to them. The numbers we put in later don’t matter nearly as much as those. It says,

yThese are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens.

Later versions of these genealogies will say things like “these are the generations of the sons of Adam” or the sons of Noah or whatever. But this is the first one. So it’s the generations of the heavens and the earth. It’s a genealogy of the world, not just people, and it’s saying that all of reality - the heavens and the earth, all came from God like children come from parents. In other words, this is the first generation. There is no genealogy of God. He was never born, and he never died, leaving behind sons. He just is. Generations is an idea that begins with creation. It’s what happens when created, mortal, changing, temporary things move through time. Genesis uses these genealogies to mark out the story. We’ll see that even more clearly when we get to the first human genealogy. But look at what goes on either side of this section marker. Right before it, in 1:31-2:3:

And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day…. And xon the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done…

Then the toledot section marker - these are the generations of the heavens and the earth. New section now.

5 When no zbush of the field1 was yet in the land2 and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man ato work the ground,

First off, you get a time indication of when this part of the story is taking place. No green stuff yet. Why? Because God had not yet made it rain, and God had not yet made man to work the ground. So this is early on day 6. And second, God makes people. Why? To work. Listen, we could absolutely sit down on this idea for a year if we wanted to. Track where we are in the story. At the end of that little mini prologue section, God had just made man and said it was very good. Then we skip back to right before he had made man, and it says he made man to work the ground. Meaning that when he looked at everything he had made and said it was very good, he was looking at a world that included people who were created for the express purpose of working. God looked at people working and he said, “Good - I like that!”  I need you to hear this. Work is not a part of the curse, it’s a part of creation.

Now check this out. In verse 15, it says “The Lord God took the man kand put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Those are some real important verbs there, “work it and keep it”. They are the same verbs used later in Numbers to describe what the Priests were to do in the tabernacle. They were put there to work and keep it. To serve and to guard. And look at the motivations here. They are working to fill the earth and subdue it, to serve God, to cultivate and protect the good order of the garden, and to be like God. Those are the original motivations for work according to the first two chapters of Genesis. Which of those is lost in the fall? Did we become unable to fill the earth and subdue it? No. It’s harder now, but not impossible. Did we lose the ability to serve God? No, Colossians 3 says, “2 Bondservants, obey xin everything those who are your earthly masters,6 not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers, but with sincerity of heart, fearing the Lord. 23 yWhatever you do, work heartily, zas for the Lord and not for men, 24 knowing that from the Lord ayou will receive the inheritance as your reward. bYou are serving the Lord Christ.”

He’s not talking to Pastors there he’s talking to servants. He isn’t talking about vocational Christian ministry, he’s talking about regular work. And he says, “you are serving the Lord Christ.” What about the ability to be like God, did we lose that? No. The command to keep the Sabbath says 6 days shall you work, and on the sevent day you rest, why? Because that’s what God did and you should be like him. So I’m telling you that for all the thorns and thistles and difficulties that human work was cursed with, according to the Bible, none of the original purpose and motivation for work is lost to those who are in Christ.

Now I’m going to drop another important phrase on you that you’ll probably hear a lot over the next couple weeks. It’s this: “Grace restores nature.” We’ll get more into what that means when we get to the fall, but for now suffice it to say that the grace of God that redeems and restores and recreates the world isn’t undoing nature, it’s restoring the nature that was undone by sin. Sin undoes nature, curses undo nature, grace restores nature. That’s why in the New Testament, when Jesus comes, he talks an awful lot about work. And he uses work as one of his number one ways of talking about and explaining the kingdom. And after he leaves, the Apostles unanimously affirm work both by the word and their example. Paul has to write about this to the Thessalonians, who had some really weird and messed-up views of the End Times. They thought that because Jesus had come, that means work should be over. Because everything is good now, and work is bad, so work is out. And Paul said “no, if you don’t work you don’t eat.” And to the Ephesians he explains what kind of change Jesus does make. He says, “let the thief no longer steal, rather let him work, so that he may have something to share.” So Jesus came to do away with sin, therefore stop sinning, aka stop stealing, and start working that you might have something to share. Work isn’t a lincoln log in the lego bin of your life. It doesn’t need to be filtered out. It might be broken and in need of repair, but it’s not a bad idea.

