Who is the First, Best, and Greatest Laborer?

Labor Day has come and gone, with all of its sales, barbeques, political rallies, and vacations. We get so busy that we often don’t take time to consider why we have it as a national holiday.

The Department of Labor credits a number of union organizers as the likely founders of Labor Day, and states it “is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.”

It is a good time to ask, Who has been the first, best and greatest laborer? What single worker has shown the greatest aptitude for excellence, enthusiasm, and ethics in their work?

Here’s a clue: “In the Beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”

That’s pretty good work.  The work is so excellent, with everything fitting together so perfectly, that we just don’t even think of how magnificent His work really is.

The Genesis account says: “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

Monkeys may not be our common ancestor, but dirt is: clay and earth contain every single element which is also found in the human body.

It takes 20 amino acids to make the proteins that exist in the smallest living cell, and the proteins in living beings are made of long chains of different amino acids that must be knit together precisely.

How did David, an ancient desert-dwelling king, know all that when he wrote in Psalms: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

God intentionally and perfectly knits together each aspect of a life and all aspects of all lives. It is not a random occurrence. The odds of even a single DNA gene being formed by chance are 1 in 10 followed by 155 zeros.

After a baby is conceived, the DNA code for the eye programs the baby’s body to begin growing 1,000,000 optic nerve endings to grow to the brain and 1,000,000 optic nerves to grow to the eye. Per eye.

All those optic nerves meet perfectly and allow the human eye to send 1.5 million messages to the brain.

Grant R. Jeffrey in his book “The Signature of God” uses the picture of a man watching a woodpecker to illustrate the elegant simplicity and perfection of God’s work.

You see a woodpecker flying. In much less than a second your brain figures out the trajectory of the woodpecker flying near you and sends to your arms and legs electronic messages at speeds of 300 miles per second telling them to run and get the camera because the woodpecker is such an amazing creature.

Like other birds, it has hollow bones to allow flight. But woodpeckers also have two clawed front toes and two clawed back toes so it can climb up and down trees and short, stiff tail feathers to brace it against the tree while it is working.

While other birds have their bills attached to their skulls, the woodpecker has a spongy tissue between its bill and its skull to act as a shock absorber.

Other birds have their tongues attached to the back of their mouths. The woodpecker, though, has its tongue attached to the “hydroid”, a bone and elastic tissue structure which loops around its skull.

When the woodpecker’s pecking hits an insect tunnel, it will send out its five-inch, sticky, barbed tongue to get its food.

Go ahead, try and evolve a man watching a woodpecker.

Very simply, God is the first, best and greatest laborer.

We can’t say it any better than He did Himself in the first chapter of John: “Through Him all things were made; without Him nothing was made that has been made. In Him was life, and that life was the light of man.”

Now, “Consider the ravens [or the woodpeckers]: they do not sow or reap, they have no storeroom or barn; yet God feeds them. And how much more valuable you are than birds!” (Luke 12:24)