Thought for Today

Genesis 1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Isaiah 45:18 For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it a chaos, he formed it to be inhabited!): I am the LORD, and there is no other.

1 Corinthians 14:33 for God is a God not of disorder but of peace. (As in all the churches of the saints,

James 3:16 For where there is envy and selfish ambition, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind.

I confess   . . . I prefer order and structure over chaos and disorder. I suspect that is the case for many engineers. In the study of thermodynamics, engineers learn that “Entropy is a thermodynamic state variable that quantifies the probabilistic distribution of accessible microstates in a system . . . Entropy is central to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time.” (en.wikipedia.org) A more simplistic summary of the concept is that entropy is “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder.” (Bing search)

Even if you are not wondering, you will not find Bible verses mentioning thermodynamics or entropy. At least not directly. To the best of our knowledge, none of the authors of the Bible were engineers or physicists. The Bible is not inimical to science or technology; the Bible just isn’t very interested in either. The Bible deals with more  important things. (Please don’t tell anyone I wrote that. Other engineers and scientists will not approve of my admitting that. For engineers and scientists, that is the real inconvenient truth)

It is inescapable, however, that the Bible is definitely biased against chaos, disorder and disarray. Genesis 1:2 offers the basic fact that God did not approve of “formless void and darkness. So  much so that “God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light.” The Creation Story in Genesis is not meant to be a scientific explanation of astrophysics, but, rather, it is meant to confirm God’s action in imposing order over disorder. The concept of an orderly series of distinct creative actions bringing about an orderly universe is deliberate. The primary message for us in this is not the mechanics, it is the author, the initiator of those creative actions.

   For Christians, the words of Jesus offer further insight into the preference for order over chaos. Three times in Matthew’s gospel we find references to the outer darkness, e.g., in the Parable of the Talents we read about the 1 talent slave, “Matthew 25:30 As for this worthless slave, throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'” In Mark’s gospel, in describing “γέεννα, ης, ἡ (also Γέεννα) Gehenna” (Friberg, Analytical Greek Lexicon), which we translate as hell, we read, “Mark 9:47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, 48 where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.”  The inference we can draw from this is that hell is not a desirable destination, that it is beyond the orderly Creation we now know, and is a place of weeping, gnashing, fire and disorder.

As we Christians view the world around us, what are we to think? Does the world in which we live represent God’s orderly Creation or is entropy at work? Do we see “Genesis 1:4 God saw that the light was good” and the repeated references of God’s seeing God’s created stages of Creation as good, or do we see “lack of order or predictability; gradual decline into disorder?”

While I do prefer order, predictability and stability, I know that ‘stuff happens.’ I know that there are those who prefer disorder, unpredictability and instability. I know that Jesus encourages each of us to “Matthew 5:44 . . . Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

More than working to bring about order and predictability, the Bible commands us all to love. And, as Paul wrote, “1 Corinthians 13:13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

Prioritize love, work to further the Kingdom of God, trust God,

Pastor Ray