Play to work or work to play?

It must have been quite a sight---like the landscape of lifeless dolls in Francis Schaeffer's film Whatever Happened to the Human Race? We learn, as if in defiance of Cecil B. DeMille grandeur, that most of the generation of Israelites in Moses' day were lost. The ESV says, "they were overthrown in the wilderness." Another version reads, "their bodies were scattered over the desert" (1 Corinthians 10:5)

Only a little earlier, their mouths had been full of laughter as they watched the Red Sea snap into service for them against Egypt's finest, and a common rock do an imitation of a water faucet for their drinking pleasure (verses 2, 4). But now nature was working against them: snakes, plagues, disease. And in the end, there was only the hollow sound of wind whistling over their graves.

What crime was so heinous that it could account for such judgment? Murder? Rape? Robbery? Here is the writ of indictment: "The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play" (v.7).

I had always read that as an orgy, perhaps a description of the golden-calf-making party. But today I was thinking it over. There are two possible postures one can have toward one's gainful employment-and-recreation ratio. Do we see our recreation as a means to being reenergized for work? (That is, re-creation). Or do we work at our jobs mainly so that, come the weekend, we can "rise up to play"? Which mode serves the other? Which is the goal?

It seems to me the weekend mindset waxes in our day, as the gap narrows between a doomed generation and our own. The Bible passage adds this sobering note: "Now these things happened to them as an example . . . they were written down for our instruction" (v.11).

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