Did you think that work just has to be a result of sin? And that no one had to work before Adam and Eve rebelled against God? Actually, the Bible tells us that the first thing God did once He put Adam in the Garden was to give him a job! Let’s find out about the job of the first Adam and learn about how the “second Adam,” Jesus, always knew how to do His job.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
Did you know that we were each created with a job to do for God’s Kingdom? That’s right—we were created to work. At the beginning of Genesis 2, we see that the earth had no crops or cultivated plants because there were no people to work the earth and there was no rain yet. And so, God created people. And the first thing that God did was give people a job:
15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
In another few verses, God announced that He was going to make a perfect companion for the man because none of the animals was his equal. He had animals that could be used as tools, like oxen, but none of them could think and plan and help make decisions and be a real companion. Humans are unique on earth in that we can anticipate the needs of others—not perfectly, the way God can, of course. Animals can be trained to do some things, but they aren’t intelligent in the same way we are. Have you ever watched someone doing something and realized that they were about to hurt themselves because you could see something they were missing? Or has someone ever watched you doing something and shown you a better way? We have all been on both sides of that—we have all been the student and we have all been the teacher. Grownups aren’t the only people who can help others. If you see a smaller child who can’t reach the drinking fountain and you lift that child up, you have become that other child’s ezer k’negdo, which is how God described the woman when He saw how much the man needed her. We all need human helpers. We can all be human helpers. We were created to help. We were created with jobs to do. We were not created to sit around doing nothing while everyone else works. We were all created to help. Almost every job is helping someone in some way.
But wait! Some people might object and think that having to work is because of Adam and Eve’s punishment after they sinned. But nope, work is a gift from God—the gift of vocation. What is a vocation? That’s a strange word. That’s what we are going to talk about today. We’re going to learn about the vocation of Adam and Eve.
First of all, I need to give you a definition of the word vocation because you might never have heard of it before. A vocation is a job, but in a believer’s life, it is more than a job! A vocation is a special job that God gives us the talent and ability and the calling to do. What is a calling? A calling is when God sets us apart from other people in order to do a specific kind of work. Not to make us more important than other people, but to do a specific job. And all jobs that God gives out are important. For example, in the Bible, God gave some people the vocation, the job, of being priests if they were a part of a certain tribe of Israel–meaning if they were descendants of Jacob’s son Levi. But not all of the sons of Levi were priests—some were musicians and some guarded the Tabernacle. Some of them carried the furniture of the Tabernacle when the children of Israel traveled through the desert. They were called because they were born into certain families, and God equipped some of them, for example, with musical ability and those were the men who sang in the Temple. In the Psalms, you will read about the “sons of Asaph” because they were singers and the Psalms were originally sung. Does that all make sense? They were called because of the family they were born into, into certain vocations, certain jobs. In Jesus, we aren’t born into jobs like they were in ancient Israel—but God still gives us jobs and makes sure that we have the talent and ability and the authority to do those jobs. Do you see how it all points back to God? He decides whom He wants doing specific things and then He gives them the ability to do it. That’s how our lives work. And there are all sorts of vocations because a vocation in the service of God doesn’t always mean you are getting paid to work! If you have a stay-at-home mom or dad and your other parent works outside of the home, those are both vocations. Jobs aren’t just for money—jobs are how we serve others and how we serve God.
When the man, Adam, was created, he was placed in the Garden (because, remember, he was created outside the Garden) to “work it and to keep it.” God planted the Garden in the first place—He didn’t make Adam do it from scratch. That shows us that God give us what we need to do our jobs—even though we still have to work. And even if the work is hard. Being a gardener is hard work—I personally hate it. I am not called to it or equipped for it. I just do it because it has to get done. But many people love it because God has given them that love for it and the ability to do it well—people like my mom. Not me. And it might seem like that would be an odd job for God to give someone. But remember, this is the radio show where I teach you cool things that most adults don’t even know so here we go.
