Your Role in God’s Divine Order

God has a vision for human society and though He has clearly articulated it, human eyes are held blind to it because of the darkness that covers them. Only when we have a revelation of Christ are we able to truly understand God's ultimate vision for human society and be instruments of God to restore order to the social institutions of our world.

God created the universe ex nihilo, a theological term that means He created the universe out of nothing. This is something that takes faith to understand. By faith we understand that the world was framed by the Word ofGod (Heb. 11:3).

God created the universe out of nothing and He Himself transcends the universe that He created. In other words, God existed before this physical material universe was created. He exists outside of this universe, but at the same time, because this universe flows from Him, there is no particle within this universe that is divorced from Him.

One of the foundational truths we must grasp is that God created an open universe. The term "open universe" has much to do with free will. God did something remarkable by giving created beings in His universe freedom—the power of choice. He did that because God is love.

Love is centered in the will, not the emotions. Emotions may accompany the exercising- of our will to love, but love is centered in the will because love is primarily a choice. If love were an emotion only, then God could not command us to love. He could only ask us whether we feel it. And the fact is some days we feel it, while some days we do not!

Yet, since love is centered in the will, God can command us, "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Husbands, love your wives."

We love because we choose to love. Therefore the expression "I fell out of love" is invalid. You don't fall in and you don't fall out of love. When someone' says, "I fell out of love," he is simply using it as an excuse because he does not want to say, "I no longer choose to love you." We love because we choose to love, and once we have made that decision (which is centered in our will) then we should make a commitment to that decision.

God is love; naturally He wants a love relationship with human society. Hence, He gives us the power of choice-—'free will to love. However, freedom comes with its own set of risks. Someone once asked me, "If God knew that Adam was going to sin and mess it all up, why did He put that tree in the garden?" God did what He did because Adam could not be considered truly free until he had the power to choose and decide for himself.

You cannot truly love without the freedom of choice. If someone loves you because they were programmed to love you, that is not love. In order for true love to exist, it must come out of your freedom to choose. If we were programmed to love, then we are robots, and God certainly did not create us to be robots. Hence, He took the risk of giving us the choice to accept Him ... or to reject Him. The presence of choice means that the universe is open!

GOD CREATED A UNIVERSE OF ORDER

Now that we understand this is an open universe, let's understand it is also a universe of order.

If the universe was not ordered, then our choices would have no effect upon the universe. Then Lucifer's decision to compete with the authority of God would have had no impact on the spirit world. But Lucifer's choice affected the spirit world and re-ordered the original order that God established in the spirit realm. What was true for Lucifer is true for humans too. Due to Adam's choice to disobey God, mankind was propelled into a condition of sin. Adam's choice re-ordered the order that was originally established by God. Our choices can either reinforce or interrupt the order set by God.

At this point, you may ask, "If Man has the power to re-order what God placed in order, how then is God sovereign?"

To answer this question, we must first understand that God is Alpha and Omega; He is the Beginning and He is the End (Rev. 22:13). Therefore, whatever that goes on in between these two points, God already knows before it happens. For example, as a result of His foreknowledge of the disobedience of Adam, God prepared a response that maintains His sovereignty over the earth. This is why when John the apostle sees the Lamb, he says, "It was slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). This means the whole experience of Jesus on the cross already happened in the mind of God even before Adam was created, in preparation for the choice that Adam would make!

In a nutshell, although God gives us the power of choice, because of His foreknowledge, He prepares responses to our choices even before we make them, thus effectively ensuring that He does not allow the order he has set over His universe to be disrupted.

RESTORING DIVINE ORDER

In John 1:1-3, it is written, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made."

I like the word "all," which means everything. Absolutely nothing escapes that all.

So since it says, "all tilings were made through Him," then we can safely say that even those tilings in decline are originally made by God, regardless of its present condition. Hence, to say that there is a separation between the church and the state is to say there is a separation between God and His creation. We just cannot separate the two. In reality, they are an integrated system that cannot be parted, even though we can try to think in our minds that it can be.

