Dennis Tuuri

# Jerusalem, Athens, and Work

Genesis 1:25-27

Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Our subject is Jerusalem, Athens, and work.

And God made the beast of the earth according to its kind, cattle according to its kind, and everything that creeps on the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female he created them.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your scriptures. We thank you, Father, for your indwelling spirit to us as well. And we pray that spirit would write this word upon our hearts. Bless us, Lord God, as we see who you are and as a result of that, who we as your imagebearers are and what Jesus has saved us to be. In his name we pray. Amen.

Please be seated. Before we get to today’s sermon, I wanted to add one comment to Chris’s sermon last Sunday. Good job that he did. Some excellent application. And I want to give you one more piece of application from that text. And I hope you don’t mind this little diversion at the beginning.

You remember last week he preached on the story of the rich young ruler. And Jesus told the ruler to sell all his possessions to give to the poor and follow him. Right? Well, frequently when we read these stories in either the gospels, actually in the Old Testament or in the epistles, when we’ve looked at this in James, and we’ve talked about this a little bit, that when we read about rich and poor. You know, certainly there are categories of people who are rich and poor. There are individuals. This was a real young ruler, real person who had riches and Jesus was telling him to give to the poor.

But beyond that, frequently these stories in the gospels and the explanation of them in the epistles wants us to think of Jews and Gentiles. The Jews were given this tremendous heritage, right? And Paul waxes eloquent about this in various places in the epistles. The Jews had the riches of the word of God, the presence of God with them, the temple, the special system of priesthood so that they could minister to all the nations.

So the wealth of the Jews was the relationship with God. And in that relationship, they were given stewardship of the Bible, we would call it, in the word and then the ministry of that and the instruction of that and the liturgies revolving around that. They had those riches and ultimately what we see in the Old Testament, for instance, in the story of Jonah or in other places, the reason why they’re taken into captivity and destroyed as a nation—to be resurrected but killed—is because they haven’t done that.

They haven’t ministered to the Gentiles the riches that they had. Okay? They haven’t gone out and evangelized properly the world as God’s priestly nation. And when we get around to Jerusalem and the destruction in AD 70, it’s the same thing. You know, one of the big things that’s going on is the rejection of the mission of the gospel of grace that they were to take those riches that God had entrusted them with.

You remember Chris talked about the word inheritance and how this ties back to the Jewish people, etc. Those people were not ministering the riches of God to the poor—certainly emblematic of the Gentile nations—without those things that God would want the Jews to carry to them. So you’ve got this whole thing, this image built up throughout the scriptures of riches and poverty, not just in terms of material blessings, but the spiritual blessings of the word, etc.

And the Jews failed to do that. And so when Jesus tells the rich young ruler that the one thing he lacks is to have the kind of gracious gospel missional evangelistic spirit to give to the poor and depriving himself of riches if need be. He’s calling him to do something that was very significant in the life of Israel in the Old Testament and in the gospel accounts. The rejection of Jesus is the rejection ultimately of the great missional evangelist Jesus Christ who with his gospel of grace had saved a people to spread that gospel of grace.

So that’s why the judgment was coming.

Now the application is simple, right? Do you feel it yet? And I hope you do. You’re the richest people on earth. We’re the people that God has brought into relationship with him through the gospel of Jesus Christ. We have his scriptures. We have the indwelling Holy Spirit. We’ve got the riches of a relationship with the triune God and with his people. We have the ultimate riches of the world.

Are we giving them to the poor? Are we evangelizing? Do we see ourselves as recipients of the gospel of grace so that we would bring other people that knowledge of the gospel of grace? You know, when we set up our community groups, we tried to use intentionality in several directions. And one was missional, evangelistic sort of stuff. And what we said was that in each community group, we wanted everyone to have one person a year that they were asking the group to pray for in terms of witnessing and speaking to about Jesus Christ.

One person—that’s all. And to pray for that regularly as a group, you know. That’s part of the evaluation form that we used last year that we’re developing for this year. And last year we used September as the month by which to evaluate how well the groups were doing. So ask yourself: Do you have one person you’re praying about sharing the gospel with or you’re already involved with sharing the gospel with, neighbor, coworker, whatever it is. Do you have a poor person? Maybe rich in terms of material wealth, but in terms of the gospel poor. And are you a rich young ruler who refuses to minister the riches that you have to other people through whatever reason—fear, self-absorption, whatever it is.

If this church doesn’t at some point bring in new maturing Christians whose lives are obviously a picture of the gospel of grace, what churches tend to do that don’t do that is we become fairly complacent and we start to become less gracious with one another. We forget we’re all sinners, right? Because we haven’t seen, you know, sinners coming in and being saved by the gospel of grace. And we start. We’re just kind of this mature group of people and we don’t want—we’re like all rich people and that’s great. We got our club. We must never let that happen.

