If Adam’s “earthly life” was in fact temporary, so also was the job he was given. In other words, even in a sinless world, work would have given way to that eternal rest, worship, and fellowship with God which was from the very beginning prophetically imaged in humankind’s weekly rest, worship, and fellowship with God. This may prove a hard pill to swallow for those who, quite frankly, value work so highly, or so find identity in their occupations, that the promise of a heaven without work sounds like the loss of all they cherish and the dissolution of self (i.e., hell).
We tend towards one of two extremes in our attitudes towards work: either we make too little of it, or we make too much of it. We make too little of work when we regard it with contempt, when we treat it as an evil — albeit a necessary one since it supplies the financial resources necessary to pursue the things we actually value (relationships, possessions, status, leisure, etc.).

Against any such tendency, we need to be reminded that God gave Adam a job immediately after he made him. “The earth was given to man… that he should occupy himself in its cultivation.” Calvin doesn’t hesitate to draw a universal principle from this — not that we should all, in imitation of Adam, set ourselves to farming (or even manual labor), but that we should set ourselves to doing something. “Men were created to employ themselves in some work, and not to lie down in inactivity and idleness.” Indeed, “nothing is more contrary to the order of nature, than to consume life in eating, drinking, and sleeping, while in the meantime we propose nothing to ourselves to do.”

Calvin has much to say, in due course, about how we go about choosing something “to do.” Selecting a job or career is a matter of measuring one’s desires and abilities, and determining how one might best serve God and others — not so much one’s self — with those desires and abilities. The fundamental point here, however, is that work is a good thing, an integral aspect of creaturely existence in a pre-fallen world, and so also in our fallen world. Work is not the product or penalty of humankind’s rebellion against God, granted that some — indeed a fairly significant — degree of frustration has been introduced to all human work in consequence of that rebellion (Gen. 3.18-19).

But recognition of work’s intrinsic goodness can leave us exposed to that other error to be avoided, making too much of work. We make too much of work when we treat it – rather than glorifying and enjoying God – as man’s chief end, or as an indubitably permanent feature of creaturely existence.

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