But the chief thing we know about God, so far in the narrative, is that God is a creator who works in the material world, who works in relationship, and whose work observes limits. We have the ability to do the same.
The development occurs in two cycles, one in Genesis and the other in Genesis The order of the categories is not exactly in the same order both times, but all the categories are present in both cycles. The second cycle describes how God equips Adam and Eve for their work as they begin life in the Garden of Eden.
The language in the first cycle is more abstract and therefore well-suited for developing principles of human labor. The language in the second cycle is earthier, speaking of God forming things out of dirt and other elements, and is well suited for practical instruction for Adam and Eve in their particular work in the garden. This shift of language—with similar shifts throughout the first four books of the Bible—has attracted uncounted volumes of research, hypothesis, debate, and even division among scholars.
Any general purpose commentary will provide a wealth of details. Most of these debates, however, have little impact on what the book of Genesis contributes to understanding work, workers, and workplaces, and we will not attempt to take a position on them here. In order to make it easier to follow these themes, we will explore Genesis category by category, rather than verse by verse. The following table gives a convenient index with links for those interested in exploring a particular verse immediately.
Genesis Genesis ; As Ian Hart puts it, "Exercising royal dominion over the earth as God's representative is the basic purpose for which God created man Man is appointed king over creation, responsible to God the ultimate king, and as such expected to manage and develop and care for creation, this task to include actual physical work.
As we exercise dominion over the created world, we do it knowing that we mirror God. We are not the originals but the images, and our duty is to use the original—God—as our pattern, not ourselves. Think about the implications of this in our workplaces. How would God go about doing our job? What values would God bring to it? What products would God make? Which people would God serve?
What organizations would God build? What standards would God use? In what ways, as image-bearers of God, should our work display the God we represent? The cycle begins again with dominion, although it may not be immediately recognizable as such. Meredith Kline puts it this way, "God's making the world was like a king's planting a farm or park or orchard, into which God put humanity to 'serve' the ground and to 'serve' and 'look after' the estate. Thus the work of exercising dominion begins with tilling the ground.
From this we see that God's use of the words subdue [3] and dominion in chapter 1 do not give us permission to run roughshod over any part of his creation. Quite the opposite. We are to act as if we ourselves had the same relationship of love with his creatures that God does. Subduing the earth includes harnessing its various resources as well as protecting them. Dominion over all living creatures is not a license to abuse them, but a contract from God to care for them. We are to serve the best interests of all whose lives touch ours; our employers, our customers, our colleagues or fellow workers, or those who work for us or who we meet even casually.
That does not mean that we will allow people to run over us, but it does mean that we will not allow our self-interest, our self-esteem, or our self-aggrandizement to give us a license to run over others.
The later unfolding story in Genesis focuses attention on precisely that temptation and its consequences. Today we have become especially aware of how the pursuit of human self-interest threatens the natural environment.
We were meant to tend and care for the garden Gen. Creation is meant for our use, but not only for our use. Remembering that the air, water, land, plants, and animals are good Gen.
Our work can either preserve or destroy the clean air, water, and land, the biodiversity, the ecosystems, and biomes, and even the climate with which God has blessed his creation. Meredith G. Chisholm Jr. We have already seen that God is inherently relational Gen. These relationships are not left as philosophical abstractions in Genesis.
We see God talking and working with Adam in naming the animals Gen. How does this reality impact us in our places of work? Above all, we are called to love the people we work with, among, and for. The God of relationship is the God of love 1 John One could merely say that "God loves," but Scripture goes deeper to the very core of God's being as Love, a love flowing back and forth among the Father, the Son John , and the Holy Spirit.
This love also flows out of God's being to us, doing nothing that is not in our best interest agape love in contrast to human loves situated in our emotions. Francis Schaeffer explores further the idea that because we are made in God's image and because God is personal, we can have a personal relationship with God.
He notes that this makes genuine love possible, stating that machines can't love. As a result, we have a responsibility to care consciously for all that God has put in our care. Being a relational creature carries moral responsibility. Because we are made in the image of a relational God, we are inherently relational ourselves. We are made for relationships with God himself and also with other people.
All of his creative acts had been called "good" or "very good," and this is the first time that God pronounces something "not good. When Eve arrives, Adam is filled with joy. After this one instance, all new people will continue to come out of the flesh of other human beings, but born by women rather than men. Although this may sound like a purely erotic or family matter, it is also a working relationship.
The word helper indicates that, like Adam, she will be tending the garden. To be a helper means to work. Someone who is not working is not helping. To be a partner means to work with someone, in relationship. Clearly, an ezer is not a subordinate. It is a tragic consequence of the Fall Gen. Relationships are not incidental to work; they are essential. Work serves as a place of deep and meaningful relationships, under the proper conditions at least.
