Why Did God Create The Mundane?

“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth….[My people] will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit….They will not labor in vain.” **Isaiah 65:17, 21, 23

“Why did God put me in a world where I have to do things like brush my teeth, wash dishes, do laundry, and empty my email inbox? Doesn’t He want me doing more important things?!”

This was the voice inside my head, pretty much every day as I became an adult. In particular, I remember the extreme frustration I felt as a newlywed, trying my hand for the first time at both running a home and starting a business.

I just couldn’t understand it. What was God thinking? Didn’t He know that I could do really cool, amazing things if I didn’t have to worry about showering, drinking half a gallon of water, and eating 3 square meals? WHY had he made me (and the world I was moving through) so filled with the mundane?

I knew that ultimately these mundane tasks supported things like a clean and hospitable home, healthy living, or my big exciting work projects, but that just didn’t seem like a good enough reason for these tasks’ existence.

I know I’m not alone in these feelings. We all chafe at the idea of having to make our bed again, and match socks for the billionth time. So let’s look at this question together: Why did God create a world where the majority of our lives is spent on the mundane?

In order to answer this biblically, we need to consider the role of mundane tasks in the garden of Eden, and second, what changed because of the fall…

Work Before The Fall

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.” Genesis 2:15

Think about the work of gardening for a second. The bulk of gardening work isn’t the planting or the harvesting. It’s the watering and weeding. It’s keeping the pests away and protecting the plants from bad weather. The work God commissioned our first parents with included the mundane. It wasn’t only to do big visionary projects, it included the maintenance of the garden as well.

This is actually really good news for us because 99% of our lives is spent in the mundane. Especially when you factor in how much time we spend sleeping! Between taking care of our physical bodies, taking care of our homes and belongings, and doing mundane tasks in our work and personal lives (why do we have to do so many post office trips?!) we spend the majority of our lives doing the not-so-exciting stuff of life.

As Paul David Tripp notes:

“If God doesn’t rule your mundane, then he doesn’t rule you. Because that’s where you live.” - Paul David Tripp

You will never escape the mundane because the mundane was created by God for your good to be a part of your work forever. God designed your soul, your brain, your body, and your entire being to need and thrive in mundane work. It’s a good gift to you.

Consider what life would be like if your life was one exciting string of events with nothing ever repeated. You never ate the same food twice. You never slept. You never showered, you went from one high-octane, high-output task to another. That would be exhausting!

No, the mundane was created for our good by a loving Father who knows us better than we know ourselves. But it still feels hard, doesn’t it? Let’s consider the effects of the fall and how that plays a part in our frustration.

The Fall’s Effects on Work

“Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread…” Genesis 3:17-19

The curse brought a heightened difficulty to our work. The good work God gave us is now toilsome and incredibly painful. So that means that the frustration you feel at matching your socks isn’t all unwarranted. I am pretty sure that the socks that somehow end up missing in the dryer are one of the biggest results of the fall. Okay, I kid. But only sorta. Pain is inherent in our work, now.

There is also a sense of futility. The book of Ecclesiastes is all about futility, describing the angst of living in a world where our work should accomplish more than it does. Our life is a passing breath. So much of what we do gets undone and has to be done again. This is futility. Romans 8:18-23 links this futility to the curse, but it also reminds us that the curse will not be forever. The redemption Jesus has brought us is for our souls, yes, but for so much more as well! The salvation of Jesus rolls back the effects of the curse on every aspect of reality and sets free the physical creation as well!

Work in the Coming Kingdom

This is where things start to get really exciting! Isaiah 2 tells us of a coming day when war will be so far out of the question that we will beat our swords into plowshares. The effects of the curse will be rolled back, but we won’t be sitting around drinking lemonade and taking naps. No, we will be busy at our original task of gardening. Full circle.

“…and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Isaiah 2:4

Full circle, but better. When John tells us of the new heavens and new earth in Revelation, he describes a Garden City. A harmonious uniting of the Garden in Genesis 2 and the dominion of man in creating culture. And Isaiah also harkens forward to this garden City, one in which we will continue working, just without the futility of sin.

“See, I will create new heavens and a new earth….[My people] will build houses and dwell in them; they will plant vineyards and eat their fruit….They will not labor in vain.” **Isaiah 65:17, 21, 23

What a beautiful vision of eternal life with Jesus! We won’t be playing harps in the clouds, bored out of our minds for eternity. We will live an embodied, physical existence with Jesus, free of the effects of sin and the curse. And the stuff we will get to do is pretty cool - worship, reigning with Jesus, and even judging angels (1 Cor 6:3). We won’t be bored.