The Bible says that Adam’s job was to work and keep God’s garden. Do you remember when we learned about ziggurats? That hilarious and weird word that means a huge ancient Temple on a mountain made of bricks? Do you remember that Temples were palaces for the false gods the same way that kings and queens live in castles? Do you remember that priests in Temples are like the servants in the palace of a king? They had many different jobs—and those jobs were described with words like the Hebrew ‘ebed and shamar—to work and to keep, just like Adam worked and kept the garden. In the Bible, most of the time when we see ‘ebed, it means to worship God or to serve Him or minister to Him in the Temple. Or to worship or minister to a false god, but we don’t want to talk about that right now! It’s related to the word slave or servant because when we work for God, we are NOT his his ezer k’negdo, His equal or a helper fit for Him! He doesn’t need any helpers, thank you very much, but we are His creation and so we serve Him and worship Him because that’s what He deserves, right? How weird would it be if there was a God and you ignored Him all the time? That’s just crazy talk! Makes no sense at all.
We’re talked about the word translated as work, ‘ebed (and by the way, parents, there will be a vocabulary list for this one in the transcript—and don’t worry about forgetting these words because the concepts are the important thing) but what about the word translated “keep”, Shamar? Well, shamar is also a word about how we live our lives as Christians. It occurs almost five hundred times in the Hebrew Bible, which is the front half of our Bibles—sometimes I call the Old Testament the Hebrew Bible because almost all of it was written in Hebrew, with a bit in Aramaic. It doesn’t mean that the rest isn’t the Bible too, but the rest was given to us in Greek. But what does this shamar mean??? I am so glad you asked! Shamar is the word that means to guard something or to keep it—to be very careful about it. It’s the word that God uses when He tells us to keep His commandments. It means that we have to be very careful about how we act and what we do. We need to be very careful to pay attention to what God says so that we can obey Him. When we aren’t careful, it is very easy to hurt ourselves and others by not doing what God says is right. How easy is it to lie when we aren’t very careful about always telling the truth? How easy is it to be cruel when we aren’t very careful to be kind? God calls His people to live very careful lives where we think about what we are doing instead of just doing whatever the heck we want! And we have to be especially careful to think about how much wiser God is than we are or else we will decide that His commandments are just a bunch of bad ideas. We’ll see in a few weeks what happens when Adam and Eve make that bad decision, when they weren’t very careful about guarding the Garden and guarding their own behavior!
But that was Adam’s first job, and it was Eve’s first job too—to serve and to very carefully guard themselves and the garden. They served God by caring for His Garden, making sure it was healthy and growing and expanding, and they guarded it too. They would need to keep the things outside that belonged outside, and to make sure they carefully kept the commandment to not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They probably had other jobs too—like worshiping God. I mean, can you even imagine them being right there with God and not worshiping Him?? Let’s face it, they had great jobs. The Garden was blessed, their food was provided for them free of charge. It was totally organic. They had animals all around who weren’t dangerous because they ate the plants. Life was quiet and peaceful, and God would visit them. It was perfect, which is why people call it paradise. As long as they did their jobs, there would be no crime or hunger or abuse or violence. In fact, in the Book of Revelation, it says that when we are in the New Jerusalem, all those things will be kept outside the city. No one who does those things will be allowed on the inside. On the inside will be everyone who wants to ‘ebed and shamar—serve and carefully guard! We talked about this last week too—New Jerusalem, where Jesus will be our King and live among us. Sure sounds a lot like the Garden of Eden!
And I just gave you a big hint about the job of every single believer. We are all called to serve God and guard all of His instructions to us. How we serve will look different based on what skills He has given us but we all serve Him. In the ancient world, only a few elite people were given the job of serving God but we are called to be an entire Kingdom of priests—we can pray directly to God and we don’t need to go to someone else to do it for us. We can worship God, and we don’t have to have someone to do that for us either. God can talk directly to us—in the ancient world, they believed only priests could hear from God. In God’s Kingdom, our work of serving and carefully guarding is wonderful. And how you serve will probably be very different than how I serve. What if everyone was a teacher? How horrible would that be? We need some people who will serve and guard those in need of food and shelter. We need others who will serve and guard people who are sick. That’s right! Doctors and nurses are serving God in their work. What about people who serve and guard the environment because they love God? Yes, them too. Others serve and guard God’s word by taking it to foreign countries, or even into their own neighborhoods, to preach the Gospel to people who have never heard it. What about moms and dads? They are serving and guarding too. And what about people who pray and who give money to charities from what they earn at their jobs? My goodness, there are so many ways to serve God. And how about you guys—paying attention in school and working hard at your chores is also a way of serving and guarding. Just think of how much easier everyone’s life is when we all pitch in and do our part to help!