So you work in order to be like God, to serve God, to steward God’s creation, to extend God’s kingdom, and to serve and bless God’s people. In short, you work to love God and love others. Let me ask you, this time tomorrow morning, will those motivations - loving God and loving others -  be the reason you are sitting in front of a computer, or out in the sun, or behind a counter, or chasing kids? Will you be doing it to love God and love God’s people? That you might serve God and share with others? Because that’s what you were made for. And few things remind us of this better than the practice of Sabbath. Which brings us to rest.

• Rest

““The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.” - G.K. Chesterton

Life is not fundamentally mechanistic, but relational. You’ve heard me say that before and this won’t be the last time. What I mean by that is, the most basic and fundamental principle at work in all of reality is not cause and effect, but relationship. Personal relationship between persons, not a mechanical or logical relationship between material objects or forces. That’s because the truest truth that ever was is the Triune God and he is neither science nor machine. Rationality reflects his nature, as the Bible says he is a God of peace and not disorder, but mere rationality is not what he is. It is, at best, a descriptor of what he is. Love is what he is. And he made the world to reflect his character, according to Romans 1. This means that while the world will often be rational, as he is, it will be even more fundamentally relational. This is why the New Testament speaks about all things working together for the good of those who, what? Make the right choices? Work the hardest? Help themselves? Earn it? No. “Love God.” This is why someone who loves God can do practically everything wrong and still end up delighted in his presence on the last day, and a person who hates God can do everything right and logical from a worldly standpoint and end up completely miserable on that same day and for an eternity of days thereafter.

The reason you work is not primarily to produce. It is primarily to be. If you are a Christian, then you work not primarily to produce profit, but to be like God. You work primarily not to meet your own needs, but to meet the needs of those you are in relationship with. And this means that when you stop working at the end of the week to rest, since that’s what God did, you are not momentarily pausing your purpose to waste your time for a weekend and then resume it on Monday. Rather, you are in fact doing the only thing consistent with your purpose of being like God. Because God rests, and commands his people to rest like he does once per week, then for you to continue working rather than resting would actually be for you to take a break from your purpose of being like God in order to waste your time being like something other than God, something which only works and does not rest, in order to then try and pick back up with being like God on Monday morning.

The Israelites were not told to keep the sabbath merely in order to be different than the Cananites. Their beard, clothing, and eating styles were certainly sufficient to accomplish this. But they were told to rest on the sabbath in order to be like God. To remind themselves that their purpose for working was not primarily doing, but being. And that’s why their whole enterprise of figuring out exactly what they could get away with doing on the sabbath is such a misguided pursuit. You know there is actually a very thin fishing line circling the entire island of Manhattan? It’s so that the Jews living there can legally consider the entire thing one house, enabling them to travel and carry things anywhere they want in the city without breaking the sabbath. That is not keeping sabbath to be like God. That’s keeping the sabbath to be like everybody else in Manhattan.

Clearly, there are all kinds of ways to be like Jesus while still doing work on the sabbath - things like works of mercy and necessity. Jesus healed on the sabbath and doctors who are needed to work on those days are being like Him. Jesus and the disciples picked grain to eat on the sabbath because God made the sabbath for man, not vice versa, and the point was to make you rest not to make you hungry. But when you’re working not because you have to in order to keep yourself or others alive and healthy, but because you have to in order to get ahead, or justify your existence, or earn your place, then you need to own the fact that your metric of success must not be conformity to the character of God. Because God rests. Remember, the thing that makes the world turn is the God who made it and set it spinning. He is free to continue or stop that process as often as he likes. The thing that puts food on your table isn’t your efforts, but God. Which is why you can work your fingers to the bone and still turn up with nothing, and why you can get laid off and still find food on your table. Because there is a God who works all things together for the good of those who love him, and don’t you dare confuse him with something as simple and impersonal as math.

