Chaos

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day” (Genesis 1:31 ESV).

There’s a theory called Entropy which states that everything is in the process of moving from order to disorder. It certainly doesn’t take much of an imagination to understand from whence this idea originated; one quick scan of the evening news seems to offer conclusive proof that this is true.

Of course, you could arrive at the same idea from reading the Bible. In Genesis 1:31 God completed creation and said it was “very good.” Then, in chapter 2, He creates man and woman. By the start of chapter 3, I think I would have wiped the slate and returned to Genesis 1:2, “The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

God, Himself, felt the need for a “do-over” of sorts. He flooded the earth and spared only Noah, Noah’s wife, his sons and his son’s wives. Yet even after all of that, we failed to give Him the honor and obedience He most assuredly deserved.

We could go on to look at the multiple failures of God’s people from Genesis to Revelation. Murders. Adulteries. Deceptions. Hatred. “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6 ESV). It would appear that chaos had free reign.

Lately, in my own life, things seem to have been in a sort of free-fall. From the recent death of my father to the flu that has kept me miserable for the last several days. The week’s cushion I had for blog posts was quickly eaten up, and I find myself scrambling to write. Chaos.

Yet, for some reason that is totally outside of my natural tendencies, I am not looking at any of this as if it were a result of the world’s decay. I’m not looking at it as divine retribution for sin in may life. I don’t even look at these things as an attack of the enemy, which may hold some merit. Instead, for the first time, I am seeing order in the chaos.

I don’t mean, by that, that God is necessarily orchestrating hardships in my life or anyone else’s life. I simply mean that nothing happens outside of His divine purview. He sees and He allows. Bad things happen to bad people. And bad things happen to good people. And the reverse is true, too. Good things happen to us all (although sometimes we may have difficulty seeing them!).

We don’t have access to the “big picture,” so we often default to the small picture, entropy and chaos. We may feel as though each and every step we take brings us closer to utter devastation. But we are being made into His image. Stones are smoothed and polished only by friction, friction over time.

I’ve come to take comfort in the words of 1 Kings 19:11-13, “And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice. And it was so, when Elijah heard it, that he wrapped his face in his mantle, and went out, and stood in the entering in of the cave.” Chaos was all around Elijah, but he knew that he had to look past the chaos to find God.

It’s my prayer that you and I will always be able to do the same.

Blessings on your day!