The Problem with Our Work

I’d like to start off this morning with a little thought exercise. For the next few moments, I want you to think about your job. Whether the primary work you do is in an office or in a classroom, on a route or in the home. Whether you’re paid or a volunteer or focused on raising your family.

Whatever your primary work is on a given day, I want you to think about that job for a moment. But not the way you experience your job right now. What would your job be like—what would your work be like—if that job existed in the new heavens and new earth?

Whether you pass away and go to be with the Lord or Christ returns and makes all things new—one of the things we mentioned last week is that work is not inherently bad. It’s actually inherently good. We work because the God who created us is a worker.

And when he created us in his image he gave us a mandate to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and to have dominion over all his creation. And right after this, Genesis 2:15 says God placed the man and woman in the garden to work it and keep it. Our work is meant to be a primary expression for fulfilling God’s purpose in our lives as his image bearers.

So, work isn’t a bad thing. But there are bad things in our work. There’s toil. There’s challenges and temptations. There’s pain, and there’s failure. All of that exists in your job in a way that may be unique and specific to your particular industry.

But what would your job look like in heaven if there was no toil? If there was no sin affecting it or directing it? For those of you working in medicine, your job wouldn’t exist. If everyone lives forever and there’s no more pain or suffering, then there’s not much need for a surgeon.

Of course, that doesn’t mean your job doesn’t matter. Quite the opposite. It means the job you have right now exists to be part of God’s promised restoration of what’s broken in creation. If sin is simply that which is not of God, and God is both the creator and sustainer of everything, then sin entering the world would naturally disorder and break the world from it’s original design.

That’s why the Bible points to sin as the fundamental cause for what Romans 8 calls the world’s “bondage to corruption”—disease, death, and disaster—all symptoms of a broken world in rebellion from it’s loving Creator.

So, for those of you working as nurses or doctors or respiratory therapists or first responders—your work steps into the brokenness of creation to both provide relief and point to God’s promised restoration. That one day, we won’t simply look to medicine to fix us for a moment, but we will gaze upon our Savior in Revelation 21:5 as he says, “Behold, I am making all things new.”

And we could go on with what other types of work might look like—the waiter might never have their food sent back to the kitchen. The marketer might look to bring awareness to products because they genuinely help people, not just because more clicks mean more commission.

The developer might be able to create code without having to devote half his time to making it secure from leaks and attacks. The realtor might not have to struggle with her motivations in selling a less than ideal home because there’s an abundance of perfectly made homes.

When we think about what our jobs might look like in heaven—if there was no sin or brokenness affecting them—we’re not just imagining a fantasy—we’re considering what work was designed to be—filling and subduing the earth as God’s image bearers—free from sin, free from toil.

That helps us get a little closer to understanding the true purpose of our work and how it fits into glorifying God throughout his creation. But it also gives us a spotlight on how much of our work is shaped and directed by sin today.

And if you’re having a hard time considering what your job would be like in heaven, that’s why. Because so much of how we think about our jobs and how we approach the work we do is framed by the problems that are inherent within them.

Each vocation, each industry, each context for your work—both inside and outside of the home—has unique ways that the brokenness of our world impacts it and unique temptations for you to operate outside of God’s good design within it.

So, this morning, we’re going to look at two passages in the book of Genesis as we consider the problem with our work, but our starting point is going to be about something more than just our work.

You see, in Genesis 3, we get the fallout of Adam and Eve’s sin against God. God speaks to the serpent, Eve, and Adam, sharing what their punishment will be for their disobedience as they looked to rule their own lives apart from him.

And when God speaks to Adam in verses 17-19, he orients his punishment around his relationships, highlighting how sin affects the way we connect with others, the way we connect with God, and the way we connect with all of creation. Because of that, God says the ground is cursed and in pain and hardship will he work it all the rest of his life.

That means that the problems we experience in our work flow out of the problems that sin have caused in our relationships. Because sin disorders how we relate to other people and to God and to the world around us, both the way we think about our work and the process of accomplishing our work are also going to be disordered.

So, in our time this morning, I’d like to spend a few minutes in Genesis 3 understanding how sin has disordered our relationships and then use that as the lens to examine the story of the tower of Babel as a case study for how our work is affected by sin and where we can find our hope.