The practice of resting on Sunday is an exercise in reminding ourselves that the world runs on relationship - us to God and us to one another, not on cause and effect. The reason we work and the reason we stop working are the same: to be like God.

Conclusion:

One of the biggest proponents of faith and work theology was Martin Luther. The guy who started the protestant reformation. In his early days he started out trying to be a lawyer, because what better way to ensure you are a just person than to study the law? Then he got caught in a bad storm one night and made a deal with God that if God would save his life, he’d become a monk. Well a desire for self-justification and a sense of needing to pay God back worked hand in hand to make him a very diligent, if not slightly obsessive, religious worker. His whole life became about working to earn his keep with God. And then he realized one day, as he was reading the New Testament, that nothing he did affected his standing before God. Because that came from something else. A righteousness that was alien to him - it didn’t come from him or his work at all.

You might then think that the result would be a disregard for earthly work. If we couldn’t do anything to please God, who cares what we do? But quite to the contrary, Luther became one of the biggest proponents of the equal dignity of all human vocation. He later wrote, “It is pure invention that pope, bishop, priest, and monks are called the spiritual estate while princes, lords, artisans, and farmers are called the temporal estate. This is indeed a piece of deceit and hypocrisy. Yet no one need be intimidated by it, and for this reason: all Christians are truly of the spiritual estate, and there is no difference among them except that of office.” The righteousness of Christ’s work doesn’t negate our work, it bestows dignity upon it. All of it. Because none of it factors into our justification, it is free to be merely our good and God-given vocation. It is a grace that restores the nature we were created with -  a nature that works to build and spread God’s kingdom throughout the earth in all realms of life.

In our text today the garden of Eden is described as this beautiful place full of lush forrest, fruit, and beauty. Sitting on top of a mountain, apparently, as streams of water flowed out from it to the places around. Streams flow downhill, so if they all flow away from Eden that makes Eden up hill. And the land is full of gold and precious stones like onyx. And a man and a women are put there to work and to keep it. And the presence of God is there with them, face to face. Then later a tabernacle, and eventually a temple is built. And Ezekiel has a vision of the temple with water flowing out from it into all the nations. And in the middle is the holy of holies, a place covered all over with gold and precious stones like onyx, which are placed both in the decorations of the room and on the breastplate of the priests. And all over the walls are golden images of trees and fruits, like a garden. And the priests are put there to work it and to keep it. And God is there to meet with them.  And all of this comes together in Revelation 21, where the Holy City is said to be made all of gold, inlayed with precious stones like onyx and jasper, and the tree of life is in the city with fruit available to everyone, and in the center is the throne of God where the Lamb sits, with streams of living water flowing out from it into all the nations. And the people of God are there, and they are told to keep the words of this book and to worship God. And this whole scene is what Hebrews refers to as entering God’s rest.

And so here it is. Work, and worship, and rest are all compatible realities. In heaven, they will even be the same thing. They all reflect essential elements of God’s character and our design, they are what we were put here to do. And this is why Paul can talk about your whole life being a living sacrifice to God, which is your spiritual worship. And so worship then is the unifying principle that distinguishes Christian work and rest as such. Godly work and Godly rest are both worship. Ungodly work and ungodly rest are both idolatry - false worship. And if you work or rest in a way that doesn’t reflect God’s character, then it means you’re worshipping a different god. So today, when you go home, stop working, but keep worshipping through your rest. And tomorrow morning, when you go to work, stop resting, but keep worshipping through your work. And then come back here, every 7 days, and we will practice it together until some day all of it gets consumed with the perfect, eternal, unchanging work of resting in the worship of God when we see him face to face. But for now, let’s pray.

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