We’ve seen that, according to Scripture, work and worship are always linked together. As God’s image bearers, we are not merely meant to rule over the world — to work — but always and ultimately to do everything for God and to God. That is worship. The two belong together: the kingly task of ruling and the priestly task of adoring.
Which means that without worship, our work falls apart. Our technology, our art, our culture — everything connected to our labor — becomes futile and frustrating and finally self-destructive when it is cut off from the God it was meant to serve. That is largely the point of the strange book of the Bible called Ecclesiastes, where a man tries to find meaning in work, wealth, and pleasure apart from God and discovers that all of it is vapor. So in this talk I want to ask a simple but searching question: how does our work actually lead us to worship?
Work and worship were always one calling
Let me bring back our friend Herman Bavinck, the Dutch theologian from about a hundred years ago, because he puts this beautifully in his book The Wonderful Works of God. Writing about human beings, he says that in order to rule, mankind must first serve:
In order to rule, man must serve; he must serve God, who is his creator and lawgiver. Work and rest, rule and service, earthly and heavenly vocation, civilization and religion — these are not opposites.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
These pairs go together from the very beginning. They belong together, and together they comprise the one great and holy and glorious purpose of human life. And then Bavinck says something I find genuinely striking. He takes all of human culture — all the work we undertake to subdue the earth — and binds it to a single divine calling:
All culture, that is, all work which man undertakes in order to subdue the earth — whether agriculture, stock breeding, commerce, industry, science, or whatever it may be — is all the fulfillment of a single divine calling.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
Bavinck’s list is a hundred years old, but we can extend it without breaking it. Today we’d add capitalism, financial technology, computers — and yes, Bitcoin. It is all the fulfillment of that same single calling. But Bavinck immediately adds the condition that holds the whole thing together:
But if man is really to be and to remain such, he must proceed in dependence on and obedience to the word of God. Religion must be the principle which animates the whole of life and which sanctifies it into a service of God.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
So you can hear what Bavinck is saying. Without worship, our work fails. We heard John Calvin last time describe worshiping God as going out of ourselves to find our happiness and our peace in him. That is the destination. And work is meant to lead us there. Work is meant to lead us to worship.
The pulley: made restless on purpose
The seventeenth-century English poet George Herbert makes this point as well as anyone I know, in one of my favorite poems. It’s called The Pulley — named for the simple machine you use to hoist something heavy up. Herbert imagines God creating mankind and, at that first moment, pouring out every possible gift: riches of beauty and strength and intellect and feeling, the whole glass of blessings tipped over Adam and Eve at the dawn of the world.
So strength first made a way;
George Herbert, “The Pulley”
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure.
When almost all was out, God made a stay,
Perceiving that, alone of all his treasure,
Rest in the bottom lay.
God pours out nearly everything — but he deliberately holds one gift back. He does not give man rest. And Herbert tells us exactly why. If God were to give man rest along with all the other gifts, man would seek his pleasure and his joy in the gifts themselves rather than in the Giver. He would adore the presents and forget the One who sent them — and in doing so he would ruin himself and ruin the world. So in the final stanza, God makes a different choice:
Yet let him keep the rest,
George Herbert, “The Pulley”
But keep them with repining restlessness.
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to my breast.
Do you see what Herbert is saying? God has made us on purpose so that we cannot find rest in the riches and goodness and gifts he’s given us in this world. Even amid all the beauty and abundance around us, we are meant to be hoisted up — like a weight on a pulley — and “tossed,” Herbert says, to God’s breast. And we are tossed there not only by the goodness of the gifts but also by the very weariness of work. The exhaustion is part of the design. Our restlessness is a rope God uses to pull us home.
Rest is the true proof of work
Now, if you’ve spent any time around Bitcoin, you know that one of its central and most celebrated features is something called its proof-of-work protocol. It’s the way the ledger — the record of every Bitcoin transaction — becomes more and more secure as more and more valid work is expended upon it. That mechanism is much of what makes Bitcoin so fair and honest and open. And so in the Bitcoin world we talk a great deal about work and the importance of work: about actually contributing, not freeloading, not simply enriching the friends who happen to be closest to you without anyone having earned it.
