Called to the Marketplace

The first thing the Bible shows us about God is that he works.

Six days of it. Making things, naming them, looking at what he had made and saying it was good. I have read the opening of Genesis many times and this still catches me. Before the Bible tells us God is holy or loving or just, it shows him working. Then it says he made us in his image.

That is a strange thought to carry into an ordinary Monday. A lot of us hold a two-storey view of our lives instead. Upstairs is the real calling: serving at church, giving, maybe full-time ministry one day. Downstairs is the job, which mostly matters because it pays for the upstairs. I understand where this comes from. Nobody teaches it in so many words. It just gets absorbed, after years of hearing the word calling used only for pulpits and mission fields.

But I cannot find that house in Genesis.

The Unfinished World

The first command God gave people was a work assignment. "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature" (Genesis 1:28).

Theologians call this the cultural mandate. The name sounds grander than the text. What actually happens is that God plants a garden and puts the man in it "to work it and take care of it" (2:15). God left the world unfinished. He could have handed Adam a completed world, and he handed him soil and a task instead. I find that remarkable. It also tells you what subdue and rule cannot mean, because whatever they mean, it is what a gardener does to a garden, not what a strip miner does to a hillside.

The order of the story matters too. Work comes in Genesis 2. The fall comes in Genesis 3. The curse made work hard, but it did not make work. The assignment was already there, in Eden, given by a God who was pleased with it. I take some comfort in that, even if the hard part is usually easier to feel.

From the Garden to the City

Follow the assignment forward and it goes well past farming. Fill and subdue the earth and eventually you get irrigation, roads, written language, law, medicine, shipping, software. Culture is what happens when people made in God's image develop what God folded into creation. The farmer is doing it. So is the engineer, the teacher, the civil servant drafting policy, the founder whose company employs four hundred families. Most of them do not know that is what they are doing.

The Bible seems to trace this arc itself. The story starts in a garden and ends in a city, the new Jerusalem, and the kings of the earth "bring their splendour" into it, "the glory and honour of the nations" (Revelation 21:24, 26). Human culture, purified and carried into the new creation. I find it hard to read those verses and keep believing God only cares about the religious parts of our week.

Living in Singapore makes this easy to picture. We live inside a made thing. Reclaimed land, engineered water, a port that grew into one of the great trading cities of the world within living memory. The question the mandate leaves with us is smaller and more personal: whether we will do our part of it consciously, as service to the One who gave the assignment.

Bezalel

There is a detail in Exodus that is easy to read past. When God commissions the tabernacle he names a craftsman. "See, I have chosen Bezalel... and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with wisdom, with understanding, with knowledge and with all kinds of skills" (Exodus 31:2–3).

Bezalel is the first person the Bible explicitly describes as filled with the Spirit of God. He is not a prophet and he is not a priest. He is a craftsman, and the filling is for design, metalwork, stonecutting and carpentry. I wonder what he made of it. He was not asked to preach. He was asked to build well. The gifts the Spirit gave him, wisdom and understanding and knowledge and skill, are the same words Proverbs later uses for how God founded the earth. The sanctuary Israel worshipped in existed because of his workbench.

More Than Conduct

None of this dismisses the usual word to Christian professionals. Be honest, work hard, treat people well, be ready to speak of Christ. All of that is right. I just do not think it is the foundation.

Conduct answers the question of how a Christian should behave at work. The mandate answers an earlier question, which is what work is. And that changes things. If work is a neutral venue, then integrity is the whole of our Christian contribution to it. But if work is a piece of God's unfinished world handed to us to develop, then the work itself can be offered to God: the bridge that holds, the accounts that are true, the class that was well taught, and not just the manner in which we did any of it.

Paul says as much to slaves in Colossae, people with the least dignified work imaginable. "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters" (Colossians 3:23). Whatever you do. He does not add a condition about it being religious work.

The Carpenter

We know almost nothing about most of Jesus's life, and the silence says something.

He lived about thirty years before his public ministry started. Mark tells us what Nazareth knew him as: "Isn't this the carpenter?" (Mark 6:3). The eternal Son, through whom "all things were created" (Colossians 1:16), spent most of his years on earth making things. If ordinary work in an obscure town were beneath God's purposes, the incarnation was a strange way to spend those years.

Abraham Kuyper, the Dutch theologian who was also a prime minister, drew the conclusion in one famous sentence: there is not a square inch in the whole of human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry, "Mine!"

I do not know what your square inch looks like this week. A desk, a ward, a classroom, a site office. The mandate was given long before either of us arrived, and it has never been withdrawn. Maybe the invitation is just to walk back into it tomorrow knowing whose it is.