WORLD CHAOS AND GOD

Vol. 9, No. 4, July - Aug. 1980 

WORLD CHAOS AND GOD

Colin Blair

Readings: Genesis 1:2; 6:13; Exodus 12:22

ALL three of the above Scriptures refer to conditions of chaos. Having spent the last two years in the troubled land of Iran, I feel entitled to say something about the subject of chaos. I am often questioned about conditions there, and most of the questions have to do with physical dangers. To me, however, these are not the important questions; far greater are the spiritual problems of how to relate what is happening to the purposes of God.[66/67]

When I arrived in Teheran two years ago it was on a Friday. This corresponds to Sunday in a Muslim land, so I found myself in a church service, as a member of a congregation of about a thousand Westerners. Many of these were in the country by reason of a genuine sense of call from Christ. They had left all to serve God in Iran. Some had left good jobs and opportunities in secular callings at home to pursue those same callings for Christ's sake in that land. For us all it constituted a great problem to see all our expectations collapsing in the chaotic conditions which were overtaking the country. The shootings and mob violence, the burning down of buildings, constituted problems for the moment, but the far greater questions concerned the meaning of it all. When it became increasingly clear that the Shah's regime was about to fall and Khomeini's rule to take over, those of us who had prayed for years about the spread of the gospel in Iran were bewildered. Where was God? Was the Devil wresting power from the hands of the Almighty? These were the kind of questions which had to be faced by so many Christian workers, questions which posed a bigger danger than all the bullets and bombs.

We sat through last Winter in shivering cold because of the fuel shortage, and were almost numbed with the question: Where is God in all this? When things became impossible in Teheran we moved on into Pakistan, only to find there believers who have to live constantly under the acute tension of Islam. They could not leave the country, as we could. They have no alternative than to live on in that atmosphere of extreme pressure. What could we say to them? No escapist theories could be of any help. They needed encouragement; they needed positive reassurance concerning the purposes of God. This is the context of my message now. It relates to the faithfulness of God amid the chaos of our world. 

The Challenge of Chaos

The three Old Testament passages cited above introduce to us this theme of chaos. It is the common feature of all three. First there is natural chaos -- "The earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). Secondly there is man-made chaos -- "The end of all flesh is come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them; and behold, I will destroy them with the earth" (Genesis 6:13). In those days it was fallen men who caused the chaos -- a condition which is all too familiar to us today. Thirdly, there was divinely-created chaos, the kind of thing which rocked Egypt to its foundations when God acted in judgement, saying: "I will go through the land of Egypt in that night, and will smite all the firstborn in the land of Egypt ... and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgement" (Exodus 12:12).

The question which we must all face concerns our own attitude at such times. Many Christians opt out of such situations; they abdicate to the Devil. We in Teheran had to meet this challenge when chaos came into our situation. To many it was difficult to see anything but the power of evil. It seemed that there were no restraints upon anarchy and no possibility of the chaos giving place to order. The only remedy for despair was to go back to the Bible, and there find that in all the three varieties of chaos, God was present, and God was at work. 



God's Presence in the Chaos

In every such situation it is never easy to say that God was right there. We may have to face a grim personal tragedy in which it seems impossible to reconcile His presence with the apparent catastrophe of it all. No, it is not easy to discern God in the chaos. On the other hand, it is no easier to leave God out of it and to suggest that the Devil was in the happening and had it all his own way. Thus we have to recognize that, whichever way we take it, there is no easy answer to these chaotic situations.

If, however, we look beyond them to God's Word, we find reassurance that, despite all the perplexing elements, we do right to maintain that God is right there, moving and working in His own way, even if we cannot understand what that way is. This is the right attitude, to have faith in what God has said. It is much better than getting out into an area of speculation where we are forced to rely on human understanding -- our own or someone else's.

We face the natural chaos, the man-made chaos and the divinely initiated chaos, and we note that in the three instances we are now considering, God was always there. He moved on the face of the waters. He grieved over the [67/68] inevitability of the Flood; He made it clear that it was He who was visiting Egypt in judgement. He was never absent or distant, but was right there, on the spot! 

Creation out of Chaos

The next point to which I would draw your attention is that everyone of these chaotic situations proved to have a creative aspect. In the first God said: "Let there be light": and there was light. At the very beginning of the Bible we are confronted with the resurrection aspect of creation. Every experience of chaos gives us a new prospect of the reality of resurrection.

