Guy Duininck: God Designed Man to Work
In the beginning, when God created, He worked for six days and then rested on the seventh. At the end of each day of creating, God observed His creation and saw that it was good. At the end of six days of creating, God looked at everything He had created and found it was very good. God worked; God observed His works; and God took pleasure in His works.
On the sixth day, God made man. Concerning His making of man and man’s role, we read this:
“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Genesis 1:27-28
Man was created in God’s image and likeness. He was endowed with a mind, with imagination, with creativity, with logic, with the ability to think, to construct, to imagine, to work, to produce, and to observe and enjoy his own creativity and the good work he accomplished.
Adam and Eve were not designed for or instructed to vacation in the garden, but were designed for and instructed to be fruitful, to have children, to replenish and subdue the earth, and to have dominion.
Some believers, for some reason [often a false humility, in my view, rather than an acknowledgement of God’s design] seem to think that man is completely incapable of producing or of being fruitful and that any attempt he makes to produce, whether it be natural or spiritual production, is not only impossible, but even if man could produce something, it would only be a fleshly act and lead to pride.
Such thinking is simply unScriptural, and suggests a failure or a refusal to recognize and embrace God’s design for man.
