Q5 – “Why did Jesus work as a carpenter in his father’s joinery before his ministry and him being the Son of God as well?”

I think there are 3 things involved in this question.

• The first thing is that the Bible talks about there being a first Adam and a last, or second, Adam.

  • The first Adam is the one who by his turning away from God injected the curse into the world, including all the problems we have been talking about.
  • The second Adam is Jesus, the last Adam, and He pulls the fangs of the curse and reverses things. Now that is not complete yet. He pulled the fangs, as it were, when He died and rose again. One day when He comes back He is going to make everything right again, there will be that perfect place. So we are in that intermediate condition now. The fangs of the curse have been pulled, but there is still death and suffering in the world. Now how does this bear upon the question?
  • for Him to do all this He had to be fully man. He was the Man Christ Jesus, Son of God but also Son of Man. He needed to be able to enter into every part of our human condition, and that includes work.
  • So he was born, not in a palace, a son of leisure as it were, but born into a stable to be the son of a village carpenter. He grew up and learned his father’s trade. and no doubt there was a lot of hard work involved. There were no power tools in those days. If you wanted timber you had to cut down your own tree and saw it into planks, all by hand, and plane them by hand and so on, so it wouldn’t have been easy work. He would have grown up knowing the difficulties of dealing with difficult customers, of being misrepresented and misunderstood, as well as being physically tired and with aching muscles and sometimes an aching head, from trying to figure out how to make ends meet as a village carpenter. He would have known all that, as well every other part of our human condition, fatigue, in all its ways, and rejection, and all of that.
  • So it was necessary for Him to have work, that He might be part of that human condition, otherwise He couldn’t be the second Adam, the One to set things right again.

• The second thing I draw out of this is that it shows us the great dignity of work.

  • A friend I used to work with years ago was a great joker, and he said “Work is the curse of the drinking man”. The ancient joke is that drink is the curse of the working man! Well, is work a curse?
  • No, for Adam was given work before he rebelled. Work was a good thing and still is a good thing. There is dignity in work, in good work. I can think of exceptions of course; not all work is good work, a drug-dealer for instance. But there is a dignity in work whether it is washing up, looking after the kids, changing the nappies, or sweeping the streets, things we think of [wrongly] as menial jobs. There’s dignity in them, if we approach them in the way of integrity. The Bible talks about us being able to do this, “Whatever you say or do should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, as you give thanks to God the Father because of him.” Colossians 3:17 CEV.
  • So if we are sweeping the streets, we can do that with a sense of dignity, no matter what others think, because we are looking to Jesus, who worked with His hands.

• The third thing is that at about the age of thirty He left that work and He did a career change.

  • That was the career of His earthly stepfather Joseph, but then He took on the work of His heavenly Father. He said in one place in the gospel of John “My Father has never stopped working, and that is why I keep on working.” (5:17 CEV) and the Jewish leaders at the time were so enraged at that because they knew He was saying He was one with God. He took on his Father’s work.

So I think, to me, that’s the reason that He worked.