Is God bound to order? This is often affirmed by those who still believe God has power to move and shape our world. But I was surprised by the biblical absence of such a proverb. In some degree I know this is true – the sun rises and falls, cats never look like mice, sparrows never run, and stallions never fly. But is it true? The sun does rise and fall, but have you ever seen the same colors (have you noticed the sky lately?), and because cats never look like mice and sparrows always fly while horses run – is not this a miracle?
In fact, if order were to have its way then as a result of God’s justice, sunsets would drown in monotony and cats, birds and horses would never exist. We would not exist. Death would have taken all life before breath ever defined it.
But life is extraordinary before it is orderly, miraculous before it is routine. People are defined in part by possessing a heart and a mind, but these only function because of soul, because of life. It is the miraculous that eyes see and ears hear; deaf and blindness are a result of order, the order that entertains justice. Christ does not heal the seeing to blindness, or stun the heard with silence. Why? It would be the natural outgrowth of depravity, but God has wild compassion; He runs with abandonment to restore the blind and deaf to the miracle of sight and hearing; He splashes the sky with chaotic color waiting for our enjoyment, feeds the small sparrow from his mighty hand, surrounds the cat with personality, and breaks open the fields for running horses.
I guess it is the orderly wrapped up in the miraculous. Let us pray for eyes to see and ears to hear His wonders.
