On the Moral Duty and Necessity of Going to Work

In the Beginning, Work.

The Scriptures begin with God working, creating, forming, organizing, delegating tasks – and his created image bearer being given the blessing and responsibility of reflecting those actions in a creaturely manner. Man was created to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, exercise dominion over the creatures, and do so in accordance with the Law of God written on his heart, as well as in accordance with the Law of God given to him in the garden of Eden (cf. Gen 2:15-17). Man was created, in other words, to work. This means that any prohibition against working that is not coming from God is evil. You do not merely have the freedom to work, you are required to do so under divine Law.

So why have so many today forgotten this? Facing the tyrannical mandates of many local governing authorities and the White House’s current Resident, many have chosen to simply cave in to the pressure and cease from working when they are told to, or only continue working once they have met the terms and conditions the powers that be are arbitrarily and wickedly setting up. Why?

In my opinion, it is partly because men are tired – tired of learning, tired of dealing with the shame of having been conned by authorities they once trusted, tired of having to think through novel obstacles to them simply being alive and providing for their families, tired of having to think up novel approaches to get things done in spite of the useless and wicked mandates of tyrannical magistrates. Tired.

I think it is also simply easier to abdicate our responsibility to think individually, and to collate and evaluate and weigh our options as local bodies of responsible and critically thinking individuals. Thinking is difficult. Rather than use technology to assist us in our research as we think for ourselves, we have been conditioned to let Google search results do our thinking for us. Sadly, the internet has become an infallible Magic 8-Ball for many of us, rather than a tool to augment our finite research abilities. And so, many of us just rely on whatever information we receive from the mainstream media online, in print, on the radio, or on television.

The Broader Cultural Problem

However, there is a broader reason for this, I think. It seems to me that in the mid to late 1800s, the academic distinction between the sciences and the liberal arts became more pronounced than it had previously been. With the promotion of Darwinism and the advent of the industrial revolution, practical developments in the hard sciences were desired and viewed as real, i.e. tangible, developments in man’s intellectual, social, and, consequently, material evolution. The liberal arts were viewed as academic disciplines that were not capable of obtaining objective knowledge, but were mere repositories of subjective notions.

Studying philosophy or literature or the arts in general was akin to studying the history of what other people in those fields thought and practiced before they understood that the hard sciences alone were capable of giving us objective truth. This is not to say that there weren’t developments in philosophy and literature, but that they were, and still are, viewed as mere theories whose value primarily consists in raising questions for science to either dissolve (i.e. identify as meaningless and, thereby, disregard) or resolve by means of empirical exploration and experimentation.

With this, it seems, came the general movement toward hyper specialization, a phenomenon further resulting in what one philosopher has called “the tyranny of the experts.”1 Individuals have been encouraged not to gain a broad education enabling them to take in and analyze/critique data gathered, arguments formulated, and conclusions drawn by a wide variety of academic disciplines and social bodies, but to stay in their place. Despite the fact that discovery in any field can come from any human being who just so happens to pose the right questions or answers, men have been discouraged from thinking that they could learn enough to make them competent judges of, at the very least, the arguments being formulated by the so-called “experts.”2

So rather than viewing the question of governmentally mandated prohibitions on working as one which any man with a grasp of the law of non-contradiction and the basic theology of the Bible can meditate on and thoughtfully and, perhaps, correctly answer by making an appeal to logic and the Scriptures, we have seen many men abdicate their responsibility to think about this matter. Men have sought the easier route of giving other men free rein over their own deliberations. And after all, why not? Your position in life, in academia, in the great intellectual chain of being, as it were, is completely distinct from the position of a Fauci or a Gates. On this view, you not only are not on the same level as these men, you are essentially a foreigner who must be led around by the hand through their pretentious academic constructions, and accept their self-disclosure as infallible, inerrant, and the basis for the formation of whatever thoughts in those disciplines you may have.

