Psalms 104:24-29 (NRSV)
24 O LORD, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
25 Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
creeping things innumerable are there,
living things both small and great.
26 There go the ships,
and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.
27 These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
28 when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
29 When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath, they die
and return to their dust.
All is in Gods hands. When He gives good things, we have good. When He takes away, we are dismayed. When He takes away our breath, we die. This passage gives me rest in that it says I need not fret about what I shall eat or wear or anything else I should need. It all comes from Gods hands according to His benevolent will. Therefore, fretting about not having what I want is futile, and I need not do it. This is not to say I should not strive for the things I need. Scripture is very clear that we are to labor to sustain ourselves, but we should understand that the fruit of our labor comes from God and Him alone.
Is all of our labor futile and meaningless, are we just hamsters on a wheel?
So what does this mean? That we are like little children mimicking the work that will produce? I remember children, mine in particular, that would break out their toy lawn mowers mimicking me mowing the grass with the real thing They were laboring to mow, all the while I was yielding the fruit of the labor. Are we like those children futilely mowing the grass, not really doing anything but reaping the fruits of the Fathers labor? I think the answer is, like the famous FaceBook relationship status, “it’s complicated.”
Like the famous FaceBook relationship status, the answer is, “it’s complicated.”
Scripture makes it clear that we as Gods creation, a little lower than the angels, have dominion over the earth. We are called to subdue it to our whims and our will, to the ends of providing for ourselves. Prior to the fall, this was simple, God gave us this right and we simply did it. But post fall, the second law of thermodynamics steps in and we are victims of entropy, meaning we are continually decaying and nothing is tending toward renewal, but simply destruction. This makes the act of subduing that much more difficult as any intervention on our part breaks down that which we are to yield lessening its value.
Apart from Gods grace this process would yield complete destruction of the fruit and nothing to be gotten from our labor. But there is grace, and we are able to yield something, we are able to bring in the sheaves and taste the benefits of our work, but it is only because God withholds the curse from taking full effect.
This is further reinforced by the above passage, in that it is God who provides or takes away, in our case providing or taking away His holding back of the curse and our subsequent fruit bearing from our toil. So all in all, we are doing the work of which we can draw a direct line to fruit that is born, but it is God that allows it.
