My enthusiasm for gardening did not outlast the appearance of the first serious crop of weeds. Living on a small budget in married student housing during graduate school the first spring after we were married, it appeared to me that growing our own vegetables would be a winning proposition. But I grew up a city boy in southern California, where my family’s only venture in vegetable gardening was a cherry tomato bush which grew year round and which we regularly had to prune back viciously to keep it from taking over the whole backyard.
I was totally unprepared for the plain hard work of getting things to grow in Indiana soil tilled up for us by our apartment groundskeeper at the edge of a wild grass field. Getting the plants and seeds in the ground had a kind of excitement to it, but beyond that it was shear drudgery. There was no water source nearby, so we either had to carry it in buckets or drag out, then put away, a couple hundred feet of hose every time our little garden patch got dry. Then all that grass and all those weeds that had been tilled under to create our garden began to come back and try to reclaim it for its natural state as waving prairie.
We did get a few heads of the best and tenderest broccoli I’ve ever tasted, loads of tomatoes, and the typical bumper crop of zucchini which we tried to pawn off on all our other friends who, unfortunately, usually had plenty of their own zucchini. But gardening is definitely not my idea of a pleasant pastime or even good work.
Yet tending a garden was a large part of the first work of the first human beings. As we look at what Scripture says about work in the first three chapters of Genesis this week, we find Adam placed in a garden planted by God. Adam’s assignment was to take care of it. Ultimately Adam finds himself cursed for his sin by a future of laborious toil needed to wrest a living from the ground, perhaps an explanation for how unpleasant I found my first serious gardening venture.
Yet we need to read the account of that first human labor in the earth in the wider context of the story of God’s creation of the world and human beings. In Genesis 1:26-28, we find a call for them to “have dominion” over the earth as an outworking of being made in the image of God. Creation was clearly God doing work, as can be seen in chapter 2 verse 2 when He is said to have “rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” Human work then follows on God’s work and is in the image of that work. God creates the world and human beings continue that work by caring for it.
Fortunately for folks like me, you can also see a kind of intellectual or scientific work assigned to Adam as well, the naming of the animals in 2:19 and 20. While the focus is on the absence of a proper partner for Adam among the animals, there is also a reflection of all the human curiosity about the natural world, along with the classification and naming of both living creatures and many other aspects of creation throughout human history. That intellectual work also reflects God’s own work of love for His creation and even His naming of Day and Night and Sky at the beginning of creation.
As unpleasant, then, as gardening and many, many other forms of work may be, there is a basic foundation in creation for regarding the purpose of work as partnering with God in His own work of loving and caring for what He has made. The highest form of that creation calling is caring for other human beings in a way that reflect the Lord’s own love for us.
It’s that partnership with God in good work which was damaged by sin in the Fall recorded in Genesis 3. Our hope for our work now is that, like all the rest of human life, it can be redeemed and restored to at least some of its creation purpose through the healing grace of Jesus Christ.