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March 9 - April 24, 2023
The church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him to not be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
absolutely every part of human life—soul and body, private and public, praying and laboring—is affected by sin. Yeats said that “things fall apart,” and because of sin they do.
From the moment of the fall, humankind has suffered from moral schizophrenia: neither able to deny sinfulness nor to acknowledge it for what it is.”
Genesis 3 is an ancient text, filled with rich theology in narrative form. But it could not be more relevant and practical to life today. It goes for the jugular, as if to say, “Do you find the two great tasks in life—love and work—to be excruciatingly hard? This explains why.” God ties the pain of love and marriage and the pain of work very closely together in these verses.
In other words, work, even when it bears fruit, is always painful, often miscarries, and sometimes kills us.
“Part of the curse of work in a fallen world is its frequent fruitlessness.”94
Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. That would be a fruitless search for anyone. You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.
it is perfectly natural that changing careers may be necessary to maximize fruitfulness. God can—and often does—change what he calls us to do.
Thorns and food. Work will still bear some fruit, though it will always fall short of its promise. Work will be both frustrating and fulfilling, and sometimes—just often enough—human work gives us a glimpse of the beauty and genius that might have been the routine characteristic of all our work, and what, by the grace of God, it will be again in the new heavens and new earth.
our deepest aspirations in work will come to complete fruition in God’s future.
Old Testament scholar Tremper Longman points out that there was a literary form at that time called “fictional autobiography.”100 In this form, the writer could introduce a fictional character, give a description of his or her life’s course, and then conclude with general insights and teachings drawn from the case study of the recounted life.
Some books of the Bible are like listening to a pastor giving counsel on how to live (the book of James in the New Testament, for example, or Proverbs in the Old Testament). But reading Ecclesiastes is like sitting in a philosophy class with a professor who provokes you with thorny Socratic questions and strange case studies, who pulls you into a dialogue to lead you to discover truth for yourself.
Ecclesiastes is an argument that existential dependence on a gracious Creator God—not only abstract belief—is a precondition for an unshakeable, purposeful life.
As she would put it, “I couldn’t handle the idea that it was all meaningless, so I just put my head down and worked harder.” Eventually, she started to consider the gospel of Christ because the philosophies of this world were taking her nowhere. The emptiness of life was pushing her toward her own understanding of that transcendent uniqueness of God.
The Philosopher makes his case in stages. The book begins with what has been called three “life projects,” each an effort to discover a meaningful life under the sun. The first is a quest to make sense of life through learning and wisdom (Ecclesiastes 1:12–18; 2:12–16). The second is an effort to make life fulfilling through the pursuit of pleasure (2:1–11). The third project that the Philosopher undertakes to chase away his sense of pointlessness is the pursuit of achievement through hard work (Ecclesiastes 2:17–26).
“I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? Yet they will have control over all the fruit of my toil into which I have poured my effort and skill under the sun. This too is meaningless. So my heart began to despair over all my toilsome labor under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 2:18–20).
“What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their days their work is grief and pain; even at night their minds do not rest. This too is meaningless” (Ecclesiastes 2:22–23). Grief and pain so great that he cannot rest: This is the experience of the person whose soul is resting wholly on the circumstances of their work. In this poignant picture, the author is consciously contrasting us with the God whose labor led to real rest (Genesis 2:2), and unconsciously with the Savior who could even sleep through a storm (Mark 4:38).
For example, in Ecclesiastes 5, verse 8, Qoheleth says, “If you see the poor oppressed in a district, and justice and rights denied, do not be surprised at such things; for one official is eyed by a higher one, and over them both are others higher still.” Old Testament commentator Michael A. Eaton writes of this text that Qoheleth “considers the frustrations of oppressive bureaucracy with its endless delays and excuses . . . and justice is lost between the tiers of the hierarchy.”
Work can even isolate us from one another. “There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother. There was no end to his toil, yet his eyes were not content with his wealth. ‘For whom am I toiling,’ he asked, ‘and why am I depriving myself of enjoyment?’ This too is meaningless—a miserable business!” (Ecclesiastes 4:7–8).
[C]ommunity service has become a patch for morality. Many people today have not been given vocabularies to talk about what virtue is, what character consists of, and in which way excellence lies, so they just talk about community service.
First, if we have the luxury of options, we would want to choose work that we can do well. It should fit our gifts and our capacities. To take up work that we can do well is like cultivating our selves as gardens filled with hidden potential; it is to make the greatest room for the ministry of competence.
We have to ask whether our work or organization or industry makes people better or appeals to the worst aspects of their characters.
Rather, it illustrates the need for everyone to work out in clear personal terms how their work serves the world.
Third, if possible, we do not simply wish to benefit our family, benefit the human community, and benefit ourselves—we also want to benefit our field of work itself. In Genesis 1 and 2, we saw that God not only cultivated his creation, but he created more cultivators. Likewise, our goal should not simply be to do work, but to increase the human race’s capacity to cultivate the created world.
[T]he moment you [only] think of serving other people, you begin to have a notion that other people owe you something for your pains; you begin to think that you have a claim on the community. You will begin to bargain for reward, to angle for applause, and to harbor a grievance if you are not appreciated. But if your mind is set upon serving the work, then you know you have nothing to look for; the only reward the work can give you is the satisfaction of beholding its perfection. The work takes all and gives nothing but itself; and to serve the work is a labor of pure love.
