Exegetical and Hermeneutical Commentary of Psalms 104:23

Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labor until the evening.

Man goeth forth … – Man is now seen to go forth from his dwelling, and he appears on the stage to perform his daily toil, until evening comes, and then again he gives way for the beasts of night. Thus the scene is ever varying – showing how full of animated existence the earth is; how varied are the occupations of its different inhabitants; and how the varieties of being are adapted to its own varied condition in the alternations of day and night.

Fuente: Albert Barnes’ Notes on the Bible

Psa 104:23

Man goeth forth unto his work, and to his labour, until the evening.

The days work

The psalm from which our text is taken is one of the most complete and impressive pictures of the universe to be found in ancient literature, and it breathes the very spirit of the Hebrew race. It has been called the Psalm of the Cosmos. It moves through all creation, and begins and ends with praise. In our psalm until we reach the text, the Deity is represented as working alone, causing the grass to grow and giving to the wild beasts their food; but man goeth forth–goeth forth a self-conscious, self-acting being, a distinct person, a sovereign soul with power to shape the course of his own life and activity. And this going forth of man is not only the summing up and end of a creation, but the beginning of a new creation. Marvellous as is the material universe, in man is hidden a glory beyond that of all things visible. Because he thinks and wills, and loves, he is kindred to the Infinite Mind and Will and Heart–kindred to God; not only a creature formed and sustained by the Creators power, but a Son of God, begotten not made, and therefore more to God than vast worlds and burning suns. He has his origin and home in the Eternal Fatherhood with all its thought and labour and sacrifice.

I. Why are we here in this world and what for? Has the question never occurred to you? Rather has it not come up often in your experience? It has been at times only a vague and fleeting curiosity. Why are we here and what for? He is a little man in a little world who thinks that he can give a complete answer to this question. Why did the Creative power send forth man into this world at all? What if he were not and never had been? Can his work and labour in his brief mortal day count for much or anything in the universal plan? The mystery is great, but it is plainly the purpose of the mystery to challenge our courage and to lead the human mind onward step by step to the conquest of the unknown. We have not drifted to the place where we now find ourselves. We are not accidents, chance appearances in the world, a mass of solitary creatures unrelated to anything truly great and significant beyond and above ourselves. Of one thing we may be certain, that the whole purpose and order of the world must have some relation to our lives, and our lives some relation to the whole purpose and order of the world. We are here, must it not be? as parts of this great creation, to fill our place in it as faithfully as we can. In childhood many of us were taught that the chief end of man is to glorify God. It is a sublime answer to our question, and cannot be improved upon, if we only put the true meaning into it. We glorify God when we give ourselves to His purpose in the world and in our human life, to His will and work. St. Paul describes himself and his companions in service and sacrifice as fellow-workers with God. In his controversy with John Stuart Mill, the French philosopher Comte said, My Deity (Humanity) has at least one advantage over yours–he needs help, and can be helped. Mill met the charge by saying that the theists God is not omnipotent, He can be helped, Great Worker though He be. But we are not compelled to doubt or deny the omnipotence of Deity before we can believe that our part in the Divine movement of the world is not a passive one, that we are not simple recipients and blind instruments, but allies and helpers of the Eternal Power. There prevails here and there a kind of belief in the power of God which makes all human effort appear to be unnecessary and superfluous, and which if acted on would deaden the sense of duty and be the paralysis of energy. On the other hand, what the philosopher described as the feeling of helping God, has always been cherished by the most sincere and earnest believers in the power of God over all. No one believed in the sovereignty of that power more than St. Paul, but his belief in it did not prevent him from putting forward the claim again and again, to be a fellow-worker with God. To be a fellow-worker with God may appear to be too vast and impossible an idea of the purpose of human life in this world; yet nothing is clearer and more certain than that He who made and meant man and sent him here to work and to labour until the evening has left many things for man to do in fulfilling His plans and completing His works. The Divine power in the world is not an abstract, impersonal energy, not an unembodied and wandering spirit. God in the world creating and perfecting it means His power and spirit dwelling in and working through industrious, righteous, faithful, beneficent lives. The unit of power in the world is not God isolated from man and not man isolated from God; but God and man united, working purposely and continuously together; God quickening and inspiring man and man opening his life to be a part of the Divine life of the world. How we have lost sight of this truth! And what confessions and miseries have come of our searching and effort to field God in the world outside of and apart from man; from placing God and man over and against each other as though their spheres of activity were separated by the chasm of an infinite difference! Deity has been conceived as a majestic Being dwelling apart from the universe, over-seeing it and intervening now and again by special acts, but working as a rule in profound and mighty isolation, outside of and apart from the world, outside of and apart from His children. Men have sometimes wrought and fought against the evil of the world as if they had no Divine companion at their side, and felt no need of any other help than their own. Again, at other times, they have imagined that God would do it all, that they had no place in the Divine work, that it was their place to stand by and wait and pray. In this vast order of things we often count ourselves of little worth and significance. But our littleness is only seeming. We can think the Creators thoughts, be conscious of His purpose, and take some intelligent part in fulfilling that purpose. It must surely be more honouring and pleasing to Him who made us to pray and strive to be something. Our unreal and morbid self-depreciation cannot be acceptable to Him. We were not made to be nonentities, and the pietistic cry to be nothing, nothing, must be hateful in the ear of Him who created us in His own image and sent us forth to work and to labour until the evening.

II. We are here to share the work of God in creating the world–called not only to subdue and control, but to create. God made the heavens and the earth, said the ancient seer; but when God made the world He did not finish it. Creation is not finished, but is always proceeding. We stand in the midst of an unending Genesis. We do right to expand the six days of the Hebrew story into the whole life of the world. My Father, says Jesus, works continuously, and I work. And in this continuous and never-ceasing work of creation man can help or hinder, develop or retard, the creative purpose and process. Things have been made possible, but man has to make the possible into the actual. The world into which he is born has all the raw material prepared to his hand, but he is here to work it into new and nobler forms. Nature is a wilderness; he must work and labour to make it a garden. Some of you are familiar with the pathetic picture which Plutarch draws of a man of the earlier period addressing the men of a later ago: O how you are cherished of the gods, you who live now! How fortunate is your time! All Nature is engaged in giving you delights. But our birth-time was mournful and barren. The world was so new that we were in want of everything. The air was not pure, the sun was obscured, the rivers overflowed their banks, all was marsh and thicket and forest; we had neither inventions nor inventors, our misery was extreme. The immense change which has taken place in the environment of man since the time Plutarch recalled has been due entirely to the co-operation of successive generations of mankind with God. What we behold as we look back is God creating through man, improving and completing His world, making it more habitable and home-like, less rude and barren, fairer and more fruitful. The one great teaching of modern knowledge is that not anything above a certain low level of excellence comes by natural law unaided by man; that all best things in the world of Nature to-day are the result of his thought and toil. An eminent geologist has written a book that bears the title, The Earth as Modified by Human Action, and one has only to read it to see the wide range of human power and to discover how closely man is in partnership with God in carrying out and completing the creative process which is still going forward on a vast scale. True! he can do nothing without God; he can create no new force; neither sun nor soil, nor plant nor seed are of his making; all the material with which lie works Nature has furnished him; but what can he not do with that material, and what has tie not done? He has modified climate, made the rivers change their course, the ocean its shore, made forests grow and made new ground for them to grow in, made the parched ground a pool and the thirsty land springs of water, changed useless ore into iron and sand into glass clearer than Natures crystals. Eight hundred years ago, for example, there was no such country as the Holland of our day; God had made it possible, but men had to give it frame and form. The map of Holland now is not even what it was at the beginning of last century. It has about 120,000 more acres of land than it had then. Thus does man work with God, thus does God work along the lines of human life, thus is the ancient miracle of creation repeated–The waters under the earth were gathered together and the dry land appeared. Man is not only a factor in evolution but an instrument. Not without him does Nature evolve. He has his contribution to make towards the finishing and perfecting of the material universe. The message of evolution to man is, Thou art Gods fellow-worker. Through the animal world we see him working with creative touch, carrying out the Creators purpose, improving the type and elevating in the scale of being the creatures God has made. To bring flowers and fruits to their perfection the labour of man must be joined to the labour of God, and man must improve and finish what God begins.

