Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human.

by John Mark Comer

In Hebrew there’s a play on words. Adam (the man) is made from the adamah (the ground). It’s a poetic way of saying that human has a symbiotic relationship with the earth itself. We’re made from the dust. Which is why the first human profession was gardening . . . “Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the East, in Eden . . .” And . . . “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”4 Let’s drill down on two ideas here: work it and take care of it. The first word is abad in Hebrew, and it basically means work. But that’s not the only way it’s translated into English. Sometimes it’s translated “service.” So work is service. Service to God. Service to people made in his image — which is everybody. And, I would argue, service to the earth itself. But abad is also the same word used all over the Hebrew Bible for worship. Interesting. So work and worship aren’t two separate ideas. They are connected at the hip. They are two translations of the same word.5 It’s tragic that we think of worship as a few songs at church every Sunday. That is worship — of course. But in a Genesis-shaped worldview — all of life is worship.