Then John 1:10 says, "He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him." The word "world" over here is kosmos—the social order.

In John 1, we understand that the world was made by God, but the world did not know Him.

In other words, the mind of God takes on a human body, and God Himself steps into the social order. The One who created the original order stepped into the social order as it was when He entered it, yet it did not recognize Him. And this is because it has become so far removed from the way He originally ordered it.

Let me give you an illustration.

You have a beautiful house that you built. You painted it, designed it, picked out the carpeting, put in the furniture and arranged it exactly the way you love. You had all the money in the world to do it and the house turns out to be beautifully done up with impeccable taste. Then, you invite a few friends to stay at your house while you take a trip out of town. When you come back, you walk through the door of your house and find the living room in the kitchen, the kitchen in the bedroom, the bedroom in the dining room, and the dining room in the basement. The original arrangement which you ordered so perfectly has been changed totally. Your friends have messed it all up and its present state is completely foreign to you. What would be your course of action? You would begin to re-order that house to bring it back to the original order that you established.

Guess what? Jesus came to do just that.

Anything outside of the order of God is chaos. So when Jesus came, He came to bring order to the chaos of the world because He knows how things function best. He knows the order that works best for the role and function of every piece of creation.

Jesus came as the light into a world where darkness was prevalent. He knows what man's life should be like. He knows the right order that your life should be in. But sin, which has influenced your choices, has re-ordered your life. And your life is now far from the original order God Himself established.

When Jesus comes into your heart, light comes into the darkness, order comes into the chaos, and He begins to re-organize your life according to His original order.

The first thing he does is re-organize your thinking. Then He begins to re-order your finances. He begins to re-order your relationships. He begins to re-order your lifestyle and everything else to bring your life back into the original order in the mind of God. The image of God must be restored to your life so that you can function at the highest level of productivity and re-capture the original mandate to be fruitful, to increase, to multiply and to overcome—to restore the divine order that God created you with.

I have a calendar book. That calendar book maintains my freedom because by writing things in that book, I do not have to worry or remember what I have to do a month from now. As such, I am free to think about other things.

Effectiveness in life demands order and order demands a clear plan of action.

Divine order leads to- freedom. True freedom is based on order. Your life becomes free, when you organize that life.

Let's take a look at what Jesus does when He has 5,000 hungry people to feed, and all they have is a little boy's lunch. Notice what Jesus tells His disciples. He says, "Divide them into groups of fifty, and have them seated accordingly." He takes up the massive challenge and brings order to it by addressing the issue.

One woman asked me, "Pastor, does this apply to finances?" I said, "Yes! Get all of your bills together. They are the 5,000 you must now feed. Organize them into groups of creditors and balances, and then let's come up with a plan to 'feed' them." Within three years, she was out of debt!

But understand that trusting God is pro-active. Faith is a verb. There was another woman who did not ask for my help until she was about to be evicted from her house. I asked, "What happened?" She replied, "My finances are overwhelming. There are just too many problems. Everything is out of order." So I said, "What did you do? What was your plan?" She said, "I trusted God." I said, "What did you do while you were trusting God?" She said, "I just trusted God. So when the bills came in, I threw them into the garbage. I was trusting God!" I said, "You deserve to be bit!"

SERVING AS GOD'S INSTRUMENT

In Acts 17, Paul's perspective of human society was that it was tied to God in ways that humans.were unaware of. Paul did not try to make things happen. He simply discerned accurately what God was already doing and then got involved to do his part.

Acts 17:16 says, "Now while Paul waited for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him when he saw that the city was given over to idols." Notice his spirit was provoked by what he saw. What did he see? He saw that idolatry ruled the city that he was passing through.

