We’ve now seen, from a couple of different angles, that Scripture teaches our work is ultimately about worship — especially the worship of the life to come. That’s what we found in Hebrews chapter 4. And the same is true of all the things bound up with our work: our technology, our vocations, our money, even something like Bitcoin. They all bend toward worship in the end.
But here is where a misunderstanding can creep in. If work is ultimately about a worship still to come, someone might conclude that work and technology and culture and our callings here and now don’t really matter — that they’re just a holding pattern until the real thing arrives. That conclusion would be a serious mistake. The very opposite is true. Precisely because our work is caught up in God’s eternal purposes, our work and our technology matter enormously, right now and forever.
The way to heaven goes over the earth
Listen again to Herman Bavinck, once more from The Wonderful Works of God. He says that the final purpose of man lies in eternal blessedness, in the glorification of God in heaven and on earth — but that in order to arrive at this end, man first had a task to fulfill on the earth:
In order to enter into the rest of God, man first had to finish God’s work. The way to heaven goes through the earth and over the earth. The entrance to the Sabbath is opened by the six days of work. One comes to eternal life by way of work.
Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God
You can see the point Bavinck is making. The spiritual and the material are not opposed to each other. Heaven and earth are not rival realms, two counter-worlds set against one another. The earthly and the material are meant to point us toward, and to prepare us for, the heavenly and the spiritual. They always belong together.
And it isn’t even the case that we eventually graduate beyond the earthly and the physical, leaving them behind like a discarded shell. The world to come is itself earthly. It is physical. It is a resurrected world — resurrected just as Jesus was resurrected, his rising being the down payment on our own resurrections still to come. So the material world is not a problem to be escaped. It is the very arena in which God’s glory is being worked out.
Six days of work, one day of rest
We see this pattern at the very beginning of the Bible, right where God speaks of creating man in his image: a rhythm of work and then rest. Work for six days, and then rest for one. And that rhythm is modeled on God’s own pattern in making the entire universe in six days and then resting on the seventh.
And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
Genesis 2:2–3
The passage we looked at last time, from Hebrews chapter 4, clarifies what this resting means. It does not mean that God stepped away from the world, or stopped being involved in it. It means that God was finished creating. He had made everything he wanted to make, and so, in a sense, he stepped back from it — to enjoy it, and to keep working in it for his glory.
This six-plus-one pattern then gets picked up in the Ten Commandments. In the fourth commandment, God says:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God… For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.
Exodus 20:8–11
Take this day, God says, to rest and to worship, because I made the world in six days and then I rested. So you, literally, are to work for six days and then to rest and worship on the seventh.
Rest that is about God, not just recovery
Work is meant to lead to rest. But because this is a cyclical pattern, rest also leads back into work. And here we have to be careful, because it’s easy to get the order of things wrong. We don’t rest merely so that we can get back to work and labor harder and faster than before.
A lot of people today, if they care about the Sabbath or the Lord’s day at all, treat it as little more than a way to recuperate — a chance to re-energize so they can grind through the rest of the week without burning out. But that misses the point entirely. The day of rest is not ultimately about becoming an even more productive worker, though I do think it helps our work. It is ultimately about God. It’s about remembering who he is, and where everything we have comes from, and why and how we are able to work at all — why and how we have any wealth to enjoy in the first place. The answer, every time, is that it all comes from God.
From Saturday to Sunday: rest comes first
The resurrection of Jesus shows us all of this most clearly. His resurrection in history is the down payment on the resurrection of the whole universe still to come. His work in ministry, and supremely his work of suffering on the cross, led him into the rest of resurrection — a kind of eternal rest that he now always enjoys, and that we get to enjoy in him, and will enjoy in him forever, if we trust in him.
This pattern of working and then resting, of dying and then rising again, is so central to the fabric of the universe and to what God is doing within it that something remarkable happens as we move from the Old Testament to the New. The six-plus-one pattern becomes a one-plus-six pattern. The Israelites worked for six days and rested on the seventh, the last day of the week, on Saturday. But Jesus’ resurrection on a Sunday, the first day of the week, is so important and so central to the meaning of our universe that God’s people begin worshiping him no longer on the last day of the week but on the first. The Sabbath becomes the Lord’s day. We move from Saturday to Sunday. Our day of rest now stands at the beginning of the week rather than at the end.
There is a deep theology in that shift. In Christ and in the resurrection, the new creation has come:
For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.
Galatians 6:15
As the day of rest moves from Saturday to Sunday, rest becomes primary instead of work. We no longer work in order to earn our rest; we now work out of the rest that Christ has already won. We rest first, and then we go into our labor from that place of rest — even though, as Hebrews chapter 4 reminded us, we still look forward to entering the ultimate and final rest of the new creation that is yet to come.
God will not let work take over your life
Just as he did for the Israelites, God still today builds seasons of rest into his creation. He still wants his people to take a day of rest — now on Sundays, the first day of the week, because of Jesus’ resurrection. And he does this because he wants to keep us focused on our destiny. He wants us to remember that the ultimate rest is still ahead of us, the rest in which we will worship God forever and ever.
So God does not let work take over our entire lives. He insists that it must not. You have to draw limits around your work, he tells us, because your focus has to be on me. With the incarnation and the resurrection of Jesus, heaven and earth are united in him — God and man joined together in one person. And because of that, Jesus stands at the center of all of our work and at the center of all of our rest.
Nothing cordoned off from his glory
The God-centeredness of creation, and of time, and of work shows us something crucial: there is nothing — not technology, not money, not computers — that can or should be cordoned off from God, from his interests, and from his glory. We work, but we work worshipfully. We go into our labor out of a day of rest and worship, seeking to honor God by what we do, seeking in a real way to worship him by what we do with our hands and with our technology.
This means we should work, and create, and invent, and steward our wealth in such a way that God is honored and glorified through it all. And it means we should bring honest questions to our work and to the products of our work — to our technologies. Do these things honor God? Do they help people see his glory, or do they detract from it? Do they draw people toward him, or lead them away? Our work matters to God because, in the end, it is about worship — and about showing people what it means to worship him.
That sets the stage for where we’re going next, and last. In the final talk in this series, we’ll bring all of this to bear on the question that started us off: money. We’ll ask what it means to handle money honestly as an act of holy calling — how the integrity of our wealth, and the very tools we use to hold it, can become part of the worship that all of our work is meant to be.