That instinct is good. But George Herbert, four hundred years ago, gives us a reminder the Bitcoin conversation badly needs. Biblically and theologically speaking, rest is the true proof of work — and worship is the true proof of rest. In the Bible, work is never just about work. Productivity is never just about productivity. Wealth and technology are never merely about wealth and technology. Work is about worship. It’s about God. It’s about resting in God.
The rest that remains: Hebrews 4
You can see this clearly in the letter to the Hebrews. In chapter 4, the author looks back at how the Israelites journeyed through the wilderness and came up to the edge of the promised land under Joshua — and yet did not truly enter God’s rest. Writing to Christians just after the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, he argues that God’s people are still meant to find rest in God: a rest we genuinely begin to enjoy now, but do not yet fully possess.
For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his.
Hebrews 4:8–10
The chapter then turns to the way this rest is bound up with living before God in integrity — in obedience and righteousness — which always comes by way of openness to him, of exposure before him, of being in his very presence. And that, all through Scripture, is the heart of worship: that you get to go and be with God, and when you are with God, you cannot help but adore him. Listen to how the author describes this presence:
For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
Hebrews 4:12–13
On our own, this should terrify us — to stand naked and exposed before God with all our feeble attempts at honoring him. And so, anticipating exactly that fear, the author immediately reminds us that Jesus is a great high priest, deeply sympathetic toward us in our weakness, who has come to cover us with his own blood so that we can enter God’s presence after all:
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Hebrews 4:16
There is the whole movement in a single chapter: we rest from our work, and we draw near to worship — living before God with integrity, openness, and freedom. The aim of all our labor and striving, all our wandering through this valley of the shadow of death, is to rest in and before God, and to do so most fully in the life to come. The rest, the author says, remains. It is still out ahead of us, waiting for the day Jesus returns to remake the entire universe and bring all his people into a creation resurrected along with them.
A heaven full of work and worship
Here many Christians are surprised. We tend to picture heaven, and the new creation beyond it, as a kind of permanent stillness — everyone seated, frozen, perhaps thinking quietly about God forever. But that is not the world the Bible describes. Scripture pictures the world to come as dynamic: this world transposed into a more beautiful and lovely key. There is still activity there, still growing, still development, still learning. We will remain God’s image bearers, and we will still be given a vocation — to reflect his glory throughout his resurrected creation.
And notice, as always, where Scripture lays the emphasis. When the Bible speaks of our vocation as image bearers who rule the world through work, it never lets go of the worshiping, priestly side — not now, and not in the age to come. You can hear it at the very end of the Bible, as John sees the new Jerusalem descending and the new creation arriving in its fullness:
By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there. They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.
Revelation 21:24–26
The nations are doing something. They remain distinct; they keep their identities. The kings of the earth carry their particular treasures with them, the glory and honor of their own peoples, into the city. This is plainly a world of activity, of vocation, of work — even as it is above all a world of worship. A few verses later John makes that last point unmistakable:
No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
Revelation 22:3–4
God’s servants — his image bearers — will worship him and see his face. And his name will be written on their foreheads, which, as we’ve seen before, is a way of marking ownership. It is one more way of saying: this is my image bearer, someone called to do what I do and to want what I want. So at the very end of the Bible, just as at the very beginning, work and worship are joined — serving on the one hand, adoring God on the other.
Kept in their proper place
As we work to understand technology and labor — and what they have to do with God and with Jesus and with the whole big picture of what God is doing in the world — we have to keep our tools in their proper context. Bitcoin, computers, all of it: they are good, and they are meant to lead us somewhere beyond themselves. They are meant to lead us to God. Yes, we were made to work. But more than that, we were made to worship. And we will go on worshiping God forever and ever, even as we go on, in our own way, working and reflecting his glory in the age to come.
I’ve hinted here at something I want to dwell on next time: that the world to come is not a static eternity but a living one, full of activity, growth, and culture. That has enormous implications for how we think about our work and our technology right now. So in the next part we’ll take it up directly and ask why work and technology are not merely useful for this passing age, but eternally important.