We’ve been saying all along that God made human beings to work in this world. The Bible calls that exercising dominion — what theologians often name the creation mandate, or the dominion mandate, from Genesis 1. But we’ve also been saying that we are not meant to work merely for work’s sake. And that applies to everything bound up with our work, including the developing and the using of technology. According to the Bible, none of it — not technology, not money, not Bitcoin — exists for its own sake, and none of it should be used for its own sake. All of these things are ultimately for God and about God. As we saw last time, when Jesus cleared the temple in Matthew 21, dominion over God’s creation is not the goal. Dominion is ultimately about submission to God. Work is ultimately about worship.
So in this talk I want to begin tracing how our work is finally about worship — and what that has to do with technologies like Bitcoin. Herman Bavinck, the Dutch theologian who has been helping us understand how Christians have read the Bible theologically, puts the principle sharply in one of his books on the family:
The purpose of work is inherent neither in work itself, nor in pleasure, nor in wealth. Anyone who abstracts work from the moral context in which God placed it debases work and robs it of its honor.
Herman Bavinck, The Christian Family
Bavinck goes on to point out that this is especially true insofar as we work for the sake of other people. God equips us to survive, he says, not for the sake of satisfying our lusts, but for the sake of providing for our family before God and with honor — and also to extend the hand of Christian compassion to the poor. And here we are, as I record this, at the beginning of another bull run that has carried Bitcoin’s price up into the stratosphere. Yet here we also are in a society and an economy full of chaos, with so many people nagged by the fear that they are not being productive enough, not impactful enough, not successful enough. We need to be reminded not just that work and technology and Bitcoin are gifts, but most of all that they come from a Giver — a Creator who is perfect in beauty and majesty and goodness, the Lord who is abundantly generous with all his gifts, and who is also the Father, the only one in whom we can and must find our rest.
The ultimate proof of work is rest
In the world of Bitcoin, and more broadly in our technological society, we are forever talking about building things, doing things, fixing things, transforming the world, working hard and pouring out enormous energy to solve every kind of problem. If you know anything about Bitcoin, you know that it is a network and a money that revolves around its proof–of–work protocol. It is a system — a set of rules — that rewards only those who slog through a great deal of labor, who burn a great deal of energy and resources. That is one of the genuinely good things about Bitcoin, and we’ll have more to say about it later. A protocol in which only those who work hard are rewarded is a good thing in its own place.
But there is a danger here. We can become so consumed with working and building and accomplishing that we forget that, biblically speaking, the ultimate proof of work is actually rest. It is not enough to understand that we must work for God. Scripture teaches that we must also rest in God. And there is a sense in which even God himself rests after his work.
God works, and then he rests
On the very first page of Scripture, in Genesis 1 and 2, we hear that God creates the entire universe out of nothing in six days. He saves for the climax of his creating work the making of Adam and Eve, and he hands them a world of abundance to enjoy, to subdue, and to cultivate. When God made man, he also gave him work to do. Adam and Eve and all their descendants were to go out from the Garden of Eden to subdue the earth for God’s glory as his image bearers:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Genesis 1:28
Working is not all that it means to bear God’s image, but it is a significant part of it. To work for God is to reflect him and to resemble him in his world. Our vocations and our works — including in technology and on Bitcoin — flow downstream from this original creation mandate. But Genesis tells us something more. On the seventh day, God rested from his work:
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
Now, when we hear that God rested from his work of creation, we should not imagine that God simply went idle. Later, the book of Hebrews clarifies what this rest means — it is a way of saying that God has finished creating, even though, of course, he continues to work in countless other ways, sustaining and ruling over all that he has made. Hebrews holds that very rest out to us as something still to be entered:
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 4:9–10
And because of his own pattern — working, completing his creation, and then resting — God turns around and commands his human image bearers to rest every seventh day, after six days of working for him and in him. This command is the fourth of the Ten Commandments given at Mount Sinai when Israel comes out of Egypt:
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.
Exodus 20:8–10
The word Sabbath means, literally, a seventh. And the point for Adam and Eve, the point for Israel, the point for all of humanity, is the same: God’s work and God’s rest are meant to be primary. They are fundamental to human life, community, and vocation. We work and we rest only in and because of God’s work and God’s rest. We never stop being his creatures, and we must never forget it.
Rest is not blessed inactivity
But we have to be clear about what this rest is, because biblically speaking it is not mainly about relaxation. For God and for us alike, sabbatical rest is not, as one theologian puts it, mere “blessed inactivity.” It is not simply kicking back, and it is certainly not just catching some “me time.” It is not a kind of scheduled maintenance that lets us keep running a million miles an hour the rest of the week. Rest is not even resting in ourselves, or merely recovering so that we can go back to work.
This rest is about resting in God and for God. That is why, throughout Scripture, the rest of the Sabbath is so deeply tied to worship — to gathering with God’s people to praise him, and to hear and respond to his word. That is the shape of rest. It is the practice and the posture of someone who understands that God is the one from whom and in whom and for whom we do all things; that he is the one who works for us; that he is the one who so generously provides the riches of his creation to us.
We have to go out of ourselves
The sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin saw this clearly. He taught that God ordered us to cease from our work, in his words, “so that we would give place to God to work.” God cannot work in us, Calvin says, until we rest. And then he warns against those who would confine mankind and his work to himself, because, Calvin insists, it is necessary for us to go out of ourselves in order to find happiness.
That is so different from the way many people live today — looking inward, to themselves and their own work, and to humanity’s work, to find happiness. But the Sabbath, this day of rest and worship, reminds us that we have to go out of ourselves if we are ever truly to be happy. We have to go to God.
Made to be kings and priests
So, just as we saw in Jesus’ clearing of the temple in Matthew 21, we see it again here: we were made to worship. We were made to draw near to God in friendship and love. It is true that we are meant to rule over God’s creation for his glory as his kingly subjects. But we are also meant to approach him in and through his creation as his priestly servants. We were made to worshipfully rest and to restfully worship — and our work can never afford to forget it.
This is the heart of the matter: work and worship belong together, and rest is the hinge that joins them. In the next talk I want to follow this thread further and ask how our work actually leads us to worship — and what happens to our work, our technology, and our culture when we sever it from worship and try to make it stand on its own.