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

by John Mark Comer

the curse is a blessing in camouflage. It’s God’s love in disguise. His mercy incognito.14 Because the curse drives us to God.

Because for followers of Jesus, Eden is where we come from, and it’s also where we’re going.

To delight in the life you’ve carved out in partnership with God, to delight in the world around you, and to delight in God himself.

But this God doesn’t have a holy space; he has a holy time —the Sabbath.

Sadly, a lot of us think of holiness in the negative — about what we don’t do.

His vision for humanness is shrunk down to ten commands — so few a child can count them on their fingers.

so he counts down all week long. Three days until Sabbath. Two days left. Tomorrow! Which comes as no surprise. In Genesis, Sabbath is the climax of the seven-day cycle.

You can even rest to the glory of God. When you enjoy the world as God intended — with a cup of coffee, a nap in a hammock, a good meal, time with friends, it glorifies God — it calls attention to the Creator’s presence and beauty all around us. And when you do all that in a spirit of gratitude, letting the goodness of your world and life conjure up an awareness of God and a love for him, then rest becomes worship.

At Sinai, the Sabbath is an art form. It’s about tapping into the rhythm of creation; in Deuteronomy, the Sabbath is an act of defiance against Pharaoh and his slave drivers. At Sinai it’s a way of saying yes to God and his world; in Deuteronomy it’s a way of saying no to Egypt and its system. At Sinai it’s an invitation to join God in his delight; in Deuteronomy it’s a warning to stay away from Egypt’s way of life.

Pharaoh is alive and well. He’s that guilty feeling in your gut, that voice in the back of your head, screaming at you, “Work harder, work faster, work longer. Produce, produce, produce. You’re only as good as your daily quota. Make more bricks!”

Idolatry is when we look to the creation for something we can only get from the Creator. But God isn’t a commodity. He’s a Spirit. Intangible but real. Invisible but true. He doesn’t have an idol. The closest thing he has is us, his image bearers.

But keep in mind that the Sabbath predates the Law by thousands of years. It’s more of a rhythm in creation than a rule in a book.

This is a far cry from how a lot of us think about the future. Most people I know see the future in “heaven” as nothing more than leisure. A combination eternal church service and eternal vacation. This is a reflection of American culture, not the Scriptures.

If Jesus is a “ticket to heaven,” as the preacher says, then he’s a round-trip ticket, not a one-way. Because at the resurrection, we come back.

This is what’s waiting for us. Not an eternal vacation in the sky, but an eternity of working and resting in this world completely remade from top to bottom by the Creator, ruling over the earth, side by side with Jesus himself, forever.

Right now we are learning the skills we’ll need forever in God’s new world. The Bible opens with God giving humans a vocation, a calling to rule, to look after his creation and make it flourish, and after a long, drawn-out detour through human history, the Bible ends with that vision finally coming to pass and even going forward.

If so, as you go to work each day and hone your skill, you’re not just making a better world now, you’re learning the skills, one day in the future, to make the best world. Whoever you become will carry over into the next life.

“What you do in the present — by painting, preaching, singing, sewing, praying, teaching, building hospitals, digging wells, campaigning for justice, writing poems, caring for the needy, loving your neighbor as yourself — will last into God’s future. These activities are not simply ways of making the present life a little less beastly, a little more bearable, until the day when we leave it behind altogether (as the hymn so mistakenly puts it). They are part of what we may call building for God’s kingdom.”

I wrote this book to flood the engine of your dreams with nitrogen. I hope and pray that reading this gives you a shot of vision and courage and faith to step out and do whatever it is that God had in mind the day he thought you up. Go to school. Get your PhD. Drop out of school. Start a business. Become a surgeon or a professional luchador. Move to the inner city and work for justice in the middle of gentrification. Or move to Tribeka, make a billion dollars, and give it all away to the kingdom. Invest in your children like every day is your last. Treat them like the future world-makers they actually are. Solve the energy crisis.