III. In his own making and saving, in the development of personal faculty and character, man is called to work and to labour until the evening. What he can do for the earth and for the creatures and things which live upon it, he can do for himself–fulfil and finish the Creators purpose and plan. God makes nothing right-away and perfect at once. Like the rest of His work man was left unfinished that man himself might complete what God began. All creation moved by steady gradation up to man, and from age to age man has been moving upward, slowly finding himself, becoming more and more an intellectual and moral being, more and more a son of God able to know the truth, to discern and do the right, and to love and serve the Infinite God. Not alone and not out of nothing has he created language, literature, art, science, society, religion; but with the help of God and out of capacities which were hidden in him from the beginning and which contained the promise and potency of his future development. Faith in man, in what he can do and achieve, and in his power to create character, does not exclude but include God as the ground of all power, the giver of all good, and the helper of all endeavour. Our knowledge is knowledge of His ways in those laws which to the religious mind are His will. We can do nothing for ourselves without God, but God can do nothing with us, cannot bring us to ourselves, without our cooperation. To an extent practically unlimited we can make or mar ourselves. Work out your salvation, says the apostle. We cannot be passive recipients of the divinest blessings of life. But the work of God for and with man is identified not only with the salvation of individual souls and lives, but with all work we respect, honour, and rejoice in; with art, science, literature, politics, trade, with every activity that makes for the good of the community and the civilization of nations. We must not think of Him with whom we have to do as if we only had to do with Him in parts of our life and not in the whole of it; as if He were only interested in ministers of religion, missionaries, itinerant evangelists, in supplying theological colleges with students, in starting revivals, in the size of congregations and the amount of collections. His kingdom ruleth over all. Not long ago I read in the biography of an eminent business man that he would never engage in any commercial enterprise which he did not think to be beneficial to the community. That is what it means to work with God in the ways of common life. It is working in accordance with His will. The great duties, believe me, are never at the ends of the earth. Let us idealize our daily tasks and put them on the side of the Power who is working for righteousness and love in human society.

IV. In the saving of the world God seeks to join men with Himself and His Christ, and calls them to work and labour with him until the evening. In the New Testament the work of reconciliation or atonement is spoken of as in a peculiar sense the work of God in our human world. We cannot conceive of the Eternal Goodness ever being insensate and passive, or as other than ceaselessly compassionate and helpful. The life of sacrifice is the law of love for heaven as for earth. It was not a new and strange work which His beloved Son came to do, but the work which He knew His Father was doing continuously. It is the Fathers work into which the Son enters. In redeeming the world, even more than in creating it, God works through men and in human ways. God the Saviour must be helped even more than God the Creator. And we–if we have the spirit of sonship to God and live in the fellowship of Jesus Christ,–cannot help sharing in the ministry of reconciliation and in the sorrow and sacrifice of that cross in the heart and life of God, which was shadowed forth in space and time in the crucifixion on Calvary. God needs strong men. His Kingdom will never come in this world without them. Men and women! what are we doing in the way of helping God to create and redeem His world? Fellow-workers with God! This is what you and I are here for in this world; this is why we are endowed with various gifts and why we ought to train them to the utmost and make the best of them; this is why we are placed in different spheres and stations, with different opportunities and duties. Fellow-workers with God! This is a vision of life at its prophetic best and when one realizes its meaning it becomes his greatest inspiration. There is no dead line in that mans work and no slackening of effort. He keeps his faith, his freshness of spirit, his enthusiasm unto the end. (J. Hunter, D.D.)

Mans work-day

This psalm was a favourite with Humboldt. In his Cosmos, after speaking of the views of nature given in the Old Testament, as the living expression of the omnipresence of God, he says of this psalm, We are astonished to find in a lyrical form of such limited compass the whole universe, the heavens and the earth, sketched with a few bold touches. The section of the psalm with which our text is connected begins with the nineteenth verse and ends with the text. It is occupied with the uses of the seasons, of night and day, and the preciousness of time. These natural divisions of time fulfil high moral ends.

I. Man goes forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening–in the first place because the very existence of God makes work a universal and eternal ordinance. The first chapter of George Gilfillans Alpha and Omega is entitled, The Solitary God Inhabiting Eternity. But that is unthinkable. The first essential conception of God is activity. My Father worketh even until now, and I work, said Christ. And in my conception of God work must be a universal and eternal law. He is the God of the tiniest mote dancing in the sunbeam, as much as of the archangel standing in His presence; and in the creative design each was meant for the other, and all meet in and answer to something in man. Gods plan is one, and unity is the reigning idea. Thus all existence is in indissoluble connection with Eternal Being: and the law of work is stamped upon mineral, vegetable, animal, man, and angel–all work, led on by the great Eternal Father who is for ever working with all the ceaseless energy of almighty and unslumbering love.

II. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening, because not to work is sin. Idleness, indeed, often makes a business for itself. But the first blush of eternity will turn this seriousness about trifles into shame and contempt. Paul speaks of some who were learning to be idle. They were learning to be fussy about nothing–to be talkers and busybodies. For idleness is not mere inaction. Every life without power and effect is an idle life, and every work is an idle work in proportion as it is not done as well as we can do it. The idler sins at once against himself, the creation, his fellows, and his God.

III. Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening, and is blest in and by his work. There is a close connection between the habit of industry in secular and in spiritual things; and when our daily work is performed in the spirit of love to God and man it becomes the business of eternity. All faculties are given to be cultivated for ever, and all powers to be used at their best; therefore let your best to-day be but the starting-point for something better to-morrow. Sir Joshua Reynolds sat at one time thirty-six hours before the canvas that he might bring out in beauty the human face divine. You are doing more and greater than painting a human face; you are putting on Christ, making an immortal soul divine, and therefore you are under obligation to Adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things. He who does this finds his very creed steeped in love.

IV. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening. This ordinance finds its highest development in the spiritual life. There could be no saving religion without duties to perform, powers to develop, sacrifices to make, and a personal God to love and obey. One of the greatest preachers of the past century is reported to have said that Salvation could be secured between two ticks of the clock. Now, while that is true, it requires so much explanation to guard it from misconception that perhaps it were better it never had been said. Salvation in the sense of the pardon of sin is a free gift bestowed the moment the sinner believes in Jesus Christ. But it is one thing to get into the way that leads to heaven, and another to pass through lifes dangers, fulfil lifes duties, and accomplish lifes work, so that the verdict of the God of Truth shall be, Well done, good and faithful servant. True success only comes with all-round endeavour of head, hand, and heart. Half-heartedness is wasted power. Only at the Cross do we obtain motive power enough to do our work well. But here being is more than doing. If, says one, you do a great thing and lose your temper in doing it, you are like a man who toils up a hill to find a shilling and loses a sovereign on the way. If we would do more, we must be more. Do you know this high and holy meaning of life? The Kingdom of God has come nigh unto you, but have you entered into that Kingdom? Our opportunities are great and precious, but the better the opportunities the worse the waste. The prodigal was ruined by the portion of goods falling to him. Gods gift of time is sufficient; there is plenty of time for work, but not an hour for waste.

V. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening. Yes, man. More than men, says John Pulsford, you cannot be; and if you are less, your own nature will never forgive you. And forget not that the greatest thing we shall ever see in earth or heaven is a man–a Man upon the Throne. Until the evening, for after all no man is given to see his work through. Until the evening bell call the worker home. Soon, and sudden as a tropical night, may the shades of the evening fall. Then, I would rather be found working than resting. (Hugh MGahie.)

Work

I. Work is a duty. Six days shalt thou labour, is as much a Divine ordinance as is the command to do no work on the seventh. He who is idle seven days is as out of harmony with Gods law as is he who toils without a break. Pauls command, That if any man would not work neither should he eat, represents the ideal to which society, as it grows perfect, will tend. The idle man is neither happy nor healthy. Says Carlyle, To make some nook of Gods creation a little fruitfuller, better, more worthy of God; to make some human hearts a little wiser, manfuller, happier,–more blessed, less accursed! It is work for a God.

II. Work is a right. While some will not work, many who would cannot get it to do. And men and women are in poverty, and near to starvation, who would gladly toil had they the chance. We need to have the teaching of Christ applied more broadly to this than it has ever yet been. No employer has a right to think simply of getting all he can out of his men, and then to discharge them when trade is slack, while he himself is living luxuriously on the fruit of their toil.

III. Work has, or ought to have, a limit. Until the evening. Come ye apart, said Christ, and rest awhile. That is a need of life. No labour is right that does not allow it. No man does himself justice or gives God His due service when he lets his work monopolize his life.

IV. Work must have a termination. Just as the hours hastening on limit opportunity, and the shadows lengthen until the evening comes and work is ended; so lifes days go, carrying with them openings that can never be ours again, and the shadows draw out, and the sun sets, and the day is at an end, and its work is done–good or bad it must stand for ever. How man will toil when he knows that on it depends home with its rest and happiness. And shall not we toil earnestly in the Masters service when we know that on our faithful labour depends the home beyond with its bliss. (F. Smith.)

