Toil Theory

To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Genesis 3:17

I became interested in this verse many years ago one Sunday morning as some pastor, somewhere was of course, blabbing about this fateful occurrence in Genesis. I began to wonder how this verse applied to modern life, as not all of us do manual labor to make a living. I always imagined Adam hunched over in a field digging ditches and sweating somewhere in Iraq, really hot, not too psyched about the prospect of another couple hundred years of doing the same.

There came a point, even very early on in history when not necessarily everyone had to work like this for their food. Solomon for instance pretty much didn't do anything hard in his life. He just chilled on some drank and got crunk with his homies and was real smart. I then began to ponder, how does this toil apply to someone like Solomon, or even myself.

A lot of people like to say, "everything happens for a reason." In the past I had never really agreed with this statement. There are plenty of things that happen in ones daily life that apparently have no purpose, and this is where I believe this toil comes into play. It can strike anyone anytime.

I began to define this toil as: anything that happens that is generally annoying and frustrating, yet has no real deeper consequence. Examples of this include: tripping, locking your keys in your car, the cable going out, mosquitos, no air conditioning, clothing stains etc.

So if we go back to everything happens for a reason, this must explain why these instances occur. Because it is toil, and we must endure.