So I would encourage you in your community groups over the next few weeks to bring this up and to share somebody—to think about someone that you’d like to share the riches of the gospel of grace with.

Now, when people come to salvation, we just had this at the beginning of our worship service, and that initial entrance in is sort of pictured when we confess our sins and God assures us of forgiveness. You know, that’s kind of like sharing the riches of the gospel of Christ and people coming to faith, right? That’s kind of what that is. But that’s not the end of the worship service. You know, the rest of the worship service is not just that.

We move ahead in our Christian life. We did that strange awkward thing again this morning that we always do—lifting our hands. And why do we do that? You know, people visitors come in, we don’t—they don’t know what’s going on. Is this a charismatic church? But everybody’s doing this. What’s the deal? Well, it’s one small way that we’re trying to implement what I’m going to talk about today based on Genesis 1:25-27.

And that is that materiality in the physical universe matters. That the Christian faith is not just some idea. Ideas have consequences surely. But a man, a real living incarnate man had consequences and you have consequences in the world. As you engage in the physicality of the world, it’s good. And so that’s one reason we do that strange thing. And maybe it’s a good reason, maybe it’s a bad reason, but just so you understand—that’s what we’re trying to do.

That’s why we have you come forward for the offering. That’s why we have you come forward. One of the reasons why we have you come forward for the table. We want to engage your bodies. Because for too long we’ll sit here and I’ll blabber on about ideas and you’ll sit there and think about them, right? Now that’s okay. That’s part of the worship service too—bringing of that knowledge.

Why are we here at this stage of the worship service? We’re to get a heavenly perspective on what we’re doing here on earth. Because the two are to be joined. We’re to pray that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We’ll pray that again today. So that’s what we’re doing. But don’t think somehow that the heavenly perspective is just something to be understood or thought about or contemplated. Yeah, it can begin there.

But then it results in actions that we take with our bodies. And that’s what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about the problem of our origins and the sort of culture in which we live and then as it relates to work. This is the second in a series of sermons on work.

Now, one little warning, by the way. You know, as we go through these opening sermons on work, it all sounds like blue sky, right? I mean, it’s all great things that work is and why it’s great and why it’s good and why it’s God ordained and how it reflects God’s image and all that stuff. And the idea is to give you a real sense of dignity as you go to work tomorrow, whether it’s in your home and doing things there or in the workplace. And so, you know, a place of working in this world and the work in this world culminates in peace, the Lord’s supper, rejoicing and together.

So work is important and that’s why we’re preaching this set of sermons. So we’re going to say things at the beginning that are trying to lay down some tracks, right? Lay down some basic ideas about what work is from a biblical perspective. But understand that in a few weeks after I get back from a council meeting in October—it’d be about mid-October—that I’ll start talking about the effects of sin and the fall on work.

So as you go about doing your work and try to implement what I lay out last time and this time in the next couple of weeks, just understand that we’ll get to the part that makes it so difficult, frustrating, futile and fruitless. At least that’s the way it feels and can be sometimes. We’ll get to that part. But first we want to lay down some basic tracks.

And what we want to do today is take a little bit of time to contrast Jerusalem and Athens.

Now, you know, those are city names that stand for something much bigger—for a cultural perspective. We’re to raise our children in the nurture and admonition of Christ, which means one of the words used there is paideia, which means inculturate them. And so paideia was the system of Hellenistic enculturation, teaching Greeks the Hellenistic culture. And we’re supposed to have a counterculture to that which is the culture of Jesus.

Right? And so this contrast between Athens and Hellenism and Jerusalem biblical faith, Christianity and what Jesus says—these are what we’re going to talk about today. And we need to talk about it because for 2,000 years when the church started up, the church age, it was in the immediate context of a different paideia. Okay? And so it was in the context of this Greek view of things. And I’m going to way oversimplify majority opinions of Greeks today.

But you know that’s what you do when you talk about big picture stuff. And I want to talk about some of the big picture Greek influences on the early church. You can see it in the writings of the church fathers, etc. And if we’re not careful, the kind of influences that will gum us all up in terms of what we’re supposed to do in on the earth.

So you know, the idea is that the church was birthed in a syncretic relationship—you could almost say—with Greek culture. Now the providence of God—that’s what happened. And I think that 2,000 years on, significant elements of the Christian church are trying to say we need to decouple from Greek thinking and we need to become more biblical. We need to mature as a Christian culture and civilization, you know. We need to mature in a paideia of Christ to try to get rid of, you know, the Greek influences that are counterproductive.

So today we’re going to talk about—we’re going to begin by talking about several—a handful of Greek thoughts relative to work and then the implications of those. And then we’ll look at what the Bible says about those areas that we’ll describe as Greek thought. Now we’ll say what does the Bible say about mind and work and physicality. Okay. So we’ll contrast that. So we’ll start with Greek stuff with some implications for work. And then we’ll talk about the Bible and what it teaches and again ending with some implications for work. So that’s kind of where we’re going, that’s where we’re beginning here.

