The Theology of Tuesday: Work as Worship

 The alarm goes off at 6:15, same as it does five days a week, and for a few groggy seconds you're not thinking about God at all. You're thinking about the shower, the coffee, whether you set out clothes for the kids, the email you didn't finish last night. By the time you're backing out of the driveway, the day has already started running you instead of the other way around.

I know that morning. I've lived my own version of that morning more times than I can count — the kind where the only prayer that makes it out is, "Lord, help me get through another Tuesday."

Get through it. Is that how you think about it? Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the idea that an ordinary workday is something to survive, a stretch of hours you push through so you can afford the life you want to live. Church is where you meet with God. Tuesday is where you meet a deadline.

But that is not how the very first workday was set up. Before there was a regular work-Tuesday, before there was a paycheck, there was a man in a garden with a job assignment.

Of course, I'm referring to Adam in the Garden of Eden. And in full confession, I'm writing this article to challenge the way you might think about your career, about work in general, even about the way you sweep the floor of your own house. I want to challenge an assumption most of us never think to question: that work exists so we can survive. If that's wrong — and I think it is — then why did God give Adam a job?

Provision Was Already There

Let's state the obvious. Adam didn't need grocery money. Genesis 2 tells us the LORD God had already caused every kind of tree to grow out of the ground, trees pleasant to the eye and good for food (Genesis 2:9). Two verses later, God gives Adam total freedom about his diet: "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden" (Genesis 2:16). Adam's next meal, and every meal after it, was already provided.

If God had designed work just to keep a person fed, you would expect the order to run the other way: Plant Adam in the garden first, give him an assignment, then let the food grow as a reward for his labor. That is not what happens. The trees come first. The invitation to eat freely comes before the job description. Only after both of those does verse 15 say the LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden "to work it and keep it" (Genesis 2:15).

Adam's dinner was already handled. So was God just giving Adam busy-work so he wouldn't be bored?

We treat work as the reason the money shows up, the thing we do so the mortgage gets paid, and the groceries get bought. And we think about our ordinary Tuesdays as a drudgery, a duty, an obligation, and sometimes we think of work in general as a curse.

But consider that work was assigned before there was sin, before scarcity, and before a single complication had entered the world. Work was not a result of the curse of sin, and it was not about food, clothing, or shelter.

I hope you're curious by now. If Adam was not working for his supper, what was he working for?

The Image Was a Job, Not a Look

The answer starts back in Genesis 1.

"Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth...' So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Genesis 1:26-27).

We tend to read "image of God" as a statement about resemblance — we look like God somehow, in our reason, our creativity, our conscience. That's certainly not wrong. But I want to pitch a little-known fact to you that adds a layer to Adam being made in the "image of God." I found this fascinating.

Did you know that in the ancient world, a king would set up a statue of himself in a city or a distant province to represent that he was the ruler of that area? That statue was the king's way of saying "this place answers to me." You didn't have to see the king in person to know whose rule you were standing under. His image standing there was enough to indicate you were in the presence, figuratively, of the ruling power.

In fact, many ancient civilizations, like Egypt, for example, believed that the king was himself an image of the deity who ruled over that region. The king was the embodiment of a god.

Genesis certainly has echoes of that ancient concept when it states that Adam was made in "the image and likeness of God." But the distinctions are important. Adam is not the embodiment of the deity. He is uniquely made in the image of God.

And Adam is not the only one who gets the image of God; every human being — not just the ruling class, or the priesthood — but every man and woman, too, all of us have the image of God.

So it seems that Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden as God's representative, perhaps in the idea of ruling it on God's behalf and for God's personal glory. If so, the remainder of Scripture would indicate that idea wasn't confined to the Garden of Eden. God's plan was that wherever a person stood, that place was meant to answer to God, because His image was standing in it. The whole world was to be the Kingdom of God.

However, there's a caveat. I realized something about how God Himself is pictured in the Creation narrative. God was not presented as a King. He was a Laborer. He worked six days a week and then rested on the seventh. That's a worker's rhythm, not the schedule of a royal.

So the image, Adam, is patterned after God. God the Laborer. Which is exactly why it came bundled with a job instead of a crown.

Perhaps it might help to ask what that job actually involved?

Discovering It, Building It Out

If you're familiar with the Creation story, you might assume Adam's whole job description is sitting in Genesis 2:15: "to work it and keep it." But I learned that verse didn't tell the whole story. Before God ever gave him specific tasks, He gave him the equivalent of a mission statement.

Genesis 1:28 lays it out: "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion..." Two things are happening in that sentence. There's dominion, ruling, knowing, naming what belongs to you, which is exactly what Adam does a few verses later, naming "every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens" (Genesis 2:19-20). And there's subdue, a harder word. Elsewhere in Scripture it describes putting down real resistance, bringing something stubborn under control.

Have you ever thought of the idea that some of Adam's territory wasn't subdued yet, and it was his job to bring it into order?

Before Adam ever hears the words "work" and "keep," he had a vision casting meeting with the Creator. His marching orders? Know what's been entrusted to you, and bring order to what isn't ordered yet. And that mission statement was not just for Eden. It was for the planet!

Work it and keep it is the immediate job assignment as it relates to one specific plot of ground called Eden. Be fruitful, fill, have dominion, and subdue — those were long-term targets for the future of the territory outside of Eden.

But the mission begins with the Garden. Step one, if you will: Work the garden and keep it. Those two ordinary-sounding words carry incredible weight.

The Words Are Worship Words

Here's the scope. In Hebrew, "dress" is the word ʿabad, and could be simplified as "work." And it does triple duty in Scripture. It's the ordinary word for tilling soil. It's also the word for serving a master — the word Jacob uses when he serves Laban for fourteen years. And it's the word God uses through Moses when He confronts Pharaoh: "Let my people go, that they may serve Me" (Exodus 8:1). That layer of service implied the act of worship.

This one Hebrew word can mean farming, the service of a slave, or the service of worship. We treat these categories as completely separate. But in the Hebrew culture, these ideas were related. I do not believe it was random chance that put these three concepts in Adam's hands in the garden.

Work is farming, in this context. But it is also service. And somehow, it is simultaneously worship.

"Keep" has its own history. The Hebrew word is shamar, and outside of Genesis, it shows up again and again describing — wait for it — the Levites' duty at the tabernacle. The Levites were to guard it, watch over it, stand ready in case anything approached it that shouldn't (Numbers 3:7-8). It is temple-guard language. It's priest language.

So read Genesis 2:15 again, now that you know what meaning the words are carrying: "The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it." Man was handed the same vocabulary Israel would later use to describe serving God and guarding His presence.

Work was never neutral. From the very first sentence it shows up in, it was worship, dressed up as a chore.

So where does that leave us on those hectic, ordinary Tuesday mornings? Well, frankly, it revolutionizes our work.

If Adam's job never had anything to do with grocery money, and the words for that job were worship language, service language, and farming language, then "work is how I pay the bills" is not merely a smaller, softer version of the truth. It's a distortion of it. That mindset swaps the actual purpose of work- glorifying God, representing Him, bringing His rule to bear in the place you've been assigned, advancing His agenda- for a goal that does not accomplish the mission.

That's true of your career. It's true of the laundry sitting in the dryer right now. It's true of the meeting you're dreading this afternoon.

Every one of those normal Tuesday tasks is still garden ground, and God is still handing out the same assignment He gave Adam: know what's in front of you, and bring God’s order into it for His glory.

God planted Adam in the garden, and He planted you in an ordinary Tuesday — don't survive it, represent God in it.