God Creates Order Out of Chaos

I’m a pretty open person, and we have people over a lot… So if you've ever been over to my apartment and I've closed my bedroom door, it's probably because of The Pile.

The Pile lies over a foot deep and about 4 feet in diameter… but it moves, sometimes spreading itself thinner and further than that. It contains clothes, hangers, deodorant, usually three different hairbrushes, emptied supplement sleeves, leftover materials from events… It is chaos in the purest sense. And the truly humbling part is that I created it. Slowly, decision by decision, “I’ll deal with that later” became a mass removing precious square footage in my little New York City apartment.

Every time I finally rid my room of The Pile, I marvel: Wow, I love my bedroom. I’ve made it really pretty and functional, basically my dream room! And then, every single time, I realize: Oh. I’ve been avoiding my bedroom for weeks.

We are remarkably good at making messes. And yet we are remarkably intolerant of mess.

Chaos has a way of feeling permanent. When a project falls apart, when a relationship fractures, when the thing you were building suddenly looks like rubble, it becomes difficult not to believe that disorder is the deepest enduring truth about reality.

But Genesis describes something opposite, and interesting.

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep.” That’s not nothing—it’s something more unsettling: formlessness. Chaos. A world that exists but doesn’t yet cohere.

And into that, God speaks.

Day by day, the formless becomes formed and the void becomes full. The chaos becomes cosmos—which, delightfully, is the Greek word for both “world” and “order.”

The whole creation account is this movement from chaos to cosmos over and over again. Light and dark, sea and land, day and night… boundaries are drawn, roles are assigned, and systems are built upon specificity of purpose.

The universe God makes is not just a collection of things. It is structured, intelligible, patterned. It holds together because He made it to hold together. The cosmos is not scattered building blocks, but a world fitted together with care.

This is easy to understand and believe in when things are going well–but it’s at the very center of suffering, too. Job shows us how the order of creation is perhaps the most relevant in the chaos.

When Job’s life has fallen completely apart, he finally asks God the question underneath all suffering: Why is this happening?

And God answers him out of a whirlwind:

“Who shut up the sea behind doors
when it burst forth from the womb…
when I said, ‘This far you may come and no farther;
here is where your proud waves halt’?”

Humbling, yes. But also stabilizing.

God is not just rebuking Job. He is reminding him that chaos has boundaries. The sea has a door. The waves have a limit. The Creator of the cosmos is still holding the line between order and disorder even when Job cannot see it.

Because–it’s actually really easy to believe, especially in grief, that chaos has the final word. It’s easy to believe in entropy. 

We deal with the pull towards chaos every day! When I do clean the Pile in my room, I’m wrangling. Hang these things in the overstuffed closet; stack these horizontally on my bookshelf; I guess I can empty this bin and use it for costumes? 

Even in the best of times, just getting things back to our human vision of order is basically just sorting things! Order from chaos is primarily a matter of organization. And there are whole industries–The Container Store, storage units, professional organizers–to help us manage. 

And this concept of sorting as “order” does have some Biblical basis! Weren’t we handed the metaphorical “label maker” in Genesis when we were tasked with naming the animals? 

But when perpetual management is an uphill battle, it’s clear: We simply do not have sovereignty over our stuff. 

And I think when we read the creation account through this lens of “order from chaos,” it is easy to think God’s vision of order is similarly limited. After all, it seems to be about structure, categories, boundaries: sea vs. land, night vs. day, types of creatures… 

But God does have sovereignty over his creation, so his breathtaking, interlocking system isn’t just about bins and edges; it’s about life. 

This is why God’s response to Job starts with emphasizing His creative boundaries, but it evolves into multiple chapters of rhapsodic nature poems describing the vivid, diverse span of the created universe: 

- the mountain goats giving birth in secret,

- the wild donkey roaming free in the wilderness,

 - the ostrich flapping her wings wildly,

 - the war horse pawing the ground “with fierce joy,”

 - Leviathan churning the sea behind him

God doesn’t merely describe systems. He describes creatures with instincts and desires and strange beauty. He delights in things Job cannot control, categorize, or fully understand.

This is not grim, dutiful organizing. Creation is ordered so that every possible variety of beauty, meaning, and life can actively do what it was made to do. It’s not a filing system–it’s an ecosystem.

The cosmos of God is utterly unique– because in God, order is bred rather than imposed. 

That’s why He set us within it, rather than above it; that’s why He told us to name and measure and account for His work. Because it is in our nature to recognize His moves from chaos to order; He made us to behold and celebrate the cosmos. 

So… what does this mean for those of us who also make things?

First: the work of bringing order is genuinely creative work. When you find the structure in a chaotic draft, when you clear a space and make it beautiful, when you edit something down until it finally says what it meant to say—you are participating in something deeply reflective of God’s own creativity.

I think this is especially important for artists who are afraid of meaning. I see this constantly in film festivals and scripts and visual art: the artist backs away from their point at the very end, fearful of being too “on the nose.”

Now, I’ll be the first to talk about ambiguity and its power in art… but eventually the work has to become willing to mean something. The creative process is often the place for exploration, but the finished work requires the courage to let coherence emerge. To say: this is what I saw. This is what I found. This is what I’m trying to reveal.

Second: disorder within your work is not the final word.

I’m talking about the artistic flop you never want to show anyone. The abandoned project. The creative season that went dark. The work you look back on and cringe at.

None of those things are verdicts.

The God who brought cosmos out of chaos is not intimidated by your particular variety of formlessness. He has a history with it.

Meaning is possible even after disorder. Healing has a structure. Trust can be rebuilt. Coherence can emerge. These aren’t naive hopes. They’re woven into the fabric of the world God made.

And third: When in doubt, your art can get back to the Genesis call to “name” what’s already there. There’s power in recognizing and sharing what God is doing. If all your art does is draw attention to God’s conducting the cosmos, you’re still fulfilling God’s purposes for humanity; beholding and celebrating God’s creation is part of our creative call. 

Tangibly, this looks like choosing to hope. Where there is mess or formlessness in your own world, treat it as a starting point and wait with expectation. We can assume that God is making it still. 

—

Which brings me to something we’re doing this month; we’re collecting submissions for an art show this August called From Mess to Meaning. 

We’re collecting art made from mess—or made about it.

Take the disorder that’s sitting with you—the pile in your room, the unresolved grief, the unfinished project, the season that hasn’t cohered yet—and make something from it. Share the art you made in the most confusing or painful seasons of your life. 

It could be a photograph. A painting. A poem. Anything. If you’re a Christian artist in NYC and you want to apply, our partners at SoulCry and us would love to see if we can curate your work. 

The resulting show will be a chance to see how all our individual stories of chaos and meaning begin to cohere into something larger together. 

Submit your work at tinyurl.com/messmeaningshow and let’s participate in the cosmos together.