Brow Sweat, Part 2: Frustration

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     In our last letter, we started looking into the nature of work. Work: you know, the thing we thought was a punishment for sin, but learned otherwise a couple of weeks ago. The very first human had good and gainful employment before he sinned; and presumably, the second human (his wife) joined in the work – a family operation. Sin happened and changed the appearance of work, but not its origin or its reason for being. With our tuned-up understanding, we’re ready now to see why we misunderstood in the first place.

     Back in Genesis 3, there’s an important detail hiding in plain sight:

And to Adam he said,

…cursed is the ground because of you;

in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
    and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread…” (Genesis 3:17-19).

     True or False: this was part of God’s curse on Adam.

     False. There was no curse pronounced on Adam. Of the four beings in the garden at that moment – the LORD God, Adam, Eve, and the serpent – only one was cursed. The LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you…” (verse 14). When the LORD God says, “cursed are you,” it’s a done deal, and the end of the serpent’s story is already written in the twentieth chapter of the Revelation.

     But look again at what the LORD God said to Adam: “…cursed is the ground because of you…” The ground was cursed, not the humans. It’s right there. All manner of ugliness would sprout from the ground because it was cursed. And it was cursed because of human sin. The unhappy couple were expelled from the Garden of Eden, and for the first time ever (and henceforth), frustration and work became inseparable.

     If we mistakenly see God pronouncing a curse on mankind, here’s what happens: we set ourselves up in an adversarial relationship with the creator of all things. And if we could just wiggle out from under the curse (the one that doesn’t exist, actually) we’d be much better off. Adam tried that. It didn’t go well.

     Instead of inventing a curse God didn’t pronounce, let’s look instead at a blessing he did:

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).

     The question at hand is this: Did God, in pronouncing the consequences of sin, retract the blessing he pronounced earlier?

     To arrive at a sensible answer, let’s break out the blessing, item by item. The benefits of the blessing would be: 1) be fruitful, 2) multiply and fill the earth, 3) subdue the earth, and 4) have dominion over the non-human living things. Now let me ask one question pertinent to each item:

1)    Q: Are humans fruitful, ever? A: Yes.

2)    Q: Have humans multiplied? A: Oh my gosh, absolutely!

3)    Q: Have humans subdued the earth? A: To some extent, sure.

4)    Q: Do humans have dominion over non-human living things? A: We live where we want, for the most part – so, yeah.

    All the essential elements of the blessing are intact. God grants success in every one of them – in measure. Before sin, success was absolute; ever since sin, success has been expressed in a ratio with frustration, and can’t be absolute – yet. (More on the “yet” in a future letter.) Back to the original question: Did God, in pronouncing the consequences of sin, retract the blessing he pronounced earlier?

     Answer: Some of it… for a while.

     In our previous letter, dear Church, I planted a seed: Live as much Genesis 2 (satisfaction) as you can, even though Genesis 3 (sin) happened. Work is not a consequence of sin, because work predates sin. The takeaway from this edition is this: Sin did not cause God to pronounce a curse on mankind; neither did sin cause him to retract the full measure of blessing. Let’s please stay out of the adversarial relationship with our creator; there’s no basis for it.

     Sometimes, Bible teachers will use the term “co-regent” in reference to Adam and Eve: they co-reigned with God in the Garden of Eden. Contrary to the serpent’s lies, the same term applies to Christians now, outside the garden – except, creation is in a flawed, cursed condition.

     But creation won’t stay that way.

 

 Grace and Peace (beyond the frustration),

 

John

Sweat of Your Brow, Part 1: I Can't Get No...

 

Hey, Cobblestone,

     A strange thing happens to a man when he takes hold of a pressure washer gun. The machine’s engine is roaring, and the work is right in front of him: a dirty house, a moldy slab of concrete, maybe a deck that really needs to be shown who’s boss. With the opening shot, ugliness is blasted away, and the man gets to thinking, “Wow, I could clean the WHOLE WORLD with this thing! If I just had a long enough hose and a steady supply of gas… Maybe I should get a sponsor. Honey, I’ll be back home in a few weeks, and you’ll be tickled pink with what I got done!”

     And then reality sets in: the sun begins to set; his trigger hand cramps up; the extra can of gas he was counting on actually went into the lawnmower last week, and he forgot to refill it. Such is life. And work.

     The expectation that a person can clean the whole world with a pressure washer is, to say the least, unrealistic. And yet, there’s satisfaction in the work. Dirty stuff gets clean almost instantly. If only that kind of satisfaction could carry over into every other form of work.

     For decades I operated under the assumption that work, in and of itself, is a consequence of the Fall. By “the Fall,” I mean The Big One, the Genesis 3 Fall, where sin entered the human experience, causing separation from God – and, of course, death. I thought, because of Adam’s screwup, I should expect work to be difficult and unsatisfying. Many’s the paycheck I drew with resentment, realizing I had given time out of my life in exchange for the boss’ money – and while the boss’ money was replenishable, my time was not. I couldn’t wait to get my hands around Adam’s throat.

     Though I can’t say for certain when my understanding of the nature of work was flipped on its head, I can certainly say that it has. And over the course of our next few letters, dear Church, if your understanding of the nature of work needs to be flipped – and I reckon it does – I hope to be the flipper. Are ya ready?

     An upside-down understanding is easy to come by. Scripture itself requires a clear-eyed look at what led up to the Fall. Absent that clear-eyed look, the Fall and the Curse become synonyms referring to the same event. They are not. Below is a key piece of Bible, familiar to most of us, I’m sure, that needs to be understood better. Here it comes, in the King James Version, for maximum theatrical effect:

…cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return (Genesis 3:17-19).

     Totally looks like a curse – I get it. Why it’s not a curse on mankind is a topic we’ll get to in a future letter. This time around, what I want to highlight is the order in which events took place.

     Work predates the Fall. Genesis 2:15 says The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. Did you catch the chapter number? Early in Chapter 2 of Genesis, Adam was the happiest (and only) human on earth. He also had a job. And with his work and stewardship, the Garden flourished. Late in Chapter 2 of Genesis, the second human came along, and Adam was happier still. In verse 23 we find the first recorded words of a human being, Adam’s joy over finally having another imago Dei around the place. And we would do no harm to Scripture if we assume Eve began to “work” and “keep” the Garden along with her husband. Clear eyes will see that work was well underway before the serpent did his dirty work, before the deception of Eve, before Adam’s sin.

     What does that mean for us now? Well, I could go into several trains of thought on how God set, in the beginning of human history, a laser line that has established the standard for marriage and family and all other human relations. But since the topic at hand is work, I’ll stick to it.

     In 1965, the Rolling Stones blew the rock charts to smithereens with their hit song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Yeah, I was around for that. I remember gathering around a record player in an upstairs bedroom of my grandma’s house with my aunt and two uncles – all of whom were not much older than me, one of whom had bought the 45 single – and marveling at Keith Richards hitting those now-famous riffs on his newfound fuzz guitar. Maybe the riffs are so famous that the underlying message snuck in unnoticed.

     Here's what I recommend to all humans, married/unmarried, employed/unemployed, young/old: Live as much Genesis 2 as you possibly can, even though Genesis 3 happened. As it pertains to work, the satisfaction we gain won’t be like the satisfaction Adam and Eve had before the Fall, but satisfaction can still be had.

     That kernel of thought is what I want to plant at the moment. And now I’ll shut up for a while.

  

Grace and Peace (and satisfaction beyond the pressure washer),

 

John