Christ or Chaos!
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The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. - Genesis 1:2
INTRODUCTION
For the Christian, one of the surest ways to develop an unwanted migraine, is to try imagining what things were like just before the creation. You know, that time when there was no time and that space where there was no space. Just nothingness. No light. No dark. No material. No time. Nothing.
And the reason this is such an impossible task for us to consider is because our material minds attempt to rationalize our world by finding material meaning. When we see problems our brains were designed by God to combat confusion by applying orderly and logical solutions. But when we impose that kind of material order upon an immaterial state (as in reality before creation), we attempt to impose categories on things that had no category. We attempt to think of a thing like nothingness, in the same logical categories we use to interpret somethingness. And that sort of madness devolves immediately into the kind of head smashing befuddlement that gives you the headache we were talking about before.
Let me say this a little bit more plainly. Your mind can only think in somethings. You cannot, and were never meant to, be able to comprehend a nothing. And yet, this actually does get at what I am hoping to talk about in today’s episode.
You see, while we cannot possibly conceive of a thing like a nothing, no pun intended, and while we cannot travel back to see God’s unique and triune existence that He had in eternity, we can observe the things God did after He made time and space. And the first thing God did, to kickstart the whole creation project, was to create a formless and void kind of pre-matter substance that He would use to craft and design all created reality.
While being careful not to venture too far down speculation road, it seems clear enough that Genesis 1:2 describes a pre-creation material that God would use to shape all created reality. It was this material that He used to make atoms, light waves, compounds, galaxies, beasts, and man. It was the material before the material if you will
Now, while we do not know what this matter consisted of, we do know some of its properties from Scripture. According to the text, this material was formless and void, it was cloaked in a kind of impenetrable darkness, it had a surface, of sorts, that had significant immeasurable depths, and was filled with a kind of primordial waters that the Spirit decided to hover over. This could use some explanation.
The word used for this “formless” substance comes from Hebrew word תֹהוּ (To-Hu), which means unreality and confusion. It is the kind of word you might expect to find in Lewis Carol’s poem Jabberwocky and on the same philosophical plane as a square circle. Idiomatically speaking, To-Hu means non-material material; it means a shapeless shape; it means an unformed form.
It is a material that looks and acts a lot like liquid chaos. It is a wild, untamed, unformed mass of potential energy that God immediately sets about the work of subduing, taming, and forming. In fact, the Bible is not the only ancient book that describes creation in this way. As you look across the ancient world, the majority of all creation myths begin with a watery chaos that the god’s endeavor to tame and subdue. And while we know that these myths are not true in the same sense that the Bible is true, they show us a wonderful oral tradition of how the ancients viewed creation; God’s war against chaos.
THE SUBDUING OF CHAOS
Chaos may have been how reality began, but God had no plans to keep it in that unkempt and unseemly state. For as soon as formlessness and voided materials existed, the Spirit of God was said to be hovering, an avian sign of rule and dominion, over the waters. Take for instance, Deuteronomy 32:11
Like an eagle that stirs up its nest, That hovers over its young,
Using that same word in Genesis 1:2, the Spirit was hovering over and exercising rule and authority over the materials that belonged to Him. Like an eagle that keeps its chicks from bumbling flightlessly out of the nest, the Spirit was holding the chaos in bounds. Like a prison subdues criminals from escape, so the Spirit had chaos on lockdown, which ushered in the next phase of creation.
THE SHAPING OF CHAOS
As the Spirit held the chaos in check, God said: “Let there be light” and good light was formed. He said let there be good skies, with good planets, and good suns, moons, and stars. Good gasses, minerals, waters, birds, and good animals. And in the end, He said let there be man, which He alone called very good.
God was not only subduing the chaos He was pushing it back like an advancing King. He was universally extending His Kingdom of ordered reality to the point where chaos had no place. So that by the time you get to Genesis 1:28, there was no more formlessness, void, or chaos left. The enemy was vanquished. All that remained was God’s perfect rule over an orderly creation. This was God’s work and it became the paradigm for human work as well.