A yoke is what makes it possible for two oxen to work together. In Christ, people may truly work together as God intended when he made Eve and Adam as co-workers.
For more on yoking, see the section on 2 Corinthians in the Theology of Work Commentary. A crucial aspect of relationship modeled by God himself is delegation of authority. God delegated the naming of the animals to Adam, and the transfer of authority was genuine. Much of the past fifty years of development in the fields of leadership and management has come in the form of delegating authority, empowering workers, and fostering teamwork.
The foundation of this kind of development has been in Genesis all along, though Christians have not always noticed it.
Many people form their closest relationships when some kind of work—whether paid or not—provides a common purpose and goal. In turn, working relationships make it possible to create the vast, complex array of goods and services beyond the capacity of any individual to produce.
Without relationships at work, there are no automobiles, no computers, no postal services, no legislatures, no stores, no schools, no hunting for game larger than one person can bring down. And without the intimate relationship between a man and a woman, there are no future people to do the work God gives. Our work and our community are thoroughly intertwined gifts from God.
Together they provide the means for us to be fruitful and multiply in every sense of the words. Francis A. God could have created everything imaginable and filled the earth himself. It is remarkable that God trusts us to carry out this amazing task of building on the good earth he has given us. Through our work God brings forth food and drink, products and services, knowledge and beauty, organizations and communities, growth and health, and praise and glory to himself.
A word about beauty is in order. This is not surprising, since people, being in the image of God, are inherently beautiful. Inherently, beauty is not a waste of resources, or a distraction from more important work, or a flower doomed to fade away at the end of the age.
Christian communities do well at appreciating the beauty of music with words about Jesus. Perhaps we could do better at valuing all kinds of true beauty. A good question to ask ourselves is whether we are working more productively and beautifully. History is full of examples of people whose Christian faith resulted in amazing accomplishments. If our work feels fruitless next to theirs, the answer lies not in self-judgment, but in hope, prayer, and growth in the company of the people of God.
No matter what barriers we face—from within or without—by the power of God we can do more good than we could ever imagine. Both are creative enterprises that give specific activities to people created in the image of the Creator. By growing things and developing culture, we are indeed fruitful.
We bring forth the resources needed to support a growing population and to increase the productivity of creation. We develop the means to fill, yet not overfill, the earth. We need not imagine that gardening and naming animals are the only tasks suitable for human beings. Work is forever rooted in God's design for human life. It is an avenue to contribute to the common good and as a means of providing for ourselves, our families, and those we can bless with our generosity.
An important though sometimes overlooked aspect of God at work in creation is the vast imagination that could create everything from exotic sea life to elephants and rhinoceroses. While theologians have created varying lists of those characteristics of God that have been given to us that bear the divine image, imagination is surely a gift from God we see at work all around us in our workspaces as well as in our homes. Much of the work we do uses our imagination in some way.
We tighten bolts on an assembly line truck and we imagine that truck out on the open road. We open a document on our laptop and imagine the story we're about to write. Mozart imagined a sonata and Beethoven imagined a symphony. Picasso imagined Guernica before picking up his brushes to work on that painting. Tesla and Edison imagined harnessing electricity, and today we have light in the darkness and myriad appliances, electronics, and equipment.
Someone somewhere imagined virtually everything surrounding us. Most of the jobs people hold exist because someone could imagine a job-creating product or process in the workplace. Yet imagination takes work to realize, and after imagination comes the work of bringing the product into being. Actually, in practice the imagination and the realization often occur in intertwined processes. Picasso said of his Guernica , "A painting is not thought out and settled in advance.
While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at it. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer, Jr. Waltke, eds. While this quote is widely repeated, its source is elusive. Whether or not it is genuine, it expresses a reality well known to artists of all kinds. Since we are created in God's image, God provides for our needs. God has no needs, or if he does he has the power to meet them all on his own.
God said, "See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.
Without him, our work is nothing. We cannot bring ourselves to life. We cannot even provide for our own maintenance. We do not have to depend on our own ability or on the vagaries of circumstance to meet our need. The second cycle of the creation account shows us something of how God provides for our needs. He prepares the earth to be productive when we apply our work to it. Though we till, God is the original planter.
In addition to food, God has created the earth with resources to support everything we need to be fruitful and multiply. He gives us a multitude of rivers providing water, ores yielding stone and metal materials, and precursors to the means of economic exchange Gen. Even when we synthesize new elements and molecules or when we reshuffle DNA among organisms or create artificial cells, we are working with the matter and energy that God brought into being for us.
Did God rest because he was exhausted, or did he rest to offer us image-bearers a model cycle of work and rest? Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy.
Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it. While religious people over the centuries tended to pile up regulations defining what constituted keeping the Sabbath, Jesus said clearly that God made the Sabbath for us—for our benefit Mark What are we to learn from this?
