The War on Your Work

Work was designed by God Himself to be a generous gift to humanity.

It isn’t a necessary evil. It isn’t something to grit your teeth and “make it through another day”. No, before sin entered onto the scene, God gave humanity a task: to cultivate, to guard, to create, to build. “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth. Subdue it. Have dominion…” (Gen. 1:28). Work wasn’t our side quest, it was the original mission.

But if we’re being honest, most Christians don’t relate to the idea of their work being a generous gift. It feels… hard. Confusing. Frustrating. It feels somewhere on the scale from boring to crushing. Why? Because your work—yes, your ordinary, mundane, everyday work—is under attack.

Trying to understand our work apart from Genesis 1-2 is like trying to pick up The Lord of the Rings and starting in the middle, trying to make sense of why some hobbit is trying to get a ring to Mount Doom. Without the beginning of the story, we lack appropriate context.

So what’s the context that Genesis 1-2 gives us?

Well, first we see God Himself portraying Himself as a Creator, Craftsman, and Designer. This would have been a shocking difference to the ancient audience who first heard this Creation story. The ancient creation stories they were familiar with framed creation as a chaotic, violent, and degrading thing.

The famed Enuma Elish (Babylonian) creation story tells of violent and self-serving gods, and creation resulting from divine conflict. The cosmos is born from chaos and violence, not order and goodness, like we see in Genesis 1. The Egyptian creation stories (yes, there were numerous ones based on which deity you worshipped) portrayed the gods are part of creation itself, emerging from the waters or elements. In Genesis, God is utterly distinct from His creation, and creation is by purposeful design, not happenstance. In the Atrahasis Epic (from Mesopotamia) the lesser gods grow weary of doing hard labor—digging canals and maintaining the earth—so they rebel. To solve the problem, the higher gods create humans out of clay mixed with the blood of a slain god. Humanity’s role is essentially to be a labor force to take over the toil that the gods despised.

In these pagan creation stories, work is seen as a curse or burden for humans. That stands in stark contrast to Genesis 1–2, where God Himself is portrayed as the first worker and humanity’s work is part of their dignity and purpose as His image-bearers.

Next, God gives a royal commission to Adam and Eve-

“Then the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate [`abad] it and keep it.” Genesis 2:15

The Hebrew word for “cultivate” in this text is the word “’abad” which in other Scriptures is actually translated “worship”. Right from the first pages of Genesis, God is telling us that our understanding of work and worship should be tied together, for in fact the very same word is used to signify both. That’s a pretty cool connection!

Next, we see what kind of life we are meant to live with God when we see how God walked in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. He didn’t create them and then leave them to do life on their own. They lived in intimate relationship with God, fellowshipping with Him and depending on Him for wisdom and guidance.

Imagine what life must have looked like for Adam and Eve as they were figuring out how to cultivate the garden: exclaiming in joy as they found a new plant, watching in wonder as they saw an animal give birth, sitting down to eat lunch together and enjoying the new foods they had discovered or cooked in a new way. And God was with them, living life with them as they cultivated His amazing creation. So we learn from this that humans were created to live in intimate fellowship with God Himself.

We also see that work was a fundamental part of their lives. Genesis 1:26-27:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

God has called humanity, both men and women, to rule and create, just like God does. That means you! We call this the “dominion mandate”. Notice how this comes in the context of humanity being made in God’s image. Just like God Himself created this beautiful world from nothingness, we are called to mimic that by taking barrenness and unfruitfulness, the raw materials and raw potential of the world, and create beauty, order, and fruitfulness from it.

In fact, the Hebrew text can be translated, ‘God made human in order to rule.’ Our purpose is to rule on behalf of God, to rule in a way that reflects who God is to His creation, and to serve God through our work. We are made to work, to ‘abad”, to worship, to experience God through what we do. It’s our meaning and purpose.

This drive to rule is in our DNA. We can’t escape it. We have a deep longing to do something with our lives, to build something meaningful, and to create something that will outlast us. That drive was put there by God Himself! It’s one of the main purposes for which he created you, and it’s a way you reflect His image in you.

So in the beginning, Adam and Eve walked in the garden with God. We were made for fellowship with God; to behold His face. And second, we were made for fellowship with each other. Then third, we were made to WORK, to take dominion in the world with Him as our friend and our King.