The story then continues, "Therefore he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and with the Gentile worshipers, and in the marketplace daily with those who happened to be there. Then certain Epicurean and Stoic philosophers encountered him. And some said, 'What does this babbler want to say?' Others said, 'He seems to be a proclaimer of foreign gods,' because he preached to them Jesus and the resurrection. And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, 'May we know what this new doctrine is of which you speak? For you are bringing some strange things to our ears. Therefore we want to know what these things mean.' For all the Athenians and the foreigners who were there spent their time in nothing else but either to tell or to hear some new thing."

In the New International Version, it says that they were "listening to the latest ideas."

So Paul was in an environment where there was idol worship, but at the same time, people were open to hearing new ideas. Over here, Paul began to discuss and dispute with them in a way that led him to stand, before the Areopagus. The Areopagus was the highest judicial and legislative council in Athens!

The stage was then set for one of his most brilliant messages. Acts 17:22 says, "Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, 'Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious.'"

Notice what Paul did. He did not beat the people on their heads with religious theology. Nor did he attack them by saying, "You are going to hell for worshiping these idols!" Instead of coming with a fire-and-brimstone message, Paul simply shared an observation by saying, "I notice you are all very religious people."

Then, Paul adds something else peculiar that he has noticed. Acts 17:22-23 records, "Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, 'Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD."

The people that Paul was speaking to believed there is a God, but they did not know who that God is. Paul thus seizes the opportunity to answer the mystery by preaching Jesus to them!

From the whole chain of events, Paul effectively influenced the individuals who had influence over the entire city. And that's how God can use you. He can place you in a position to influence those who have influence, and through these people, you can then influence an entire city or all the people under their influence.

This pattern of change and influence runs throughout Scripture. In Luke 19, Zacchaeus is a short guy who wants to see Jesus so much that he actually climbs a tree just to peek at Him. Seeing Zacchaeus, Jesus says, "Come down, Zacchaeus, I am going to go to your house." And Zacchaeus becomes all excited. However, there is a problem. Zacchaeus is a tax collector, and to the Jews, he is a thief because he is joined to the Roman government to exploit the Jewish people. The disciples are shocked. They say, "Does He know what he is doing? He is going to the house of a sinner, a tax collector."

Nevertheless, Jesus decides to go to his house anyway. Jesus eats and interacts with Zacchaeus. And Zacchaeus is so challenged that he experiences a conversion of mind and attitude. He falls under conviction and says this, "If I have stolen from anyone, I am going to restore it to them fourfold, and I am going to take my money and give it to the poor."

By touching that one man, Jesus affected the economy of that city, moving wealth from the hands of the rich into the hands of the poor. Pie impacted the poverty within that city through one man's influence.

RESTORING DIVINE ORDER THROUGH THE BELIEVER

God wants to use every Christian to change the world, no matter what his gift or talent is. Jesus wants to change the way you think, so that when He puts you in the position to influence those who have influence, you can articulate your faith in such a way that they get converted, and they will in turn be released to bring about change in their sphere of industry.

What about you as a Christian then? Where has God placed you in? Whom does God have you talking to? Whom does God have you interacting with? Have you looked close enough to see God at work in that unbeliever's heart? Or have you just passed him off because he is a sinner? Maybe you need to start looking closely again.

Think about how God dealt with you before you got saved. He is dealing with others the same way too, Now it is your job to discern what God is doing—to pray and ask the Holy Spirit to open your eyes to see what God is doing in that sinner's life, so that you can be prepared to speak into the life of that person because you have no idea how that is going to impact all the individuals within that person's sphere of influence.

You are an instrument of God to change culture. You are an instrument of God to change schools, communities, workplaces, and the way to do that is not by standing on a box and shouting, "Jesus is coming and you are all going to hell!"

