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

by John Mark Comer

In Genesis’s vision of humanness, we don’t work to live; we live to work. It flat out says we were created to rule — to make something of God’s world.

The word image is selem in Hebrew, and it can be translated “idol” or “statue.” An idol is a visible representation of an invisible being. A statue was put in the temple of every god in the ancient world so the worshiper could see what that god was like. We are God’s statues. His selem. We were put on earth — because the entire cosmos is this God’s temple — to make visible the invisible God. To show the world what God is like. We are the Creator’s representatives to his creation.

And the dark underbelly to this way of thinking is obvious and axiomatic: If the king is the image of god, that means the rest of us aren’t. Remember Marduk? Humanity was created as cheap slave labor. Nothing more than a minimum-wage employee to push around. The theology of the image of God in Genesis was, and still is, subversive and stunning. It claims that all human beings — not just those of royal blood, not just the oligarchy of society, not just white men — all of us are made in the image of God.

That’s why the very next sentence says, “So that they may rule.” The seamless connection between “image” and “rule” is explicit in the text.

The word rule is radah in Hebrew. It can be translated “reign” or “have dominion.” It’s king language. One Hebrew scholar translated it as “to actively partner with God in taking the world somewhere.”

The imagery of humanity’s relationship to God is not of puppets on a string, with God up in heaven playing around. Rather, it’s of partners, God’s representatives on earth, kings and queens, ruling over his world.

This word subdue is intriguing. In Hebrew it’s kabash, where we get the saying, “Put the kibosh on it!”11 (Come on, that’s cool.) It can mean to exploit or enslave or abuse or even to rape. But it can also mean to tame something that’s wild, to bring order out of chaos, to bring harmony out of discord. Once again, it’s king and queen language.

What is the Old Testament but the story of one ruler after another, trying to do what Adam was supposed to do — rule over the earth in a life-giving way — but failing, often miserably?

What’s he doing at the “right hand of God”? Ruling over the earth. And what’s the first thing Jesus does with his rule? He shares it with us. Why? Because from the beginning of the story God has been looking for partners. Is this starting to come full circle for you? This is what we were made for.

Our culture as a whole, and sadly even the church at times, doesn’t have a high view of parenting, at least, not as a career. God’s view of the family, however, is over-the-top. To him, it’s the first thing on human’s job description.

Robinson; he wants a civilization. He wants human beings to make babies and to make churches, community centers, schools, social services, governments, entire countries. All of this falls under the rubric of “fill the earth.”

Which leads to the second part of human’s job description: “Subdue it.” Meaning, harness the raw, uncut potential of the earth itself. Make something of the world you’ve been dropped into.

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

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.

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.

The next word we need to take a closer look at is shamar, and it’s even more interesting. It’s usually translated as “take care,” and that’s spot-on. It means to watch over, protect, guard, police, and stand up for the creation. The first human was an environmentalist. We should be too.

But the imagery isn’t of an ecological preserve where we stay on a skinny little path and don’t touch anything (although there’s a place for that). Shamar can be translated “cultivate” or “develop” or “draw out something’s potential.”

The author is saying that Eden is made up of raw materials. It’s spilling over with pent-up potentiality. Everything you need to make a civilization is there; all you have to do is to cultivate it, to draw it out. But that’s going to take some work. I love Tim Keller’s definition of work. He puts it this way: work is “rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.”

All of this is the work of cultivation. Of drawing out something’s potential. In fact, our word culture comes straight from this idea of cultivation. Good culture is the result of even better people hard at work, rearranging the raw stuff of Planet Earth into a place of delight.

We’re called to a very specific kind of work. To make a Garden-like world where image bearers can flourish and thrive, where people can experience and enjoy God’s generous love. A kingdom where God’s will is done “on earth as it is in heaven,” where the glass wall between earth and heaven is so thin and clear and translucent that you don’t even remember it’s there.

Here’s what you have to understand: the Garden was dynamic, not static. Put another way, creation was a project, not a product.

Why is that? Because the Garden was never supposed to stay a garden; it was always supposed to become a garden city. Boom.

He puts it this way, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.”11 Now, planting, watering, growing — this is Eden imagery, and it’s likely that any self-respecting first-century Jew would have picked up on the allusion. And all of Paul’s language builds up to this staggering line: “For we are God’s coworkers.”12 This is a provocative metaphor. Most of us think of ourselves as God’s employees, not his coworkers. As if we’re working for God. And there’s some truth in that. Paul loves to call himself God’s servant. But if we’re God’s coworkers, that means we’re not only working for God, we’re also working with God.

You are a modern day Adam or Eve. This world is what’s left of the Garden. And your job is to take all the raw materials that are spread out in front of you, to work it, to take care of it, to rule, to subdue, to wrestle, to fight, to explore, and to take the creation project forward as an act of service and worship to the God who made you.

I think a better way to think about calling is as what God made you to do. How you’re hardwired by God.

The word vocatio can also be translated voice. Man, that says a lot. Your vocation is your voice. The Quakers have a saying about calling that I love: Let your life speak. Finding your calling is about finding your voice — what cuts over all the din and drone of the other seven-billion-plus people on earth.

