Holy Scripture begins with a workweek. Over the course of seven days, the Lord brings the creation into being, fashions its structures, fills its realms with life, and delegates aspects of its rule to appointed agents. Each successive day is numbered and punctuated with the refrain “and there was evening and there was morning …” and divine acts of assessment of his creations, both severally and collectively, are scattered throughout the account: “And God saw that it was good.”

Within the stable rhythm of the creation days, the creative work of God is richly varied in its form and its objects. God speaks and brings light into being; he separates light from darkness; he assesses his creation; he names his creatures; he makes an expanse; he charges and enlivens the earth to bring forth vegetation; he appoints sun, moon, and stars to be for signs and for seasons in the heavens; he blesses the fish and birds with fruitfulness and empowers them to multiply and fill the seas and earth; he creates humankind. And on the seventh day he rests, blessing and sanctifying the day.

The reader of Genesis might be surprised that an almighty God did not bring the entire creation into existence in a single instant. Yet a key dimension of God’s work of creation is setting up the continued rhythms, orders, and patterns of the creation. Within his workweek in creation God sets the pattern for human labor. The pattern of the day (evening and morning) and the pattern of the week (six days of labor, one day of rest) do not result from some limitation on God’s part, but from God’s purpose to set the pattern for his creatures’ labor and to dignify that labor by establishing a continuity between his own creation work and creaturely sub-creation.

On the sixth day, God creates humankind in his image and likeness, blessing them and commissioning them: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Humanity’s task continues God’s own creation, filling the realms that God established, extending and elaborating good order within the creation, and exercising beneficent rule over its creatures. Humankind both had to rule over and to share the creation with other creatures.

In Genesis 2, the creation is described as incompletely ordered, filled, and ruled: “when no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up – for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.” The original creation is good, yet much remains to be done. God creates, commissions, empowers, and equips humanity to complete what he has started; we are a means of his continued creation and providence.

The man was created in the wilderness, and then God created the garden. Presumably the man witnessed God’s formation of the garden: this is what it looks like to tame, order, and glorify the wilderness. The garden, a beautiful, bounded, and ordered realm, was a model, training ground, staging area, and orienting heart for humanity’s labor. Placed in the garden, the man was given the task of serving and guarding it, defending its bounded order and encouraging its flourishing. As several scholars have observed, the task given to Adam in the garden is the same as that given to the Levites relative to the tabernacle.

Downstream from the garden lay other lands; their treasures are described in the account – the Pishon flowed around Havilah, a land of gold and precious stones. Having learned the ropes in the garden, humanity, the reader presumes, would need to venture out and start to tame the wider world, the task for which we originally were created. The garden was also an elevated sanctuary, a realm where God and man enjoyed fellowship. There was a centrifugal impulse, by which man would be propelled out from the garden to the four corners of the earth (suggested by the four rivers). There was also a centripetal impulse, by which humanity would always return to the garden sanctuary, glorifying it with the treasures of the creation.

Adam, alone in the garden, was completely insufficient for the task that lay before him. He lacked the capacity to be fruitful, multiply, and to fill the earth. He needed a fitting counterpart by his side, not chiefly for companionship to address his personal loneliness, but for effective performance of his God-given commission. Before creating a counterpart for Adam, however, God gave the man the task of naming the animals. While God had named some of his creatures on the first three days, the creatures of the later days remained unnamed. Like a father training his son in the family business, God taught Adam the business of ordering and understanding creation through speech. Work, then, is not just physical and creative: it is intellectual as well. There is an implication that Adam, in his naming, was making what might be judgment calls: discerning the nature of the creatures he was naming. Man’s labor is thus continuous with and established by God’s labor.

The pattern of labor and rest is fundamentally divine; in our work, we continue a pattern established in God’s own creative work.

Although he successfully named the animals, Adam was unsuccessful in finding a suitable counterpart. When Adam awoke to see the woman God fashioned from the rib he took from him, he greeted her with delight, recognizing not merely a fitting counterpart but a companion in relation to whom he could arrive at a new self-knowledge: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” He could recognize her in part because his work of naming had prepared him to do so: the work of naming is thus also a work of love.

A rich account of human work is already implicit within the first two chapters of Holy Scripture. The pattern of labor and rest is fundamentally divine; in our work, we continue a pattern established in God’s own creative work. Besides following a pattern of divine work, human work continues what began in divine work, further filling, ordering, naming, taming, and glorifying creation. Human labor is a participation in divine labor, in God’s ordering of, provision for, ruling over, and glorifying of his creation. Humankind is created for the purpose of labor – “to work the ground” – and blessed and commissioned for the task – “Be fruitful and multiply.” That fruitfulness and multiplication entails another kind of work: the labor of women in childbirth, contextualized as central to the other kinds of work that men and women do. Created in the image and likeness of God, humankind has a capacity for transforming creative activity in the world that no other earthly creature possesses. It is difficult to imagine a firmer basis for the dignity of work than that offered in Genesis 1 and 2.