How we attain such a balanced life is one of the main themes of Scripture. First, it means recognizing and renouncing our tendency to make idols of money and power (see Ecclesiastes 4:4—“I saw that all toil and all achievement spring from one person’s envy of another. This too is meaningless, a chasing after the wind”). Second, it means putting relationships in their proper place (see Ecclesiastes 4:8—“There was a man all alone; he had neither son nor brother”), even though it probably means making less money (“one handful” rather than two).
One of the reasons work is both fruitless and pointless is the powerful inclination of the human heart to make work, and its attendant benefits, the main basis of one’s meaning and identity.
In Genesis 1 and 2, work is a joyful cultivation of creation for its own sake and God’s sake (Genesis 1:28, 2:15). By Genesis 4, technology has become a means to power. In Genesis 11, we come to the famous story of the building of the Tower of Babel. Two reasons are given for the building of the Tower. In verse 3 the people of Shinar say, “‘let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly’ . . . instead of stone . . .” Someone had discovered a way of making bricks that was an advance beyond previous methods of building. It meant they could build a much taller building than had ever been built
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“To make a name” in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves. We either get our name—our defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness—from what God has done for us and in us (Revelation 2:17), or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves.
While the first kind of identity-making comes from creating an idol of one’s individual talents and accomplishments, the second kind comes from making an idol of one’s group. This leads, of course, to snobbery, imperialism, colonialism, and various other forms of racism.
Babel is a pointed case study of the impossibility of building any collective endeavor—a society, an organization, a movement—that really “works” unless it is grounded beyond itself, in God.
See how C.S. Lewis puts it in Mere Christianity: Now what I want you to get clear is that Pride is essentially competitive—is competitive by its very nature. . . . Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.116
I want to make it clear at this point that no one can live entirely out of the pure impulse to serve the interests of other people at all times. Even the most loving, morally beautiful people fall prey to motives of self-interest, fear, and glory seeking. Our acceptance of our own brokenness—and the world’s—keeps us going back to God to remember what we cannot do on our own.
The book of Esther parallels the biblical accounts of Daniel and Joseph. All three people were believers in the God of Israel. Each was an official in a pluralistic, nonbelieving government and culture. None were prophets, priests, elders, or teachers. They had reached the highest circles of power in their secular cultural institutions. And God used them mightily.
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Lucas says, “In the long term I think being a preacher, missionary, or leading a Bible study group in many ways is easier. There is a certain spiritual glamour in doing it, and what we should be doing each day is easier to discern more black and white, not so gray. It is often hard to get Christians to see that God is willing not just to use men and women in ministry, but in law, in medicine, in business, in the arts. This is the great shortfall today.”117
earn; they were given to you. You went through doors of opportunity you did not produce; they just opened for you. Therefore, everything you have is a matter of grace, and so you have the freedom to serve the world through your influence, just as you can through your competence.
Esther saved her people through identification and mediation. Her people were condemned, but she identified with them and came under that condemnation. She risked her life and said, “If I perish, I perish.” Because she identified, she could mediate before the throne of power as no one else could, and because she received favor there, that favor was transferred to her people.
you will become a person of greatness not by trying to make yourself into one, but by serving the One who said to his Father, “For your sake, thy will be done.”
No one grasped its power more than Martin Luther. He defined idolatry as looking to some created thing to give you what only God can give you.
Whatever it is we seek, Ferry says, it is a form of salvation.120 This fits with the implication of the first of the Ten Commandments. God says, “I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me.” Notice that God says that either he will be our God or something else will. He leaves open no in-between possibility of having no gods at all that we rely on to “save” us.
could be argued that everything we do wrong—every cruel action, dishonest word, broken promise, self-centered attitude—stems from a conviction deep in our souls that there is something more crucial to our happiness and meaning than the love of God.
Personal idols profoundly drive and shape our behavior, including our work.
Idols of comfort and pleasure can make it impossible for a person to work as hard as is necessary to have a faithful and fruitful career.
Idols of power and approval, on the other hand, can lead us to overwork or to be ruthless and unba...
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Andrew Delbanco writes: I will use the word culture to mean the stories and symbols by which we try to hold back the melancholy suspicion that we live in a world without meaning.
Nietzsche was looking mainly at modern cultures, but he observed that all cultures—even self-styled “secular” ones—promote moral absolutes and transcendent values to which (they said) all people must conform if they are to have worth or meaning.
With the rise of modern science and the philosophical movement called the Enlightenment, modern society dethroned the idols of religion, tribe, and tradition—replacing them with reason, empiricism, and individual freedom as the ultimate values that overrule all others.
Philosopher Luc Ferry explains how the new individualism of modern society influenced our work: In the aristocratic [traditional] world-view, work was considered a defect, a servile activity—literally, reserved for slaves. In the modern world-view, it becomes an arena for self-realization, a means not only of educating oneself but also of fulfillment. . . . Work becomes the defining activity of man. . . . His aim is to create himself by remaking the world. . . .132
the modern idol of individualism has tended to raise work from being a good thing to being nearly a form of salvation.
Science can tell us only what is, never how things ought to be.
