My friend John Van Sloten preaches and writes about vocation regularly. He just posted another piece at ThinkChristian. His post triggered a question I often ponder: why did God bother to make this enormous cosmos?

Anyone with a bit of Reformed catechism can easily answer “for His glory” but that of course just begins the conversation. What about the manifest abundance of the cosmos is glorious?

The movie “The Color Purple” in this scene brings the old catechism teaching to life. The creation is designed to evoke admiration, praise, worship.

More than Watchers, Doers

As good as this scene from “The Color Purple” is, it remains “movie” to today’s “video games”. Why are video games trouncing movies in box office earnings? Because we’re not just made to WATCH the creation, it’s even more fun to get involved, to get our hands dirty, to act and react, to sub-create, to sub-author, to instigate, to produce. As children we learn that the puddles and streams invite us to splash, to throw things in, to move the rocks and see what crawls out, and then to use the rocks to build pools and divert the water. Watching is never enough.

Warn Down by the Curse

My first paying job was for an old Dutch baker nearing retirement. My first day on the job he told me “we work because of Adam’s fall.”

I was just 16 but knew my Bible well enough to correct him. “God gave Adam work BEFORE the fall, the frustration comes by the fall, not work.”

I don’t begrudge the aging baker the rest he sought after years of early morning labor baking bread and cakes. There’s a reason they have to pay us to work, often. Work in the curse is deeply tied to frustration. Our rebellion against the author gets mirrored back towards us by the medium we employ in our sub-authorship. The medium is cursed for our frustration.

African Graduate Student

A roommate was an African graduate student at the seminary I was attending. I remember getting into a debate about “heaven”. He argued the side of Dante, the beatific vision. When we get to the hear-after all we’ll do is stair at God and Jesus and enjoy and adore him. I argued the “new creation” side of things and told him we’d enjoy basketball and music and cakes and each other too.

John’s post reminded me of that conversation. John sees in the vocational lives the revelation of God’s glory, just like we see it in the sun, the stars, Yosemite National Park and the color purple. Christian theology 101 of course asserts that people are on the “created” side of the “creator-creature” distinction meaning that people too are part of the glory that reveals its author.

John’s contribution is the recognition that the glory producing that humanity contributes to isn’t simply the vision of a sculpted David or Venus, or the music or visual arts, or the theological or literature, but includes the vocational. The plumber who crawls under the sink or the house to make it all flow where we need it to manifests the glory of God, butt crack not-withstanding. John mines this insight to expose and enjoy the author of the entire system.

When Work is Worship

Eric Liddell (the subject of the movie “Chariots of Fire”) famously said “God made me fast, when I run I feel His pleasure.”

I can’t think of a better quote to sum up the idea that work ideally is a form of worship.

The Christian God perpetually invites us to be like him. The Hebrew god, unlike the Greek god, is a worker, a gardener, someone who likes to get his hands dirty. The god of the ancient Greeks just thinks and watches. We catch that god continuing to stow away through our theologies.

God made us all kinds of ways, and when we live out those ways we feel His pleasure. This is where work and worship are one.

I believe in the new earth we will devote ourselves to all manner of things with parallel upscaled joy to what we experience when we do them here and now. When we step back from a job well done and admire it, feeling it’s joy, and say “it’s good, It’s very good” we of course echo the creator who did it first in Genesis 1.

John is right. Satisfaction in the common good is nice, but the more basic joy is in the excellence of the thing itself.

Work As A Sixth Sense to Experience God’s Glory

Now I know that there will be many who say “but the most excellent thing is God himself so why would we pause on mediated things when in the age to come we will see Him face to face. Surely that we will drop our tools to stare and sing and stare some more!”

In understand their point, but I think God enjoys the mediation, the iconic as John calls it or the sacramental as Len Vander Zee calls it. God wants to be enjoyed by ALL our senses, not just sight and hearing.

I am certainly not a pantheist but like all theological errors it is rooted in a truth. Paul noted that we easily confuse the creature for the creator, partly out of our constant striking to make the creator into our object and our tool. Yet the created is so alive because of its author we touch God’s glory in a sense when we touch His creation. It’s not enough to touch it, like we touch the fur of some creature at the petting zoo, but work becomes a sixth sense where we are deeply involved with the furry beast in animal husbandry. We tabernacle with the glory infused creation. Work is a way we apprehend the glory where the other 5 leave off.

Feeling God’s Pleasure

The last two months have brought losses to me.  I’ve been feeling those loses along with the added practical burdens of falling behind at work and extra duties involved. After putting away leftovers in the kitchen tonight part of me wanted to simply flop into bed and go to sleep. I have a sermon to write tomorrow. I have kid transportation and a wrapping up of things before a trip. I just need more sleep I thought.

I paused, however, because I thought back on John’s article that I read after skimming my RSS feed. I knew I had to write about it because I knew that if I did I would feel God’s pleasure, as I often do when I write, or preach, or teach, or converse, or pray with another. I knew that although I would expend energy in writing this piece that I would also be renewed in a deep way, renewed by the joy of not just seeing John’s handiwork in the piece he wrote, but in feeling the joy of taking that and writing my own piece. That is how work in God’s glory infused creation ought to be, and some day fully will be.