Many working people quietly wonder whether the hours they spend at a register, a desk, a classroom or a job site count for anything with God, or whether the real spiritual work happens somewhere else. Genesis 1 answers that question before the Bible mentions a priest, an altar or a sermon. The God of that chapter works, judges his work good, then makes human beings in his image and hands them work to do in his world. Ordinary labor is part of the human calling from the start. That is why Sho Baraka can argue that any job, not only art, can share in Christ’s repair of what has gone wrong. His argument stands or falls on how carefully Genesis 1 is read, so the passage comes first.
God works before he speaks to anyone
The chapter opens with a verb, and God is its subject: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Faithful Christians read the days of this chapter in different ways, and that question can stay open here. Its central subject is clear either way. It tells us who God is and what kind of world he made. The first thing the Bible shows God doing is making something.
The next pattern is easy to read past because it repeats so often. God makes, then he looks. “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:10). The same verdict returns after the plants, the lights, the sea creatures and the land animals. God does not only produce. He evaluates what he produces.
Sho Baraka builds his whole case on this sequence. His book He Saw That It Was Good takes its title from that refrain, and he reads Genesis 1 as a picture of God creating, assessing his work and calling it good. The detail matters for everything that follows. If God judges his own work, then work has a standard. It can be good or not good, and God is the one who says which.
The first human job is in the world
The pattern changes at verse 26. God speaks about making humanity in his image, and the narrator then reports it: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The image is mentioned three times in two verses. The chapter wants the reader to notice it.
Then comes the first thing God says to the people he has made: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). In the KJV, replenish simply means to fill. Many modern translations render it that way.
This first assignment points outward, to the created world. The objects of the verbs are the earth, fish, birds and every living thing. Before Scripture says anything about worship gatherings, it gives human beings a task in the physical world: fill it, order it, care for what lives in it. The mention of the image and the mention of dominion sit side by side, and the most natural reading connects them. Humans carry God’s likeness into his world as those who act on his behalf within it.
That is the textual ground under the everyday question. If the first human calling concerns the earth and its creatures, then the farmer, the builder and the person balancing accounts are working inside the purpose God gave humanity.
Does the text actually tell us to create and cultivate?
Here a close reading should slow down. Baraka summarizes the command in the latter part of Genesis 1 as a call to create and cultivate, and he grounds it in the image: “in Genesis, we see how we are a reflection of God and his creating.” That summary is fair, but it gathers more than one verse together, and a reader should know where each part comes from.
In Genesis 1, only God is ever the subject of “created.” Human beings are never said to create in this chapter. They receive a world already made and are told to fill it and rule it. Human making is real, but it is derivative. We work with what God has already given, which is part of what it means to bear an image rather than be the original.
The word “cultivate” fits most closely with the next chapter: “And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15). To dress a garden is to work it. To keep it is to guard and tend it. Read together, Genesis 1 and 2 give the shape Baraka describes: people who reflect a making God by working and tending what he made.
Christians do differ on how far to stretch Genesis 1:28. Some interpreters read it as a mandate to build culture in every field, from agriculture to architecture to law. Others read it more narrowly, as a blessing about filling the earth and ruling over the animals, and they warn against turning one verse into a full theology of careers. A third concern runs through both camps. The words “subdue” and “dominion” have sometimes been used to excuse exploitation of land and people.
The context answers that misuse. The ruler in verse 28 is the image of the God who called every creature good. Dominion exercised by that image is accountable to that verdict. Genesis 1 does not list jobs, but it does establish that human work in the world belongs to God’s purpose and is measured by God’s standard.
Where repair enters the story
The chapter ends with God’s widest verdict: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). Nothing in Genesis 1 is broken. So the language of repair cannot come from this chapter alone. It requires reading forward.
Genesis 3 supplies what is missing. After the first disobedience, work itself continues, but it becomes hard: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread” (Genesis 3:19). This detail corrects a common assumption. Work belongs to the very good world of Genesis 1 and 2. What the fall adds is toil, frustration and a ground that resists. The calling stays. The conditions change.
Baraka’s argument moves through exactly these two steps. First, people make things: “we are creating stuff. We are creating institutions, we’re creating ideas, we create culture.” Second, what people make can be bent. He argues that if Satan has twisted the true intention of that creating, in institutions, systems, ideas and culture, then Jesus calls his people to redeem those things as an act of restitution to God.
He presses the point against a smaller picture of salvation. “Jesus didn’t just redeem my relationship with God so that I can just sit and wait for myself to die and go to heaven,” Baraka says. Christ also restored how people treat one another, and, Baraka adds, “he redeemed how I create and cultivate.” This is theology drawn from the whole sweep of Scripture rather than from Genesis 1 by itself, and it should be held that way. Genesis 1 gives the original calling. The rest of the story explains why that calling now involves repair.