Let’s start off by reading these three verses from Genesis 3 again in their entirety, so we can get the full scope of God’s words to Adam. Starting in verse 17:

Genesis 3:17–19 ESV

¹⁷ And to Adam he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife

and have eaten of the tree

of which I commanded you,

‘You shall not eat of it,’

cursed is the ground because of you;

in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;

¹⁸ thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;

and you shall eat the plants of the field.

¹⁹ By the sweat of your face

you shall eat bread,

till you return to the ground,

for out of it you were taken;

for you are dust,

and to dust you shall return.”

Right at the beginning, God points to the relationship between Adam and Eve—not saying that she made Adam sin, but that he listened to her instead of him.

If my 3 year old tells us that he threw our tv remote in the trash because our 1 year old thought it was funny, that tells me that, in that moment, he valued her opinion over ours. The order of influence in his relationships was wrong.

And we find the same thing with Adam here. He placed a greater value on what his wife said about eating the fruit of the tree than what God had already told him. The order of influence in his relationships was wrong, and that led to an action that harmed both relationships.

If we back up just one verse to the end of verse 16, we see the final thing God tells Eve is, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” The strain we feel in relationships with others, the draw we have to make relationships serve us rather than solely looking to serve—we see that traced all the way back to the garden.

Adam and Eve demonstrate that when we place our relationships with others above our relationship with God, we’ll find that neither can flourish, and both are broken as a result. With Adam and Eve, we see a tension. But with Adam and God, we see a separation.

By the end of chapter 3, God drives them out from the garden where he had walked in communion with them. By the end of verse 18, we see the creator of life tell Adam that he will be punished by one day losing his life—from dust to dust.

Now, when someone does that to you today—if you say something wrong or disappoint somebody or offend them, and they block you on social media and don’t respond to your texts or calls—if that just went on and on, after a while we would call that person petty. Like, I’m sure that was hurtful for you, but are you really going to separate yourself from that person forever because of that one thing?

We think people that act like that are a little petty. So, then we look at God in Genesis 3, and we might be tempted to think the same thing about him. “I mean, God, it was just one piece of fruit. Why can’t that be their first strike instead of their final strike? Is it really that big of a deal?” But too often we evaluate sin based on the seriousness of what we did rather than the seriousness of who we did it to.

Losing a football game the way the Saints did last week is incredibly disappointing. But losing that way to the Falcons—that’s incredibly depressing. Macie and I got to go. It was her first ever NFL game, and I don’t think it sold her on wanting to come back anytime soon.

But the biggest reason it stung wasn’t just because it was a blowout. It was a blowout to our greatest rival. There were two young boys and their dad sitting next to me at the game and shortly after halftime I saw him lean in and try to encourage his sons saying, “Just remember, the Falcons had a 28-3 lead and lost the Super Bowl.”

Yes, sin is bad. But the biggest reason it’s bad—and actually what defines just how bad it is—is the dignity of the one we’ve sinned against. Wrongdoing against an infinitely good God is infinitely wrong, which is why God’s justice requires an infinite punishment. Once again, another relationship has been disordered.

But then the bulk of what we find here in these three verses is how man’s sin affects our relationship to the rest of creation. God says in verse 17 that the ground is now “cursed”—that word refers to divine harm being invoked against something. Once again, we could go to Romans 8 where Paul says that creation was “subjected to futility.”

What this means is that the failure to always produce a good crop, the ability for some rain to nourish the ground but for too much to drown it, the struggle we face trying to get things to consistently do what they’re supposed to in whatever your work might be—what it was intended to be—Genesis 3:17-19 is telling us that all that toil is the result of sin breaking the design of God’s creation.

The world was built to respond to our leadership over it. That’s the cultural mandate we read back in Genesis 1:28. But now, our rejection of God’s rule in our lives has led to creation’s rejection of our rule over it. Now, it takes pain to conquer it. We don’t just tend roses; we have to wade through thorns and thistles.

Even when we give our greatest effort—like verse 19 says, even when we’ve exhausted ourselves and have earned our bread through the sweat of our face, we’ll find that we wake up the next day having to toil with our work all over again.

Work was a good thing provided as an instrument for the blessing of the mandate God gave us to fill and subdue and have dominion over his creation. But now, because of sin, it’s one of the primary contexts where we experience hardship. The ground we work was our servant; now it’s our enemy.

And I want to pause on this point for a moment because some of you might hear me describe the toil of work and that doesn’t seem to fit your experience. You might love your job (And by the way, that’s great. There’s nothing in Scripture that says you shouldn’t).

