How Christ's Toil Made Light Work

Post last updated on August 7, 2023

This is the sequel post to another post, When History Serves Prophecy.

Israel’s afflictions in Egypt assumed a different character than mere difficulty—they point the reader back again to history’s beginning in Eden, recalling the effects of the Fall upon man. No situation in this world, we must remember, can be rightly considered without taking account of Adam’s sin, and the details given to us in this chapter mean that the Fall becomes the unavoidable factor when reading this portion of the Exodus narrative. Indeed, the very curses associated with Adam and Eve after the Fall become part of Israel’s bondage in Egypt, and we cannot read Exodus properly without this in mind.

Exodus’ first chapter describes Israel’s afflictions in two different ways, each one evoking events recorded in Genesis’ third chapter. The first of these lies in its recollection of Israel’s labor in Egypt: The Egyptians, we learn, made the children of Israel to serve them with a kind of labor, one which the scripture calls rigor and bondage (Exodus 1:13-14). Importantly, this description regards something qualitatively different than work alone—their exertions are called rigor (Exodus 1:13). A distinction is thus apparent between work and rigor, between work and toil. This is a difference that was impossible before the Fall. The same distinction is confirmed later, in Genesis 5:29, when a man by the name of Lamech gives his son the name of Noah, meaning comfort, in the expectation that his son will “comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.” Thus, very early in history work becomes associated with toil by way of Adam’s sin and its attending curses (Genesis 3:17-19).

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Another fact might be briefly considered at this point, the connection between Adam’s work and his calling. The connection is definite but subtle: In the beginning, God placed man in the garden to dress and keep it (Genesis 2:15). Work did not then come to man as an enterprise that was separate from his being; rather, man’s creation and immediate placement in the garden suggested the very nature of his life and activity in relation to God and the presentation of the created world. It is true that God’s subsequent commands assigned Adam’s activity definite form and purpose, but there was not yet an inevitable gap between work and calling because there was no breach between Adam’s existence and his perception of purpose: Command was understood and received as a calling, as intrinsically possessing the dignity of purpose in God’s world. In other words, Adam’s life in the garden had included work since the beginning, confirming the goodness of man’s work by its association with God and his work (Genesis 2:2-3).

As such, work was not a begrudged side hustle, appended to periods of play, but nor was it the overwrought attempt for a man to find fulfillment in mere activity, apart from his creator and the long arc of creation’s design—God’s glory (Revelation 4:11). In fact, both tendencies mentioned above arise out of anxieties; they are reactionary, attempts to reorder the world and its present circumstances in conformity to our own wants and by our own motions—motions which we both refuse and justify by naming them work. We discover this same tension in a consideration of the 104^th Psalm, when for an exercise we highlight two different words within its 23^rd verse: “Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening;” and then, “Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.” We note by illustration, then, that one man slips out early from his office chair at 4:45 on a Friday, intent upon beginning the weekend before the end of a weekday, but that another man enters the same building for the seventh day in a row on a Sunday morning. One refuses his work; the other inappropriately justifies it.

These two tendencies—and there are other ways in which they might be described—suffer from the single failure to recognize man in God’s created order, to first account for himself in relation to God and the revelation of his will. In other words, we may diagnose these and other inclinations as expressions that belong to a fallen world, one in which man’s isolation from God has tended toward his reconsideration and reemployment powers in connection to himself and his party or clan, apart from God’s purposes. Properly conceived, work belongs to man as man, but man, we remember, lives unto God. Man is that one exceptional creature whom God endowed with dignity and dominion over the creation (Genesis 1:26-28). As such, work is best conceived as flowing out of the creative initiative and purposes of God unto man’s motion. Thus, Jesus’ answer to his critics noted this connection. He told them on one occasion, “My Father worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5:17).

Adam’s work, then, might be described as vocation, activity given to him by God—activity that privileged him to participate in the way that God’s glory was already and clearly manifest in the world. Eden was a realm of God’s revelation and Adam’s work thus acknowledged and maintained God’s communication of himself. In cursing the ground for reason of Adam’s disobedience, it is notable that God did not change the nature of Adam’s original calling—in fact, the responsibilities imparted to Adam were confirmed to Noah and his descendants (Genesis 8:15-17). Even so, there was a real change in the conditions and experiences associated with obedience to that call. Adam’s work was originally without vanity or toil, for it was attached to God’s purposes. It is only after the Fall that the idea of vocation might be confused with mere occupation—a name we might give (with some allowance) to activity when it is divorced from its proper purpose. Occupation is, at least, activity, even if we are not sure that it is something more than that.

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Adam’s exclusion from the garden, combined with the curse upon the ground, meant that mankind was hereby hindered (but not recalled) from his original obligations; however, from this point onward, man’s work took on the additional character of toil. Adam and his descendants, rather than work in the sphere of God’s revelation with easy correspondence to God’s glory, began to toil in ground that God had cursed. When the reader, then, turns to the pages of Exodus, he is brought to consider this fact and its implications by a narrative in Egypt.

Situated along the Nile, Egypt was a place of exceptional beauty (Genesis 13:10¹Here we see a simile that connects the beauty of the plain of Jordan to both Egypt and the garden of Eden.); and yet, it is evident that Egypt’s biblical significance is confirmed only when its natural beauty is considered alongside its religious character and the associated toil of the Israelites there. The Nile River and its surroundings possessed a beauty that was analogous to both Eden and the New Jerusalem (Genesis 2:1 and Revelation 22:1); and yet, Egypt becomes the place where Pharaoh sets his throne and builds himself a city. In Egypt, then, symbols more properly belonging to the worship and the rule of God²i.e., a city and a throne were reincorporated for idolatry. Accordingly, as the Exodus narrative begins, the children of Israel are growing in number but, nonetheless, occupied in a kind of religious task for which they were never called: they build and beautify the revelation of Pharaoh—the treasure cities that become known as Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11). Their work not only possesses the character of affliction (Exodus 1:11) and rigor (Exodus 1:13), we also note that the people that God had chosen for himself (cf. Exodus 19:6) are, by then, enslaved and employed in the glorification of a human king who had wickedly made himself a god. Work’s purposes were now captive to idolatries. Egypt’s contrasts with Eden, then, become apparent, tragic, and descriptive, but so does Israel’s eventual deliverance from Egypt, predicting the believer’s deliverance from sin by the cross. Jesus’ work becomes effective unto man’s salvation precisely because the cross—adorned with a man of sorrow, who is crowned with thorns—is God’s answer to Adam’s obligation.