Read more here about a new study regarding rhythms of rest and work done at the Boston Consulting Group by two professors from Harvard Business School. It showed that when the assumption that everyone needs to be always available was collectively challenged, not only could individuals take time off, but their work actually benefited.
Harvard Business Review may show an ad and require registration in order to view the article. When, like God, we stop our work on whatever is our seventh day, we acknowledge that our life is not defined only by work or productivity. Walter Brueggemann put it this way, "Sabbath provides a visible testimony that God is at the center of life—that human production and consumption take place in a world ordered, blessed, and restrained by the God of all creation.
Otherwise, we live with the illusion that life is completely under human control. Part of making Sabbath a regular part of our work life acknowledges that God is ultimately at the center of life. Further discussions of Sabbath, rest, and work can be found in the sections on "Mark ," "Mark ," "Luke ," and "Luke " in the Theology of Work Commentary.
Having blessed human beings by his own example of observing workdays and Sabbaths, God equips Adam and Eve with specific instructions about the limits of their work. In the midst of the Garden of Eden, God plants two trees, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil Gen.
The latter tree is off limits. God tells Adam, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" Gen. Various hypotheses are found in the general commentaries, and we need not settle on an answer here. For our purposes, it is enough to observe that not everything that can be done should be done.
If we want to work with God, rather than against him, we must choose to observe the limits God sets, rather than realizing everything possible in creation. In the Christian tradition, the Gospel of John deliberately refers back to Genesis, and says that the God who created "in the beginning" is the God made known in Jesus Christ John So Genesis isn't just stating what it sees to be the facts: it is making theological points.
It is also not doing this in a vacuum. The traditions and stories of the origins of the universe that are found in Genesis are not the only ones that exist in the ancient near east , and there are all kinds of similarities, but the theological points they make are strikingly different. Other ancient near-eastern traditions, found in, for example, the Atrahasis, Gilgamesh and Eridu epics, agree that gods exist, that they are responsible for the existence of the world that we live in, and that they interact directly with human beings.
They also agree that human beings have more in common with the gods than animals do, for example. These are general assumptions in the world in which Genesis comes into being. But there the agreements begin to peter out. Most of the other ancient near-eastern cultures see the divine realm as quite heavily populated with gods, often having different interests and colourful personalities.
The world is usually seen as coming into being through violence, either between squabbling deities or between the gods and a primeval chaos monster, whose slain body forms the stuff of the world. The relationships between human beings and gods are not generally very friendly: either human beings are created to be slaves for the gods, or they may be on good terms with some gods and not with others. The contrast with Genesis is striking.
In Genesis, God is alone, and the measured, ordered creation comes into existence by the sheer benevolent power of God. Sun, moon and stars, often seen in ancient cultures as powerful deities, requiring worship and propitiation, are merely among the things that God creates in Genesis, and God decides their proper role and sphere Use SBL Abbrev.
En dash Hyphen. None — Jhn KJV. Square — [Jhn KJV]. Parens — Jhn KJV. Quotes Around Verses. Remove Square Brackets. Sort Canonically. Free Bible Courses Visit. Help Quick Nav Advanced Options. Cite Share Print. Search Results in Other Versions. BLB Searches. Search the Bible. LexiConc [? Advanced Options Exact Match. Theological FAQs [? Multi-Verse Retrieval x.
En dash not Hyphen. Let's Connect x. Subscribe to our Newsletter. Daily Devotionals x. Daily Bible Reading Plans x. Recently Popular Pages x. Recently Popular Media x. The first verse of the Bible contains some of the most famous words ever written. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There are several things that this verse teaches us that are foundational to our understanding of the total message of Scripture.
The beginning is the commencement of creation. Humankind can look back to this beginning as an initial, historical reckoning point. However, no one knows when this beginning was. The Bible emphasizes the fact of creation by God, rather than the exact time that creation occurred.
The beginning in Genesis sets the stage for the rest of the biblical story. God Genesis records that a personal, all-knowing, all-powerful God created everything that existed.
The Bible emphasizes that the Lord is the Creator of all things. For He is the Maker of all things Jeremiah The only thing that He did not create was Himself. Existence Assumed Without argument or preface, God is spoken of as the Creator in the Bible's first verse.
The fact that God is the Creator of the universe is assumed or stated in all the books of the Bible. There is no attempt to offer proof that He exists. The Book of Genesis was written to a people who believed in this Creator God. He had been revealed to them as the only God who exists.
The Hebrew noun translated God is plural while the verb translated created is singular. This is the first indication in Scripture that God is a Trinity. The Trinity can be simply defined as follows: within the nature of the one God there are three eternal Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three distinct Persons are the one God.
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