The ability to work, both inside and outside of the home, is still, at it’s core, a gift from God. But if you don’t recognize the cracks in your work, then I would argue you haven’t thought very deeply about your work.

We’ve seen that story told over and over again of the infatuated boy or girl who has such an all-encompassing crush that the person they’re attracted to can do no wrong. Everything is wonderful. In marriage, we might call that the honeymoon phase.

But if you get to know anyone long enough, you’ll learn why it was important you promised “for better or for worse” and “till death do you part” when you said your vows.

When somebody idolizes a person, they fixate on the things they love about them so much that it blinds them from the ways they’re broken. Over time, they might even distort the good things about them with unrealistic expectations.

And we can do that with our work as well. And when we do, the crash down to reality is brutal. Take a new parent, for example. During that first pregnancy, those 9 months are filled with anticipation. You cannot wait to meet your son or your daughter.

And when they arrive, that moment is irreplaceable. But if you think that child is perfect? If you build a caricature of them in your mind and set an expectation that only baby Jesus has ever lived up to, then you are going to struggle when your child disappoints you. When they disrespect you. When they disobey you.

All work has purpose because our God gave us work as a gift. But all work also has problems because we chose to rule our lives apart from the God who gave us that gift. From our relationships with others to our relationship with God to our relationship with all of creation, the way we connect is disordered, which is why the way we cultivate what’s in front of us is also disordered.

And I think the story of Babel gives us an excellent case study on how these relationships, disordered by sin, also disorder both the goals of our work and the practice of our work—both the reasons why we work and the ways how we work.

Here you have the whole earth described in Genesis 11:1 as having “one language and the same words.” And so as people migrated from the east like we read in verse 2, they find an area of land to settle in, and they come up with a plan. Look with me, starting in verse 3.

Genesis 11:3–4 ESV

³ And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”

Here we see a productive people. A hardworking people. An ambitious people. But a disordered people. They’re blessed with unity, peace, and potential, but they choose to leverage those things, as verse 4 says, to “make a name for [themselves].”

That’s the opposite of how God designed us when he said back in Genesis 1:26 to, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” If we were created to represent God, then utilizing our gifts and circumstances should make his name great, not our own. But this distorted goal has penetrated every aspect of the work we do.

It could be as obvious as the lawyer who finds ways to let everyone know she’s made partner or as subtle as the dad who brags about his kid’s grades because he hopes to find personal validation for being a good father in his child’s achievement. Even when our goals look good, they can have sinful motives.

I mean, aspiring to build an entire city and a skyscraper like they did at Babel is an incredible goal. No doubt the finished work would’ve benefitted the people there as they had an interconnected place to live and flourish and be protected from someone conquering them and scattering them over the face of the earth like we read at the end of verse 4.

But it’s their “why” that demonstrated their problem. God had already made them in his image. He had already given them a name. But, just like Adam and Eve in the garden, they chose to follow their ambition rather than their Lord, to use their work for their own glory rather than to demonstrate the glory of their God.

Of course, this is a very extreme example. I don’t suppose many of us will attempt to build a skyscraper that reaches heaven in our lifetime. But it does beg the question: Where are you currently using your work to make a name for yourself? Where are you rejecting God’s purpose for your work to create and cultivate his creation as his image bearers in order to create and cultivate some kind of personal output for yourself?

Sure, we need financial security. Awards and acclaim aren’t bad things either. But our hearts are, and we have a unique ability to twist the good things God has placed within us and the good things we experience in the world around us to please ourselves rather than orient the work we do around pleasing him.

When we read that the people at Babel wanted to make a name for themselves when they built that tower, our tendency is to connect their motivations to status—like they wanted to make themselves as glorious and as heavenly as God. And maybe that’s something you can identify with in your own work, or maybe it’s not.

But the foundation of any desire for status or fame or recognition is something that’s much more fundamental to every one of us, and that’s our search for justification. We want to know that what we do matters. We want to know that we matter. We want to feel at peace with the nature of our work, the way we approach our work, and the results from our work.

And because our work takes up a quarter or more of our daily lives, we can twist the work we get to do with who we are and why we matter. Wether you’re a counselor who cares for people who are struggling or a stay-at-home parent raising your children, it’s easy for us to lose our identity in the work we do.

And when that happens, we find ourselves measuring the success of our lives based on how we define the success of our work. On days that our kids nap when they’re supposed to and eat all of their dinner and don’t push their brother or sister down, we feel like we’re a good parent. We’re okay. We’re at peace.