When I was on furlough in Canada, I found the dead months of Winter very trying, for there seemed no life anywhere. Suddenly, however, the crocuses began to come up through the snow, first with living shoots of fresh green and then with their own bright colours. The deadness of Winter was being conquered by the new life of Spring. So it was that out of the original chaos, God's Word brought form and beauty. In spite of the harm that men have introduced and the acute modern problems of ecology, nothing can obscure the wonder of God's creation. Again, although it must have seemed hopeless that anything fine could have come out of the chaotic waters of Noah's Flood, we know that the Scriptures point to it as presenting a pattern and picture of redemption in Christ. This is even more so when we consider the chaos in Egypt, for the sequel was the glorious liberation of God's redeemed people.

Into chaos, then, came God's creative Word. "God said, Let there be light" (Genesis 1:3); "God said unto Noah ... Make thee an ark" (Genesis 6:13); "The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in Egypt: This month shall be unto you the beginning of months" (Exodus 12:2). We need to remember this for, as we look out on to our world, we see an approaching chaos which none of us can escape. The threatening problems which seem remote today, including the oil crisis, can be on our doorstep tomorrow. Chaos is abroad, and we in the West cannot expect to escape it. Students of history remind us that the relative stability of the nineteenth century was really a kind of Indian Summer in a world which has always been chaotic. While the Rapture is a Scriptural hope, there is no guarantee at all that when things get too hot for us, God will suddenly lift His people out of it all. We have got to face squarely the prospect of chaos.

Will we abdicate, saying that the power of evil is so great that God cannot handle it? In a spirit of escapism will we focus on the Rapture as a mere salvage operation by which God rescues what He can? Will we muddle along, vaguely drifting with the tide? Or will we be among those who hear God's creative Word? Noah, who found grace with God, heeded His word, obediently building the ark and faithfully preaching righteousness (Hebrews 11:7). He ignored the chaos and became part of God's new creative activities. We, too, should listen to God's creative Word and become part of what He is doing. No chaos, no creation! No flood, no rainbow! No Passover judgement, no liberation of a people of God's building.

Is it not a basis of all faith that the greatest chaos of all history, the cross of Christ, brought God's supreme creative act of redemption? The disciples were ready to run away because all their hopes seemed to be crashing into ruins, but they found in the resurrection that God had been sovereignly acting in it all.

The more you read your newspapers, the more you will be depressed at the inevitable chaos of man's world. The more attention you pay to the media, the more you will be preoccupied with the fantastic succession of troubles and disasters which seem to cry out: 'There is no hope. There is no future. We are going no place.' Why not pay more attention to God's creative Word in Christ, and link up with Him in the redemptive work which He is doing? 

Building in the Midst of Chaos
I close with an illustration from Pakistan. In a certain town there, I found a group of Christians worshipping in a modest building in one of the back slums of the town. They told me the history of their humble chapel. A group of men and women who had found Christ were meeting in the house of one of the brothers. This house was in the middle of a Moslem district, with a Koranic school just opposite and a mosque. The Christians tried to meet on the roof of the house, singing and worshipping the Lord, but although their praises were doubtless [68/69]acceptable to heaven, they were unacceptable to the Moslems all around, who especially resented their singing. These neighbours threatened and harassed the Christians in every possible way, including hurling bricks and rubbish into their meeting.

In the end a member of the police force intervened, and told the troublemakers that they must stop their violence, since Pakistani laws guaranteed to the Christians the right to worship in their own way and according to their traditions. Having rebuked the neighbours, the policeman then turned to the Christian leaders and said: 'I cannot guarantee your security unless you build for yourselves a place of worship. When you do this, then we guarantee you a hundred per cent security from molestation. That is what you must do.'

Now those Christians were very, very poor; their combined gross income would never have been sufficient to pay for such a chapel, let alone their tithes and offerings. But so far as they were concerned, God had spoken. True the actual voice was that of a Muslim policeman, but to them it became God's creative word in their chaotic circumstances. So they got to work and brick by brick, they built themselves their simple place of worship. As they proudly showed it to me, I realised that its drab simplicity was beautiful to them. And when foreign type church buildings were being destroyed by angry mobs, this humble edifice was respected as a legitimate Pakistani house of worship. So much so that when a decree was made for the destruction of that slum area, the local inhabitants risked the danger of an appeal to the Martial Law authorities and included the Christians in their protest. 'You have put out an order to bulldoze and demolish our area because it has never been recognised by planners', the objectors complained, 'but we will lie down in front of your machines and force you to crush us into the ground before you can destroy our sacred mosque'. And then, on their own initiative, they added: 'And these Christians will also do the same. They will give their blood rather than let you destroy their house of worship.'

Happily it never came to that. But my point is that in the chaos of having their meetings broken up by violence, those believers heard God's creative voice -- even through a Moslem -- and they sacrificially gave and worked for the honour of Christ's name. They proved, as we all must, that God is faithful in the midst of the chaotic conditions of our modern world. 

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