Mind The Sun-Mon Gap (I)

Courtesy of Graduate Christian Fellowship, we had Dr Gordon Preece to share with us on Minding The Gap between sacred/secular, Sun-Mon. He made an interesting observation that in the epic of Gilgamesh, men were created to be slaves for the gods, for hard manual labor in their service. Leisure was the right and privilege of the god-kings i.e. Egypt, Parthenon.

How radically different and subversive was the Genesis account of creation, where God created Adam and Eve on the sixth day, and when He rested, humanity rested too. The pattern of rest and work in the Sabbath is applied to all, regardless of social class.

Lausanne paper on Marketplace Ministry:

"The loss of the creation commission/mandate has detrimental effects on Christians
who are not directly engaged with people-type or evangelistic work, who work with
technology, material things or are engaged in wealth creation. These Christians often feel like second-class believers who have to pretend to be social workers at work. A chemical engineer when asked about his faith and work at an InterVarsity Graduates Fellowship meeting, described it in terms of the people-side of serving clients as if he were a social worker, but failed to mention that he had developed a less pollutant pesticide that fulfils the creation commission.

In contrast, Crawford W. Long, M.D., who discovered the use of sulphuric ether
as an anaesthetic in surgery on March 30, 1840 and whose statue stands in the US Senate building in the state of Georgia, was attributed with these words, ‘My profession is to me a ministry from God.’ Consider also Professor Graeme Clark, the Australian developer of the bionic ear who has brought hearing to over 50,000 people worldwide. His scientific passion for the creation/dominion mandate and for alleviating the suffering of hearing-impaired humanity (including his father) combined with his front-page and televised witness to Christ, represents a very balanced and inspiring expression of all three mandates." (i.e. creational, relational, evangelistic commissions)