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Chaos is the state of disorder, the opposite of order. It is a state of unpredictability, of randomness, of disarray—a state incompatible with life. Chaos—disorder—in society causes anxiety, terror, and harm.
Cosmos is the state of order, of dispelling chaos and establishing predictability. It is a state of organization, of cooperation, of function—a state required for life. Cosmos—order—brings calm, peace, and health.
Order is of God; chaos is of Satan.
Order—organized form, function, structure, and harmonious cooperation—is required for anything to be beautiful, like the rapturous chords of a symphony. Order never happens randomly or by accident. It never arises without purposeful, intelligent action. God is our Creator, the source of order, beauty, and life. When God created, He brought order; He built the fabric of the universe—the cosmos—by dispersing energy and applying His design laws; He also continuously sustains their operations.
God’s laws are the protocols that govern all reality, the laws that bring predictability, reliability, and order to the universe, such as the law of gravity, the laws of physics and health, and the moral laws.
Satan is the author of confusion, of disorder, of chaos. He is described as the “man of lawlessness” (2 Thessalonians 2:3), the one who violates God’s design protocols for life and seeks to establish a system of made-up rules and arbitrary penalties. By deviating from God’s order, Satan’s way causes chaos, disorder, pain, suffering, and death. In other words, Satan’s way is against God’s law, outside of God’s law, without God’s law—i.e., lawless.
This state of lawlessness is called sin, which is a state of being out of harmony with God, out of harmony with the protocols He built life to operate upon, out of order—a state that is disorderly, chaotic, irrational, and destructive.
Salvation is when, through our trust in Jesus, God restores us to well-ordered living, when God writes His living law upon our hearts and minds (Hebrews 8:10); it is being at-one with God and Jesus, being united in the bonds of love and trust, in harmony with God.
Satan’s kingdom is built upon chaos and disorder, a world in which people and nations operate by their own rules that violate God’s design. And what are we experiencing in society today? Ever-increasing chaos, anarchy, discord, conflict, disorganization, bedlam, and unruliness—a state of lawlessness. Despite the far too many human laws, mandates, regulations, and rules, society is becoming ever more disordered, which causes more fear, which inflames selfishness, which leads to more chaos.
For a society to be well-ordered, its people must make orderly decisions in the governance of themselves and in the actions they take in how they relate to others. This cannot be achieved by imposed laws, external threats, and infliction of punishments. A society of well-ordered people requires those people to have internalized the principles of God as the basis for their actions.
John Adams, the second President of the United States, assisted Thomas Jefferson in drafting into the Declaration of Independence the truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”—because he understood that a well-ordered society requires its people to be moral and self-governed. He wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[1]
James Madison, the fourth U.S. President, a Founding Father, and a framer of the U.S. Constitution, wrote that our Constitution requires “sufficient virtue among men for self-government,” otherwise, “nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.”[2]
Sin causes people to be afraid and selfish, greedy and cruel, and exploitive and untrustworthy. Without Jesus renewing their hearts and minds, individuals unavoidably become more abusive, deceitful, and self-centered. Such people seek more wealth, power, and control for self and will hurt others to get it. Without the Holy Spirit recreating virtue within the heart, society decays into chaos, with increasing crime, drug abuse (including state legalization and sponsoring of it), breakdown of families (including the state arbitrarily changing what marriage is, what God-designed male-female identity and relationships are), domestic violence, and with more dishonest and exploitive leaders, corrupt and deceitful media, and practices and policies that cause more harm, chaos, and suffering.
Chaos causes harm; being harmed—physically, emotionally, spiritually—causes pain and suffering, which inflames fear, and this fear causes people to become more survival driven, more willing to lash out against others to protect themselves, to make themselves feel safe, and to find safe spaces. And such people will band together with others into various factions, whether tribes, gangs, or political parties, to gain greater power for their group in order to force their ways upon others—all to make self feel more secure and less afraid. But this only causes more conflict, fear, and chaos, and society rapidly decays to the point in which the people become so desperate to feel safe that they welcome a totalitarian ruler and rules to restore some semblance of order—as we see in China and North Korea.