But we do get bored now. I’d be so okay to never do my budget again or match socks or clean my stove. Let’s consider a few things that might be skewing our view of the mundane…

No Instant Gratification Here!

Probably the hardest aspect of the mundane for my heart is that there is often no immediate payoff. It’s difficult to get that dopamine from finishing a household task because it’s going to need to be done again in just a short while. As soon as I’m finished cleaning up from one meal it’s time to start thinking about the next one.

It can take an entire lifetime or even multiple generations to see the fruit of mundane work. We want to see the payoff immediately, but we need to think generationally. I should care for my health not so much for today’s benefits but so that I can live a long and fruitful life for Jesus. I should care for my body so that I can pass along good health to my children and be present in their lives for as long as I can be. We are part of the family of God and have the privilege of helping to pass the faith on to the next generations of believers. As long as the Lord gives us breath, we should be faithful in the mundane so that we and others can experience the long-term benefits of faithfulness in the mundane. Blessings like physical health, Scriptural knowledge, spiritual maturity and wealth often take long-term cultivation.

We see this most clearly when the mundane isn’t being done. Teeth that haven’t been brushed, a house that hasn’t been cleaned, churches that haven’t been invested in spiritually… the fruit of neglect is nasty. We were created by God to care for the mundane, and there’s a sense of disgust we experience when that doesn’t happen because it’s a defiling of our dignity, a slap in the face of our Imago Dei.

Instead, we need faith. We need the Holy Spirit to help us be faithful and work in hope, even when we don’t see the immediate payoff. There is a very real sense in which we groan right now because of the effects of sin on our bodies and on all of creation (Rom 8:22) but we wait and work in hope, knowing that the redemption of all of creation is coming.

This excerpt from a book I read a few years ago highlights what this kind of resurrection hope can look like in our everyday lives:

“When I stand before the sink brushing my teeth and see my reflection in the mirror, I want it to be an act of blessing, where I remember that these teeth I’m brushing are made by God for a good purpose, that my body is inseparable from  my soul, and that both deserve care. This is a great mystery. My teeth will be in eternity and are eternally good. When I brush my teeth I am pushing back, in the smallest of ways, the death and chaos that will inevitably overtake my body. I am dust polishing dust. And yet I am not only dust. When God formed people from the dust, he breathed into us—through our lips and teeth—his very breath. So I will fight against my body’s fallenness. I will care for it as best I can, knowing that my body is sacred and that caring for it (and for the other bodies around me) is a holy act. I’ll hold on to the truth that my body, in all its brokenness, is beloved, and that one day it will be, like the resurrected body of Christ, glorious. Brushing my teeth, therefore, is a nonverbal prayer, an act of worship that claims the hope to come.” Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary

When I first read this a few years ago, it was as if that metaphorical lightbulb above my head turned on. When we do the mundane, ordinary tasks like brushing our teeth, it is actually an act of faith. It is saying that while we see the effects of the fall and the futility we cannot escape, we also believe that our Jesus has conquered futility and death, and that our physicality will be forever. Our teeth will be in eternity. Our physical work is an act of faith in the God who is redeeming this physical world from futility.

What a beautiful way to look at your mundane to do list! It is an act of faith. It is saying, “God, I know that folding the laundry again feels pointless to me, but I know that you created this good physical world, and I am going to fold it as an act of defiance to the effects of the fall on your good physical world. I believe that futility is not forever.”

There are other things that contribute to our chaffing at the mundane. Part of our need for the exciting is created by our social media age. In centuries past, people didn’t constantly see the highlight reels of others. They would see their neighbors, normal people like them, living their lives day in and day out. There’s something grounding about that that our society has lost. We need to recognize that everyone has to deal with the mundane. Everyone has to do things they don’t want to do. Everyone dances with futility.

Another thing that adds unnecessarily to our chaffing at the mundane is our view of the physical world. We tend to divide our lives between the sacred and secular parts. We tend to put church, quiet times, missions, ministry, and evangelism in the boxes we think God cares about, and put things like work, mundane tasks, money, and anything having to do with the physical world into the compartments we think God doesn’t really care about.

But to think this way is to relegate God into the minority of our lives. The bulk of our hours, indeed, the bulk of our lives, is lived in dealing with our physicality: working, eating, sleeping, cleaning, working out, driving, making our bed and brushing our teeth, taking a shower and talking to the people we meet. When we relegate God to only the “spiritual stuff” we diminish His lordship over most of our life. We create a tension between living and worship that doesn’t need to exist! We were made to worship and abide with Jesus in every moment of every day. He is the Lord of every molecule and He cares about the way we interact with the physical world He created (and is going to re-create when He comes back). When we think that our physicality is unspiritual, washing dishes, making our bed, sweeping the floor, and grocery shopping feel like necessary evils.