Do you see these three funamental spheres of worship laid out here in Eden? Worship as we relate with God Himself, Worship as we serve and fellowship with our fellow image bearers, and worship as we “’abad” or cultivate the world as God has commanded us to. Three spheres, all of them are worship.

You are made for an intimate, abiding relationship with Jesus and your work is actually a vital avenue for how you will learn to connect with Him. Your work is built to point you to Him. I can attest that it is in my work-life that my reliance rears its ugly head the most! It’s so easy to do our work in our own strength and wisdom, and leave God entirely out of it. But God actually wants to use our work as a way to grow us into His likeness more, and as a way to learn moment-by-moment fellowship with Him. Our work is one of our best opportunities for learning to experience Jesus more, because that’s where we spend the majority of our time.

We spend half of our waking hours in some form of work. Whether at home or in the marketplace, paid or unpaid, work takes up a bulk of our life. This is not an accident. No, God designed it that way! We were designed to spend the bulk of our life in work. God designed us that way on purpose, for our good, and for His glory. We just need to know how to work in a way that treats it as the avenue of worship that it is.

Your job won’t always feel like a dream fit, and even your perfect calling will sometimes feel like drudgery. That’s the curse at work. But don’t misread it: the ache doesn’t cancel the assignment. The battlefield hasn’t changed, and neither has your mandate. You’re still called to take dominion, even when it feels like dust and sweat. The fact that our fall-affected work bothers us so much isn’t an invalidation, it’s the proof that it’s what we are made for.

In Psalm 8, when David thinks about this beautiful role of dominion we have been given, He can’t help but break out in worship! He says that this glorious calling of dominion crowns us mere human beings with glory and honor. God has made us just a little below Himself in giving us such an incredible job.

“What is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” Psalm 8:4-9

But there was someone who looked at our first parents, laughing, planting, tilling, and walking with God, and he hated it. Instead of rejoicing in God’s design for humans, He loathed us for it. As a glorious angelic being, He despised us humans, made from lowly mud. He hated that God had crowned us with glory and honor. And He sought to destroy God’s image bearers from the inside out.

Now, we know the story of what happened next. We messed everything up through sin, and now we have a curse to deal with. It’s what all of our classic fairy tales are based on: Paradise with God was shattered, and now we live under a curse. The dragon brought death to what was good and joyful.

But thankfully, that wasn’t the end of the story. Right after our first parents sinned and were standing there with the serpent and God in the aftermath of their blame fest, God gave them hope. God promised to send a hero, a Savior, who would come and put everything right. And we know now, that that hero was Jesus.

This is where things start to get really cool: Jesus and Adam are contrasted in Scripture. Jesus is called the “second Adam” because He has accomplished what the first Adam failed to do. He fixes what our father Adam messed up.

“For if, by the trespass of the one man [Adam], death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!” Romans 5:17

Jesus has set us right with God again through his redemptive death and resurrection. His salvation secures not only our eternal life with God, but also notice at the end of that verse, that we “reign in life”. Whereas in Adam death had a tyrannical reign over us, with us as the victims, now in Jesus, we reign in life, we have been restored to the beautiful calling of dominion that Adam and Eve were given. We reign, we are no longer victims.

“In all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” Romans 8:37

In short, Jesus restores us to all three avenues of worship that Adam and Eve lost:

Jesus restores our fellowship with God, He restores our reconciliation to one another, and He restores us to the beautiful, noble call of dominion IN OUR WORK.

But until King Jesus comes back and fully crushes the serpent forever, we still strive against our enemy. And we need to recognize that all three of these avenues of worship are going to be his primary battlefields. He’s going to attack our relationship with God, our relationship with others, and our work.

Let me be blunt: we are not being taught to fight this battlefield of work well, at all. And because of that, we are wide open to the enemy controlling one of the primary battlefields in our lives. We MUST stop treating our work as though it’s neutral. We must stop giving ground to the enemy because we think that God only cares about our “heart”.

We need to grapple with the harsh reality that we live in the tension of what theologians call the antithesis—the spiritual conflict between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness. And the battle doesn’t just rage in our relationship with God or our relationship other people. It rages in your calendar. In your daily responsibilities. In your house work. In your 9-5. In the moments where you’re tempted to believe, “None of this matters.”