So you may want to take notes, you might not. But there will be, you know, a handful of things to say today—more than just three. And so I’ll just prepare you for that.

So let’s get started. What did the Greeks think that have particular—and again all the caveats in the world, this isn’t what all Greek philosophies taught—but it seems like the predominant Greek ideas and it seems like these are the Greek ideas that from my perspective at least have most heavily influenced the church and continues to today.

You know, it’s an interesting thing. Two other strikes against us as we start to think about this stuff. One is we’re conservatives. That’s a strike against us in this area. Why? Well, if I’m right, the church has embodied a lot of Greek philosophy as it’s developed for 2,000 years, then we’re going to be loath to leave it behind because we tend to want to conserve what was in the past.

I mean, it’s interesting to think, for instance, about the Westminster definitions of God and how the catechism talks about what is God as opposed to who is God and how God is passionless, etc. It’s interesting to think about some of those things and are they really communicating today? What was trying to be communicated. So the fact that we’re conservative means we’re going to kind of hold on to the past and the past from my perspective has these problematic Greek influences.

Secondly, here’s a big problem for the American church, not so much for us, but maybe so. If you split up the Old and the New Testaments and you become a New Testament Christian, you are going to severely limit your ability to understand what work is and all the things surrounding it. I read this morning from the Genesis account in creation, right? Because that’s very significant for what I’m going to say today.

And if you’re only a New Testament Christian, you end up with these things that are tied to and have a foundation in the Old Testament which is very, you know, that Old Testament is written in a language and with a worldview that’s very earthly—we could say—in a proper sense. And if you get to the New Testament and reject the Old Testament, you end up with what seems to be a set of Greek ideas about everything.

It looks that way because you don’t understand that it’s referencing the Old Testament. Do you understand what I’m saying here? So the fact that we split up Old and New Testaments, right? You know, it’s like this whole Judeo-Christian thing. If I understand it right, historically the idea was to get Christians not to think about the Judeo part of it. Those laws are for the Jews and just about the Christian part. And what does it say about biblical structures and legal structures? In the New Testament—not a lot—because it’s building upon what was already there.

So the attempt was to get us to separate off the two elements, the two halves of God’s word so that we wouldn’t know what the New Testament really is talking about when it talks about government or work or the world or anything else. We’d get confused easily and instead of bringing in Old Testament definitions and thoughts to a piece of scripture, we would see them instead through Greek eyes.

So, for instance, in John 1, right? “In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.” And word is translation—the word logos. And all of a sudden we got all kinds of people in the Christian church not connecting this up with the physical creation account that we just read in Genesis 1, but with some kind of eternal Greek ideas of logos or word or whatever it is. It’s an example. Bible wants us connecting the whole word.

So we got trouble going in. Now maybe you don’t and maybe some of these things I’ll tell you today are kind of obvious for you. I hope they are. But it’s worth repeating, I think, some of these Greek influences that can be negative.

And the first thing is that their view of work itself was that work is demeaning. The idea from the Greeks is, well, work isn’t really all that great a deal. Now, I’m going to be reading some quotes here, and these are quotes, most of which came out of Tim Keller’s book, Every Good Endeavor, which, you know, is sort of prompting this sermon series. And he’s read a lot of books, and he has various quotes, and I’ll use some of them today.

So, for instance, he quotes from an Italian philosopher Adriano Tilgar who says this: “To the Greeks work was a curse and nothing else.” According to Aristotle, unemployment—not having to work—was really sort of the ideal because then you could really devote yourself to non-material considerations, philosophy, etc. So to begin with, the Greeks thought that work was demeaning. It really wasn’t a good thing. It was a necessary curse. The gods created men to work but, you know, the gods are kind of, you know, not so good sometimes. And really the idea is to transcend work.

So work itself is demeaning. Now folks, you know, having been raised in the American culture, you know, 63 years now in it, I mean that’s what a lot of people think about work. It’s a kind of a necessary evil, right? So work is demeaning to Greek philosophy.

Secondly, the body itself is demeaning to the Greeks. The body itself is kind of, again, maybe a necessary evil for a period of time but all these bodily emotions and urges and realities and things we have to do in the body just to survive—to eat, to do whatever else we got to do—the body itself was seen as kind of a problem. Okay. Plato in one of his writings says that being in the body distorts and hampers the soul in the quest for truth.

“In this life, the person who develops spiritual insight and purity must do so by ignoring the body as much as possible.” So work is demeaning. The body isn’t particularly good. And there’s kind of an embarrassment about the body and particularly, I would say, in terms of some of the, you know—for instance, the—well, we won’t get into it. So the body itself is a problem.