The Bible lays out a different story. Our physicality is not a result of the fall. Our physicality was God’s plan all along. He made us physical creatures! And this is not something we are going to rise above in the future, we will continue to be physical creatures in the New Heavens and New Earth. Our resurrection will follow the example of Jesus’ resurrection. He has, and will continue to have, a physical body into eternity. He has hands and feet that all of us, like Thomas, can touch. In His resurrected body He can eat fish and build a fire.

Jesus’ physical resurrection is the first-fruits of our physical resurrection. To believe otherwise is actually heresy. The physicality of our Savior dignifies our physicality on the deepest, most fundamental level and gives weight and dignity to everything we do in this physical world, no matter how mundane. Jesus is Lord over the entirety of our lives, all of it is “…our spiritual service of worship” Romans 12:1.

When we learn to view the mundane through the God’s perspective, there is a surprising and deep comfort in it. The mundane teaches us that we don’t need to be important or impressive or earn the right to be noticed by God.

Ultimately, we find God in the mundane because He is just as present with us when we write a boring email as He is when we we experience our biggest wins. (Psalm 139:8). The mundane helps us to realize just how much He loves us. He is attentive to us, and we don’t need to earn His attention. God has His fingerprints all over our mundane lives. Just like the birds of the air and the wildflowers on the side of the road, we don’t have to be important for Him to care for us (Matthew 6:26).

But our world does not view the mundane through God’s eyes. The world tells us that we need to do important things to be worthy of notice. We see this starkly put forth in the business world. It is an immense temptation in the business world to seek to escape the futility of life.

They project this mirage: that there is a way to rise above futility. We are told that if we just make enough money, become successful enough, delegate enough, and workflow enough that we won’t have to deal with the hardships of mundane life. We don’t have to be ordinary. The gurus tell us that if we are doing mundane tasks, it’s our own fault because we haven’t implemented the right systems, streamlined, and hired enough.

The world wants a Savior, but not Jesus. So the world looks to be saved from the effects of the fall through their own works.

The lie that we are sold by the secular business world is that there is a way to defeat futility apart from Jesus. And we shouldn’t be surprised that their solution rests on our own works.

I used to believe that lie. Even as a Christian, I bought into the world’s promise of salvation from the effects of the curse. I was obsessed with eradicating the mundane from my life as much as possible through productivity tips and streamlined living. The self-help gurus told me that I could rise above the mundane, and that if I hadn’t yet done that, it was my fault for not being smart enough. This led to a place of discontentment with my everyday, good life. And it led me to place my hope in my own abilities, instead of in Jesus.

The truth is, even the most wealthy CEOs out there, no matter how rich and famous, still have to contend with the mundane. They still have to brush their teeth and do tasks again and again, and in the end they will die. They will never rise above futility. It is part of the reality of the fallen world we live in. We see this explored in the book of Ecclesiastes. Solomon, even with all of his wisdom, riches, and power found that he could not outsmart futility. If Solomon couldn’t do it, who are we to think we can?

Now, there is an element of truth to what they are saying which is this: as you grow as an entrepreneur, your goal should be to delegate as much as possible, streamline as much as possible, and work within your genius zone as much as possible! It’s a way we essentially push back on the curse and feel its effects a little bit less. I think that this is not only good, but an essential element of stewardship. We are commanded to redeem our time, and finding ways to reduce the felt effects of the curse is absolutely something we should work towards.

But where this can grow dangerous is when our hearts believe the lie that we can strategize our way right out of futility, apart from Jesus.

This is the crux of the issue. Not whether you are doing mundane work or not, but whether you are living your moment-by-moment life in an abiding relationship with Jesus. He is the one who is progressively pushing back the effects of the curse, and He is the one who will someday put futility in the grave.

“There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?” Ecclesiastes 2:24-25 v

As Christians, we work in hope. We know that futility is ending. It’s been dealt a fatal blow on the cross and it’s slowly dying. So we can embrace our mundane lives as a good gift from our Father. And when we see areas where our work is tainted by sin and the effects of the curse, we do three things:

1. We accept the reality of living in a world that is groaning because of sin.

2. We reject discouragement in that reality, because of the greater reality of Jesus’ triumph over sin and death. We work in hope, knowing that in the new heavens and the new earth, our work won’t be touched by futility anymore.