MADE TO VANQUISH CHAOS
Simply put, God made human beings to be like Him. Genesis 1:28 tells us that we were made in His image and likeness, which means we were made to resemble Him. And by resemble, I do not mean that labored stare when a person is meticulously determining which parent the child most looks like. I mean that in a small but pure way, we look like Him in His character, we think thoughts like Him in our minds, we end up doing the kinds of things God does by design. This is how we were programmed. And since God began creation with a war on chaos, humans made in His image, will find their meaning and purpose in joining in this fight. We were made for this, quite literally.
In Genesis 2, God reenacts His cosmic war on chaos on a local earthly scale. He first makes a world filled with void. Like a blank canvas before a master artist, the world was empty and ready to be decorated. The Bible tells us that there was no shrub, no plant, no tree, just a dusty ball of spinning dirt orbiting around the sun (Gen. 2:5). The text also tells us that there was a watery mist surrounding that void which reminds us an awful lot of the waters the Spirit hovered over in Genesis 1:2. And it was at this point that God began the process of bringing order to the void.
For instance, the Lord took the dust of the ground and fashioned the man. The Lord took the man and fashioned the woman. And then the Lord put the two lovebirds in the garden penthouse suite that He, Himself, had fully decorated. The rest of the earth still looked like a wilderness and that is kind of important.
Think about it this way, God put Adam and Eve into a well ordered and beautifully decorated garden. He did not start them off in the murky chaos that He began in, but He does start them off with a purpose. Their purpose was to be a blessed people who knew this Chaos crushing God and because they were made in His image, they were called to imitate Him in subduing the formless void.
Adam and Eve were put in a garden to fill it full of people. When it became full with human life, they were to extend its borders like God stretched out creation. They were to grab the hoe, the rake, the shovel, and the seeds, and cultivate life and order all across a barren world. They were to chase away the chaos; they were to bring order to all the parts of this world that still remained formless; they were made to imitate their God!
THE UNLEASHING OF CHAOS
But sadly, the campaign on chaos got as far off the ground as an angry peacock. Maybe less so. Satan with the exact opposite aims as God, slithered in before there was a platoon of humans and got to them when there were only two. Like God, they were supposed to see the chaos-inducing serpent as a threat to be chased, not a friend to be embraced. But his lie fooled them and he became their new king.
He divided them up into gender factions, he separated the woman from the man, and by getting them to defy their God and their God ordained purpose, he tore down the levy of protection and broke down the bulwarks keeping them safe, which brought a tsunami of chaos called sin on top of their heads.
Instead of a soul beautifully formed and ordered into the image of God, it fell into a mangled and twisted mess of confusion and formlessness. Instead of a heart filled with the knowledge of God, sin rendered the heart diseased, void, empty, and barren. Like the original To-hu pre-creation material, depths of darkness descended upon the surface of the human conscience. But this time, God’s Holy Spirit was no longer hovering over these sinful people. They were under Satan’s charge, who is known as the author of confusion (i.e. chaos).
In their sin, chaos rose up against them and consumed them in spiritual confusion. And that is what sin is, the unleashing of chaos upon our soul leaving it permanently disoriented and disfigured. Whenever we sin, we do not simply gratify unholy desires, we invite emptiness, despair, and confusion willingingly into the very core of our being. The earth became a domain of deep voided darkness and everyone born into were subject to the author of confusion.
Thankfully, God would not allow the chaos to win.
THE DEATH OF CHAOS
Adam and Eve were condemned at the tree. They were marched out of the garden like POW soldiers from a captured city with no hope of return. The earth and every living thing in it was subjected to futility and chaos. The human story that began with such high hopes looked irredeemably broken. But, God had a plan.
You see, littered throughout the story of the Old Testament, is the promise that God will come and make war with the chaos. Since chaos and sin plunged our world back into deep darkness, He will come bringing light. Since chaos and sin brought an empty void to the heart of man, He will come as a man and fill His people with a new Spirit-hovering. Since chaos and sin bring manglement and disfigurement to the soul, He would be mangled and disfigured so that we could be made well. He came imitating God perfectly, as Adam should have done, chasing away the chaos, and bringing order, beauty, and life back to the soul of man!
