Order from Chaos
In the beginning God created… (Genesis 1:1). God created order from chaos, which does not mean He created it of out the laundry room of a family with four boys under ten. Literally, the Hebrew Bible says earth was formless and void, which means He created it out of nothing. The nothing is not as big a deal as the order, however, for order gives us a huge advantage.
In an orderly universe, things get predictable. If you plant carrots, you get more carrots, which allows agriculture. When male and female bovines get together, they produce calves, which allows cattle ranching. Stars appear in predictable locations, which allows for navigation, which allows for trade. From weather patterns to crop cycles to the arrangement of organs in our bodies, God’s order gives us the ability to do many things more efficiently.
We call the observation of God’s order science. Science makes life better, but, great as it is, science tells us nothing about the meaning of life, much less how people or God work. For that, we need God’s revelation, which is one reason to read the whole Bible—to know how God works and how people tick.
Around 600 years ago, science started wiggling out from under the idea that everything was created by God’s design. Science soon took on a life of its own. Since then, it’s become an idol, a fake god with its own set of doctrines and commandments. Few scientists accept the Bible’s creation account, preferring natural selection to explain how we came to be. But like all idols, science falls short. Natural selection cannot explain love, meaningful existence, or how the universe is so finely tuned to allow for life on Earth. Nor can it explain how Moses got so much of the creation story right.
According to MIT scholar and physicist Gerald Schroeder, the probability of Moses guessing the order of creation is impossible without revelation from an intelligent Being. That is to say, mathematics prove that only God could create such a finely tuned universe and only God could have revealed it to Moses thousands of years before science discovered it. Schroeder aligns scientific calculations of the history of the universe with the creation story, and by applying Einstein’s Law of Relativity to the equations the biblical account checks out. So, people who puff at the Bible are full of smoke. The Bible is right when calculations include what science has learned about time, mass, and energy. The math does not lie, nor does the Bible.
Many people can tell you something important about nature, like which foods are edible, or how to get more sleep. But only God can give your life meaning so that family dinners are fun, and sleep comes easily. When you’re tired of going through the motions, tired of working to buy stuff to impress people who don’t like you anyway, frustrated by the banality, arrogance, and outright deception of the world’s system, then you may be hungry for God. God feeds hungry people. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled (Matthew 5:6). Perhaps you will start the year by asking Him to fill you.
—Hunger, January 1, book available here