Back to Work

But this is clearly not the case, given that the Lord God has given us a very simple break down of how things in his creation are to work. In particular, the book of Genesis tells us very early on that work is activity that is required by the Lord. God did not suggest that Adam and Eve ought to work six days and rest on the seventh. He did not insinuate that it might be good for them to follow that pattern. He declared that this was the very purpose of man –

• Be fruitful

• Multiply

• Take dominion over the earth

• Subdue the earth

Man is, in other words, morally obligated to work six days a week. This is divine law, not the fanciful decree of some petty tyrant. Those who make your employment dependent on your submission to their arbitrary commands, mandates, edicts, etc are in flagrant violation of the law of God. To whom then do you submit? Are you arguing that it is in your interest to simply comply in order to not “stir the pot”? Then you are not reading the Scriptures closely enough.

Back to Genesis & the Fall

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. He made man in his image – as a rational, volitional, and moral personal being. Being made in God’s image not only means that man is a rational, volitional, and moral personal being, but that he is such in a way that distinctly mirrors God. Man occupies the highest seat of authority over all of the vegetal and animal creatures in the universe (under God, of course) and, thereby, is capable of, and culpable for, exercising dominion over them. Working, in other words, is an inseparable consequence of man being the image of God. If man is not working, then he is not acting in accordance with his created nature which is the imago dei. Man, by his created nature as well as by divine decree, is obligated, and blessed with the opportunities and responsibility, to work.

If our understanding of the world is to be in accordance with the Scriptures, therefore, we must view man not merely as one who may work and thereby physically and externally reflect God’s image, but one whose being must do so. Not only this, but we must also view any prohibition on man’s ability and responsibility to work, if not explicitly or implicitly revealed by God, to be illegitimate, an illegal order that we ought not obey, lest we find ourselves placing the orders of wicked magistrates and rulers above and against the orders of the King of kings.

Please note that I am not here talking about those who are ill, disabled, etc who cannot work, as such conditions are, I believe, legitimately excusable grounds for one not working, as well as for not requiring another to work. Rather, I am talking about those who are forbidding others to work because they have not met some governmentally decreed arbitrary set of terms and conditions, as well as those who are fully capable of working and yet refuse to work because they have not met those arbitrary terms and conditions set up by the government. These individuals are forbidding what God commands (viz., work), and commanding what God forbids (viz., idleness).

While we exist outside of the Paradise Adam and Eve occupied, our occupation has not changed. Adam was placed in the garden to till and keep it, according to Gen 2:15. And once he had sinned, the Holy Spirit tells us the following –

Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:

“Cursed is the ground for your sake;
In toil you shall eat of it
All the days of your life.
Both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you,
And you shall eat the herb of the field.
In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread

Till you return to the ground,
For out of it you were taken;
For dust you are,
And to dust you shall return.”

[…]

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”— therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden to till the ground from which he was taken.3

Prior to the Fall, man’s job was to till and keep the earth. After the Fall, man’s job was the same. And this implies that it is likewise our job to this day. Note the words used by the Lord in the passage above –

“…all the days of your life…”
“…till you return to the ground…”

How long is man to work? As long as he arbitrarily determines? Or all the days of his life? Till he gets bored or is too afraid to work? Or until he returns to the ground? The text is clear about this – man is to work, in one way or another, as long as he can, until he returns to the dust from which the Lord created him.

While we await the Lord’s return for his church, we are to work. If we are capable of working, we must. If the governing authorities attempt to tell us we cannot work unless we meet their terms and conditions, we must decide who it is we are going to obey – the Lord of the universe whose jurisdiction is over all of creation? Or those who are acting outside of their jurisdictional boundaries – namely those of rewarding good and punishing evil (as per Rom 13:1-7) – and placing themselves as authorities over and above and against the Creator himself?

1 See my article “The Tyranny of Bureaucracy vs. The Sovereignty of God,” Invospec, Oct 29, 2020, https://www.invospec.org/2020/10/the-tyranny-of-bureaucracy-vs.html.

2 See my article “Debunking the ‘Expertise Rule,’” ThornCrown Ministries, July 10, 2020, https://thorncrownministries.com/blog/2020/7/10/debunking-the-expertise-rule.

3 Gen 3:17-23. (emphasis added)