It is in his work that man takes an active interest in and responsibility for the creation and fellow creatures; through work he can deepen and enrich his relationship with the ground from which he was first formed. God created man to make a divinely desired mark upon the world, so that his work would be fruitful, effective, and good. Through labor, man will mature in skill, understanding, wisdom, and agency. In the garden, man is offered a model and training for his task, the connection between his work and God’s work further underlined. The realm of the garden is to be maintained by the wisdom and skill of the man, and caring for it trains him in skills by which he would later fashion such realms of his own. Fellow-labor is also a primary basis of human fellowship: the man and the woman are created in a shoulder-to-shoulder relationship, not merely a face-to-face one. Together, they will be fruitful and multiply, labor, make a world, and make a home – world and home are places both of work and of rest.

Beyond the marriage relationship, collaborative labor binds people together and establishes contexts of belonging, mutual dependence, common concern, and common good. While talk of “the economy” or “the market” may often function as unhelpful abstractions, they can relate to the “commonwealth” formed by the multifaceted entanglement and interdependence of the labor and interests of many people in some realm. Work is the form that participation in a larger society can take.

Man’s work was supposed to flow out of and back into fellowship with God: it was ordered out from and into the sanctuary. However, after humanity’s rebellion in the Fall, human labor went awry, adopting a different character. Alienated from God, human labor lost its primary orientation to communion, becoming acquisitive, driven by a desire for material possessions, power, and status. Capacities that were created for beneficent rule were twisted to the ends of domination over others, and labor became entangled with systems of bondage. Mutual recognition, companionship, and belonging through fellow labor curdled into rivalry and division. Work once blessed with fruitfulness was reduced to frustration and futility. Labor degraded into unrelenting toil. The earth no longer readily answered to the efforts of the man, and now, alienated from the Giver of Life, man’s labors were constantly slipping down into the pitiless maw of death. The labor of women in childbirth became hedged about with the risk of death, for mother and baby alike. The book of Ecclesiastes, which meditates upon the condition of man in a world under the power of death, describes how man’s greatest works are washed away and forgotten beneath the advancing tides of time.

Sabbath presented work with an end, being both a cessation of toil and a purpose: an orientation to something greater that upholds its goodness.

At the heart of the biblical story of the Exodus is the theme of labor. Egypt is described as “the house of slavery” and not merely on account of the children of Israel’s reduced condition within it: the whole land and its population are characterized by a cruel distortion of labor. The children of Israel were afflicted and placed under bondage. In place of the creational dignity, fruitfulness, and fellowship of labor, and its ordering around fellowship with God, they experienced the mastery of merciless tyrants, continuous and unforgiving toil, alienation from the fruits of their work, and the enervation of their peoplehood and spirit under crushing burdens.

To many readers it might feel that the kinetic narrative of the book of Exodus loses its steam somewhere around the halfway mark, its energy petering out in a tedious morass of obscure case laws, instructions for the tabernacle and its furniture, and a lengthy account of the process of its construction. Yet, if the first half of the book described the deliverance of the children of Israel from oppression in Egypt, the second half establishes the laws and institutions by which they might enjoy continued freedom. In the provision of the manna in chapter sixteen, the people were already being prepared for a new form of life. Their former life had been one of daily toil without rest, struggling to find the means of survival. Now their daily bread was provided by God and all had a sufficient amount, one omer. As it could not be accumulated, they had to learn a grateful and trusting dependence upon God’s provision. On the sixth day enough was provided for two days and, on the seventh, they were charged to rest. Sabbath rest was a revolutionary transformation of the manner of life to which they had been accustomed.

In the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, the law of the Sabbath was given its rationale in God’s own rest after the six days of creation: in its practice, a former slave people were called to follow God’s own pattern of labor and to liberate others in their turn. As the principle of Sabbath was expounded and expanded upon in the rest of the Pentateuch, it was related to civil legislation concerning the liberation of slaves and provision for the poor. The weekly Sabbath was also the seed of a calendrical principle that was elaborated into a festal year with an annual cycle of seven festivals, seven days of rest, two seven-day feasts, and the Feast of Weeks or Pentecost as a Sabbath of Sabbaths, seven sevens from the Feast of Firstfruits (where the omer presented to the Lord recalled the people to the lesson of divine provision of the manna). Expanded further, it was expressed in a sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee (after seven sets of seven years).

These feasts and years grounded Israel’s life in the rest freely granted by the Lord. They memorialized and occasioned thanksgiving for his deliverance and provision and prayer for its continuation. In celebrating them, Israel enjoyed the fruits of their labors and shared them with others, especially the poor, the stranger, and the Levite. They were times of assembly, community, and festivity, ordering Israel’s labor to thanksgiving, enjoyment of God’s good gifts, and liberality to others. Due to the division of labor, societies are typically stratified and their members separated by their diverse economic activities; the feast was a reassertion of commonality, mutual interest, and mutual recognition, tempering tendencies toward the alienation of classes both from each other and from a greater shared peoplehood.

The Sabbath principle was not exclusive to free Israelites: Israelites were charged to give rest to their servants, animals, and all within their households. Indeed, in the seventh year, the rest was explicitly extended to the land itself, which was to lie fallow. Likewise, in connection with the Feast of Weeks and the year of Jubilee, God’s concern that no Israelite be alienated from his gift of the land is demonstrated: even the poorest must be allowed to glean and all ancestral property must be restored to its original owners in the fiftieth year.

