God is a God who commands and orders justice, and justice is a form of order.
God’s order is good.
The Creator God of Scripture takes the earth from being ‘tohu’ and ‘vohu’ (wild & waste – formless & void) to being more and more ordered. And places humans at the crest of the wave of creation – investing them (us!) with the duty of working with God to bring His good, loving, wise order to the world. To ‘tend and keep the garden‘ you might say.
Order is the opposite of chaos.
Whether they be caste systems, separating the ‘heads’ of the human race from the ‘untouchables’, or whether they be fashion systems, separating the world into ‘hot’ and ‘not’ or ‘in’ or ‘out’ of fashion, some concepts of ‘order’ serve to categorise people in terms of rank, worth, status, popularity, success, sex-appeal, brick-quota, etc.
These are dehumanising ‘orders’ which we should be disobedient to.
Our words and actions should be ‘chaos‘ to these kinds of ‘orders’.
And we should instead be all the more eager to obey the good ‘orders’ of a God for whom justice and righteousness is still the order of the day.
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Dale Campbell is a volunteer advocate for TEAR Fund New Zealand. He is an Associate Pastor at Northcote Baptist Church in Auckland, New Zealand and runs a blog that is well worth reading – Fruitful Faith.
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