Non-working and over-working the curse of modern England

I. Human labour is a Divine institution; and therefore non-working is an evil.

1. Nature does not supply man with what he requires, independent of his own agency.

(1) As a mere physical existence, does he not require food, raiment, and a dwelling? But does nature yield these to him as he requires them, either for his physical well-being, or his physical preservation, without his effort? No.

(2) As an intellectual being, it is the same. Man must work for the knowledge he requires.

(3) As a moral being, having obligations to discharge, spiritual powers to develop, a God to love and serve, he must inevitably perish without labour–agonizing labour.

2. Man is endowed with working powers admirably fitted to get from nature whatever he requires. There is the investigating and planning intellect; and there is the executive hand; and there is the varied impulse of animal appetite; social affections, and progressive aspirations, rising every moment like a tidal force in the soul, pressing the faculties of the mind, and the members of the frame, into action. He is made for the work required.

3. The Bible teaches that human labour is the ordination of Heaven.

(1) Non-working is a moral wrong. Inaction, where there is the power of action, is a crime.

(2) Non-working is a positive injury. To the individual himself. Muscular inactivity enfeebles the body, mental the intellect, moral the soul. To others. The idle person is a social thief.

II. Mans labour has its proper limitations, and therefore excessive work is an evil.

1. Overwork involves an infringement of the laws of health. The spring will bear so much pressure and no more without danger or ruin. Too much weight will bend the lever and strain the engine.

2. Overwork involves a violation of the claims of mind. Over the door of every room, office, shop, warehouse, manufactory, where excessive labour and long hours prevail, you may write, Within, are intellects fitted to tread in the footsteps of illustrious sages, explore new regions of truth, and enrich posterity by their discoveries, losing their vision and their vigour;–within, are hearts containing germs of sentiment and wells of sympathy, the sublimest gifts of Heaven, undergoing the terrible process of ossification;–within, are souls that must outlive the stars and yet be young; sacrificed to matter and to mammon.

3. Over-work involves a wrong to humanity in general. The advancement of the race depends upon each individual contributing his part to the general intelligence and virtue–the two great uplifting forces. Society advances by the increase of these Divine elements, and in no other way. Every true thought from every brain, every noble sentiment from every heart, every honest word and deed, serve to augment these elevating forces of the world. But what opportunity have the over-worked men and women of England to do their part in a mission so indispensable and glorious? (Homilist.)

Work

Man goeth forth. And thus tents and ships have, from time immemorial, charmed the attention of young and lively minds. The ocean and the desert have ever been the pathways along which the most adventurous spirits of our race have travelled; and the most romantic and imaginative have transported their thoughts over the same mysterious fields–hailing any means of escape from the present monotony. We are the subjects of Divine, or of merely natural, sometimes infernal, restlessness; and, in truth, we do not much prize the lymphatic and indifferent beings who sit still in their chimney-nook, and take no interest in the great world roaring around them.

I. Work is the true sacrament of life. It has been truly said, a man cultivates himself by working. Very plainly God has put us into such a universe that He only can shape us by,–destiny only Spins its purpose out of us by,–work. Every toil may be the platform for a higher toil; and all toils point to the consummation and perfection of the worker, the invisible, but living, personal soul. Work! it never ends with its act; it has a great beyond, and there is a great beyond to thee. It is from brave labour that life rises, rises the God-like force, the sacred life-essence breathed by God. It is by labour, by work you rise to all nobleness–you rise to all knowledge. This is the Work of nature, to which, man goes forth. In the kingdom of grace there is work too. Understand, as has been said, the Gospel does not abrogate works, but it provides for them. Man goeth forth to his work and labour from the morning of the world to its evening.

II. I turn from the thought of the work as a fact, to the spirit in which it should be engaged. A nobleness of soul looks out from the words, go forth! The view of labour is not only great objectively, it is subjectively also. Some mens souls are like a French drawing-room, all looking-glass, whichever way they look they see themselves. It is not so with noble souls; they see their work, and not merely the little piece which lies before them, they see its end. So man goeth forth. The blessed glow of labour spreads over the man. He goeth forth; and it means that he calls to patience, courage, perseverance, and to that simple, weak-looking little faculty, good temper, to wait upon him. He goeth forth; then what to him are the doubts and difficulties that beset him? Doubt of any kind–it is extinguished by action, and difficulties retreat as the man goeth forth. As the ploughman drives his team through the stubble, and knows it is for the harvest,–the sailor waves a farewell to the shore, and knows it is for the freightage,–as the builder rears the scaffolding and knows it is for the building, so man goeth forth; so the Christian goeth forth, refreshed by prayer; the crooked becomes straight before him, the rough places plain, the valleys are exalted, the mountains brought low. Have you not heard in some of those old wild legends of the Middle Ages, how, while men slept, some of the old church towers and spires rose in the night–invisible builders working in the air: so rise the towers and the spires of our life–a mystic building: so it is also with our life. Or, say it is like a building, the design of the architect hidden behind the scaffolding; but, at last, the building is complete, the scaffolding falls, and all stands revealed. (E. P. Hood.)

Work

This psalm is the creation-story of Genesis, set to music and brought down to our own day and our own doors. As in Genesis, so here, the crown and master of creation is man. We must never let go either the dignity or the responsibility of this. Since the Incarnation, when the Infinite Worker Himself stepped forth into the midst of human affairs, creation itself, with our own place and part in it, has a new meaning for us–a tenderness, a livingness, a sacredness, which nothing else we can conceive could have given it.

I. Human labour is universal. Let a tribe be just clear of the grade of savagism: you find the men, with fishing-net, or fowling-gear or rude implements of husbandry, earning a regular livelihood by labour, while the women fill up the blanks in the daily toil by the lighter occupations which befit them. Let a people be rising in civilization: you find fewer idlers, less of wandering, less of mere sport or mere fetching of food, and more of settled labour. And let a people be standing high in the ranks of humankind: you note that labour has become general, varied, skilful, steady, honourable, more evidently a thing which speaks of manhood at its best. Man goeth forth unto his work.

II. Human labour belongs to the regular system of things. Man was made for work; he did not fall into it. He fell into sin, and sin has cast its shadow upon his work as upon all else that concerns him. The curse of labour, then, means no more than that particular part of the shadow of the general curse of sin which lies upon labour, as one of the most important and essential and radical elements in human existence. For labour, work, belongs to humanity as humanity, and not to merely sinful humanity or to human sin. We may be tempted often to sigh for a life that has no labour in it. But do not permit your work to overbear and oppress you thus. In the best sense of the words, you must keep above your work, and must keep your work beneath you. You must never feel it a thing you have to endure, to put up with, to slave to or to serve. Do not degrade your work to task-work. Let it be work to you still–a thing honourable, a thing appointed, a thing human, a thing amid which you are able to lift up your head in Gods creation as a being who is thus, and now, claiming and affirming your likeness to the Divine.

III. Human labour has upon it Gods eye and Gods smile. He sets our work for us, and He looks on continually while we do it, with no indifferent gaze, but with His great fatherly approval when we do it well. He would have us to seek His help in it, and His blessing upon it. Every day, it is certain, He knows well what we are doing, what we have done, and how we have done it. His interest in our work, in ourselves as workers, is deep and unwearied. We wrong Him and ourselves if we think of our daily work as being of no account to Him–if we cut it off from Him because we deem it too lowly, too secular, too common, too much our own needful affair, for Him to trouble Himself, or to be troubled by us, concerning it. It is the balsam of a labouring life–it is oil to every wheel in our daily round of toil–this felt interest of God in it all, and this unearthly geniality touching it all with a holy sweetness of dignity and peace.

IV. Human labour is mans ordinary method of serving and glorifying God. Men speak of doing Gods work when they are doing work which bears closely upon the spiritual welfare of their fellow-men; and worthy work it is, and momentous, when done in wisdom and love and humility. Men talk of Christian work when they mean the definite doing of good around them upon plans and motives that recognize the kingdom of Christ in the world; and all success to every one who puts his hand to it thoughtfully for the Lords sake. But really, ought not all our work to be made Gods work? Christian work? It shall be just this if it be done for God and for Christ. Let us go forth unto our work when the morrow breaks, let us stay our labour when the morrow closes, let us go forth and return as morning and evening pursue each other along our little life, making each day a day of Gospel work, of evangelic labour, until the evening of our earthly sojourn itself closes in, and we go forth into our Lords eternity, at our Lords bidding still–go forth to our work, our true life-work, which has so little of labour in it, and so much of rest–the work of the day which shall always be brightening in its happy perfectness, and always be fresh in its cloudless peace. (J. A. Kerr Bain, M.A.)