Martin Luther saw this war clearly:

“In this way a man could be happy and of good cheer in all his trouble and labor; and if he had accustomed himself to look at his service and calling in this way, nothing would be distasteful to him. But the devil opposes this point of view tooth and nail, to keep one from coming to this joy and to cause everybody to have a special dislike for what he should do and is commanded to do. So the devil operates in order to make sure that people do not love their work and no service be rendered to God.” - Martin Luther

Our enemy hates us with such a vile distaste that he delights to make us miserable. Like a school bully, he loves to kick us into the dust and then laugh at us. And one of his favorite ways to torture us is to take the very task God created us to do and make it feel like a crushing burden or useless bore. If Satan can’t stop you from being saved, he’ll try to make you useless to the kingdom and absolutely miserable while he does it.

Oh how he loves when he can accomplish a masterpiece of deceit and give you a contempt for your own God-given calling.

If he can convince you that your work is insignificant, if he can get you to despise your daily duties, if he can flood your mind with comparison, discontentment, or boredom, then you stop showing up with joy. You stop stewarding what’s in front of you. You trade dominion for distraction.

This is a theme I’m seeing in both my own work and the lives of others I’m coaching and teaching. We look around at the work of others and we can readily see the value of it. But when we look at our own work, we experience doubts about whether or not our work is truly needed and useful and whether we should be doing it at all. I believe the enemy strategically places those very doubts there to hold us back from going all out in kingdom efficacy.

“Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil.” (Eph. 6:11)

The schemes of the devil aren’t always dramatic. Sometimes they show up as that low-grade resentment toward your job. That shame you feel for “not doing more.” That subtle belief that folding laundry or mowing the lawn can’t possibly be kingdom work.

“Work is not a curse, but part of God’s original design… Yet the devil will always try to turn gifts into burdens.” — Tim Keller, Every Good Endeavor

But here's the truth: your work is the battlefield.

“Vocation is where I do spiritual battle. Vocation is the ring in which the old Adam and the new creation spar. This is where I suffer. This is where I bear a cross. This shouldn't surprise me, for I am Christ's coworker. He puts me on as His mask to love my wife, my children, and all the people with whom I interact. This is really about Christ loving my neighbors, and I just happen to be a part of the equation. I decrease so that he might increase. Should I not share in his sufferings? Will there not be a cross? When I live for them, I die to myself. This is a spiritual battle. Yet once again, the burden is light. Once again, for every vocation I fill, there are countless vocations through which God loves me. I receive much more than I give.” — Michael Berg, Vocation: The Setting for Human Flourishing

This is not just duty. It’s doxology. It's not drudgery—it's participation in the life of Christ.

And all of this weighty glory and meaning attached to our work could become a crushing burden if we didn’t look to our Savior, the second Adam, Jesus Christ Himself.

We will never perfectly image or God and reflect His character to creation as we were made to do. | But Jesus is the perfect Imago Dei. He is the exact representation of God to creation (Heb 1:3).

We will never perfectly take dominion. But Jesus’ dominion is complete and final (Eph 1:20-21).

We will never perfectly listen to God’s calling and follow Him unreservedly. But Jesus did all that the Father commanded Him and pleased the Father to the fullest extent (John 8:29, 14:31).

We needed a second Adam because the first Adam failed us. Adam didn’t do His job to be a faithful priest-king and vice-regent of God. He allowed evil to stand unopposed. But Jesus, our perfect Priest-King succeeded where the first one failed. And in a shocking turn of events, He takes his traitorous enemies (us) and puts us back on His side of the war. We are now joined to Him in salvation, and we will get to take dominion through Him, and someday share in His inheritance and reign. I see myself fail in my calling every day. But that’s not a cause for despair, for Jesus has perfectly fulfilled all the works I am called to do. This allows me to take my eyes off the goal of perfectionism and put them on my perfect Savior. It allows me to experience real freedom and joy in my work because I have nothing to prove.

So as you go into your work day, remember that you have an enemy. He hates you, and his goal is to make you miserable and ineffective. But you are not like our first parents, naked. You are given the armor of God. So gird yourself. We have work to do.