In this brief Chapter of Exodus, God finishes His lengthy list of instructions to Moses and gives the command to put into action all that He has said. And I think the central issue in Exodus 31 is that, after appointing a specific person to oversee the construction of the tabernacle, God reminds His people of the commandment to "keep holy the sabbath day." Obviously the building of the tabernacle, along with the construction of the ark, the altars and tables, the vessels, and the making of the vestments, is going to be a time-consuming, laborious, toil-inducing job. So God, in His infinite Mercy, makes sure to remind everyone that, even though they are about to be hard at work with this project, they are not to forget about the sabbath -- in other words, they are not to forget about God. And this led me down a train of thought.
In a previous post I had written about the Third Commandment, and how I feel that today we are in violation of it due to our obsessive work "ethic" and our lack of observance of the Lord's Day, a day to rest and contemplate our God. Exodus 31 demonstrated to me the immense importance of this command. God wants a specific day devoted to Him! If we blow right through the week without giving Him that, we violate His Command!
This may be a topic I've discussed to death, but I truly feel that our modern work-obsessed culture is completely counter to what God wants from us. We've developed a societal mindset that industriousness and busy-ness are the pinnacle of human goodness. Where did we come up with this?! I recently read a great article by Edwin Faust called "The Day I Retired," which is all about this screwed-up, work-first mindset. Faust brought to my attention an essential fact of human existence that puts "hard work" in its proper perspective. At the outset of human life on earth, as captured in the Book of Genesis, God uses work and labor as a punishment for Original Sin! God says to Adam, "Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee, that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work: with labour and toil shalt thou eat thereof all the days of thy life" (Genesis 3:17) [italics added]. And further: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken" (Genesis 3:19) [italics added]. There are two things we can take from this: 1) that we are forced to labor and toil as punishment for the fall of man, and 2) that God's original plan must not have included all this labor and toil. In a perfect world, as God envisioned it, we would be freed from the bondage of work and we would be able to contemplate our Maker and enjoy His Goodness and Mercy all the days of our lives. That is what ought to be held in high regard; not the backwards-thinking mindset of today.
I'm not trying to argue that we ought not to ever work or work hard. I know that we must provide for our families and ourselves. Work is necessary. But is it necessarily a virtue to let it take over our lives? Is it such a good thing to work sixty hours a week, weekends included, and therefore leave little to no time for Divine contemplation? If so, where is the Biblical evidence for this? So far, all I've read in the Bible stresses the necessity of a day of rest to forget about work, for work is simply a punishment for our fallen nature. In the Faust article, in order to show the hopelessness that work-obsession leads to, he makes mention of one of my most favorite Henry David Thoreau lines: "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation." Faust elaborates: "Recall that desperation comes from despair, which is the loss of hope. Hope in what? In God. Men cannot be sustained by a hope that is not theological." Faust also quotes Shakespeare: "There is a memorable line in Shakespeare's Othello in which the villain Iago describes his duplicity by saying: 'I am not what I am.' How many of us might say the same?" In our society we are defined by what we do for work. How nonsensical! If work is our punishment, why should we be proud to define ourselves by it? For most of us, when defining ourselves by our jobs, we may accurately reply, "I am not what I am." I am a teacher, but teaching does not define me. What defines me is that I am a creature of God, and I don't teach for a living, but my living consists of making my way back to God in heaven. I must teach for the time being because our fallen nature has necessitated it, but it's not what I live for. If we live for our work, where does that put God?
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