Our labour and Gods order

1. The world in its peace and gladness is a compound of many activities set in motion by God: the seasons, night and day, sun and rain, and the labour of man.

2. Our labour, springing from our free choice, is most closely connected with the moral order, for which the physical order was established.

3. This daily toil may include, as a part of it, a direct attempt to join hands with God in His moral and providential work.

4. This was meant to bring out our humane and religious character. (F. Noble, D.D.)

Work

The grammarian will tell you that work means prolonged exertion of body or of mind, to attain some desired end. It implies conscious efforts;–the strain and stretch of mind or body. Even the most slothful are sometimes constrained to work; and very many human beings do very little else than work, through all their waking hours, to earn food and clothing and shelter for themselves and their children. We wrest our livelihood from the elements and from society by labour. It has been well said that labour is at once the symbol of mans punishment and the secret of mans happiness. And it has been well said, too, that the Gospel does not abolish labour, but gives it a new and nobler aspect. The Gospel abolishes labour much in the same way as it abolished death: it leaves the thing, but it changes its nature.

1. One good end served by work, and served most effectually when work is felt most hard and painful, is this: it all goes to keep us in mind that we are fallen creatures,–to keep us in mind of the evil of sin. Man was at first intended for work; and afterwards, when he fell, doomed to work. The distorted form of the miner, labouring in peril and darkness that we may have our cheerful fires; the stiffened limbs of the sailor, drenched with the wintry spray; the lined face, the grey hair, the frail unmuscular body, which speaks of the over-driven brain; what do all these remind us of, but that sin is bitterly hateful in the sight of God? Sin brought all suffering, and all suffering should remind us of the evil of sin.

2. A second reason why our Saviour has set to every man his work, doubtless is, that in so doing He provided effectually for the health and sound estate of our bodies and our minds. We cannot be happy when we are idle. The machine, body and soul, is made for working, and in a little, the appetite for occupation revives again. Many of us would be lazy enough if we had it in our power: let us thank God that He has saved us from that temptation. Where is it that we shall find the grossest forms of vice and folly, but among those who by their circumstances are freed from the necessity of labour?

3. A third advantage to the Christian of having suitable work to do is this: that in faithfully doing his work, and doing it in a right spirit, he is doing what tends to make him grow in grace: he is working out his salvation all the while. Our Redeemer has appointed us to labour as we do: and so labour must be the right thing. It has its temptations, like everything on earth: but the Holy Ghost wilt help us through them, if we do but earnestly ask His blessed guidance. (A. K. H. Boyd, D.D.)

Work and leisure

The great God of Nature who has appointed, as this psalm tells us, a season, a use, a function, a duty, for every created thing, has ordained for man the day wherein to labour, and the evening wherein to rest. Work and leisure alternately are His ordinance.

I. Work. Wise men, such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero taught that it was unworthy of a free-born citizen to engage in trade or commerce; and agriculture which, with the sanction of Socrates, held longest an honourable place among civic avocations, came also at last to be regarded with contempt. Any profession that exchanged its products for money was despised. Even intellectual work, done for money, was counted unworthy of respect. The freeman was degraded by acting as tutor or schoolmaster. Only the liberal arts, such as medicine, philosophy, architecture, commerce on a large scale, were regarded as honourable and suitable to the position of citizen. But, in contradistinction to this pagan teaching, our Bible puts the highest dignity on work. Our first parents, even in their innocency, were to dress and keep the garden. The Lord of Glory Himself worked as a carpenter. St. Paul–the free-born Roman citizen–deigned to soil his hands at tent-making. In his epistles he again and again comes down, as with a shattering sledge-hammer, on the idleness of some professing Christians. If any will not work, neither let him eat. The law of work is, moreover, stamped on our being. The anatomy of our body shows that work is a necessity for its health and vigour. It is not work, says Beecher, that kills men; it is worry. Work is healthy; you can hardly put more upon a man than he can bear. Work is not only a negative good, saving us from the mischief which Satan finds for idle hands to do, but it is also a positive good. Besides keeping us physically healthy, it also calls out our intelligence; and when done honestly, it strengthens us in many a virtue such as patience, courage, endurance, fidelity. These moral gains we may find as readily in sweeping the street or performing trivial household duties as in sowing our grain or in attending to a piece of delicate machinery.

II. Leisure. By many a voice God says to each of us in the words of the poet, Work like a man, but dont be worked to death!

1. The leisure of the evening is appointed for rest. The machinery of our body is such that it soon wears out under too lengthened physical toil; and the balance of our mind is such that it is liable to give way under the monotony and overstrain of too many hours of application.

2. The leisure of the evening is appointed for wholesale recreation. The bent mind, like the bow, needs to be occasionally unbent for a while. And innocent amusement for the man who has been working hard is as a strengthening medicine. But alas for the recreations of some! It is more killing than their work.

3. The leisure of evening is appointed for spiritual improvement. Were we only physical beings, then it were right that we should only live to eat–to secure the comforts and luxuries which are dear to our animal appetites. Or were we only the social creatures of a day, then it were pardonable that we should give the great bulk of our leisure hours to gratify our selfish taste for exciting amusements and companionships. But if it be true that we are undying souls in need of salvation, and of that sanctified fitness which must be acquired for the heavenly state, then surely there ought also to be daily leisure for spiritual meditation and private prayer. (T. Young, M.A.)

Work and labour contrasted

Work and labour are not the same. Work is the operation of body or spirit but labour is not simply work, but work attended by fatigue, weariness, and pain. It is said that man goeth forth to his work and to his labour, because, for us, work and labour run into each other; we cannot have the former without the latter; what we do in this world, from the morning of our days until the evening, is done with toil and care, and amid difficulties and vexations. But it was not so from the beginning, and it shall not be so, with us, for ever (Rev 14:18). Now, it is not necessary to prove that the Christian, as such, has a work to do. But it is, perhaps, a less familiar thought, that the Christians work, being that of man here in this world, is not a work only, but a labour also; that it is not easy nor light; that it is hard to do, and costs, like all labour, much toil and fatigue, and weariness of heart and flesh; not because the service of our Master is, in itself, intrinsically, a hard and painful one, but because we make it such, and cannot help making it such, by that native opposition to it, and reluctance to do it, which every life exhibits. If any one finds it sweet, delightful and easy, to bear the Cross, and mortify the flesh, to resist temptation and school himself in silence and submission, to practice self-denial, and feel the burden and heat of the day, to go and come in season and out of season, where good is to be done; let him be thankful; but, with most of us, it is not so. In all our work, whatever intention hallow it, we find labour; and it seems hard, in certain respects, and sometimes so very hard, that we are all but ready to give out; and this is so whether we be working for ourselves or for others. And yet we dare not rest, or cease from work, until the end come: because the work is to live and to be imputed to us, eternally, for weal or woe. We must endure the pain and weariness, as knowing that without these, as accompaniments, the work cannot be done; and that, unless the work be done, we shall have nothing to follow us at the last, nothing to show when we are called to account, and therefore nothing to reward. For the sake of the work that shall remain, we must sustain the labour which is to end. This is, of course, the practical conclusion, which they should be urged to consider who find it a great effort to do their duty, and who think perhaps that they will never improve. To them we say: You ought to know, that it is of the nature of things that your struggle is what it is. Labour, pain, toil, and everything most repugnant to your self-indulgent spirit, attend upon, and are inseparably united to the work which is set before you to accomplish. It is so, it must be so, it always will be so. We must accept our lot, and do what we can, and wait for the hour when the labour and the work shall be separated, and the former shall cease and be forgotten, and the latter shall remain with us, the proof of our fidelity and the guarantee of an eternal reward. (Morgan Dix, D.D.)

Occupation a blessing

Physical occupation is an excellent aid to a happy and contented mind. I have seen a stage coach driven by a man of L10,000 a year, because he was wretched without regular muscular exertion. I have heard of a nobleman who, for the same reason, bargained with the cutler of the village to be allowed for a certain time every day to turn his grinding wheel. If you visit the Louvre in Paris you may see with your own eyes the anvil at which Louis XVI was in the habit, with a smiths apron on, of making locks, in order to divert his mind. (J. Thain Davidson, D.D.)

Working hours of a mans life

Did you ever calculate that the number of working hours in the mature part of life is only 135,000? Rest a moment on that thought. Between twenty-five years, which pass in the early part of life without much fruit, and the seventieth year of life, there are forty-five years of life which we call mature. Now, suppose that a man throw away in every year fifty-two days for Sundays, thirteen days for illness, vacation, and other interruptions; and suppose that for forty-five consecutive years he works 300 days a year–a large average–that would give a man in the mature part of life, 13,500 days. Supposing that a man have health and industry enough to work ten hours in each of these 13,500 days, he will have 185,000 mature working hours. A man who is forty, however, has but 90,000 hours left; a man who is sixty has so few hours left that I dont want to shock you by mentioning their number. (Joseph Cook.)

