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| Chaos and Order: a visual puzzle in stained glass |
I read yet another
Christian thought-for-the-day piece this morning that celebrated God's ability
to bring order out of chaos. Made me wonder why chaos gets such a bad rap.
There is a popular
strand of thought that sees order as good and chaos as evil. In religious
circles that thought is extended to position God as the lord of order and the
arch-enemy Satan as the presumptuous lord over chaos. But surely that's not the
Biblical view?
God is Lord of all – Lord of both order and chaos.
Certainly, God
created the structure of the universe out of the formless void (Genesis 1). God
provides physical boundaries so that the
sea stays in its place (Jeremiah 5:22). Gravity so that the stars stay in their
place (Psalm 8:3). Psychological boundaries to guide our personal growth –
like the Law, which acts as a kind of tutor (Galatians 3:24).
But God also created
the Flood (Genesis 6-8), deliberately caused confusion (e.g. Genesis 11:7) and
watches over a world dominated by entropy (Romans 8:20-21). God can calm the
storm (Psalm 107:29) just as Jesus did (Matthew 8, Mark 4, Luke 8), but God created
the storm in the first place (Psalm 107:25)! Jesus raised several people from
death, but God had allowed them to die, and they all presumably died again
later on.
I think it is time
we stopped trying to escape from chaos. Let's stop thinking that when things go
a bit crazy and out of (our) control that God is absent – or even worse, that
God must be angry with us. God can be found in the good, the bad, the happy,
the sad, the order and the chaos, because God is always and everywhere present.
God is as wild as
fire and as uncontrollable as the wind. God cannot be contained or explained by
any systematic, ordered, analysis but will always be mysterious and never
fully known. My wife is mysterious and never fully known, and I take that to be
a good thing! Why would we expect otherwise of God?
Do you wish we could
escape the chaos of suffering and unknowing, and find a world of order and
certainty? Why would we expect that to be either possible or helpful?
Of course we could
not survive without a level of ordered predictability. But meaning and
creativity and growth are found in the disruptions of life. Better to embrace
those chaotic disruptions than try to escape them.
It's ok not to know.
It's ok to experience confusion, uncertainty, pain. It's ok to not be in
control. In fact my bet is that we will find God in the chaos.
May you have order
and safety when you need it.
And may you have
chaos and risk … when you need it.
