Sometimes when I look around, all I see is chaos. People
being oppressed or killed, nations suffering through famine or drought,
communities being destroyed by nature’s fury, families being broken apart, the
rich getting richer while the poor keep getting poorer, the list goes on and
on. I don’t understand. Sometimes I see
scientific articles, news reports, or debates on certain topics and I am
frazzled by what they have to say. Everyone is trying to prove their own points
while trying to disprove the points of others around them at the same time.
Terrorism, global warming, overpopulation, conspiracy theories….everyone has an
opinion, everyone has an idea and everyone thinks they are right. I’m tired just
thinking about it. Chaos. All I can say
is Lord, direct my steps by your word, and let no iniquity have dominion over
me. When I don’t understand, I have to trust that God has a plan that is higher
than I can comprehend, that what I see as chaos God created as order. Isaiah 55:8 says, “For as the heavens are
higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts
higher than your thoughts.”
Many people struggle with this, including me. It is in our
nature to want to understand and to be in control. Even when we cannot control
something, we attempt to. We gauge things, we forecast things. We cannot
control an earthquake but we try to control the damage it causes by placing
strict building codes in areas where they are frequent. We cannot control the
weather (though some of those conspiracy theorists think that the government
can and is) so we forecast it. We can’t control when it is going to rain but if
we know roughly when it is going to rain we can make sure we are indoors when
it does.
Even in our chaos, we have a certain amount of order. We
have recognizable seasons; we have a gauge on time (seconds, minutes, hours,
days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia, etc…); many of us recognize some form
of a higher authority whether it is our parents, our employer, our government
or our God. The question becomes did we
create this order within our chaos or were we made aware of it? The vainglory
of man would have us believe that, out of our own intelligence, we have created
some order. My belief is that, as the creation of God, we have been given
certain revelations into His design.
I recently shared a Facebook update that consisted entirely
of numbers:
550701701809050140420250404201601409022016042030404205504024012018042080240180702804205501026070420230901404202602404201702601703201201701404042015010330904207024025017026017024026042024033090180420250902704205502201601023025016042061061069044061063063
…and I left it at that. To look at those numbers, one might
see purely chaos. They may think, “Wow, Mike must have rolled over on the
computer while he was sleeping”. Another
may look at it and say, “This doesn’t make any sense but perhaps if I look at
it long enough or study it in some detail, perhaps something will begin to come
together”. The plain fact of the matter is, I know what this number means and
you do not. I know what it means because I made the system to create it. I gave
the number its order and it makes perfect sense to me. It is not overly
complicated and I’m sure there are people out there smart enough that could
figure it out given time. But, the easiest way to understand what it means
would be to either simply ask me, or ask for the key to decipher it. That
leaves me with a choice. If I want you to know what it means I can tell you, if
I want you to figure it out for yourself I can give you the key and if I really
just don’t want you to know I can simply do nothing.
If I were to choose to not tell
you what it means or not help you figure it out, how would you react? Some
might become angry and turn away from me. Some might continue to try and figure
it out on their own. Some might decide that it may really have no meaning and
just forget about it altogether. What reason could I possibly have to not show you what it means? Perhaps
I would not tell you because even though it has meaning, you wouldn’t
understand it if I showed it to you. Perhaps I would not tell you because it
would hurt you to see what it means.
It comes down to trust. We can
trust that where we see chaos, God sees order. We can trust that God gives us
the answers we need. We can trust that God protects us from things that we don’t
understand and could hurt ourselves with (look what the knowledge of good and
evil did to Adam and Eve when they chose to try the fruit over trusting God). We can trust that God has the keys and that He gives
them to us when we need them. I can
trust because “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways
higher than your ways, and My thoughts higher than your thoughts”.
With love,
Mike
P.S. I purposely didn’t give you
the key to decipher the number. I will however give you where to find the
answer - Psalms 119:133
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