The daily round

Life to every one is a common round of continual beginnings and endings. Each day is a little circle returning where it began. Each year is a wider circle linking on its last day to its first. We lived within the same limited, circumscribed horizon. We have to perform, day after day, the same actions, to repeat the same duties, to go round and round in the same routine of daily tasks. Our range is as narrow as that of the ox that treadeth out the corn among the heap of sheaves. And all this is apt to become monotonous and wearisome. Some are so consumed by ennui that life has lost all relish for them; and some have grown so tired of pacing the irksome daily round that they have put an end to it by violent means. But surely it gives a new zest to life if we realize that all this constant doing of the same things, this constant going round and round the same little circle of daily duties, is not a treadmill penance, a profitless labour like weaving ropes of sand, but is designed to bring out and educate to the utmost perfection of which we are capable all that is best and most enduring in us. And surely it heightens the interest immeasurably to be assured that God has not merely ordained this long ago as part of His great providential plan for the world, but that He is daily and hourly superintending the process of our discipline and education by His personal presence, compassing our path, going round with us in the circle of lifes toils and duties, and causing all our experiences, by His blessing, to work together for our good. (H. Macmillan, D.D.)

Ones special work

There is a work for all of us. And there is special work for each, work which I cannot do in a crowd or as one of a mass, but as one man, acting singly, according to my own gifts, and under a sense of my personal responsibility. There is, no doubt, associated work for me to do; I must do my work as part of the worlds great whole, or as a member of some body. But I have a special work to do as an individual who, by Gods plan and appointment, has a separate position, separate responsibilities, and a separate work; if I do not do it, it must be left undone. No one of my fellows can do that special work for me which I have come into the world to do; he may do a higher work, a greater work, but he cannot do my work. I cannot hand my work over to him any more than I can hand over my responsibilities or my gifts. Nor can I delegate my work to any association of men, however well-ordered or powerful. They have their own work to do, and it may he a very noble one. But they cannot do my work for me. I must do it with these hands or with these lips which God has given me. I may do little, or I may do much. That matters not. It must be my own work. And, by doing my own work, poor as it may seem to some, I shall better fulfil Gods end in making me what I am, and more truly glorify His name, than if I were either going out of my own sphere to do the work of another, or calling in another into my sphere to do my proper work for me. (John Ruskin.)

Industry

A celebrated divine has said, If it were not for industry, men would be neither so healthful nor so useful, so strong nor so patient, so noble nor so untempted. There is no greater tediousness in the world than want of employment. Time passes over the active man lightly like a dream, or the feathers of a bird; but the idler is like a long sleepless night to himself, and a load to his country. (Christian Weekly.)

Fuente: Biblical Illustrator Edited by Joseph S. Exell

With security and confidence, knowing the nature and custom of wild beasts, that they hide themselves by day.

Fuente: English Annotations on the Holy Bible by Matthew Poole

Man goeth forth to his work,…. Having taken sleep in the night, being comfortably refreshed, and his strength recruited; he rises with the rising sun, and goes forth cheerfully and with intrepidity to his work in the field, or elsewhere, the beasts being fled and gone.

And to his labour until the evening; to till the ground, and do other services and labour, either of the head or hand; for man is born and designed for labour, and not for sloth and idleness: in his innocent state he was set to dress the garden and keep it; and, after the fall, his doom was to get his bread by the sweat of his brow; and he is to work while the day lasts, till the evening and night come on, when he betakes himself to sleep and rest again. So the believer, though the work of redemption and salvation is wrought for him, and the work of grace is wrought in him, each by another hand; yet he has work enough to do, which he is created for, and under obligation to perform; and in which he is to continue steadfast and immovable, while the day of life lasts, till the night of death comes, and no man can work; and then he rests from his labours, and his works follow him.

Fuente: John Gill’s Exposition of the Entire Bible

23. Goeth forth These words are more significant in the East than with us. There the universal custom of city or village life left, and still leaves, their fields often far from home. “The people of Ibel and Khiem, in Merj ‘ Aiyun, for example, have their best grain growing fields down in the ‘Ard Huleh, six or eight miles from their homes.” Thomson. The country referred to is in the plain north of Lake Merom. The dignity of man above the noblest of the wild beasts is here preserved. They seek their food by night, he by day; they “creep forth,” he “goeth forth;” they for prey, he “unto his work and to his labour.”

Fuente: Whedon’s Commentary on the Old and New Testaments

So, my soul, do thou, morning by morning, go forth in the spiritual work of thy Jesus, in his strength, and his righteousness, until the evening of life be come, and the Lord of the household command his steward to call the laborers, and give them their hire. Oh! for grace to be found at that season in Jesus, and wholly accepted in him. Joh 9:4 ; Mat 20:1-8 .

Fuente: Hawker’s Poor Man’s Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

Psa 104:23 Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.

Ver. 23. Man goeth forth unto his work ] His honest employment in his particular place and calling, whether manual or mental; eating his bread in the sweat either of his brow or of his brain.

Until the evening ] That time of rest and refreshment. The Lord Burleigh (William Cecil), when he put off his gown at night, used to say, Lie there, Lord Treasurer; and, bidding adieu to all state affairs, disposed himself to his quiet rest.

Fuente: John Trapp’s Complete Commentary (Old and New Testaments)

The Days Work

Man goeth forth unto his work

And to his labour until the evening.Psa 104:23.

The psalm from which the text is taken is one of the most complete and impressive pictures of the universe to be found in ancient literature, and it breathes the very spirit of the Hebrew race. It has been called the Psalm of the Cosmos. It moves through all creation, and begins and ends with praise. Like all the highest reaches of the human imagination, it lays hold of the inner and deeper truth of things, and suggests much more than literary description can convey. He was not a man of knowledge in the modern sense, this Hebrew poet, although the wide sweep of his thought seems to speak of some contact with foreign culture; but he was at home in that knowledge of God which is Eternal Life. No careful reader of the psalm will fail to see that it follows mainly the order and sequence of the story of the beginnings of things with which our Bible opensa story which in its groupings of the creative action into progressive stages dimly anticipates our modern idea of development: yet the psalm is no mere copy of that story. The story of Genesis is the record of a past and finished creation: the psalm is a picture of a continuous, ever-proceeding creationa kind of prophecy of the genesis of science. All the work of the ancient record we see going on before our eyes: the wondrous week of Divine activity is every week, and its six great days are repeated in all the days. In the psalm, as in the Book of Genesis, we see life moving on in the same ordered and stately way to the same goal; rising up in slow and steady grandeur to man, and in man reaching its summit and crown. The going forth of man is the highest point in the vast, ascending movementthe end or goal of life on its material side. In this psalm, until we reach this verse, God is represented as working alone, causing the grass to grow and giving to the wild beasts their food; but man goeth forthgoeth forth a self-conscious, self-acting being, a distinct person, a sovereign soul with power to shape the course of his own life and activity. And this going forth of man is not only the summing-up and end of a creation, but the beginning of a new creation. However closely he may be allied to what is beneath him, he belongs to another order. Because he thinks and wills and loves, he is kindred to the Infinite Mind and Will and Heartkindred to God; not only a creature formed and sustained by the Creators power, but a son of God, and therefore more to God than vast worlds and blazing suns.

In the Psalms, Alexander von Humboldt recognized an epitome of scientific progress, a summary of the laws which govern the universe. A single Psalm, the 104th, he writes, may be said to present a picture of the entire Cosmos. We are astonished to see, within the compass of a poem of such small dimension, the universe, the heavens and the earth, thus drawn with a few grand strokes.1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Psalms in Human Life, 315.]

In the 104th Psalm the inspired poet gives us a magnificent picture of the movement and march of a living world. The clouds roll on like the swift chariots of God; the winds are winged creatures; the springs of water run among the hills; the grass is growing, the sap circling through the cedars, the birds building their nests among the branches; the moon keeps her seasons; the sun rises and sets, the beasts of the forest creep forth in search of their food; the ships are sailing upon the great and wide sea. And of man, set in the midst of this vast, busy scene, the Psalmist says, Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening. There is a beauty and pathos in these words which makes them smite upon the heart like the fingers of a skilled player upon his instrument, a beauty and pathos which is due essentially to their truthfulness to human experience, turning them, all simple as they are, into the solemn refrain of the Psalm of Life.2 [Note: J. C. Lambert, The Christian Workman, 18.]

