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.
Francis Schaeffer has pointed out that God didn't give Adam and Eve a choice between a good tree and an evil tree, but a choice whether or not to acquire the knowledge of evil. They already knew good, of course. In making that tree, God opened up the possibility of evil, but in doing so God validated choice.
All love is bound up in choice; without choice the word love is meaningless. God expects that those in relationship with him will be capable of respecting the limits that bring about good in creation.
Human creativity, for example, arises as much from limits as from opportunities. Architects find inspiration from the limits of time, money, space, materials, and purpose imposed by the client. Painters find creative expression by accepting the limits of the media with which they choose to work, beginning with the limitations of representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas.
Writers find brilliance when they face page and word limits. How do you avoid failure? A lot of people come to a crisis in their lives that forces them to recognize their shortcomings. Jim Moats claims, "I believe that failure is the least efficient method for discovering limitations. The human body has great yet limited strength, endurance, and capacity to work. There are limits to healthy eating and exercise.
There are limits by which we distinguish beauty from vulgarity, criticism from abuse, profit from greed, friendship from exploitation, service from slavery, liberty from irresponsibility, and authority from dictatorship. In practice it may be hard to know exactly where the line is, and it must be admitted that Christians have often erred on the side of conformity, legalism, prejudice, and a stifling dreariness, especially when proclaiming what other people should or should not do.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. The use of this terminology is not essential, but the idea it stands for seems clear in Genesis 1 and 2. From the beginning God intended human beings to be his junior partners in the work of bringing his creation to fulfillment. Is it coincidental that Genesis clearly spells out life originating in the sea, then on land, and only then birds are mentioned?
Does this not correspond with the progression of life from ocean based organisms, through to amphibians, and eventually to birds and mammals as portrayed by the evolutionists? Does it, now? According to Genesis 1, after some preliminary firmament-creating and water-separating, on the third day God creates the Earth, and the first living things he places upon it are flowering plants. But this is wrong.
The first plants to appear on the Earth were not the flowering plants, which includes all true grasses and all plants that bear fruit which contains seeds the scientific name for this group is angiosperms. On the contrary, the first angiosperms appear in the fossil record much later on, only million years ago, during the time of the dinosaurs.
For hundreds of millions of years before that, the Earth was dominated by other kinds of plants not mentioned in the Genesis account: mosses, ferns, and a different kind of plants, the gymnosperms, which do not bear seed-containing fruit and are represented today mainly by conifers and cycads. On the fourth day, God creates the sun, moon and stars. Whenever this expression is used in the Pastoral Epistles, it refers to salvation. This would suggest that the phrase does not simply signal a reliable Pauline tradition, or a secure doctrine but rather heralds an assurance of the gospel.
More on this here. Her presence was pervasive in Ephesus. And yet many people believe that men and husbands function as priests, that only men and husbands are some kind of spiritual mediator between God and women. I would be wary about dismissing whether women are considered to be lower or not. The idea that women might be lower than their brothers is a huge call with broad consequences. The idea that women are lesser creatures continues to have devastating consequences.
This has been documented in the book Half the Sky. More here. Thanks for this post! I love the work you are doing and am thankful you publish it for the world! I am a pastor of a small church that we planted about 8 years ago.
I am often stunned by how many people simply will not come because of that one fact. So very sad. Your work is important! Thank you. Hi Marg Thanks for your post, very informative. Paul is hardly going to ask the rhetorical question if whether he and Barnabas can take husbands along with them on their missionary journeys. What is more controversial is that Paul wanted to take a believing woman with him as a ministry partner cf.
Acts In 1 Corinthians , Paul is simply defending his own rights as an apostle. Or is it only Barnabas and I who have no right to refrain from working? Actually never mind. Your comment answered my question as well as the article you linked. Sorry for the confusion! Paul is speaking about his own situation and he is not asking if he can take a spouse along. Paul was not married. Paul is speaking about taking along a believing woman or sister.
Paul did not have had a spouse but he did have female coworkers in ministry. For example, Euodia and Syntyche worked with Paul for the gospel Phil. And Prisca and her husband Aquila travelled and ministered with Paul Acts ; cf. Moreover, Paul refers to Phoebe Rom. No doubt most apostles were male, just as most overseers were male. But not all. Junia and Prisca functioned as apostles. Did you have a look at this article? If anything, Paul wants to include women as apostolic coworkers.
I think you posted it as I was already writing my previous comment. Jesus seems to have had 4 brothers, and their names are given in Matthew We also get to know that he had sisters, in plural, although not their names or number.
Megan, this may be a little off the direct topic of your question to Marg, but in the passage 1 Cor Paul says something interesting about apostleship that may answer your question. For you are the seal of my apostleship. You are not an apostle because an institution gives you a title — rather, you are an apostle based on the results your preaching, teaching, mentoring, and example does in others.
Really enjoyed the article and the responses. I also recommend N. Lots of words here. Fortuitously God makes scripture simple and understandable to all. There is of cause value in deep study of scripture but straight forward understanding of scripture is always correct.
Also some have the gift of discernment and we should always listen to there voice. Finally we have the especially blessed that have direct revaluation form God. I am fortunate to be one of these. I have received Gods word on this topic and can affirm that there is in deed an order of Creation and that men do in fact have authority over women. There is a need for this type of order in all creation. It is also obvious that sin will challenge this state because the world sees this as unequal.
But in fact it is a blessing because the Christian life blessing is to be submissive. The way of the world is always wrong. The thinking of the world is wrong. We must all submit to the way of the Lord.
Peter, No one is disputing that, in both Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2, there was an order or sequence in creation. Yet this sequence has nothing whatsoever to do with authority. In Genesis 1, both men and women have the exact same status, the same authority authorisation from God , and the same purpose. And in Genesis 2, both the first man and the first woman have a part, or side Hebrew: tsela ; Greek: pleura , in the same body, the body of the first person.
Authority is not mentioned in any way in Genesis 2. Patriarchy is a consequence of the fall. Submission humble deference and loyalty is for all followers of Jesus, whether male or female Eph. If you want a platform to state your own opinions, get your own website.
0コメント