In the popular 1960’s television show, Get Smart, our hero, Maxwell Smart and his organization Control, were locked in a weekly battle with the evil organization, Kaos. While it lacked a certain philosophical gravitas, it still serves to remind us of the ongoing struggle we face every day of our lives. We also want to control the chaos in our world, and while it may be as simple as killing the weeds on our perfectly manicured lawns, it may also be as complex as avoiding the threat of nuclear war, either way, we all seem to think that disorder is a really bad idea.

Everywhere we look we see a universe that operates in an orderly fashion. When we look to the heavens we see planets dance to a mathematically choreographed routine. When we listen to the earth we hear a beautiful symphony emerge as each unique ecosystem performs together in orchestral harmony. When we listen with our scientific headphones we hear cells hum with the sound of precision machinery. The order of the natural world has inspired mankind to take this primeval principal and use it to construct human societies. While many of them have been based upon flawed ideologies, those who promoted them still knew that it was impossible to build them without some sort of order.

Despite the fact that order is the air we breathe, our young people still wheeze when they inhale its rules and regulations. They complain that authority squeezes the air out of their lungs and then proceed to a safe space where they take a couple of puffs of their tolerance inhaler and breath a sigh of relief. Ironically, once they catch their breath they try to silence those who disagree with them by asking the courts to knock the constitutional air out of them. Unable to practice postmodern disorder on their own terms they are forced to turn to the very people who are in charge of order.

Our youth love to think they live in a subjective world, but then awake every morning to the sound of an objective alarm clock reminding them its time for school. They try to convince us that truth is fluid but do so from a solidly built societal boat. And while they want the postmodern wind to take them where it may, they soon find that they need a metanarrative map to navigate their way back to Port Reality for much needed food and supplies. In their zeal to deconstruct the world, they still find themselves awkwardly penciling their protests into a daily organizer. Sadly, our young people fail to recognize that their postmodern one-man show can only be performed on a world stage built with sound engineering concepts, in a theater built to safety code, for a crowd that observes proper audience etiquette. Life without order is unlivable. So how can we use the orderliness of the world as an apologetic tool for our postmodern youth?

God spoke through His creational words, His written Word, and His incarnate WORD, and while many of our young people will reject both the Bible and Jesus, they still all read from the book of nature, the first offering in the Greatest Story Ever Told trilogy. The reason the book of nature continues to be a bestseller is because it is a book of order. It starts with an opening line sunrise and concludes with a sunset exclamation point. It allows us to schedule water skiing in the summer and snow boarding in the winter. It provides the standard by which we evaluate the lifelikeness of our video games. It provides us with a place to recharge our batteries and realign our priorities when we feel drained by the disordered affections of our fellow man. Ultimately, it represents an ongoing natural liturgy, and if we listen closely enough, we may just hear God’s daily homily reminding us that we walk on Hallowed Ground. How sad that despite being surrounded by divine discourse we often don’t hear a word He says.

God created the world in a sequential fashion declaring each step to be good, and when He completed His work, He stepped back and conferred a very good blessing over the functional integrity of the whole. The reason we love order is because every time we encounter it our ears are tickled by the echo of this ancient celestial benediction. The order that we all desire is best exemplified by the Hebrew word, shalom, which we translate as peace, but which means something far more than just a lack of conflict, rather, it implies a harmonious life where all is right in God’s world. Shalom is the Garden order that Adam and Eve experienced before they disrupted it with their arboreal atrocity. I think it is helpful to recognize that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil can also be viewed as the Tree of the Knowledge of Order and Disorder because when Adam and Eve partook of its fruit their once perfectly functioning world was transformed into a bureaucratic mess. Sadly, drawn away by the ssssiren song of Siegfried they opened up a KAOS recruiting office in the wilderness and plunged their offspring into an ongoing battle between order and disorder.

Our youth are turned off by the word “sin” because they define it as just a violation of arbitrary laws or rules imposed by an oppressive authority figure. So it may be more appropriate for us to describe sin as acting in a way that is inconsistent with the order that God has already established. The universe was conceived in the mind of God, therefore, when we act contrary to His thoughts we are basically telling Him that He is out of His mind. Sin represents disdain for God’s logical thought process. If, as I mentioned in my previous blogs, the world speaks to us in spiritual ways, and that amongst the grandeur we hear groans, then God’s order is the standard that allows us to discern natures cry for help. God created the world to operate in a perfect way so we need to question the sanity of anyone who tries to rewrite the instruction manual because when we put words into His mouth the world ends up looking like a badly overdubbed martial arts film.

We need to help our young people get reacquainted with the Orderer because He is the One who makes life livable. The order He established reminds us to set our spiritual watches by the recurrent peeling of His natural bell. He embedded order into nature not to create mindless routine, but to bring Him back to mind. One of the consistent themes in the Bible is God’s call to remember the ways in which He made Himself known to His people. Thankfully, God makes it easy for us by meeting us in the sun and the rain, the morning and evening, and the fall and the spring, and even though we frequently fail to show up, He continues to schedule meetings with us in His daily planner.

God’s thoughts are not top secret, they are available to anyone with ears to hear and eyes to see, so we need to resist the temptation to tell others that they need a dogmatic Cone of Silence to hear His voice. If we are to effectively evangelize our postmodern youth we need to Get Smart and show them that working for Kaos is ultimately a losing proposition and then introduce them to the One who is really in Control.

For God is not a God of confusion but of peace (shalom). (1 Corinthians 14: 33, My insertion)

Picture by Ricardo Viana at Unsplash