I

Work as a Law of Mans Life

1. To the vast majority of men and women work is a law, first of all, in the sense that it is a positive necessity of their daily existence. We must eat to live, and we must work to eat; that is what the law comes to in its ultimate physical form.

In one of his poems Arthur Hugh Clough gives us a realistic picture of morning in the city:

Labourers settling

Slowly to work, in their limbs the lingering sweetness of slumber;

Humble market-carts coming in, bringing in not only

Flowers, fruit, farm-store, but sounds and sights of the country

Dwelling yet on the sense of the dreamy drivers; soon after,

Half-awake servant-maids unfastening drowsy shutters

Up at the windows, or down letting in the air by the doorway.

No early stroller through the streets has failed to observe with interest this awaking of a great city from its slumbers, this re-application of itself to all its manifold tasks and toils. And if he seeks an explanation of it all, the reason at bottom undoubtedly is that in no other way than by arising and working can human beings earn their daily bread. A little further on in Cloughs poem, we get a glimpse of the secret spring which drives the huge machine, as we read of the

Little child bringing breakfast to father, that sits on the timber

There by the scaffolding; see, she waits for the can beside him.1 [Note: J. C. Lambert.]

2. But it is not merely in this lower sense that work must be conceived of as the universal law of human life, a sense determined by the relations in which we stand to the forces of Nature on the one hand, and the social order on the other. Work is the proof that man offers of his manhood. This is his law of relationship to the complex universe. He works. He creates a world for himself. He makes his own environment. He does not merely accept from Nature his range of opportunity. He does not merely find her useful for his purposes, and rest satisfied with the food he can capture from her, or the shelter that she suggests. He sets to work to bring about what he will require. He takes up what she gives him, and out of its materials he contrives, fashions, invents, improves, thinks, reasons, imagines, and toils until he has brought into existence a whole creation of things that were not there before. His life is his own in the sense that his head and hands and heart have produced it. It could not come into existence but by the sweat of his brow. And as he began, so he continues. He is ever at work. He is ever bettering, correcting, enlarging. Ever a worker! Ever a creator! Ever a builder! Ever labouring to win a fuller result! Ever sowing in tears that he may reap in joy! Ever hoping to wring a richer spoil out of the rugged soil! Ever dreaming of a finer reward, ever foreseeing a better day; ever spending and being spent; ever giving himself away for a vision still denied him, of a hope still deferred! Ever on his pilgrim way, with his eyes set on far horizons! Ever warring with a stubborn earth which must be purged of thorn or thistle in order to correspond with his strong desire! So man down all the ages, amid the awful silence of a nature that waits around him in expectation, goeth forth to his work and to his labour.

It has been well saidsaid by a poetthat labour is at once the symbol of mans punishment and the secret of mans happiness. And it has been well said too that the gospel does not abolish labour, but gives it a new and nobler aspect. The gospel abolishes labour much in the same way as it abolished death: it leaves the thing, but it changes its nature.1 [Note: A. K. H. Boyd, The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, ii. 148.]

There are three things to which a man is bornlabour, and sorrow, and joy. Each of these three things has its baseness and its nobleness. There is base labour, and noble labour. There is base sorrow, and noble sorrow. There is base joy, and noble joy. But you must not think to avoid the corruption of these things by doing without the things themselves. Nor can any life be right that has not all three. Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.2 [Note: Ruskin, Time and Tide, v. 21.]

When Charles Lamb was released for life from his daily drudgery of desk-work at the India Office, he felt himself the happiest of men. I would not go back to my prison, he said to a friend, ten years longer, for ten thousand pounds. He also wrote in the same ecstatic mood to Bernard Barton: I have scarce steadiness of head to compose a letter, he said; I am free! free as air! I will live another fifty years. Would I could sell you some of my leisure! Positively the best thing a man can do isnothing; and next to that, perhaps good works. Two yearstwo long and tedious yearspassed; and Charles Lambs feelings had undergone an entire change. He now discovered that official, even humdrum workthe daily round, the common taskhad been good for him, though he knew it not. Time had formerly been his friend; it had now become his enemy. To Bernard Barton he again wrote: I assure you, no work is worse than overwork; the mind preys on itselfthe most unwholesome of food. I have ceased to care for almost anything. Never did the waters of heaven pour down upon a forlorner head. What I can do, and overdo, is to walk. I am a sanguinary murderer of time. But the oracle is silent.1 [Note: S. Smiles, Character, 98.]

3. Work, then, is the significance of our manhood. We are those who present themselves to the earth in the eye of God as workers. We create a world of our ownthe world of human society. We build a city, we organize a fellowship, we produce a wealth, which were not there until we called them into existence out of the resources and materials supplied us by God in nature. And every one contributes to this work, every one is a worker, who spends a continuous and rational effort in creating, or sustaining, or fulfilling, or enriching, the social fabric that man has fashioned for himself. All who contribute by head, or hand, or heart, to the common endeavour have found and verified their manhood; they have justified themselves as members of that humanity which for ever goes forth to its work and to its labour. And, reversely, those who play no such part at all, who have no intelligible function to fulfil, who bring no contribution, who have discovered no rational purpose for which to labour, and no special use for their heads or their hands, and no end that they can serve, and can see no reason why they should not be idle if they choose, and leisured when they like, and live to please themselvessuch, the workless, have failed their manhood; they have betrayed humanity.

On a passenger ship the officers and crew keep the watches day and night, and busy themselves continually with the working and the safety of the vessel; while the passengers, looking upon the voyage as a mere holiday, amuse themselves on deck by day, and lie down in their berths at night, without any sense of responsibility. But on board ship every one knows that the positions and relations of passengers and crew are of a special and temporary kind, due to the specialization of social function through the division of labour, and that they justify themselves by that very fact. When Jack gets ashore, it is his turn for a holiday; while yonder lounging passenger in the deck-chair will have to put on his harness again as soon as the vessel reaches port, and work all the harder because of the respite he is now enjoying. What is natural and proper, for the time being, on board of an ocean liner is neither natural nor tolerable on the voyage of life. Here all are sharers in a common duty and responsibility. No one has any prescriptive right to enter himself in the ships books as a mere cabin-passenger. In some capacity or other every one is morally bound to take a part in the working of the vessel; and, from the point of view of social obligation, those who refuse to do so are no better than malingerers or mutineers.1 [Note: J. C. Lambert.]

Indolence is one name of many for the abstraction of Franciss mind and the inactivities of his body. He was not of the stuff to break ice in his basin by candle-light, and no doves fluttered against his lodging window to wake him in summer, but he was not indolent in the struggle against indolence. Not a lifetime of mornings spent in bed killed the desire to be up and doing. In the trembling hand of his last months he wrote out in big capitals on pages torn from exercise-books such texts as were calculated to frighten him into his clothes. Thou wilt not lie a-bed when the last trump blows; Thy sleep with the worms will be long enough, and so on. They were ineffectual. His was a long series of broken tryststrysts with the sunrise, trysts with Sunday Mass, obligatory but impossible; trysts with friends. Whether it was indolence or, as he explained it, an unsurmountable series of detaining accidents, it is certain that he, captain of his soul, was not captain of his hours. They played him false at every stroke of the clock, mutinied with such cunning that he would keep an appointment in all good faith six hours after it was past. Dismayed, he would emerge from his room upon a household preparing for dinner, when he had lain listening to sounds he thought betokened breakfast. He was always behindhand with punctual eve, and in trouble with strict noon.1 [Note: E. Meynell, The Life of Francis Thompson (1913), 32.]

II

Work as a High Calling of God

1. We ought to think of our work as an expression of our personal lifeto think of it as the means granted to us to give body and coherence and aim to the great universe-forces. And then, if in our imagination we can identify these universe-forces with the wisdom and love of God, the One who with us lives and works, we shall be able to rise to the point of view which Christ tookthat point of view which becomes both light and inspiration: My Father worketh continuously, and so do I. That is the highest reach of the human spiritto conceive of ones work as a part of the Divine activity itself. The daily life, with its tasks and occupations, its duties and its cares, its problems to solve, its burdens to carry, its beauty to appreciate and enjoyall these become an echo and reflection of what the infinite activity itself is. Viewed in this light

The trivial round, the common task,

Would furnish all we ought to ask

Room to deny ourselves; a road

To bring us daily nearer God.

Ask me, she wrote, to do something for your sake, something difficult, and you will see that I shall do it regularly, which is for me the most difficult thing of all. Let those who reproach themselves for a desultoriness, seemingly incurable, take heart again from the example of Florence Nightingale! No self-reproach recurs more often in her private outpourings at this time than that of irregularity and even sloth. She found it difficult to rise early in the morning; she prayed and wrestled to be delivered from desultory thoughts, from idle dreaming, from scrappiness in unselfish work. She wrestled and she won. When her capacities had found full scope in congenial work, nothing was more fixed and noteworthy in her life and work than regularity, precision, and persistence.2 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 40.]

