Economics 101: Work

Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion … Genesis 1:28

Man was created to work. The objective of that work, as seen in the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28, was to prepare the world as a dwelling place for God and man. God provided the Garden of Eden as the starting place, but man was to take it from there, essentially turning the garden into a garden city that covered the world.

This transformation involves three related tasks that require three types of work:

• Structural: fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion through procreation
• Functional: fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion through discipleship
• Physical: fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion through the work of our hands

All of these tasks existed pre-fall and still are in place post-fall. It is the third type of work of building the garden city, spread God’s glory through the work of our hands, that most concerns us when it comes to economics.

All economics really is is an explanation of how the world works. Economist (and Christian) Shawn Ritenour, says that economics helps us to answer the question, in a world of scarcity, how do we fill the earth and subdue it “without our starving to death or killing one another in a barbaric struggle for survival?”

Scarcity is a key economic term. It refers to the fact that humans have unlimited wants and needs but limited only resources to satisfy them. The air we breathe is perhaps the only unlimited resource we have. In other words, it is the only resource that doesn’t require work to make it useful to us. We just breathe. Even water, unless someone lives in the middle of a natural lake, requires work to move it from one location to another before it is useful.

Scarcity existed before the fall. Despite the abundance of grains and fruit, picking, harvesting, and preparation of food would have been required. As the humanity spread, they would have been required to plant as well. The fall and God’s curse on the ground made the work much harder:

cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground. (Genesis 3:17-19)

It made it so hard, in fact, that starvation became a real possibility. As did murder, as some people would decide that they would rather steal to survive than work.

Of course, in a populated, crowded world, self-sufficiency is impossible for most people. But instead of resorting to theft, people can exchange the fruit of their work in a market economy in order to carry out the cultural mandate.

p.s. I noted above that economics is primarily a description of how the world works. This makes it very important to make sure that the description is accurate. Most economics taught in schools and relied upon in public policy debates misses the mark. That is why it is important for Christians to mine Scripture to develop an accurate system of economics. After all, the Word of the One who designed the world ought to have a lot to say about how the world works.

Next up: Work, Image, Freedom, Property, Labor, Capital, Abundance