God Wants Us to Work, Work Hard (Genesis 3:16-19)

“To the woman [God] said, ‘I will make your pain in childbearing very severe; with painful labour you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’ To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’ ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return’”

(Genesis 3:16-19, NIV).

Before Adam and Eve sinned, the earth offered up its good things willingly. It even watered itself (2:6). I imagined. Everything changed, however, after that first sin. Now cursed, the ground produces “thorns and thistles” more easily than fruits and vegetables. Since the Fall, work has been a struggle – contrast to work before the Fall.

Work is not the result of the Fall. It is sacred. Even before they had sinned, Adam and Eve had the job of taking care of the Garden (see 2:15). From our post-Fall perspective, it’s hard to imagine what such work might have: no thorns and no thistles. But whatever that post-Fall work might be, we can – I can – be confident that it was a work of cooperation with the earth, free from the frustration of the work we experience where the weeds always grow back, no matter how many times we pull them (ask my mother).

Because of sin, everything is harder than it has to be. Have you ever wonder about that Christians? Work is harder. Childbirth is harder. Relationships are harder. And yet this is still our Father’s world, and He still calls us to push through the hardships to gain such rewards as this world yields. God’s grace, yes; hard works, of course.   

THINK BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.