The tune and tone that only you can bring to the table.

If you’re a thinker with a rapacious appetite for learning but you go into manual labor, it’s going to drive you insane.

But burnout isn’t always the result of giving too much; sometimes it’s the result of trying to give something you don’t have to give in the first place.

God’s made my calling clear — I’m just a voice. I’m supposed to speak vision to the church, teach the Scriptures, and write a little bit. That’s it. That’s what I believe God put me on this earth to do. Waking up to this was brutal. Because it was embarrassing. Basically, I failed at my job. I was frustrated; people were frustrated with me. It wasn’t working. So I asked the elders at my church if I could quit. They were gracious enough to say yes (maybe they were thinking, Finally.) Now I lead just one church, not three. And I share the leadership with an amazing team of people. I can be myself. I make less money, have less clout, have way less to brag about, and I feel human again. We need to learn to embrace our potential and our limitations. Because both of them are signposts, pointing us forward into God’s calling on our life.

What are you passionate about? What makes you angry? Sad? Happy? Energized? What keeps you up at night? Maybe you’re quiet — what’s that one thing you always like to talk about? Start there.

For me, I would teach the Scriptures. The art of learning an ancient God-inspired text and then dragging it into our world is enthralling to me.

It’s not failure if you fail at doing something you’re not supposed to do. It’s success. Because with each success, and with each so-called failure, you’re getting a clearer sense of your calling.

Historians argue that the Bible is one of the only ancient documents to hold up blue-collar work as an honorable way of life.

Now, hopefully you love what you do — it’s not drudgery or mundane survival. It’s a calling. The novelist Frederick Buechner put it this way: Work is “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”6 That’s what your looking for — the intersection between what you love and what your world needs.

Sometimes a calling is staring us in the face, we just need to make eye contact.

At thirty-three I’m just now starting to figure out who I am, what I’m passionate about, good at, bad at, wired for, and what God’s spread in front of me to do. And I started this process when I was a teenager. For most of us, our calling or vocation won’t become clear until our thirties. And that’s okay.

“The soul is like a wild animal — tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an hour or two at the base of a tree, the creature we are waiting for may well emerge, and out of the corner of an eye we will catch a glimpse of the precious wildness we seek.”

Because whatever it is that you’re called to do — write a symphony, run a landscaping company, invent hydropower, create a vaccine for HIV/AIDS, start a sandwich shop, teach English literature at Yale, come up with really good vegan ice cream — whatever it is — if you don’t do it, not only do you rob yourself of the life God’s called you to live, but you rob the rest of us. We need you to be you. Don’t sell us short. Give us all you got.

The sacred/secular divide is this erroneous idea that some things are sacred or spiritual, and they matter to God; but other things are secular or physical, and by implication, they don’t matter to God, at least, not all that much.

Or we feel a twinge of guilt because even though our job as an IT specialist isn’t sacred, we really enjoy it and are proud of what we do. And every time we come home from work and drink a glass of really good wine or watch a great film or eat a delicious meal, we feel this nagging sense of shame because we enjoy it so much — it feels good and right and earthy and human — but it’s not “spiritual.”

Did you know there’s no word for spiritual in the Hebrew language?

And it’s not just that athlete’s foot and women’s menstruation and erectile dysfunction and taxation and economic theory made it into the Bible, it’s that there are laws about them. Teachings about how to do or not do them. There’s a specific way that the Creator wants us to navigate all this unspiritual, secular, run-of-the-mill stuff. It’s almost like it matters.

Even when you get to the New Testament, the word spiritual is really only used by Paul. In his writings it means “animated by the Holy Spirit.” And for Paul, every facet of our life should be spiritual.2 I think if you had asked Jesus about his spiritual life, he would have looked at you very confused.

It’s at least as old as Plato and the early Greek philosophers, if not older. Plato — whose fingerprints are all over Western culture — used this dichotomy of a spiritual world and physical world, as if they were two separate places. His goal was to get from one to the other. And over time, this worldview sunk into the church.

The great Jewish hope wasn’t to die and go somewhere else — for your body to biodegrade and your soul to float off to some spiritual world called heaven in the sky.4 The hope was of resurrection — bodily, corporeal, flesh- and-blood, dirt-under-your-fingernails resurrection. For the Creator to do his healing, saving work right here on earth.

It hit a zenith in the Middle Ages when the church was flat-out teaching that all work outside of the church was secular. No matter how Garden-like it was. In fact, the word calling was only used for church work. The mentality was, if you want to do something that really matters, something for the kingdom, become a priest or a nun or a monk or a theologian. The only other option is to work hard all day at some job you think is inconsequential, so you can get off work and go “serve the Lord.”

This is why we have to go to war with sacred/secular ideology — because it essentially compartmentalizes God. We have our God box and then our work box and our rest box and our diet-and-exercise box and our entertainment box and our money box — and we cut our life up into tiny little pieces.

I’ve heard it said that “Christian is a great noun and a poor adjective.”