3. We push back practically on futility through dominion in any way we can. We allow Jesus to be our counselor as we embrace both life and death at the same time. As my husband says, “we live in a world with so much life and so much death at the same time.” Only Jesus can make sense of that, and help us to navigate it. We do that by walking in union and relationship with Him.
   

The world feels the tension of living in this place of great life and death at the same time. But their answer to that tension is to tell you that strategizing your way out of it is how you will find peace. “You can rise above the tension if you’re smart enough, rich enough, and powerful enough”. As Christians, we should reject that idolatry. It is a false gospel. Productivity is a great gift and a terrible savior.

Our hope, our “okayness” doesn’t lie in outsmarting futility, our hope lies in Jesus, the One whose redemption will eventually put futility to death.

All of this leads us back to the goodness of the mundane. As we push back on the curse while trusting in our Savior to accomplish the final work, we can embrace the simple, ordinary, non-impressive lives God has entrusted to us.

Gratitude

What a sweet life this lays before us! What beauty Jesus and his gospel create in our lives. We are enabled to hold the tension of “the already and the not yet” because we trust in Jesus who holds it for us.

So what does all of this mean for your ordinary Thursday morning at 9:46 am? How does this practically change how we move through our lives?

Well, I can tell you how it’s changed mine.

This morning as I made my coffee, I stood there bleary-eyed, waiting for my electric kettle to boil the water. I stood there and took a deep breath. “This moment,” I realized, “is a gift from God, a reminder to slow down and remember Him. I took a split second to yield my heart to Jesus, to remind myself that He is there and that He is good. It was only a second, but that’s what the mundane can do for us. In the midst of our busy lives, the mundane moments serve as reminders of the God who sees us and is with us, and who gives us good gifts in the small, ordinary things like coffee. And they are gifts, aren’t they? The more ordinary and simple the thing, the more it reminds us that it has nothing to do with our work. We didn’t earn the sunrise. We didn’t earn the love of our family. We didn’t do something to deserve the songs of the birds in the morning or the way it feels to slip into a freshly made bed at night. We didn’t earn the pleasure we feel when we take a hot shower or watch the flame dance in our favorite candle. No, these are so obviously gifts from our Father who generously gives us so many good things to enjoy.

Our Pride and God’s Faithfulness

As much as we would like to believe that it is the big moments of our impressive achievements that shape us, the opposite is actually true. It’s the unassuming parts of life that fill in the blank pages of our stories and shape us into who we are.

It’s the everyday stuff that shapes the person you are becoming.

I know that I’m probably not alone in also struggling with the mundane because of my own pride. I want to do things where I get recognition and praise. But it’s important for our souls to have tasks that we do purely because it’s what God has given us to do. When we do the boring thankless jobs in obedience and worship, it reminds our hearts that God is worthy of our service, even when He is the only One who knows. It trains our hearts to work in worship.

It also serves as a reminder that God is not like us. Think about all the things God does day in and day out with such faithfulness: the rising and setting of the sun, the tides coming in and out, clothing the lilies of the valley and feeding the birds of the air.

God uses these daily, mundane markers to show us again and again that how faithful He is. We struggle to be faithful for even short periods of time, but God, from the creation of the world, has never failed to be faithful. What a beautiful reminder of the character of our trustworthy God!

“The wild animals honor me, the jackals and the owls, because I provide water in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland…” Isaiah 43:20

Ultimately, we hate the mundane because we are afraid. Deep down, we fear that we are losing ourselves to the redundancy. Your life starts to blur together and days begin to feel lost because they all look the same. That’s why it’s so important to remember that our God sees us. Your faithfulness is not lost, He remembers it all. Your days may be a blur to you, but He knows every one of them.

Jesus, Our Carpenter Savior

Finally, it’s a reassuring thing to remember that Jesus spent the majority of his time on earth being a carpenter. We don’t know much about his time as a carpenter, and I think that’s the point. It was ordinary. Obscure. Not something people wrote home about. And that’s what he spent the majority of his 33 years on earth doing. How that dignifies our ordinary, mundane lives! Jesus valued His mundane work, and He values yours.

Lastly, we end with hope. In his death on the cross, Jesus wore a crown of thorns. THORNS. The symbol of the curse. The symbol of our bondage, our futility, our pain in our work. What the Roman soldiers meant as mockery became a first-fruits of the victory He was about to accomplish. We serve a risen, triumphant Savior who has crushed the head of the serpent and we get to work in our mundane lives with great hope because of it.