When Jesus died He delivered the death nail to Satan. When He rose, He ended the tyranny of sin and brought the power of a new creation. And, because every good story needs redemption, He rescued those who were lost and elevated them back to their God ordained purpose. Like Adam, we have been restored to be a blessed people (i.e. the Church). We have been restored to be a fruitful people, multiplying disciples, winning converts, and extending the Kingdom of God all across the world.
Like Adam, Jesus began this work in a garden. But unlike Adam, Jesus multiplied. He began with twelve, and then sent them out to gather others. He formed a church! And soon, that family began doing what Jesus was doing. They filled Jerusalem full of the Gospel. When 3000 people came to know Jesus in that city, they did what Adam should have done and extended the Kingdom! They went to Judah, until it was filled with new creation people. Then they moved to Samaria. After Samaria, the Roman empire. After Rome, the rest of the earth and this was by design. Jesus came as the true and better Adam, to do what Adam should have done, by multiplying a family, who would advance upon the barren world, in order to subdue the chaos. This is what the church is for!
THE CHURCH AS “CHRIST OR CHAOS”
Our role, as freed people, is to get back into the fight. We were not made to sit on our jollies, singing Christian boy band songs disguised as worship music, listening to self help garbage from a smiling toothy wolf, going home to live like nothing is different. Church is not an event. Church is not for you. Church is not about you! Church was not designed to meet your needs, your wants, your desires.
The Church is the family Jesus chose to go to war against the chaos with. The Church is the ever multiplying army of a King who intends to advance. The Church is the lion hearted bride who will advance upon the territory of hell, who won’t be able to do a damned thing to stop it, literally. The Church is the blood bought, Spirit-filled means by which God will chase away the chaos and fully reclaim this world.
This means that the church is not a safe haven for cowards or an ivory tower gathering of snobs who thumb their noses to the world. It is not a gathering of believers who are waiting on Jesus to come and deliver us from the barren world, it is the Adam-Like, Christ empowered, servant of God who does the advancing.
How do we do this? Not with weapons, swords, or angry tweets. We advance with the Gospel. We take back territory inch by inch until this whole world has been reclaimed. To do this, we plant churches in cities where there are no churches. We start Bible studies at our jobs where there are few if any Christians. We go on college campuses and herald Christ. We go outside of abortion clincs and plead for life. We have lots of children and raise them up as fiercely Christian. We adopt Children and show them God’s redemption. We identify every area of brokenness and sin this world is plagued with and we get to work to see it reclaimed, redeemed and renewed! The purpose of the Church is Christ or Chaos!
WHAT IS “CHRIST OR CHAOS”?
When we say Christ or Chaos, we are issuing a battle cry. We are calling all Christians to make a choice. You can live in your sin. You can wallow in the muck of confusion and despair. You can sit idly by while the serpent slaps you around. Or you can join King Jesus.
When Christ is firmly held, the darkness flees by the power of His Gospel. When Christ is firmly held, chaos is chased away. Where Christ is firmly held, families thrive and children grow up catechized and loving Christ. Where Christ is firmly held lost people are found, churches are planted, Christian entrepreneurs start God-honoring businesses, abortion is abolished, Godless politicians lose their jobs, missionaries get sent to remote regions, and the world gets to see a holistic picture of who our victorious King truly is!
But whenever Christ is not firmly held, chaos creeps in. When Christ is not firmly held in families, children grow up and join the colorful alphabet troop or bow to Marx instead of Christ. When Christ is not firmly held, evangelistic zeal not only wanes, but Christians stop sharing the Gospel all together. When Christ is not firmly held, new churches are not planted, and old churches abandon the Gospel for social activism and inclusion. When Christ is not held, godless companies like Apple, Amazon, and Facebook have a stranglehold on society and get to ramrod their chaos upon the people. When Christ is not firmly held more children are killed in the womb, more darkness envelopes this nation, and less people catch a glimpse of who Christ is.
We have a choice. Christ or chaos. And as for me and my house, we will be choosing Christ!
