Is Work a Result of the Curse of Adam and Eve?

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It’s easy for a lot of people to attribute work to the curse. You get up and maybe you don’t have many opportunities to climb the corporate ladder, and you feel stuck in your job, and you don’t enjoy it, and you don’t feel like it uses your gifts and talents to their greatest ability. So, I identify with people who are in jobs that they just don’t enjoy.

But if you look at Genesis 2 you see that God took Adam and put him into the garden to work and to cultivate that garden. So, even in paradise it wasn’t sitting in a hammock and drinking beverages out of a coconut. Adam had a job to do, he had a work to do. And that is pre-curse, because sin happened in Genesis 3.

So work, in and of itself, is not a result of a curse. But you see Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree God comes to curse them. And the way he curses Adam, in Genesis 3, is that now he is going to work the land and it will bear thorns and thistles. He is going to experience resistance, he is going to experience a lack of success, it’s going to be hard, he’s going to sweat.

The difficulty of work that we now face that is the result of the curse, not work in and of itself. So, that gives us who believe in Jesus an opportunity to redeem vocation, to redeem work, and view it as something that God has given us as a gift to enjoy and to do for His glory. And to trust Him to empower us in the midst of thorns and thistles that make work hard. But we know that He will empower us to get through those.

Christianity.com: Is work a result of the curse of Adam and Eve? - Eric McKiddie from christianitydotcom2 on GodTube.

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