The tabernacle, the construction of which is the focus of the second half of Exodus, is akin to a Sabbath place, a realm of God’s rest amid his liberated people. The various feasts grounded in the Sabbath are ordered around the reality of the tabernacle as the site of festal gathering and of fellowship with God, and the presentation of gifts. The plan for the tabernacle and its furniture in Exodus 25–31 is delivered in two cycles of seven sections, paralleled to the days of creation: fittingly the instructions conclude with the law of the Sabbath as the great sign of the covenant. The book of Exodus begins with the children of Israel building store cities for the Pharaoh and it ends with Spirit-empowered Israelite artisans constructing a tent palace for God to dwell in their midst.

The daily cycle of work and rest, the weekly cycle of six days of labor followed by the Sabbath, the annual cycle of feasts, and the larger cycle of sabbatical years both punctuated and variegated Israel’s time. Time was meaningfully articulated, structured, ordered to new ends, and differentiated in its character. Through such an articulation of time, Israel was granted the possibility of transcending a flat quotidian grind. Time was “redeemed,” related to the fundamental time of creation in the continued recapitulation of the first week of God’s labor, to the times of redemption in the memorial feasts, and to the awaited consummation through the eschatological import of such celebrations. In such a manner, work could be bounded, differentiated from rest and leisure, flowing from a higher source and being ordered toward a higher end. Bitter toil and cruel bondage could become good work and sacred service.

Through sabbatical times and the tabernacle as the sabbatical place, the fallenness of the time of Israel’s bondage was overcome and its time and its labors were liberated. The goods of labor that were compromised or lost in the Fall and the evils introduced into humanity’s experience of work were addressed. Sabbath presented work with an end, being both a cessation of otherwise unrelenting toil and a purpose: an orientation of work to something greater that upholds its goodness.

By placing the Lord’s rest at the heart of Israel, the entire realm of man’s times and labors was reordered. The people of Israel were called to present themselves before the Lord, along with the fruit of their labors. They were to celebrate before the Lord with the fruit of their labors, enjoying fellowship with the Lord and with each other. Structures of bondage, alienation, and separation were to be loosened as people assembled before the God who gave rest to all his people. Israel’s times of festal assembly corresponded with times of harvest and ingathering, relating their labors to dependence upon and thanksgiving for God’s good gifts. In the Ark of the Covenant, within the Holy of Holies, was a measure of the manna that God had given – the bread from heaven, the harvest for which the Israelites had not labored, a reminder of the gratuitous nature of God’s way with them, even as their own labor was made holy. It is God who gives us our daily bread, as he gave it to Israel in the desert.

The futility of fallen labor is overcome in Christ, as our work for God’s kingdom is now assured of final fruitfulness.

The liberating principle of Sabbath remains for Christians, although its root meaning may now be differently conjugated. We still cease from our labors and practice sacred rest. We still assemble to celebrate together, to memorialize the deliverances of God and await the consummation of all things. We still present ourselves as laborers, and present the fruits of our labors to God. We still enjoy communion with God amid our labors. We do not have Israel’s tabernacle or the Garden of Eden, but we still have sanctuaries of worship to which we ascend, relating our downstream activity in the wider world to the central spring of life before the face of God among his people.

Through such practices, our labor can be redeemed, discovering its true end. Regularly returning to God’s rest and anticipating the greater rest that awaits us, our labor is dignified and elevated. Jobs can become vocations. As the apostle Paul taught in Ephesians 6:5–8, when done in the service of Christ, even the most menial and thankless toil can be rendered honorable and fruitful, receiving the recognition and approbation of our Lord. As a body of many members, each exercising its own distinctive gifts for the good of the whole, the church is a communion of spirited labor.

And at the heart of the church’s life is God’s taking of our gifts of bread and wine – fruits and tokens of our labor – and returning them to us as the gift of his Son, the true bread that came down from heaven, his making of them into the perfect offering that we could never have made of ourselves: the offering that atones, the bread that gives everlasting life. The futility of fallen labor is also overcome in Christ, as our work for God’s kingdom is now assured of final fruitfulness. As 1 Corinthians 15:58 charges us, “Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

We still live in a fallen world, with all its frustration, toil, and bondage. Yet as we and our labors are brought into the life of the church, we have a promissory reality of a world beyond the dominion of death and can experience something of humanity’s restoration in the good work for which we were first created.

The Book of Revelation concludes with images that recall the opening chapters of Genesis. In a book replete with significant sevens, the coming of God’s great and final rest is declared. The final vision is of a great city descending out of heaven, like a bride prepared for her husband. Hearers might be excused for feeling a sense of déjà vu: it describes a nuptial scene in a garden city, with a river of the water of life flowing out, flanked by the tree of life. It is a return to Eden, but an Eden glorified with the treasures of the world, all the good work and works that all peoples have ever done caught up in this new regime and made permanent, none of them lost. In this Eden the vocation of man to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, and exercise dominion over its creatures has been achieved, the wonderful fruits of that labor are enjoyed, and all humanity know communion with God and each other.