Remember! When I refer to person in the Godhead in any blog, I am referring either to singular person (one-of-three) or to the collective person (three-in-one) of the Triune.
We ended last blog with the question, Chaos, what’s with all that?
To talk about chaos, patient reader, we first need to see that humankind, until recently, viewed chaos entirely negatively. Chaos was seen by humankind as a disruptive, disorderly and distinctly unpleasant process. Encarata defines chaos as “a state of complete disorder and confusion.” In fact, since earliest Biblical times, only God has been seen as the master of chaos, specifically of the chaos seen as the earliest condition of the universe—“COSMOLOGY the unbounded space and formless matter supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe (Encarta)”. However, in the Twentieth Century, new theories of order, or the lack thereof, appeared— among them the theory of what Encarta calls “apparent disorder”.
Well, gentle reader from this brief background, I think you can see that the story of chaos all starts with plentiful unknowns. So plentiful are they, that if I now wrote calling chaos a mega-dynamic composed of unlimited fragments, that would not be a far-fetched statement, regardless of what view one takes on chaos (that’s if I should choose to say that). That idea has a certain clarity to commend it, actually. But instead, I will choose to call chaos God’s secrets, much simpler. Bet you thought I had forgotten about that phrase taken from the Title of last blog. But no, I haven’t. Timing is everything, dear tour companion, and waiting for answers sometimes makes the answers more dazzling, don’t you think? So, yes, God does keep secrets. And the secrets of chaos figure large among them.
Examples of God’s general secrets include, for one, how He does not let us know the day and hour of our death.
He does not let us know the day and hour of the final day of the end of times (Matthew 24:36: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but my Father only.”).
God The Father gave Jesus a veil of forgetfulness for those years prior to His ministry, so that He would not unduly suffer for the goodness He was sent to deliver for us.
Scripture itself is exact in its content but not exhaustive, kind companion—not all is revealed, much remains secret from us.
Scripture calls God’s secrets His mysteries (Colossians 1:26: “the mystery which has been hidden for ages and from generations, but now has been revealed to His saints.”).
So how does chaos abide in God’s secrets?
Chaos resides in God’s secrets in a well, a keeping place of God’s secrets. God both draws from and supplies this well with knowledge, information and infinite possibilities, practicalities and realities. He governs and imposes order on chaos and all other particulars. God sees chaos positively, as a dynamic because that is the way that He orders it. And under His control, chaos is fashioned as He wills. In the Garden of the New Creation, God’s dominion over chaos is revealed. I do not think it difficult to see that He makes the Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil a containment symbol for His Chaos Management (Genesis 2:9, 16-17).
As scripture insists, in all things, God is sovereign.
To be continued . . .
No comments:
Post a Comment