The God of the Signs - The Sign of Order
[Editor's note: This is part of a series by Corban Klug, author of A Light in the Darkness. This series will be published in its entirety here at Every Square Inch.]
How the Voice of Creation Teaches the Heart to Believe
The Sign of Order
The second Sign of Creation, the Sign of Order, is closely related to the Sign of Beauty. Order is that mysterious force which unites the universe in patterns, in accordance with fixed and immutable rules. It is not merely that which constitutes the physical building blocks of reality; it is what metaphysically grounds such building blocks and enchains the surging tempest of material and incorporeal chaos within closely defined boundaries. Without the appearance of Order in the form of grammar, syntax, and usage, this sentence could not be written. Apart from Order’s governing presence in logic, the reasoning essential to law, philosophy and theology would constitute mere posturing. Devoid of Order’s commanding statute in the natural world, not only would the rigorous pursuit of science be rendered superfluous but the densely structured cosmos about which man has liked to think would dissolve into atavistic white noise. Order is what ensures the theorems and equations of mathematics, from the most basic single-variable algebra to the most complex partial differential equations, always function in a consistent manner no matter the mind applied to work their controls. Order, moreover, is what separates the convivial strains of a Stradivarius in the hands of a skilled violinist from the dissonant, clanging madness of an exchange of machine gun fire. As with Beauty, the Sign of Order is ubiquitous in Creation. Denied its ministrations for even one moment in time, we would not last long enough to anticipate the end of our existence.
Again, however, mere flowery rhetoric about the sovereignty of Order in the cosmos is meaningless, in an eternal sense, to all those without the Grace of the Written Word if such rhetoric, or the observations that inspire it, is fundamentally impotent against the soul slavery of sin. What then are the precepts by which Order contributes its part to fill the heart that, by primordial remembrance of Eden, “hungers and thirsts after righteousness.” Like Beauty, Order instructs man that there is a corpus of truth external to his own musings which exists, perpetually, in a living stasis of unconquerable objectivity. Though man may master the mechanics of motion, he knows no way to propose an alternative to the laws that permit and constrain it. Such laws are changeless and sovereign over the whole of the created world. When man imagines himself a repository of unlimited freedom and recklessly flaunts the supremacy of such laws, his wayward heart is arrested by a brick wall or an STD. Order asserts itself in the midst of man’s whimsical self-aggrandizing visions and says “Thus far and no farther.” Even in the self-destructive pursuit of death man must bow to the rules that circumscribe life, for a noose is never attached to the ground. As a consequence of this unalterable feature of human existence, the Sign of Order joins with the Sign of Beauty in the spiritual imagination of man to point Otherward, to a higher realm where such ideals abide and commingle in unfettered harmony. Such principal signs, again, do not prove the existence of such a place. They foreshadow it; impose upon its invisible presence a discernable trace. Proof of Heaven is the work of other signs, one of which is the third in my list, the Sign of Consciousness.
Next time: The Sign of Consciousness
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