Third, the material world is really not all that good either. The basic idea of Hellenistic culture is the material world, again, is something that has to be kind of transcended. It places these limits and this physicality upon us that doesn’t really help us when trying to create a system of thought, mental energy, etc. Greek philosophers primarily thought of the gods as minds. Okay. Perfect minds, solitary, self-sufficient, uninvolved in the stuff of the world or the hubbub of human affairs.

So the world itself is sort of something to be transcended. Physicality is what I mean by the world there—the material world. Body is not good, work is demeaning, the physical world itself is not good. And as a result of that they sort of taught that death was a good thing because in death you get released from all these limitations of physicality, your body, the material world, and become—now an angel on a cloud playing a harp. No, that’s not what the Greeks taught, but that’s what the church taught—influenced by Greek ideas.

Heaven became, you know, and can become if we don’t think about what the Bible says, this disembodied eternal state of pure thought, pure will, whatever it is, just kind of drifting along with work finally out of the way. Our physical bodies finally gone with all the problems they’ve given to us and the material world basically irrelevant. Now we’re floating as disembodied spirits and somehow this is a heavenly existence. Okay.

So the idea is that death actually was seen—Plato said that death is therefore a form of liberation, even a friend of the soul. Okay. So death is a friend and death is a good thing.

Five, being godlike—in a good sense, I mean, not in a becoming God himself, but being divine, having the divine nature, we could say—being godlike is being detached from physicality. And I’ve kind of mentioned this already, but divinity is non-material. Okay. So the idea is that, you know, this distinct kind of deity idea or deities idea that become pure thought and will as opposed to material.

Material world is temporary in the history of things and even illusory in some philosophies—that it really isn’t even there. And if it is there, it’s only there for a period of time. It’ll be gone away. And this is, you know, again, creeps its way into Christian thought. You know, that well, this is all going to get burned up, then we’ll be in heaven—this eternal state of disembodied spirits—which the Bible does not teach but we think it does because we’ve had this mixture of Greek thought.

And the end result of all this for work is pretty devastating stuff, right? You can see where it would be. The way to peace and happiness to the Greeks was non-attachment to the things of the world. Epictetus taught his disciples that the good life is a life stripped of both hopes and fears. In other words, a life reconciled to what it is—the case. A life which accepts the world as it is. No hopes, detachment from it. Essentially, especially in terms of who we are.

To be most human was to be the least involved and the least invested in the material world and the things of earth grow strangely dim. It’s an old hymn and there’s a sense in which that’s true. Of course, the Bible refers to earthly things in terms of fallennness. But to think that somehow heaven is to be able to get away from all of this and all this grows dim as we move into a proper relationship—even here on earth—with God, this is not what the Bible teaches, but it is what Greek philosophy teaches.

And then finally, service to others is bad. We’re going to talk about this more in a couple of weeks. But service then is really, if you look at, you know, the New Testament when the Bible talks about service, then you read commentators about what the Greeks thought about that—to the Greeks, that’s just bad. I mean, it’s kind of disgusting, demeaning, serving other people. It isn’t good.

And so their view of service itself is bad. Work then, as Keller says, was a barrier to the highest kind of life. Work made it impossible to rise above the earthbound humdrum of life into the realm of philosophy, the domain of the gods. So work was not good. Now some work was there, but even the kind of work which they ended up liking then would be purely mental contemplation. Philosophers, rulers, had servants and slaves. The idea of an ideal state to serve the people that had mental acumen. And so the only kind of work that really is acceptable is kind of work that’s detached from physicality and has other people serving it.

Here’s a quote from Leland Ryken who I know some of you are familiar with his works. He wrote an article, a book on work and leisure. He says this: “The whole Greek social structure helped to support such an outlook for it rested on the premise that slaves and craftsmen did the work enabling the elite to devote themselves to the exercise of the mind in art, philosophy and politics.” So the good work was that sort of stuff and the bad work or being craftsmen—involved in physicality—because physicality is bad.

Now what does that kind of philosophy, if you have those things at play when you think about work tomorrow? What is it? What are some of the implications? Some of these kind of ideas or influences that come down to us.

Well, first of all, you then think of work as a necessary evil. Okay, so I got to go to work. I got to pay the bills. I got to go to work because that’ll give me the leisure time I really want. So I put up with this necessary evil in my life in order to get to the good stuff, which we don’t understand it necessarily, but a lot of that good stuff is informed by Greek ideals and not the Bible. So work is a necessary evil. That’s one of the implications.

Secondly, as a result of that, you want work that can give you the most money because money buys slaves or servants. Money buys leisure. Money lets you work less. And so you try to get the most money. So when you all of this is very relevant to the family. When you start to train your children and your family for vocation, do it through all kinds of things. But when they get around to selecting a career, what’s the basis? How do they select it?