Whatever He wants you to do, He will prepare you. You already have the inborn talents even if you haven’t discovered them yet. All you have to do is to listen, and wait, and obey and do the work. That’s it! You don’t have to stress out about finding it. Just keep listening. We don’t always find out right away but that doesn’t matter—what matters is that we become the kind of people who can do our jobs the right way when the time comes—like Jesus. Just look at me—I wasn’t a Christian until I was twenty-nine years old! Some of you probably think I was already too old to start. But God was preparing me all that time. I loved studying history and writing before I was ever even a Christian. I have always known just how to say things in writing, to get my point across. But I was never a teacher until I was in my forties, which probably seems to you like my life was just about over. So, I don’t want you guys freaking out that you need to figure it out yourself. God knows His plans for you and right now, that’s more than enough.
All the great heroes of the Bible were just normal kids once—kids who had no idea what they were going to be doing for God. Do you think Noah ever thought he would be building a huge boat for his family and all those animals? Do you think that he even knew how to build a boat when he was a kid? Nope, he was just playing with other kids and then he worked with his father like all teenage boys did. Do you think that Moses or Aaron or Miriam knew that they would be leading people in the desert for forty years? No way. Do you think that David ever thought he would be king while he was busy being a shepherd? How about Peter, Andrew, James and John—do you think that they ever thought they would take God’s message about Jesus to all those different places? No way, they had been taught to fish. Do you think that little Priscilla knew that she would be a Bible teacher when she was playing with her dolls? None of them started out knowing what they would do or how to do it but God gave them gifts and taught them how to do what He wanted done. All they had to do was to obey step by step. They didn’t have to figure it out right away. And that isn’t just for Bible people.
Cameron Townsend went to South America selling Bibles and was surprised to find people who weren’t willing to read them because Spanish wasn’t their native language, the language they spoke at home. When he found out that they didn’t want to believe in a God who wasn’t powerful enough to speak their language, Cameron learned it and translated his first Bible. But when he went down there, he had no idea how to do that. Corrie ten Boom was a watchmaker—a very good one—but when the Nazis invaded her country, she learned how to operate as part of the resistance, hiding Jews in her home and later in life became an international speaker and author. God made sure that she could do the job He gave her when it was time. George Mueller was just a regular kid but grew up to be the “father” to thousands of orphans who would have starved without him. God always fed the children without George even having to ask for money. He just prayed and people brought whatever he needed. Gladys Aylward was working as a maid when God told her to go to China and work as a missionary—but she couldn’t speak any Chinese so no missionary organization would send her. She paid her own way over and God used her to save the lives of a hundred children and she led many people to belief in Jesus. But they didn’t start out life being more special than anyone else—they just listened to God and went wherever He told them to do and did what He told them to do. They worked and guarded what God gave them. You are no different than they were as kids! If you listen and work and guard, there is no telling what God will do with you. Without God, these people wouldn’t have done anything like this because alone, they weren’t enough. But God made them the right people for the job and because they listened, they were enough. No one could stop them because they had God on their side. Not even Satan. The only thing that can stop us from doing what God wants us to do is—us!
I will prove it to you. Right here, God put Adam in the Garden, and later Eve, and told them exactly what to do. He didn’t put them there with no instructions. Can you even imagine? Pretend you are Adam or Eve. Whammo, one day you are minding your own business and the next day, BOOM, you are in the middle of a beautiful Garden. What do you do now? “Hello! Anyone out there? Hey, all these trees—I guess I will just start eating whatever I want because I am SO BORED with nothing to do.” Of course, this didn’t happen. God gave them instructions. God told Noah exactly what He wanted him to do with building the ark. God spoke to Moses out of the burning bush on Mt Sinai and told him to go talk to the Israelites and to Pharaoh. God told the prophets everything He wanted them to say. They didn’t have to figure things out for themselves. They just had to listen, obey God’s commandments, and wait.