No author of modern times has striven more earnestly or impressively than George Eliot to inculcate a law of duty which rests simply upon our human and social relations, and is independent of the great spiritual sanctions of the Christian faith. The late Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in one of his essays, tells how at Cambridge he walked with her once in the Fellows Garden of Trinity, and how she, taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of manthe words God, Immortality, Dutypronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, had sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing law. I listened, and night fell; her grave majestic countenance turned towards me like a Sibyls in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fate. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty hallson a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.1 [Note: J. C. Lambert.]

Carlyle preached the gospel of work as the panacea for human ills. But he did so with the air of a parent who is mixing a disagreeable medicine for a child, and is insisting on its wholesome effects in order to take away attention from its nauseousness. To Morris work was a sheer joy. It has been said that he picked out only those forms of work that were attractive. It would be truer to say that whatever work he undertook he made attractive. It was a joy to him, because he imported beauty into it. When his spirits flagged, it meant, not that he was tired, but that his insatiable energies cried out for even more.2 [Note: A. G. Rickett, William Morris, 24.]

2. Work and labour have changed indeed since the Psalmist pictured man in the fields, on the hillside, rising with the sun, to go out to his work on the soil until the fading twilight sent him peacefully home again. Now labour stays not with the dying day. No evening sets in its quiet limit. On and on through the night its vast mechanism clangs and roars. On and on through the night the loaded trains groan and shriek; the furnaces blaze on in the deep holds of the liners that press on untiringly through the black waters. Labour means no longer the slow pacing of ploughing oxen, the long watch of the creeping sheep along the folds. It means now the storm and stress of tumultuous cities, the haste of quivering looms, the heat of rushing wheels, the shout of hurrying multitudes, and the rush of crowded streets. Yes! But all this is still humanity at work. It is man achieving his purpose. It is man fulfilling his Divine prerogative. It is man building himself a city. By his labour, tremendous in its volume and energy and force, he comes to himself. He discloses his powers. He reveals his elemental character. He creates a new world. He proclaims himself a man, he discharges his obligations to God. He fulfils his high calling.

Woe to us if we let our work lose the inspiration that comes from knowing that we do it for our Heavenly Father and not for ourselves! We stand in danger of letting that knowledge go, because work so absorbs us and enchains us by its own sheer power; but yet we know that that slavery to work which we are aware is growing in ourselves is not the highest or most noble type of life as we behold it in other men. We know that the man to whom work is really sanctifying and helpful is the man who has God behind his work; who is able to retire out of the fret and hurry of his work into the calmness and peace of Deity, and come out again into his labour full of the exalted certainties of the redemption of Christ and the love of God: to make work sweet and fresh and interesting and spiritual by doing it not for himself, not for itself, but for the Saviour in whom he lives.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 347.]

In Millets Angelus we see the toil-worn peasants, who have been bending over the ground through the long afternoon, standing up from their work to think reverently and prayerfully of God, as the notes of the evening bell come floating over the fields from the dim church tower. The pious men of Israel continually heard a Divine monition, as clear and sweet as the sound of the Angelus-bell, reminding them that lifes labours were part of a godly service, and that the eyes of the Lord were upon them in the midst of the common occupations of each returning day.2 [Note: J. C. Lambert.]

III

Work as Fellowship with God

1. St. Paul more than once in his Epistles describes himself and his companions in service and sacrifice as fellow-workers with God. The words speak of conscious and voluntary co-operation, of willing and intelligent oneness of purpose and effort, with the will and work of God. In creating and perfecting His world, in getting His will done on earth as it is in heaven, God has made Himself dependent upon the help and fidelity of His human children. And the more we understand of the nature of God and the range of His working, the more shall we realize the extent to which it is possible for man to have a share in doing Gods work. Our Lords teaching about the Fatherhood of God and His personal care for every detail of every life has thrown a new light both on the nature of human work and on the spirit in which it may be done. Since all the trivialities of life and the petty drudgeries are steps in the progress towards one end, there is no sphere of human activity which is excluded from contributing towards the realization of the Divine purpose for the comfort and good of man.

All service ranks the same with God.

And there is no labourer, however humble, who may not be inspired at his toil by the childs proud consciousness that he is helping his Father. Under all circumstances he is called to co-operate with God in the service of man.

Her devotion and her power of work were prodigious. I work in the wards all day, she said, and write all night; and this was hardly exaggeration. Miss Nightingale has been known, said General Bentinck, to pass eight hours on her knees dressing wounds and administering comfort. There were times when she stood for twenty hours at a stretch, apportioning quarters, distributing stores, directing the labours of her staff, or assisting at the painful operations where her presence might soothe or support. She had, said Mr. Osborne, an utter disregard of contagion. I have known her spend hours over men dying of cholera or fever. The more awful to every sense, any particular case, especially if it was that of a dying man, the more certainly might her slight form be seen bending over him, administering to his ease by every means in her power, and seldom quitting his side till death released him.1 [Note: Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, i. 234.]

You remember George Eliots fine poem on the famous violin-maker of Cremona and its lesson:

Not God Himself can make mans best

Without best men to help Him.

Tis God gives skill,

But not without mens hands: He could not make

Antonio Stradivaris violins

Without Antonio.

It is a bold saying, but true. We have a work to do in the world which God cannot do, which we must do, or it will be left undone. Only as we co-operate with Him, can His will be done on earth as in heaven.1 [Note: John Hunter, De Profundis Clamavi, 238.]

2. The Divine power in the world is not an abstract, impersonal energy. God is in the world creating and perfecting, His power and spirit dwelling in and working through industrious, righteous, faithful, beneficent lives. The unit of power in the world is not God isolated from man, and not man isolated from God; but God and man united, working purposely and continuously together; God quickening and inspiring man, and man opening his life to be a part of the Divine life of the world. The religion of Jesus Christ represents this union of man and God in purpose and work. Man works with God: God inspires man. My Father, said Jesus, works continuously and I work. The works I do are not Mine, but the Fathers who sent Me. I do what I see My Father doing. And as the Father sent Me so send I you. The glory He has given to Me I give to youthat we may all be one, doing the same thing, working the same work.

We have all been tired in our time, one may presume; we have toiled in business, or in some ambitious course, or in the perfecting of some accomplishment, or even in the mastery of some game or the pursuit of some amusement, till we were utterly wearied: how many of us have so toiled in love? How many of us have been wearied and worn with some labour to which we set ourselves for Gods sake? This is what the Apostle has in view in his phrase labour of love, and, strange as it may appear, it is one of the things for which he gives God thanks. But is he not right? Is it not a thing to evoke gratitude and joy, that God counts us worthy to be fellow-labourers with Him in the manifold works which love imposes?2 [Note: J. Denney, The Epistles to the Thessalonians, 29.]

Ah! brothers, let us work our work, for love

Of what the God in us prevails to do!

And if, when all is done, the unanswering void

And silence weigh upon our souls, remember

The music of a lonely heart may help

How many lonely hearts unknown to him!

The seeming void and silence are aware

With audience august, invisible,

Who yield thank-offering, encouragement,

And strong co-operation; the dim deep

Is awful with the God in whom we move,

Who moulds to consummation where we fail,

And saith, Well done! to every faithful deed,

Who in Himself will full accomplish all.1 [Note: Roden Noel, Collected Poems, 354.]

3. If work is ever to win its honour, it will be from out of the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. He was Himself the ideal worker. He lived in the spirit of work, aware of the task set Himlived to do the will of Him that sent Him; conscious of the strain of the allotted limitthe twelve hours of the working day into which all the work must be crowded before the night fall, in which no man can work; living ever among men as one that worketh; straining under the yoke as He felt the terrible pressure of His task; straitened until it was accomplished; consecrated to the work of glorifying the Father by doing the work which He gave Him to do; yielding Himself to death as soon as He could pronounce that work to have been done faithfully and could say over it, It is finished.

The highest soul this world has seen was a mechanic by trade. Behind His year and a half as a teacher lay long years in which He toiled in wood, making ploughs and yokes, as one of the earliest Fathers says. And that was a preaching mightier perhaps than His mightiest word. It was the inauguration of labours day. It was the shifting of the basis of esteem. In the age into which He came, work of that kind was under taboo. The Greek, the Roman, thought it an occupation for slaves. And for long ages after, that continued the current view. It was endorsed by official Christianity. The Pope in the splendour of his Court forgot the tradition of the Carpenter. To-day we are beginning once more to remember it. The Redeemer of our soul is becoming the Redeemer of our economics, of our social state. The age-long blindness is passing away.1 [Note: J. Brierley, Life and the Ideal, 24.]