Well, if you have the Greek mindset, the idea to select it is to get as much possible work for that kind of thing rather than fulfill what you’re actually good at or what might bring you joy and fulfillment in work because work can never be that. What you want is leisure. And so you pick a work—a job rather, a vocation—for all the wrong reasons: work that makes the most money, that can help us get the most leisure, and can get the most people around us doing that bad physical labor sorts of stuff.

A subset of this is many jobs are demeaning or not dignified. If you have this idea, then the craftsman, the servant, the service industry, the guy that makes burgers at McDonald’s—those are demeaning. That’s bad work. That’s bad vocation, right? Many jobs are seen then as demeaning and not dignified as a result of that. It’s an implication of what we’re talking about in terms of this mindset.

So you start to then treat all of those jobs as less dignified, less meaningful, bad. And then secondly, you end up then thinking of those people who inhabit those jobs as second-class people. You begin to develop a class system—a system where the people who are all the idea people are the ones you want to be around, right? They’re the ones who really have value and the worker people are sort of off here. And so you have this kind of class system that starts to develop or is can be highly defined in a culture that’s not biblical but Greek.

Class systems. And as I said earlier, you know, you end up with the wrong job or you want unemployment. And in our particular social setting right now, more and more people are opting for unemployment because they have this—well, in part because they have this Greek mindset. And as a result, why not—why not, if you can get really good at government programs and stuff—go unemployed because you don’t see work as dignified or meaningful or godlike? Or you know, it’s too involved in the physical world which truly isn’t any good. It doesn’t help you develop the world of ideas. It’s just all wrong from the Greek mindset.

And for off, for many Christians, the same thing is true.

Then finally, one other implication is if you do have to work and you have this mindset that I’ve just laid out, are you a good worker? Probably not. I mean, if you think that good work is going to make you a lot more money, you can get out somehow. But if you know you’re never going to make a lot of money making burgers at McDonald’s, as a result, will you be good and diligent and try to do your best and serve people and all that stuff?

No, of course not. You’re going to be a crummy worker. Why is it that we have worse and worse workers and more and more unemployed people as we drift away from Christianity? It’s because of what we’re talking about today.

Now, in contrast to these things, the Bible says just about the exact opposite in each of these areas, right? Work according to the Bible—the Greeks say it’s demeaning, but from a biblical perspective, it’s dignified. It’s part of being an image bearer, right? It’s a mark of who we’re created to be. As we read in Genesis 1, God gives us a task. He makes us for a reason. It’s dignified.

And the kind of work that Adam is to do is manual. A lot of manual sort of labor. So right away in the Bible, we’re—work is portrayed in a very dignified manner. Why? Because it reflects the image of God himself, right? God’s a worker. We’re workers. God deals in dirt, sprinkling systems, various physical aspects that he does in the creation week and all of these things then are dignified by God in terms of who we are.

Derek Kidner in his commentary on these opening verses in Genesis notes that you know with all the rest of the animals they’re supposed to multiply. They teem and they have, you know, more animals or more bugs or whatever it is. But only man is given a job description: to tend and to guard and to garden. Right? So man is given a job description to take care of the whole world, to exercise dominion.

So the point is that is a unique aspect that’s part of what being human is—that we have work to do. We’ve got a job description. And not only a job description from God making it dignified, but it’s a job description that is explicitly tied in the text read to God himself and to the kind of God we’re worshiping and serving. How could you get more dignified in terms of work.

So to the Christian, work is not demeaning or undignified. Work—all work, physical work included—is highly dignified because it’s what we’ve been made to do as reflectors of the image of God. Okay.

It’s interesting that we read a couple of weeks ago Psalm 65, Psalm 104. The spirit of God refreshes the face of the earth. I think we just read that responsively today or heard it read to us—that the spirit does this watering, plant growing, etc. And then we also read in the New Testament the spirit convicts men of their sin—right?—their failure to have righteousness. And so the preacher preaches what I’m talking about today, convicting people of sin, pointing the way. And the gardener or the ditch digger creates the furrows, the paths where the water will flow or irrigation systems, etc.

And in those Psalms compared with the New Testament, the spirit of God is at work. In both cases, humanity is filled with the spirit of God to fulfill what would seem to be seen by the Greeks—and maybe by you and I—as demeaning, undignified work. It’s not. The Bible says work has great meaning and has dignity to it.

Secondly, the Bible says the body is good. We can get this wrong as Christians, but obviously God creates Adam and Eve with bodies. He declares them to be good, very good. The only thing that wasn’t good after God made Adam was his singularity. He needed more bodies. So not having enough bodies was seen as something not good. The first “not good” thing, right?

So bodies are a positive thing in the world in the word of God. Bodies are what God makes. Our bodies are the handiwork of God, right? How could we think that bodies aren’t good. Yeah, there’s an effect of the fall which we’ll talk about in a couple of weeks, but bodies in and of themselves are really great things. Okay.

