Physicists who’ve studied the Big Bang have said they’re certain that, following the original explosion, for a fraction of a second, the universe was in total chaos. In the milliseconds following the Big Bang, no person or computer could have possibly generated a model predicting the universe as we know it today. The laws of physics were fluid. The variables were infinite. Experts believe there may have been times when two of the three spatial dimensions were expanding while the third was contracting. Chaos!
A seemingly logical conclusion, then, would be that chaos is the most natural state of things, while order is unnatural. We know, however, that it didn’t take long for total chaos to give way to order, and for order to give way to intelligent life, which begs the question:
In a system of total chaos, where did order come from?
This is the question that has kept an untold number of physicists up at night. How was order introduced into the cosmos in the first place, and how did it succeed in subduing the chaos that was so dominant in the young universe? It’s reasonable to wonder if something – or someone – must have introduced and imposed order amidst the chaos, and that it happened on purpose, for a reason, or according to some plan.
This is where the Bible comes along and blows my mind. Written 3,000 years ago, before anybody knew how gravity works or what a cell was, the Book of Genesis says creation happened this way:
In the beginning…everything was formless and empty…darkness covered the surface of the deep (Chaos)…and God said “Let there be light, and there was light, and God separated the darkness from the light, calling the light “day” and the darkness “night.” (Order)
– Genesis 1:1-3
– Genesis 1:1-3
Genesis describes the universe’s transition from total chaos to meaningful order in just three short verses. Chaos, however, won’t go down without a fight, as we’ve seen over the past couple of years. If your life is anything like mine, you’ve probably been feeling like you’re just a little off lately, and you don’t always know why. As hard as you’ve tried to gut-up and muscle your way through it, you can’t fight the feeling that many things in our world today are out of order.
Ezekiel was a prophet of God during the sixth-century BC, when God’s people were living in chaos. The city of Jerusalem was hanging on by a thread, and would soon fall to the Babylonian invaders. In the aftermath of that battle, thirty thousand Jewish leaders and their families were taken into captivity in Babylon, where they lived as strangers in a foreign land for decades. Through Ezekiel, God showed His people a way out of their chaos. Ezekiel’s words often seem harsh, but here’s the thing about escaping chaos: the only way out is to acknowledge that you’re in it, and to be honest about how you got there.
The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, confront Jerusalem with her detestable practices and say, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says to Jerusalem: Your ancestry and birth were in the land of the Canaanites; your father was an Amorite and your mother a Hittite. On the day you were born…no one looked on you with pity or had compassion enough to [care] for you. Rather, you were thrown out into the open field, for on the day you were born you were despised. Then I passed by and saw you kicking about in your blood, and as you lay there in your blood I said to you, “Live!” I made you grow like a plant of the field.
– Ezekiel 16:1-8
– Ezekiel 16:1-8
In their civilization’s infancy, the Hebrew people were nothing in the eyes of the rest of the world. Many scholars believe the word Hebrew comes from the ancient word ‘Apiru, which was a slang term civilized Egyptians used to describe bedouin tribes who subsisted as scavengers, wandering the countryside. The ‘Apiru weren’t known for their ethnicity or nationality; all they had in common was their status as nomads and scavengers. Around 1500 BC a great famine brought the region to its knees, and many of these nomadic tribes found their way to Egypt, because it was the only place anyone could find any food. Many of them stayed in Egypt to work, but they were still called ‘Apiru. Then they grew in number and became a threat to the Egyptians, so the Pharaoh made them slaves – ‘Apiru (Hebrew) slaves (see: the Book of Exodus).
Their time in Egypt allowed the people called Hebrews to survive and, eventually, to thrive in a hostile environment. Before that time, they were nothing but dirt-poor nobodies, but they were somebody to God. That’s essentially what God said through Ezekiel: “Even when you were nobody to anybody, you were somebody special to me.”
“But you trusted in your beauty and used your fame to become a prostitute. You lavished your favors on anyone who passed by and your beauty became his. At every street corner you built your lofty shrines and degraded your beauty, spreading your legs with increasing promiscuity to anyone who passed by. You adulterous wife! You prefer strangers to your own husband! All prostitutes receive gifts, but you give gifts to all your lovers, bribing them to come to you from everywhere for your illicit favors. So in your prostitution you are the opposite of others; no one runs after you for your favors. You are the very opposite, for you give payment and none is given to you.”
– Ezekiel 16:15, 25, 32-34
– Ezekiel 16:15, 25, 32-34
Can you feel God’s pain here? Cheating cuts a person deep. A few years back, a married couple – let’s call them Jake and Jenny – came to talk with me because they were going through a crisis. They’d been together for six years, and for most of that time, Jenny had put her personal dreams on hold to work two jobs and put Jake through medical school. During his residency, Jake met someone else and started having an affair, and when Jenny found out, she was doubly devastated. Not only was she heartbroken by his betrayal; she also grieved the loss of all that time, energy, and money she had invested in a man who was apparently willing to throw it all away. I’ll never forget the moment she sat in my office with her head in her hands and whispered, repeatedly, “How could you do this to me?!”
And that’s exactly what God said to the people through Ezekiel: after all I’ve done for you, and as true as I’ve been to you, how could you break my heart like this? But, as is usually the case with God, that’s not where this story ends.
“This is what the Sovereign Lord says: ‘I will deal with you as you deserve, because you have despised my oath by breaking the covenant. Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish an everlasting covenant with you…and you will know that I am the Lord. Then, when I make atonement for you for all you have done, you will remember and be ashamed and never again open your mouth because of your humiliation,’ declares the Sovereign Lord.”
– Ezekiel 16:59-60, 62-63
– Ezekiel 16:59-60, 62-63
I’ve seen a lot of amazing things in my life, but near the top of the list was the time I witnessed that woman – who put her husband through Medical School only to have him break her heart in a million pieces – look her man in the eye and say, “I still love you. I want to make this work. We can try to start again.”
There is nothing more heroic than when someone who’s got every reason to walk away chooses to stay – to stay in love, to stay and fight, to stay and start again. That’s how God is toward us. No matter what you’ve done in the past, or how many times you’ve chosen this world’s dark chaos over His light and His love, God still says to you,
I want to love you infinitely more than I want to leave you.
My desire to love you far exceeds my instinct to punish you.
I still love you.
I want to make this work.
We can try to start again.
When was the last time you told God that you want His love more than anything else? When you make that decision, God will always be faithful to show you the way out of whatever chaos you’re in, and to reorder your life according to His perfect will.
