Friday, September 28, 2018

Order and Chaos


Life is a mixture of order and chaos.  We humans desire and seek order but sometimes create chaos.  Order is when everything makes sense and we feel in control of what is going on.  Chaos may best be defined as the feeling of being out of control. 

In our scriptures God is pictured as constantly wrestling with chaos, the chaos of nature and the chaos of human nature.  Sometimes God prevails and sometimes God fails to prevail.  Example:  Cain kills Abel and God does not stop it.  The blood of Abel is pictured as crying to God and God laments the killing but loses to the chaos within Cain.  Not everything described in the Bible is the will of God!

When we say God is in control of everything that happens we make God responsible for everything that happens. I suppose it matters what you mean by the word “control.” But, if everything happens according to God’s plan, it makes God the author of good and evil.  It turns God into an arbitrary monster who hurts people every day in all sorts of ways.

I know it can be comforting for some to think everything happens to us as part of some grand divine plan but just think about it.  If that’s true, it means the Holocaust was part of God’s plan.  Destructive diseases of every ilk are part of the plan. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and every accident and every suicide, is part of the plan.

Some will argue God has a deeper, longer, grander hidden plan which humans cannot understand.  That is possible, but if that plan includes God committing evil, why would anyone want to worship a God who does such terrible things as part of some mysterious plan?

The life we experience every day tells us order and chaos are real.  Accidents happen.  Diseases are part of life.  Hurricanes and earthquakes are part of nature.  God appears to be wrestling with the chaos of the earth, with the freedom and inconsistency of its human creatures, with the fact we all live on a small blue planet with distinct laws of nature in an obscure part of the universe.

The contest between order and chaos is messy and uncertain but it sure beats the idea of “the plan.”

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