So here’s a question. So what will make you a more spiritual person, more consecrated to Jesus, following Jesus this week? Feasting or fasting? If you fast, will that make you a lot better? A better Christian? Or if you feast, is that a better way to make you a better Christian? Well, the Bible, you know, and you’ve heard this before, you older folks, but maybe young folks haven’t. Well, in the Bible, the answer to that question is easy. It’s feasting. It’s not fasting.

Fasting does help. Fasting is a good discipline of the Christian life, and we’re assumed to do it occasionally, but we’re assumed to feast on the Lord’s day every week. And in the Old Testament, there were some days that are specifically referred to as feast days. Why is that? Why does that strike us as odd? Because of the Greek mindset that the body isn’t good. It needs to always be kept in check.

Now, Paul buffers his body. It does have to be disciplined, of course, but it’s not bad. And the way that spirituality develops is to actually get together with godly people and eat and drink. That’s what the Bible says. Because the physical body is good. Feasting is a good thing. Fasting is, you know, good, but very limited. There’s only one fast day in the Old Testament calendar system—just one—the Day of Atonement. All the rest of the holy convocations were feast days.

When we go to heaven, of course, we don’t—as we talked about earlier—we don’t be disembodied spirits as if the body is a bad thing. We’re going to get new bodies, but we’re going to have bodies. Yeah. Paul takes great time and lays out the argument in 1 Corinthians 15 about the different kind of body it is, but it’s still a body. Okay? So bodies are good.

We’re not going to be disembodied spirits. I hope I don’t disappoint you with that. But, you know, there’ll be a period of time—if you die today, you know, before the second coming—you will be a disembodied spirit, and that’ll be okay. The Bible says. But that’s not okay long-term. That is an abnormal state. That’s something odd. It’s not something to be thought of as the best thing in the world.

In fact, it’s very strange and it’s very temporary. We’ll spend eternity with new bodies. Okay? So bodies are good things.

You know, so often when we read in Philippians 2:8 that being found in appearance as a man, he—Jesus—humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of a cross. We read those verses in Philippians and we think that Jesus’s humiliation was his taking on human flesh. Why would that be? Why would that be a humiliation?

I mean, human flesh—man is an imagebearer of God. Why would that be demeaning to take on human flesh? I don’t think it is. I think Philippians 2 is saying that the humiliation of Jesus happens by becoming the sin bearer and suffering death for our sins on the cross. So it’s not our bodies that are bad, okay?

Our bodily functions aren’t bad. These things are—we are—you know, marvelously and wonderfully made, right? Psalm 139 says this: “For you formed my inward parts. You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are your works and that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in secret and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.”

The language there is emblematic of temple language. The words that are used for putting the body together is the same words that are used for bringing together the materials that actually the veils, the curtains of the tabernacle of the temple. We’re a beautiful thing. And in fact the temple is a reflection of the human body. It’s a symbol of it. But you know the psalmist goes on in this psalm to say, “How precious also are your thoughts to me oh God. How great is the sum of them.”

What’s God think about your body? We just read it. The body is good. Work is good. Your body is good. It’s a tremendous good. It’s not just good. It’s very good. And it’s a tremendous thing to be marveled over in this psalm at least, and in reality, that’s who we are. Our bodies aren’t bad. Our bodies are good.

Third, the Greeks say the material world is bad, but the Bible says the material world is good—although it is fallen, has an effect of the fall upon it. So the material creation, of course, as we just read and as we know if we just put our thinking caps on, was made by God and it was made to be developed, cultivated. We were to image him. He gave us kind of some raw potentiality in the world and we’re supposed to bring it out.

We’re to be highly valuing stewards of the material creation. We’re not to think that something is good and [we should be] released from, right? We’re not to be some lazy servant who just wants to leave the house dirty if, you know, he’s going to get out of there in time before the house gets burned down. That’s not us. We’re created to take care of a material creation that God says is good. Okay? Very good. He looks at his work, his handiwork, the world is what he’s looking at, and delights in what he has brought to pass. And we should too.

Avoid the Greek thinking that the material world or your body or work is bad. All these things according to the Bible are very good.

So we say the world is good. This is—not the world itself, like our bodies. We frequently think that this world is going away. It’s going to be burnt to a crisp, removed. That’s—we’ll be off in heaven someplace. But that’s not what the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches and the historic church has affirmed for 2,000 years that Jesus comes back here, that the new heavens and the new earth, heaven and earth are brought together, but it is here on this earth.

This earth will be transformed, purified, etc. But it’s going to stay as an earth. Just like your body is going to be a body. This earth is going to be an earth. We don’t go away forever. Jesus brings us back here. The material creation is good—although it will be refined, redeemed, etc. But there will be materiality in the eternal state. Your bodies will be material, different somewhat from what we have now.

