THE ORDERLINESS OF GOD’S CREATION

By Dr. M. R. Dowler

The 2014 movie Exodus: Gods and Kings fails miserably compared to its 1956 counterpart The Ten Commandments, a truly classic movie. I doubt Moses looked like Charlton Heston, but I still think he did. It’s only natural that many of us get images of biblical events from illustrations, movies and television. And despite the fact that some of these images offer an overall picture of the culture and area of Bible times, few are totally biblically accurate.

On the morning of April 15, 1491 BC, Moses and over two million Israelites marched out of the land they had been held as slaves for 430 years. Interestingly, God’s deliverance of His people was so swift and sudden that the people left bread baking in their ovens. When word reached the Israelites that Pharaoh had released them, how do you suppose they reacted to the news? Did they suddenly begin to pillage and plunder their former masters’ land? The answer is NO. The Passover and Exodus serves as a testimony of the orderliness of our Creator God and Savior (1 Corinthians 14:33).

When released, the Israelites did not scatter like mice; they marched out in an organized, orderly parade of five people abreast with flags and banners to distinguish the twelve tribes (Exodus 13:18). Interestingly, the word “about” [KJV] in Hebrew means “five in a rank.” Conversely, Jesus commanded over 15,000 hungry people to sit down "in ranks" (rows) of fifties and hundreds. Organizing the crowd into rows made it much easier for the disciples to pass among the people to distribute the food in an orderly fashion (Mark 6:39-40).

In 1948 cosmologist George Gamow introduced the Big Bang Theory to the world; a theory that all physical matter was encapsulated in a ball about the size of a marble. In a nano-second around 15 billion years ago the ball exploded throwing all matter out into an empty space from which all life supposedly began. The Bible tells us that it wasn’t a Big Bang that started it all, it was a Big Voice (Psalm 33:6, 9). Theologically, our marvelously complex and scientifically precise universe was created by a God of order and purpose (Psalm 8:3). Think about it.