God’s Orderliness: The Natural World, Delusions of Control, and Creation’s End & Beginning
By Elizabeth Prata
SYNOPSIS
In this essay, I explore how earthquakes unsettle people, prompting people to seek meaning and divine answers. I reflect on humanity’s attempts to categorize nature, and to control the climate. I discuss biblical prophecies of the Tribulation, highlighting a time of uncreation when the ‘natural order’ will be anything but natural. God has ultimate authority over the Earth and its ‘natural’ order.
Any time there is a large earthquake people are somehow more unsettled after an earthquake than most other natural disasters, and people flock to sites in search of the meaning of it all.
Personally I think quakes unsettle people because this is the very ground we walk on that is moving, splitting, and otherwise kicking up. If solidity isn’t solid, if the earth isn’t solid, then what is?
God of course.
But natural disasters such as earthquakes send people searching for what, where, why. God is creator. He made the earth and the stars and the heavens and the stars and everything in between. He made it…and He can UNmake it. He plans to unmake it, during the Tribulation.
Man assigns lists and categories to everything in the natural world, trying to organize it, in order to understand it. It feels natural to do that, I mean, God told Adam to name all the animals. That was an orderly thing to do. I remember in my 30s being very interested in the biological taxonomy of mollusks. Wikipedia explains taxonomy–
The establishment of universally accepted conventions for the naming of organisms was Linnaeus’ main contribution to taxonomy—his work marks the starting point of consistent use of binomial nomenclature. During the 18th century expansion of natural history knowledge, Linnaeus also developed what became known as the Linnaean taxonomy; the system of scientific classification now widely used in the biological sciences.
I bought plastic divided tackle boxes at Wal-Mart and collected shells from all the oceans I sailed on and all the beaches I walked on, and labeled them and placed them within a taxonomy … and it felt so good to organize the world. I felt that if I could organize it, and then I could understand it, and then I could control it. That’s what climate change is really all about, man’s thought that he can control the world and its natural happenings.
Of course that is a mistake in reasoning, no matter how fun it is to study natural history. But I wasn’t saved then and I didn’t know God.
The earth is not as solid as we think and the wind is not as constant as we think and the sun is not as active (or inactive) as we think. The Tribulation will be a time when all the cycles and taxonomies and orderliness of what has been a seeming normal will morph into a new normal: the horror of uncreation. Man wasn’t around when God created the stars and the earth but he will be around when He uncreates it.
For example, the wind won’t blow.
“After these things I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of
the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, on the sea, or on any tree” (Revelation 7:1).
The sun my be going through a periodic cooling cycle now but later it will turn hot, so hot it will burn men in an instant–
“The fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory” (Revelation 16:8-9)
Hail will be supersized, 100 lbs, and crush mens’ heads.
“And great hailstones, about one hundred pounds each, fell from heaven on people; and they cursed God for the plague of the hail, because the plague was so severe.” (Revelation 16:21)
The Tribulation will be a time when God will uncreate the earth, unspooling it from the seeming normalcy humanity has enjoyed, to when things are starting to go haywire, to the future when nothing will be normal. You notice in Revelation its orderly uncreation, when there will be no rain, hydrologic cycles fail, the ocean exceeds its boundaries, life in the ocean dies, vegetation withers, geologic upheavals even the sun goes dim and then dark- no light.
Spurgeon wrote that in the creation day, “The light which broke in upon the primeval darkness was of a very mysterious kind, and came not according to ordinary laws, for as yet neither sun nor moon had been set as lights in the firmament.“
All man’s attempts at orderliness, at “climate change” which is really climate control, being master of this garden, will fly from human hands and all delusions of our control will be stripped from our eyes.
MacArthur wrote of the uncreation of Revelation: “The present laws of thermodynamics, which state that matter can not be created nor destroyed, will no longer be in effect. As a result, “he universe “will be burned up,” it will be totally consumed. (2 Peter 3:10-13). The absolute reverse of creation will occur. It didn’t take eons of evolution to create the universe, nor will it take eons to uncreate it. The uncreation of the universe, like its creation, will take place by the word of God.” (source “Revelation 12-22 MacArthur New Testament Commentary By John F MacArthur”)
Nothing on earth will ‘work’ the way we have known it, not the sun, not growth, not rain, not the ocean, not the wind, not the animals…
All praise our holy God who creates, makes things orderly in their time, makes things disorderly in their time, and will dissolve the universe when it is time and create the New Earth when it is time! All is in His hands.