This world will be material. It’ll have physicality to it. Now the Bible makes this quite clear. And because of this, by the way, what we do and work on this world—including cultural achievements and stuff—have significance for eternity. So the Bible says, “No, the material world is not a bad thing. The material world is a good thing. It’s what God made. It’s what God will change and redeem and purify. But there will be a new earth.”

Jesus comes here. We go up to meet him in the sky, but he comes down. He’s on his way down when we go up and we come with him here. This is the eternal state, although it will be heaven and earth combined here.

Now I don’t think any other religion actually teaches this. So it’s one of the grand great crown jewels of the Christian faith—the goodness of materiality created by God and not just a temporary abode where we work out our eternal destiny and then we get out of here. We’re not—as I’ve said many times—dog paddling here on earth, okay? It’s not going to be completely destroyed. There’ll be a new heavens and a new earth.

The Christian faith—this is one of the crown jewels—that materiality. Quoting from Tim Keller now: “No other religion envisions matter and spirit living together in integrity forever.” And by the way, that’s the way it starts, right? When God makes human creatures, he breathes into us the breath of life. We have physicality and spirituality united. This is what God does. This is what goodness is.

Keller goes on to say, “And so birds flying, oceans roaring, people eating, walking and loving are permanently good things. Permanently good things. As we have seen, this means that Christians cannot look down on labor involved in a more intimate fashion with contact with the material world. If the material world is good, then manual labor—that’s involved in the material world and handling it and changing it and ordering it and doing things to it—is not bad.

That’s a really good thing because what you’re involved with is this wonderful blessing that has eternal significance and reality to it.

Four, death is not—is not a friend to the Christian. The Greeks thought it was a friend. Get us away from here. But to us, you know, the Bible quite plainly talks about death as an enemy, right? Paul tells us in Corinthians that it’s the last enemy that’ll be swallowed up. It’s an enemy to us because death of the body is not good because the body is not bad.

If the body is good, materiality is good, then death isn’t a good thing, but rather death is an enemy that Jesus has vanquished, which we remember every time we take this table—that Jesus was crucified. To the Greeks foolishness—because who wants new materiality, a resurrected body? Nobody. Who would want that? That’s not the idea, the Greek idea, not the goal rather.

But to us, the death of Jesus Christ is commemorated at this table. Death is vanquished and death is an enemy that will be vanquished finally at the second coming. The quote from 1 Corinthians is 15:26. “The last enemy that will be destroyed is death.” And of course in Genesis 1:31 we read that God saw everything that he had made and indeed it was very good. So materiality is good, the body is good, death is opposition to that and death is what is bad. And death is what Jesus came to accomplish—the death of death on the cross and in the resurrection. Okay.

So we’re really the opposite of the Greeks in many of these things that we’re talking about.

Point number five: While the Greeks thought that being divine—like being detached from physicality—the Bible says just the opposite. To be an imagebearer means properly valuing the work we’re given to do. And in fact, that’s what image bearing, according to the text we read at the beginning of the sermon today, is—that’s what it says. Does to be an image bearer is to exercise God’s rule in the world for him, in the same way that he has just done it in creating the world. We’re to do that.

So, you know, we don’t see God as detached. We see him intimately involved. The very opening chapters of the Bible tells us about a God who is intimately involved and creates the created order, involved in it, likes it, and sets us up to be imagebearers on that very basis. Right?

So, you know, in some other cultures, rulers who to represent God on earth would be set up with figures. Images of them would be placed in various places. And these guys were like the head of the heap, right? The top of the food chain of pagan cultures. Not so in the scriptures. If we wanted to have, you know, statues of imagebearers, however many people here—a couple hundred people—we’d have a couple hundred statues outside. They’re all the imagebearers of God. They’re all the rulers for God. Each and every one of us are that very thing representing and imaging the God who is a worker par excellence.

So we’re the opposite of what the Greeks think in terms of reflecting the image of God.

But again here, what do we fall into too easily? An argument to be made that the kind of culture we have now where people just want to will themselves and whatever they want comes from a Christian misperception of who God is—as pure will, pure mind. That really comes from Greek philosophy, not the Bible. And so, you know, part of the problem is we don’t necessarily envision God continually as a worker. Whereas Jesus tells us, you know, “I’m working, my father is always working.”

So God, the image bearing capacity of man is based on the fact that God is actually a worker. And so our work is involved in carrying on that image bearing. Ordinarily, work—specifically manual labor in terms of Genesis 1—means that human beings, instead of like the Greek thoughts, are becoming like animals. We’re becoming divine when we engage in the sort of work that God has called us to do as given to us in the creation work. We reflect the image of God.

So this is tremendously significant, of course.

So again we’re the very opposite of the Greeks in our view of the body, materiality, and then the very nature of God itself. We’re at the opposite end of that.