But then their nap gets interrupted or they suddenly hate their favorite meal and you catch yourself raising your voice at them. Now, all of the sudden we don’t just feel like we failed in that moment of parenting. We’re tempted to feel like we’re a failure in general. We don’t just feel guilty; we feel destabilized.

We said this last week: your work is meant to be the expression of your identity and not the source of it. The people at Babel set out to make a name for themselves. They wanted to justify themselves—to create their own sense of peace for why they matter and how they were sufficient.

And because the work they were doing—which again, had very tangible and positive aspects to it—but because they were looking for their work to be the source of their identity rather than the expression of their identity, they put an even greater emphasis on their performance.

They didn’t just make normal, sun-dried bricks like verse 3 says; they burned them thoroughly. Mesopotamians had access to bitumen, which was essentially asphalt, so they employed that as an extra technique to solidify the structure. Because their identity was at stake, the people gave everything they had.

And that’s often the same reason people overwork themselves today—because they are forever pursuing the sense that they’ve done enough—that they’ve earned enough, achieved enough, provided enough—that they can feel justified in their work.

Sin corrupts even our most sincere goals and practices in our work because, like we saw all the way back in Genesis 3, sin affects our very relationship to work. But as we close this morning, I want us to look at how God responds to the problems with the work at Babel and how, even in his judgement, we find the hope of good news. Let’s look in the text one more time, starting in verse 5.

Genesis 11:5–9 ESV

⁵ And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. ⁶ And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” ⁸ So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. ⁹ Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth.

The people were attempting to build a tower that reached up to the heavens, but verse 5 says it’s God that comes down to them. Just like we saw last week when God created man and woman in his image, we get our second of four uses of the “divine plural” here in the Old Testament pointing us forward to our understanding of the Trinity: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language.”

Verse 8 goes on to say that God dispersed them from there to the ends of the earth—the very thing the people were worried about in verse 4 when these chose to build the tower in the first place.

It’s easy for us to read our English translation and assume that verse 6 is telling us that God confused their languages and scattered the people because he didn’t want them to become too great—he says, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

But we have to remember what people had already done from the beginning of creation up until this point: they rebelled against their creator, they killed one another, they pursued so much wickedness that God sent a flood both as an act of justice against humanity and an act of mercy for the rest of his creation.

The point of verse 6 isn’t that God felt threatened by the people’s ability. No, his concern is that when sinful people work together apart from the God who made them, there will be no limit to how much evil can result.

If you ask me to build you a house, it will go badly. I’m not knowledgeable, equipped, or qualified. But if you ask 100 people as incompetent as me to build you a house together? Somebody’s gonna die.

When we see God’s judgment in Scripture, we often focus on what he takes away, but it’s important for us to consider what he’s restraining. When God scatters the people at Babel, it’s not just a punishment for attempting to make a name for themselves apart from God; it’s an act of mercy to prevent them from the damage that occurs outside the design of God.

In these first 9 verses of Genesis 11 we see an incredibly reversal from the actions the people take at the beginning to how God responds at the end.

• In verse 1, the world unites with one language. In verse 9, the world is scattered with multiple languages.

• In verse 2, the people travel there with a plan. In verse 8, the people travel from there with no more plan.

• In verse 3, they say to each other, “Come, let us make bricks.” In verse 7, God says, “Come, let us confuse their language.

• In verse 4, the people see an opportunity in what they can build together. In verse 6, God sees a threat in what they could do going forward.

And smack dab in the middle of this great reversal is the hinge point of the Babel story, the hinge point of each of our work stories, and the hinge point of the full story of human history. Look what it says in verse 5: “the LORD came down.”

God drawing near is what restrains how broken our world could be, it’s what provides a steady focus in the midst of the problems of our work, and it’s our only hope in life and death.

When God came down to Babel, he pushed back the desire to make a name for ourselves. When God came down to Bethlehem as Christ, he didn’t just restrain our desires for our own name; he gave us the gift of his name. His identity. His righteousness.

No amount of building, no amount of success in your life or your work will eliminate your problems or provide you with a secure identity. But trusting in the work of Jesus—his perfect work—covers over the problems in all of our work.

So that, even while we still face the daily struggle and toil with them, our hearts do not have to be ruled by them, because our security is found in what he has done rather than through anything we can do. That’s the gospel at work.

Let’s pray.