A different kind of society arises from the godly order of a moral and religious people who are mature in character and self-governed, who practice the principles of godly altruism, love for truth, and liberty of conscience—the principles espoused in the founding documents of the United States. Such a society is built upon common values inherent in our equality as beings created in the image of God. These common values include respect for the freedoms of others, freedom of speech and religion, freedom of conscience and to disagree, freedom to travel, assemble, and conduct commerce, and the right to have a truly free and honest press. Such a society creates an atmosphere capable of sustaining greater cooperation and tolerance even with divergent ideas, perspectives, beliefs, and attitudes. We become a people united on common principles, the United States of America, and such a people will rise to greatness.
How Chaos Attacks Order
But these godly principles are under attack by the enemy of God, and society is decaying into chaos—and that decay is predictable, purposeful, and a strategic goal of the enemies of good. Chaos is the unavoidable result of destroying in the hearts and minds of people the truth about God, the truth that we are created as image bearers of our incredible God of love, and replacing it with the godless theory of evolution, which teaches that chaotic forces are the source of life and that we bear the image of wild animals in which only the strongest, the most vicious, the most willing to kill competitors, survives.
The enemies of good, the enemies of God, are active in advancing a variety of theories that are all rooted in the lie that there is no God and that humans evolved from random chaotic forces of nature. If the philosophy, movement, or idea being advanced incites fear rather than love, inflames conflict rather than cooperation, increases hopelessness rather than inspiring hope, requires hurting another to advance the cause, you can be sure that movement or philosophy is part of chaos and is designed to destroy the image of God in people, break down societal order, and prepare people to accept a powerful dictator as their savior.
Those who want a totalitarian form of government want to destroy individual morality, to destroy families, to destroy the principles found in the U.S. Constitution, to have more chaos in society, more isolation, and more fear so that the people will eventually be so frustrated, frightened, discouraged, and exhausted that they will exchange their liberty for security.
Benjamin Franklin understood this threat and said, “Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
The only way for a secure and ordered society to exist is when it is populated by mature and ordered people who seek, to the best of their ability, to live out God’s design laws for life, who love others as themselves, who are honest in their dealings, and who respect the liberties of others.
But the Bible predicts that as the second coming of Christ approaches, those who have rejected the Creator God (design law) will become more predominant in society. As godlessness/lawlessness spreads and people harden their hearts to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit respects their choice and is slowly withdrawn from the earth. Without God’s restraining power, chaos increases. Society experiences ever-increasing violence, decadence, corruption, villainy, vulgarity, and human debasement. People will feel less and less secure and, in order to feel safe, they will embrace the rise of the beastly powers of Revelation, the totalitarian rulers that will arise claiming to do “justice” to “make things right” by using external power, restrictions of liberty, and control over people.
All but the very elect will be deceived because the actions of the beast will have the superficial appearance of order—maintained by government surveillance, community infiltrators and informers, secret police, oppressive restrictions on liberty, and coercive enforcement.
In the world today, chaos is increasing. God allows this because He gives us real freedom; as people reject Him, He lets them have what they have chosen and withdraws His presence, and the only possible result is chaos. God also allows this to occur gradually, as a mercy, to provide real-time evidence of how reality works so that every human being has the opportunity to see for themselves what happens when people reject God and His design laws for life—chaos!
Godly order, life, and health are only possible by functioning in harmony with God’s design laws for life:
This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people (Hebrews 8:10 NIV84).
I invite you to choose God, choose order, choose life by asking God to write His law into your heart and mind, to live out the methods and principles of God in how you treat others, and to reject the lie that we can have a better world by having more government, more man-made laws, more mandates, and the loss of more freedoms.
[1] From John Adams to Massachusetts Militia, 11 October 1798, Founders Online, National Archives, accessed Feb. 28, 2020, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102.
[2] James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 55.
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