You know, this word dignity. Work is dignified. Here’s three definitions out of the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Dignity means having a high rank, office, position. Well, that’s what we have in our work. We have a high rank, office and position assigned to us by God as his imagebearers in our work.

Secondly—oops, back a page. A second definition of dignity is a way of appearing or behaving that suggests seriousness and self-control. To have dignity as we go about doing something. Well, the end result of this notion of what God is, what he’s made, how he’s reflected himself in us in our work means that’s the sort of bearing we’re to have in the kind of labor that we do. Work is not demeaning, undignified. It’s to be done in a way that is dignified in the sense of this definition—to appear or behave in a way that suggests seriousness and self-control as we go about doing that work.

And then the third definition is this: the quality of being worthy of honor or respect or esteemed. And we are. We’re worthy of honor, respect, and esteem because we’re made in the image of God. And as workers, we have that same kind of dignity.

Finally, serving others then is not a demeaning or bad thing in our work. It’s the essence of work. We’ll talk about this more in a couple of weeks. But of course, this relates to the fact that God is triune. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all involved in service to one another. We reflect the image of God in doing our work. And when we do that, we reflect the characteristic of God that God is a God of love, which means serving other people.

The implications are obvious. Work is a royal privilege for us, right? Work is not a necessary evil that we engage in tomorrow morning. When you go to work, it’s not a necessary evil. It is a high royal privilege.

Secondly, work that we choose to do is based on a variety of factors—not just how we can get out of doing work, not just making more money, not just getting status—but engaging the abilities and talents and gifts that God has given us to do. We’ll talk more about this in weeks to come. How do you choose a vocation? Right? And what do you do when you go through the economic difficulties we’ve gone through and certain people lose a line of work that they were involved in for 20 years.

If your identity is in that particular kind of work and that’s the only work that really is good from a godly perspective, you’re in big trouble when you get laid off and have to become a manual laborer or some other vocation at all. But if all this work, all this work that God has given us to do, has this high dignity and it’s a privilege of working—no matter how much money you make ultimately, right? Or no matter how much in physical contact with the world you are. No matter how much sweat you must do to accomplish the work—it’s all a piece of dignified and privileged work as imagebearers of God.

And that means that when we go through the kind of economic times we’ve just gone through, it’s okay. It’s okay. You take on the new job, whatever it might be, and you approach it with dignity in your bearing—dignity as an imagebearer of God—and dignity in seeing that position as having worth and value to it.

So the kinds of work we do, we don’t work for the most money. We indeed are not involved in trying to avoid that kind of work. We embrace different forms of work. We can choose vocations then for other factors.

Three, the implications of this is that there is an equal value to all workers. When we come to the table, all kinds of different vocations come to this table in a couple of minutes. Class distinctions are done away with on the basis of work and we come together as the body of Christ. There is no sacred/secular distinction. The Holy Spirit is moving through the sprinkler system being established and through the preaching of God’s word.

Finally, work diligently. If the Greek system ends up with poor work, we end up with diligent work. The Bible says, “Whatsoever you do, do as unto the Lord.” And so when we go to work, we work diligently embracing the privilege of doing that work as imagebearers of God by working diligently for what we’re given to do.

And then last thing I’ll say: We work joyously. There’s a passage of scripture in the Proverbs that defines, or rather describes, God’s work. Proverbs 8:27-31.

“When he prepared the heavens, I was there. Now, this is—we know that God’s work of creation becomes the model for what we do as his vice-regents under him to extend the potentiality of the created world. Here’s what it says about God:

“When he prepared the heavens, I was there. When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters would not transgress his command, when he marked off the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as a master craftsman. And I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him, rejoicing in his inhabited world. And my delight was with the sons of men.”

What that means is we don’t just work hard and diligently and with dignity and honor. We work joyously. That’s how God worked in the original creation. He looked at his work and took great delight in the process and in the end result.

May the Lord God cause us to go to work tomorrow with a perspective from Jerusalem, not the perspective of Athens, that goes about the smallest menial sort of work we do tomorrow diligently with honor and dignity as imagebearers of God and do it in a way of rejoicing as he rejoices in his work.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your work. We thank you for our work and how your work informs us. Help us, Lord God, to drive out Greek philosophy and thoughts from our world, from our thoughts and how we approach work. Help us, Lord God, to fully embrace what your scriptures teach about it. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.

I see my previous. Blessed peace. [Hymn singing begins]

“Heavenly mercy. Before thy throne, oh God, we kneel.
Give us a conscience quick to feel, of ready minds to understand the meaning of thy chasing hand. Whatever the pain and shame may be bring us so far the nearer thee. Search out our hearts and make us true. Wishful to give to all their due. From love of flesh, shine lust of gold, from sins which make the heart grow cold. Keep us and train us with thy right. Teach us to know our faults, oh God. For sins are heedless.

Good energy for pride, ambitions to succeed for crafty train and subtle snare to catch the soul aware.”