A living sacrifice goes to work on Monday
Baraka connects this calling to Romans 12. Paul writes, “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service” (Romans 12:1). The word “therefore” points back to eleven chapters on what God has done in Christ. The offering is a response to mercy already given.
The image also carries a deliberate contrast. Temple sacrifices were killed and burned. Paul asks for a sacrifice that keeps living, and he names the body, the whole person as they actually move through ordinary days. The KJV’s “reasonable service” is rendered in other translations as “spiritual worship” or “true and proper worship.” Paul then adds, “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God” (Romans 12:2). The renewed mind learns to recognize what is good.
Paul does not mention jobs here. Applying the passage to the workplace is Baraka’s application, and it is a reasonable one, because the body presented to God is the same body that swings the hammer and sits at the spreadsheet. Baraka names the hammer, the spreadsheet, the loan and the classroom as places where that offering happens: “we have to see it as worship and operate as if it’s worship.”
He chooses the word worship on purpose. He has no problem with the word ministry, but he notes that it can sound as if it belongs only to people employed by churches. Lisa Fields names the same gap from the other side: “People don’t think they’re doing ministry unless they’re at church.” Genesis places the first human calling in a garden and a field, long before any sanctuary exists.
Can ordinary work do damage without anyone intending it?
If God’s verdict on work is “good,” the reverse is possible too. Baraka warns that when people grow apathetic and detached from the purpose of their work, “we can also create detriment without really knowing it.”
His example stays with the image of a hammer: “if you have no conviction behind the swinging of the hammer, then you’re swinging for somebody else’s convictions.” He pictures a contractor who builds well, adds value to properties and provides for his family, which Baraka calls good and necessary. Years later the neighborhood has changed and the people who lived there have been pushed out. The contractor feels bad, but he might have asked earlier how his work could bless that community instead of displacing it.
Genesis 1 says nothing about housing markets, so this is application. Still, it follows from the text. A person who rules as God’s image is answerable to God’s judgment of good. Every swing of the hammer serves some purpose, and work with no conviction behind it ends up serving whatever purpose is nearest. Baraka’s alternative is attention: “we should be looking at need.” He suggests bringing ordinary choices before Christ, including whether to take a particular check or partner with a particular person, because those choices shape what our work says about God.
Doesn’t this either make every job holy or make every worker responsible for fixing the world?
Two objections pull in opposite directions, and both deserve an answer.
The first says this reading baptizes whatever a person happens to do for a paycheck. The text resists that. Dominion in Genesis 1 is exercised under God and measured by his verdict, and Baraka’s contractor shows that competent work can still do harm. Work matters to God. That does not mean every piece of work pleases him. The question is whether it is offered to him and shaped by what he calls good.
The second says this reading loads a crushing weight on ordinary people, as if a cashier had to justify each shift by transforming society. Baraka rejects that too: “your work doesn’t have to be tied to some social good in order for it to be good or it to be changing the world.” Building something is already a contribution. Faithful work is a share in repair, and the finishing of that repair belongs to God.
Work offered to God also earns nothing from him. Paul is plain about this: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10). Notice the creation language again. In redemption, as in Genesis 1, God is the maker, and good works follow from what he has made. They are fruit, not payment. Scripture also makes no promise that faithful labor will heal a neighborhood on a timetable or reverse every injustice it touches. The calling is to work as God’s image in a damaged world. The outcome stays in God’s hands.
What a job says about God
If human beings were made in God’s image and set to work in his world, then work always displays something about the one we represent. Baraka frames his book around this idea through an interlude about an artist commissioned to paint the highest divine. His point reaches well beyond painters. In whatever we do, he says, “you’re painting something or you’re telling the truth about how you believe or what you believe about God.” The portrait is not reserved for Sunday. A ledger kept honestly, a classroom run with patience, a house built with an eye on the neighbors: each one is a brushstroke in a picture of God that someone else will see before they ever hear a sermon.
Quick answers
Do I need to leave my job for church work to serve God? No. Genesis 1 gives humanity its first calling in the created world, and Baraka argues that work done as worship is already service to God, whether or not it is tied to a church or a cause.
Is this calling only for Christians? The image and the task in Genesis 1:27-28 are given to humanity as a whole. Baraka’s emphasis on redemption adds that Christ restores how his people create and cultivate, so believers take up the original calling with a renewed purpose.
What about work that feels tedious or exhausting? Genesis 3 explains why work now involves sweat and frustration. That hardship does not cancel the calling. Romans 12 frames the offering of the body as daily worship, which includes the dull hours as much as the satisfying ones.
Does faithful work earn God’s favor? No. Ephesians 2:8-10 says salvation is God’s gift by grace through faith, and that believers are created in Christ for good works. The work follows the gift.
What if I have little say over what my work produces? Baraka’s point about conviction applies inside the choices a person does have: how they treat people, which work they take on, and whether they notice who their work affects.