We often forget that before the fall, Adam worked. God entrusted him with caring for the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:15). Unlike the work we experience today, it must have been a wonderful task. In fact, it must not have seemed like work at all.
Could you imagine working and being told that you could work as little or as much as you want, and all your needs would be taken care of no matter what? That’s what Adam and Eve experienced before the fall. In the garden, they had access to the Tree of Life. They didn’t have to work in order to earn it. It was always there – day or night. No need to put in eight hours before partaking. They were totally and utterly free to work simply for the joy of shaping the garden, creating just as God created.
But in a moment all that changed.
After the fall, God cursed Adam with work – the type of labor more familiar to us. Genesis 3:17-18 explains that this new kind of work would be difficult. Instead of working for joy or pleasure, work would be essential and functional, and Adam would have to work to live. Instead of the freedom to stop, work would never end. Adam would always be racing against the clock. No longer did he have all of the time in the world.
Perhaps the greatest curse of work is that it never ends. Even though it’s essential, it never fully satisfies, because, there’s never enough we can do. We could always do more, but no matter how much we do, it can never give us everlasting life.
Isn’t that ironic? The Tree of Life that God provided bore fruit that sustained forever. No need to work to get it. But when that was taken away, when man was left to his own labor, he would work for food that would only provide temporal sustenance. It’s a cyclical process he was doomed to repeat for a lifetime.
I wonder if Adam ever thought, “Maybe one day I’ll plant, and up will sprout that Tree of Life, and I can stop working.” Maybe he thought, “One day my work will prove that I deserve to return to Eden with its everlasting life-giving fruit.” Perhaps Adam entertained the idea that one day this work would finally be freedom.
Deep down I think we all entertain that Nazi mantra – “Arbeit macht frei” – Work makes freedom. Regarding this statement, Otto Friedrich wrote in his book The Kingdom of Auschwitz:
He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labour does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom.
Otto Friedrich is right. Endless labor does have a spiritual connection in our mind, especially in our Western society. Unfortunately, it is a spiritual element of idolatry. Work can be idolatrous when we find our identity in what we do. Yes, God did declare that work was necessary for life and that it would always be a part of our existence, but work was never intended to (nor can it) bring about a spiritual wholeness. We can never find spiritual freedom in our endless labor.
Recently a wise friend told me that she doesn’t like to look at all of those home improvement picture ideas on Pinterest. She said, “The biggest temptation on there for me is dissatisfaction with myself – like I ought to be doing more ‘stuff’ instead of walking in the Spirit.”
What a profound statement worth breaking down. Notice what she said. 1) Identifying work often makes us think we need to do more. 2) Work can lead us to feelings of self-satisfaction and equally (if not more often) self-dissatisfaction. 3) Work does not equal walking in the Spirit.
So if work doesn’t brings us freedom, then what does? 2 Corinthians 3:17 tells us, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” Work, like many other pleasures or tasks, is not in and of itself idolatry. It is when we set work up in competition and contradiction with the Spirit that it becomes (like anything else) idolatry.
As the great hymn Rock of Ages declares:
Not the labor of my hands
Can fulfill Thy law’s demands;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save, and Thou alone.
Today, us wilderness laborers, have received an invitation to return to Eden. It is not through the labor of our hands. There’s nothing to prove. There’s nothing that we could possibly do to prove ourselves deserving. The invitation is to love Jesus – to eat from His life giving fruit. There is no cost nor labor to earn it. It is total and redeeming grace. For when we love Him, when we give ourselves to Him completely, we will find that our work is simply work. We will discover not just the Tree of Life, but the author of life, and the realization that our identity is utterly and completely found in Him.