God’s Word for You

Genesis 2:15 to work it and take care of it

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Sunday, August 23, 2026

15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to take care of it.

Now at last God places the man he made into the garden. This raises a question right away: Did God make the man somewhere else? Why didn’t he simply form the man there in the garden in the first place? The simplest answer might be the best, that the Lord made the man a little way distant, in a fine and lovely place. But then, after Adam had found his legs, as we say, the Lord took the man for a walk, and brought him from this or that other fine and lovely place, through delightful and fertile fields, sunlit groves of trees along rolling hills and pretty little valleys, until, at last, up the slope through the entrance of the garden, the Lord showed the man this remarkable, beautiful, incomparable garden. The man who, perhaps, had seen a few other places by now on this day (for it was still the sixth day of creation), knew that this place above all others was special. We can easily imagine that by now the sun had climbed high and was perhaps beginning to ease its way west. Here was the man’s home.

By putting the man there (literally, following the Hebrew hifil verb, “causing him to settle” there), God sated the man’s natural curiosity about other places. Such curiosity is not sinful, but it is best settled in open and honest ways. God settled the man here to take care of the place.

This reminds us that we are to earn our daily bread. As Paul told the Thessalonians, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10). Not even in the Garden of Eden was man permitted to live an idle life. And after his wife was created and brought to him, she, too, would have work. A godly woman is not permitted, as the song says, “to marry young, and then retire.” The work for the first man was to work the garden and take care of it. Leaves fall and blow here and there. Branches and twigs come down from time to time. An animal (or child) at play might bring down a branch through carelessness—this would be some of their work, espcially after the children started coming. But beyond keeping things tidy in the forest, there was also the matter of planting orderly rows of good things such as grains and corn. And there would have been vines to tend, figs to dress in their peculiar way, and other things. Even without the need to pull weeds, which came later with sin, there are other aspects of tending fruits, berries, vegetable patches and groves of fruit trees that would occupy man’s attention.

We apply this work of the man, even before the fall into sin, to the positive obedience of the Seventh Commandment. In this commandment, we are commanded not to steal. “Adam is commanded to take care of Eden and work in it. In Genesis 3:19 he is commanded to eat his bread by the sweat of his face. Therefore God commands the labors of one’s vocation, opposes sloth, and imposes sweat as punishment after the fall. In Genesis 6:11, among the causes of the flood is listed the fact that ‘the earth was filled with iniquity.’ The word [חָמָס, ‘iniquity’] properly signifies violence and overt injustice. Therefore this shows that pillage, theft, and robbery were commonplace for those antediluvian workers of violence, yet what they had taken was ultimately swallowed in the waters of the flood.” (Johann Gerhard, ‘On the Law’ XV§22).

To do one’s work, one’s vocation, is pleasing to God. When the church before and during Luther’s time dishonored ordinary, secular work, and looked down on it, it dishonored God’s good people and the word of God. For the Lord says that fathers, for example, should bring their children up “in the training and instruction of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). A wife and mother should give God glory as she works in the home (Proverbs 31:13-15) or at her job (Proverbs 31:16-18) or both (Proverbs 31:24,27). The smith at the forge does the work God has given him to do (Isaiah 54:16), as does the farmer, the herdsman, the physician, the teacher, and other craftsmen and tradesmen. Soldiers and lawyers and judges, too, do the work given to them by the Lord. To scorn their work and say that it does not please God is an error that “greatly torments the consciences of devout people who grieve that they (seem) bound to an imperfect kind of life—in marriage, in the [government], or in other civil occupations” (Augsburg Confession XXVI:11).

Whatever work we have a gift for, or that we find ourselves in out of necessity, we do to God’s glory and without shame. Making change in a bank, or changing diapers in a daycare, are just as pleasing to God as chanting the liturgy or preaching a sermon. We do these things because it is necessary for them to be done. When we do them to give God glory and to thank him for the things he has done for us, then we do them well. We can rightly say that God has put us where he would have us, and that we do what he would have us do, “working and taking care” of the labor that we find before us. Do your work for the love of Christ and his name, and he will bless the work of your hands.

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

Browse Devotion Archive