In the opening lines of the Bible we read:
1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1)
The Greek account of creation parallels that found in Genesis: “From Chaos came forth Erebus and black Night (Nyx); but of Night were born Aether and Day (Hemera), whom she conceived and bore from union in love with Erebus.” Translating these characters into the properties they represent, this reads: Unspecified matter was divided into deep darkness and night, and night was further differentiated into light and day. It is interesting that the Greeks made a distinction between darkness and night, and light and day, whereas these four different ideas are collapsed into two in modern Christian thought, though they obviously exist separately in the Genesis account.
There is much discussion about what the Genesis account means. In Hebrew, “the Spirit of God” is the word ruah, which means “breath” or “spirit.” Though the New Testament is translated from Greek, the best use of this concept is probably used there:
7 Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again.
8 The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (John 3)
The Spirit is what actuates chaos. It is how order is born of chaos.
Chaos is the unknown—everything that lies outside of your awareness. As a bearer of light, your job is to exercise the increased trust in God that you possess to walk deeper into chaos than your fellows, to mine light and truth, to bring it back into the normal world, and to offer it to others in carefully organized packets: “To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.” (Luke 1:79)
The creation story of creating order from chaos is not just a nice story, nor is it only a literal account of how God organized us and our surroundings. It is a description of a system that is just as vital to your daily life as it is to the creation of the cosmos. The creation narrative teaches us the pattern of how light is propagated. Whether in the universe or in you, God addresses the void, an invitation is issued, light is distinguished from darkness, and light is mined and grouped.
Matter is eternal. It cannot be created or destroyed. This matter is not the light, but each piece of matter has a degree of light and truth it has attained. Matter can be organized into bodies great and small, and when this happens the degree of light and truth of the body is an amalgam of the light and truth attained by its parts.
Creation is a machine that increases the light associated with matter by extending invitations to greater light and truth. Some matter responds by one, ten, or a hundred fold. Some matter does not respond. The purpose of the gospel is to provide a means through which all matter can increase in the degree of light it possesses.
What does it mean to order chaos? You set up walls around a piece of the infinite unknown. You systematize it, name it, think about it, and reduce it. You create a finite approximation of the continuous unknown. You help other people deal with problems that lie beyond their capacity to contend with. By bringing the causes of these problems from the unknown into the known, you give them a way to deal with what they couldn’t deal with before. You discover more light, you perceive more of reality; you distill it, codify it, and name it.
Order from chaos is about abstracting the chaos into a form that requires far less attention to understand than it did in its raw form. Think of a farm. You don't just go to a virgin piece of land and start planting grape vines. You first clear an area and use the logs to build a cabin. And there is a right way—an effective way—to do both. You don't worry about the stumps right away—that is polish. You just focus on clearing enough land to grow wheat to keep yourself alive. You find a wife and start having kids so that in a few years you'll have a whole lot of extra labor. And so on. You aren't constantly reinvesting the huge amount of labor it takes to clear land. You shift your work output into more refined expressions to leverage the foundation you have built. You plant orchards and fields, then shift again to annual planting and harvesting.
We aren’t meant to continuously spin on the basics of knowledge. We are meant to systematically learn more and more. Even if we have to rehash something we thought we had figured out before, it is to replace it with something better, not to rebuild the same cabin from scratch without any improvement.
Adam was tasked to name the animals God created. The role of men is to survey the formless chaos and bring order to it by imaginatively differentiating it—using language to describe it, to partition the continuous and unknowable into discrete, knowable chunks, to mine out and distill the light from the darkness by penetrating the darkness with light.
We must first discover beyond what we know. This can come by several means, including an impromptu revelation, a situation that overcomes our current principles, or by actively seeking more instruction on a topic. Second, we must overcome the awareness that we have gained through deriving or discovering new or better principles than we previously held.
Only then can you become a guide to others in their chaos. A guide doesn't necessarily solve these problems. What he does is provide a framework for dealing with them: A language for understanding them, a system of causality. Here is this tangled mess that overwhelms you just thinking about it, and here is a way of understanding it in an actionable way. This is what can be done about it. You expose them to a world they didn’t know, and then you provide them an entry point to their own journey. You give them the tools they need, and send them off.
God created by speaking into the darkness. He acted while there was yet nothing to act upon. He, alone, organized form and order amidst chaos. He did so by generating a plan and executing it while there was still no temporal basis for it. He knew where he was going, even if it wasn’t obvious to anyone else. This is how you must operate if you would be a guide to others in their journey through chaos.
Chaos is neither good nor bad. For one, it depends on what you do with it. Secondly, “good” and “bad” are concepts that require the context of one’s awareness. By definition, chaos is what is beyond one’s awareness. All things are created from and refined in chaos. In Genesis, land comes from water. Light comes from darkness. Day comes from night. Whales come from the sea. Adam comes from the earth. These are all good things.
In manageable quantities, chaos sustains creation, or organization. In unmanageably large quantities, it destroys by overwhelming.
Take, for example, the chaos that comes from water. Water is required for life, but too much water dismantles creation by flood, tidal wave, etc. There are quantities of water that no structure can sustain. Too much water is additively destructive. It puts too much into a system and overwhelms it.
While water creates, fire is destructive, purifying chaos. It takes away. It removes anything that cannot bear it. It challenges. Precious metals are refined through fire. Fire burns away what is dead. Paul taught: “Every man's work shall be made manifest: for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.” (1 Corinthians 3:13) Cardboard is very ordered, and wood is very ordered, but the order cannot withstand fire. Improvement can’t come without fire.
When you are in a water phase, you are ascending. You are growing. When you are in a fire phase, you are being pruned, purified, and tested. You are either growing fruit or being pruned:
1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.
2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.
3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.
4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.
5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing. (John 15)
You are either in the water or in the fire. There isn't a third road. While you will rest from all things you’ve overcome, there is always more to overcome. Any perceived rest during this life is fleeting and temporary. You are either being created, or you are being refined. There is no rest. The fire purges the impurities from you, revealing both what you have and what you lack. The water provides the womb-like building state, where you can address those holes.
There are people in this world who lack the skills, knowledge, and/or determination to acquire the requirements of life. They are unable to order the chaos that exists at the minimal end of life. They have not developed the principles required to overcome the basic challenges of subsistence. They are unable to anticipate and overcome unexpected outcomes.
How do you help these people? If you stepped in and removed the symptoms of their inability to deal with the minimal levels of chaos, chaos would inevitably generate more symptoms from the same sources that the previous symptoms came from, as the principles to deal with and overcome them have not been discovered and adopted. You can't help them by removing the symptoms, and they are not interested in learning the principles.
Society today has the unfortunate attribute of being a system that sinisterly exposes people to far greater chaos than they can handle by insulating them against the consequences of their decisions on the most basic topics by giving them more resources than they can effectively manage. Technology, debt, and other illusory innovations cushion people from their limitations and mistakes, allowing them to encounter even greater levels of chaos that they are certain to fail to order instead of allowing them to contend with their inability to correctly make the most basic decisions in life. To get to a place where they can actually develop, and where they must develop before they are ready to contend with greater chaos, they must see through the illusions and perceive their limitations and the fruits of their feelings, beliefs, and actions.
Your duty is to obtain a greater awareness and then intentionally and skillfully impart ordered chaos to them.