Lord of the breeze, the rolling tide,

The rivers rushing to the sea,

The clouds that through the azure glide,

Well works the hand that works with Thee.

How finely toil, from morn till eve,

Thy ministers of light and shade;

How fair a web the sunbeams weave

Of waving grass and blossoms made!

O Thou that madest earth and man

That man should make an earth more fair,

Give us to see Thy larger plan

And Thy creative joy to share.

Had we but eyes, and hands of skill,

Had we but love, our work would be

Wisely begun, and bettered still,

Till all were perfected by Thee.

Work Thou with us, that what is wrought

May bring to earth diviner days,

While in the higher realms of thought

A temple glorious we raise.2 [Note: W. G. Tarrant, Songs Devout, 48.]

IV

Work and Rest

The strangest thing about work is the way in which all men praise it, and yet all men try to get away from it. There is no subject so popular as the blessedness of work. There is no theory so universal as that of the wretchedness of not being compelled to work. There is no man who does not feel a certain excited sense of admiration, a certain satisfaction, a certain comfort that things are right, when he stands where men are working their hardest, where trade is roaring or the great hammers are deafening you as they clang upon the iron. Everywhere work and the approval of work! and yet everywhere the desire to get away from work! Everywhere what all these men we see are toiling for is to make such an accumulation of money that they shall not have to toil any longer. Now, this double sense, this value of work and impatience with work as they exist together, seems to be the crude expression in mens minds of the conviction that work is good, that men degenerate and rust without it, and yet that work is at its best and brings its best results, is most honourable and most useful, only when it is aiming at something beyond itself. Everybody will bear witness that this is the healthiest feeling about any work that we have to do; satisfaction and pleasure in doing it, but expectation of having it done some day and graduating from it into some higher state which we think of as rest.

1. If we look to the arrangements of nature for indications of what mans life is meant to be, we see at once that, bravely as she has provided for his work, she has not thought of him only as a working being. She has set her morning sun in the sky to temptnay, to summonhim forth to his work and to his labour, to make him ashamed of himself if he loiters and shirks at home; but she has limited her daylight, she has given her sun only his appointed hours, and the labour and work are always to be only until the evening. Rest as truly as work is written in her constitution. Rest, then as much as work is an element of life.

After a very hard days work,during which he had confirmed candidates, preached at the re-opening of a church, spoken two or three times, and done much beside in a manner which perhaps no person but himself could have accomplished,Bishop Wilberforce returned in the evening to Turvey, where he was staying. A small party had been invited to meet him at dinner, and there was some bright and pleasant conversation. When the time came for retiring into the drawing-room, the Bishop, who looked a little fatigued, said to me: There is nothing which makes me more absolutely disgusted with myself than feeling tired when evening comes. What business have I to be tired? nothing gives me any comfort at all but that verse in the Psalms,Man goeth forth to his work and to his labour until the evening; and so, I suppose that, when evening comes, he may rest.1 [Note: J. W. Burgon, Lives of Twelve Good Men, ii. 39.]

2. Man goes out to his work, to his labour, only with one softening clause in the agreementuntil the evening. There are limits set; there are reliefs permitted and contrived; there are moments for slackening, for recreation, for repose. Not unbroken this labour; not monotonously blind this work. No, fixed times, ordered signals, ordained closes!

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me.

Man knows the signs. He is not left forgotten or unconsidered. He can calculate when the strain will be off.

Twilight and evening bell,

And after that the dark.

So, in kindly, successive periods, he turns to the rest that he has earned. He goeth forth to his work with the friendly sense in his heart that it will not last for ever. It will end in the quiet hour when the sun goes down.

When in the beginning God said: Let there be Light, and there was Light, Light did not spring into undivided empire, but was ordained to rule alternately with darkness. Day and night abide for ever. What was the reason, so far as man is concerned, for this curbing and restriction of so free an element as Light? The readiest reason seems to befor our relief and rest. But that is not half the reason. Our light is broken up and shortened, not only in order to afford us intervals of rest, but also to bestow upon us intensity; not only to relieve our faculties from the strain of life, but also to strain and stimulate them ever more keenly. According to Christ Himself the night cometh when no man can work, not merely that man may hope for release beneath its shelter, but that he may work while it is called to-day. Had there been no interval, since first upon the tones of Gods word Light rippled across the face of the deephad the Sun been created to stand still in the midst of the heavens, then indeed one might say there would have been no progress for man. Let your imagination strike Night out of the world, and you need not begin to speculate on the iron frames men should have required to bear the unrelieved strain, for it is tolerably certain that, without the urgency and discipline which a limited day brings upon our life, we should never have been stimulated to enough of toil to make us weary. Night, which has been called the Liberator of the Slave, is far more the task-mistress of the freea task-mistress who does not scourge nor drive us in panic, but who startles our sluggishness, rallies our wandering thoughts, develops our instincts of order, reduces our impulsiveness to methods, incites us to our very best, and only then crowns her beneficence by rewarding our obedience with rest. In short, Night, while she is natures mercy on our weakness, is natures purest discipline for our strength.1 [Note: George Adam Smith, The Forgiveness of Sins, 92.]

3. The daily drawing of the curtain between man and his active labours represents and continually reminds us of the need of the internal as well as the external in our lives. It brings up to us our need, by bringing up to us our opportunity, of meditation, of contemplation. For active life is always tending to become shallow. It is always forgetting its motives, forgetting its principles, forgetting what it is so busy for, and settling itself into superficial habits. So God shuts us out from our work and bids us daily think what the heart of our work is, what we are doing it for. If this is the meaning of the eveningand no man sees the daylight sink away and the shadows gather without sensitively feeling some such meaning in itthen surely we need it.

It is hard to see how, were it not for the continually repeated, daily stoppages of work, we could remember, as we need to remember, the great close of work which is coming to every one of us and may be very near. I picture to myself a world without an evening, a world with an unsetting daylight, and with men who never tired at their tasks; and it seems as if death in a world like that would be so much more terrible and mysterious than it is now; when once a day, for many years, we have learned that work was not meant to last always, and have had to drop our tools as if in practice and rehearsal for the great darkness when we are to let them go for ever.2 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Seeking Life, 348.]

And is the twilight closing fast?

(I hear the night-breeze wild);

And is the long weeks work all done?

Thy work is done, my child.

Must I not rise at dawn of day?

(The night-breeze swells so wild);

And must I not resume my toil?

No! nevermore, my child.

And may I sleep through all the dark?

(The wind to-night is wild);

And may I rest tired head and feet?

Thou mayest rest, my child.

And may I fold my feeble hands?

(Hush! breezes sad and wild);

And may I close these wearied lids?

Yes, close thine eyes, my child.

Oh, passing sweet these closing hours!

And sweet the night-breeze mild,

And the Sabbath-day that cometh fast!

The Eternal Day, my child.

The night is gone, clear breaks the dawn,

It rises soft and mild;

Dear Lord! I see Thee face to face!

Yes! face to face, my child.

Literature

Bain (J. A. K.), For Heart and Life, 357.

Boyd (A. K. H.), The Graver Thoughts of a Country Parson, ii. 144.

Brooks (P.), Seeking Life, 331.

Brown (J. B.), The Christian Policy of Life, 108.

Clarke (J. E.), Common-Life Sermons, 94.

Dewhurst (F. E.), The Investment of Truth, 157.

Dix (M.), Christ at the Door of the Heart, 65.

Hood (P.), Dark Sayings on a Harp, 69.

Hunter (J.), De Profundis Clamavi, 227.

Lambert (J. C.), The Christian Workman, 1.

Newman (J. H.), Sermons on Subjects of the Day, 395.

Prothero (R. E.), The Psalms in Human Life, 315.

Smith (G. A.), The Forgiveness of Sins, 89.

Christian World Pulpit, xli. 56 (G. A. Smith); xlii. 8 (T. Young); lxx. 139 (H. MGahie); lxxvii. 309 (H. S. Holland).

Church of England Pulpit, xlix. 309 (J. White); lix. 197 (B. S. Tupholme).

Church Times, May 6, 1910 (H. S. Holland).

Literary Churchman, xxxii. 316 (J. L. Spencer).

Fuente: The Great Texts of the Bible

Gen 3:19, Jdg 19:16, Ecc 5:12, Eph 4:28, 2Th 3:8-12

Reciprocal: Gen 1:24 – Let

Fuente: The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge

104:23 {m} Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.

(m) That is, when the day springs for the light is as it were a shield to defend man against the tyranny and fierceness of beasts.

Fuente: Geneva Bible Notes