“The precepts of the LORD are right,
giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the LORD are radiant,
giving light to the eyes” (Psalm 19:8)

In our day, the idea of “order” has increasingly come under suspicion. It stinks, some people say, of authoritarianism, control, drill sergeants, and people who are allergic to smiling.

But that’s a distortion of the true sense of order, and it’s certainly not how God thinks about his kind of order.

In the Bible, order is the opposite of chaos. Chaos hurts the people you care about. It is impersonal. It destroys beauty and runs roughshod over whatever it wants.

There is an order to nature. Think about sunrises, gravity and biology. There is an order to reason. Think about logic, mathematics and wise decisions.

Order is good if and when it is God’s order. After all, God is always just, holy, wise, loving and true. God’s order of grace and truth is like the rules of the road. When you follow them, people tend to be safer and get where they’re going. But when naïve vigilantes throw this sort of order out the window in the name of “freedom,” the bodies start to pile up. There are so many car wrecks that you can’t even get near the on-ramp.

In his book In the House of Tom Bombadil, C.R. Wiley writes: “We live in a tone-deaf time and we behave as though there’s no natural order to harmonize with; instead, we think that the world should just do what we tell it to do.”*

Is it okay to ask questions? Of course. It is okay to wonder and challenge and even, when appropriate, advocate for change? Most certainly. But we do so confident that God actually knows what he is doing. When we harmonize with him, we are harmonizing with a grace and truth which is beautiful, reliable and for everyone’s good.

Rest in the hands of the one who created creation and who chose you before the world began (Ephesians 1:4).

“The precepts of the LORD are right,
giving joy to the heart.
The commands of the LORD are radiant,
giving light to the eyes” (Psalm 19:8)

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Notes:

–*C.R. Wiley, In The House of Tom Bombadil (Canon Press, 2021), 57.

–Bible quotes are from the NIV.