How would you live if there were no sin in the world, if everyone and everything were just as God wanted it to be? That’s the situation in which Adam and Eve found themselves at the end of Genesis chapter 2. For they lived in a garden that God had planted with all kinds of healthy fruits and vegetables for them to eat (Genesis 1:29; 2:16). And God had given them to each other as perfectly suited companions, with no shameful secrets between them (2:25).

But verse 15 says that, instead of just enjoying the benefits of the garden in which he and Eve lived, Adam had a job to do. Instead of just wandering around, exploring the wonderful world God had made, Adam was supposed to cultivate and keep the garden. He also had the responsibility of naming, and thus of asserting control over all the birds and the beasts (v. 19). That means that even before sin came into the world, God wanted Adam to work, to order and manage God’s creation.

Now, Adam’s work was not frustrating like our work so often is today. Because Adam and Eve did not use the fruit of the garden the way God had told them to (2:17; 3:6), God removed a large part of Adam’s ability to control the way in which plants grow (3:17-18). Adam’s sin thus warped the work which God had intended to be pleasant and profitable for him, deforming and twisting it into the tiresome toil so many of us experience today.

But even though work in our sinful world is challenging and difficult, it remains a part of God’s good plan for us. In fact, after concluding their careers, many people find idleness to be so boring and stifling that they immediately flunk out of retirement, seeking something meaningful to do. Deep down, we all know that we need to be needed.

So what do we learn from this passage? It obviously teaches us that we must obey God’s clear instructions, and that’s one reason why it’s important to study them in His Word. Of course we don’t want to follow Adam’s example of sin, abusing the part of God’s creation He has entrusted to us.

But if we’ll seek to obey God as well as to trust in Him, if we’ll seek to serve Christ as our King as well as to rely on Him as our Savior, we’ll also get to experience some of the satisfaction that Adam must have received from his gardening – the joy of a job well done. After all, Paul told the Ephesians that “We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10).

So yes, let’s rejoice that God saves His people by His grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone. But let’s respond to that good news by devoting every fiber of our being and every ounce of our strength to the glory of God alone. Let’s get to work!

Genesis 2:15-25 (NASB)

15 Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;
17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you shall surely die.”
18 Then the LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him.”
19 And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called a living creature, that was its name.
20 And the man gave names to all the cattle, and to the birds of the sky, and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.
21 So the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh at that place.
22 And the LORD God fashioned into a woman the rib which He had taken from the man, and brought her to the man.
23 And the man said, “This is now bone of my bones, And flesh of my flesh; She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man.”
24 For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.
25 And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.