Jesus didn’t have to wonder what to do either. In the Gospel of John 5:19, Jesus explained how He always knew the right thing to do, “But Jesus said, “I tell you the truth. The Son can do nothing alone. The Son does only what he sees his Father doing. The Son does whatever the Father does.” Jesus didn’t have to solve some complicated puzzle to understand what He was supposed to do. The Bible says that Jesus was with God in the beginning and so nothing was hidden from Him about what God’s plan to save humanity was. Of course, you might object that no way are we going to have God’s guidance the way Jesus did and you would be 100% correct. Jesus is one of a kind, the only unique Son of God who was with God in the beginning, His powerful word through which all things were created—if you remember episode 2 we talked about that. But we have something very wonderful. In John 14, Jesus said that God hasn’t left us as orphans without any guidance, that if we are faithful to Jesus and keep His commandments—all the things He said when He was alive about how to be more like Him, and more like God—that He would come to us. Well, if He is with the Father now, how can Jesus be with us? He said His Spirit would come to be with us and guide us and, best of all, change us to be more and more like Jesus. That’s what loyalty to Jesus is about. When you are loyal to someone, you do whatever they tell you to do and if they are worth being totally loyal too, you want to be just like them. Only Jesus is worthy of that kind of loyalty because only Jesus lived a perfect life. Only Jesus taught the ways of God perfectly. Only Jesus never made a mistake about what God wants. Only Jesus always said and did what was right. Only Jesus will never leave or forsake us or be unfair. Everyone in your life, every human being, is fallible—which means they make mistakes. Even your mom and dad make mistakes and do the wrong thing and say the wrong thing. Me too. We human beings just can’t help it. Sometimes we will think that God wants us to do one thing or to listen to someone and we find out later we were wrong. Jesus never listened to the wrong person or did something God didn’t want Him to do because He was with God from the beginning. He knows God’s mind inside and out so He doesn’t make the wrong calls that we sometimes make.
And you might be worried sometimes that you will just ruin everything with a huge mistake or a big sin. But I want to tell you that we all do that. It doesn’t mean that God is done with you—it means that you get back up and do right and try again. In a few weeks, we will see that Adam and Eve will make a big mistake and not just a mistake, they will commit a terrible sin but then they made an even bigger mistake by not admitting it and saying sorry and doing better the next time. But we have their story about how not to handle our sins. We have all these stories because God loves us. He wants us to know that people sin and that even though they do, God stays the same forever and ever. Because of that, we can trust Him. So, if He wants you to do a special job for Him when you grow up, He already has it all figured out. Your job is to become more like Jesus in the meantime. Your job is to become more loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, generous, good, trustworthy (and trusting of God), gentle, and able to control yourself in the face of temptation. Those are huge jobs. That’s the lifetime job of every believer. You might end up as a missionary, or a scholar, or a teacher, or waiting tables at a restaurant, or being a cart return attendant for the supermarket, or a doctor, or a mom or dad, or just anything. If you do those jobs like Jesus, becoming more and more like Him every day, then you will be great in the Kingdom of Heaven. God doesn’t care about how much money we make or if we are famous. God cares about our loyalty and about how much we trust Him. Someone who trusts Him can change the world no matter what profession they have. Someone who doesn’t trust Him can never live up to their potential, no matter how rich and famous they are.
And all of you—no matter who you are—you all have the most important job in the world of becoming like Jesus. I can’t wait to see who you become. I believe in every single one of you. You may be small or tall and it doesn’t matter. The smallest person can be a giant in God’s Kingdom because He sees things differently than the world sees things. And how God sees things is real. We are totally fooled by appearances. The prophet Isaiah said that the Messiah would be nothing to look at—meaning that He wouldn’t be good looking and that there would be no earthly reason to notice him at all, looking at His face. But who He was, on the inside, is the most beautiful person who ever lived and He says you can be beautiful that way too. Just trust, listen and obey. It will take time but I know you can do it.
I love you. I am praying for you. And I pray that you will have a wonderful week studying the Scriptures with the people who love you.