Decently and In Order

 “Then I will send rain on your land in its season both autumn and spring rains, so that you may gather in your grain, new wine, and olive oil.” (Deuteronomy 11:14)

Have I told you that I love spring? That’s a trick question – I just wanted to see if you read yesterday’s devotion. While spring may be my favorite season for reasons aforementioned, the truth is I find plenty of things to love about all the seasons. 

Spring has flowers galore. And the gators start to emerge from their winter sleep.

Summer has its long days. Also, lots of gators basking in the sun.

Autumn has the change in colors (at least in some parts of the world). And the occasional gator.

Winter has snow (at least in some parts of the world). And where I live, gators.

Wait a minute – Is it the seasons, or the gators, that I like?!

Seriously, I love the fact that God has given us four seasons. I love the fact that God has given us 365 days in a year. I love the fact that God has given us 24 hours in the day. I love the fact that God has given us 60 minutes in the hour…

I love the fact that God designed our world with structure and order. By so doing, God has given us humans something to work with – some predictability, some patterns that we can discover and understand.

"...fill the earth, and subdue it..." 

   (Genesis 1:28) 

You see, way back at the creation of the world, when God created human beings, God gave humans a purpose, a mandate even: “God bless them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves along the ground.’” (Genesis 1:28) Can you imagine how challenging that mandate would be if there were no order or discernible pattern to the world? 

Can you imagine what it would be like to plan crops if there were no way to predict when it would be warm, and when it would be freezing cold? 

Or what if you wanted to plan for wedding pictures at sunset – can you imagine how difficult that would be if we had no idea as to when the sun would rise and set on any given day? 

Or if God hadn’t put the human body together in such an intricate design that is also very possible to learn about its inner workings, can you imagine how difficult (impossible, even) medical science would be? 

Or how would you ever plan for a club soccer tournament for your teenagers if you didn’t even know which day was Sunday (sorry, I had to get in one of my pet peeves…)? 

Thanks be to God that God created the world with patterns and a sense of order so that we humans could, in fact, have something with which we can work!

In good Presbyterian fashion, God created the world decently and in order. Thank God for the four seasons of the year, and for the predictable rising and setting of the sun, and for the revolution of the earth around the sun, and for every other way that God has put us in a world of order and predictability.

Oh, and also for gators.