Live a life that gains trust from those around you. Trust builds relationships. Relationships open hearts. And once hearts are opened, you can accurately discern what God is doing, serve as God's emissary in their lives and bring them out from darkness into God's light. HT

Rev. Dr. A.R. Bernard is the senior pastor of the thriving 27,000-member Christian Cultural Center in Brooklyn, New York. He is also a popular writer and men's speaker.

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By Rev. Dr. A.R. Bernard

Heart of Darkness

Lipid hydroperoxides--those nasty, menacing by-products of vegetable oil processing-- are the antagonists of our arteries, agitators of our joints, the scourge of our century and an enemy of mankind. In our story Dr. America, a physician who has trained for years to spot diseased food sources, takes this reporter and a crew of brave assistants on a dangerous journey up the river of vegetable oils. Our mission: find the food with the greatest quantity of lipid hydroperoxides and do what we must. This food is our enemy and it must be stopped. Our foe has ruined many bloodstreams, capitalizing on the most pitiful of human weaknesses: gluttony. Everywhere he has been, he has left ruin and disorder.

Dr. America warns that we must know our enemy so we can be prepared to face him, so as we ascend this foreboding river we study the environment carefully. At the river mouth, familiar vegetable oils flow out onto a wide delta of death. About a mile upstream, we meet the convergence of the five sisters--the rivers of soy, corn, canola, cottonseed and sunflower. Depending on the season there is also a sixth, safflower. They seem innocent enough, bland and tasteless with just a hint of yellow color (added after processing).

But we must not be fooled by this appearance. Remember, they are polyunsaturates, a family that must be processed and heated in order to extract a profitable quantity of oil from the seed. Even when they say "expeller pressed," they may still be bad. "Never trust them," Dr. America warns, shaking her head as she directs the rowers to steer clear.

Heading upstream we encounter processed foods made from vegetable oils and the crew's tension mounts as the river suddenly seems hostile. Salad dressing bottles and mayonnaise jars slowly bob against our hired junk. These contain the very stuff of the five sisters--soy, corn, canola, cottonseed and sunflower oils, in that they are mostly vegetable oil mixed with other compounds, including air and water, as well as flavoring agents and thickeners.

The river deepens and we move further on. On the banks, abandoned shopping carts, twisted and heaped into piles, some half buried in mud, lie rusting in the mist. Clipped coupons stream by the boat-like bats, their fluttering a silent applause for savings dreamt, but never realized. Several land at your feet: fifteen cents on Alfredo sauce, five cans of cheese spread for a dollar. This reporter brushes them overboard hastily, knowing at once that they are only another form of temptation. Yet they are harbingers of what's to come. We must stiffen our resolve.

Rounding a bend we come into a wide opening; the river meanders around what seems like a hundred little islands, each stream twirling with boxes, cans and cartons.

Bags of chips are everywhere. Don't let the word organic emblazoned on the box fool you, Dear Reader. In this case what happens after leaving the field trumps any loving care with which the oil seeds might have once been grown.

This stretch of river goes on for a long time. As the dense foliage brushes open before us and closes behind, we pass many of our well-known convenience items--spaghetti sauces, burritos, macaroni and cheese, microwave dinners, ready-made pizza--anything a factory can put together for sale. Time saving foods.

How much life is a little time worth, muses Dr. America, as she picks up a couple of the brightly colored boxes. Skimming the many ingredients listed on the side, we realize that they are not so appetizing when looked at closely. So many long words, some familiar, but most completely foreign. What horrors do they hide? What heinous crimes?

None of the lists disclose the content of lipid hydroperoxide, but we know it is there. We know because the names of the five sisters (and occasionally safflower) are there. And inside these foods that have been heated more than once you know what kind of vile business the lipid hydroperoxides do. In your mind's eye, picture them running amok as a riotous mob among the nutrients, cutting the throats of vitamins and hacking at the remnants of once living systems.

As we progress upwards, we are finding foods with ever higher content of lipid hydroperoxides due to more added vegetable oil, or to being heated longer, more often, or at higher temperatures. It seems as though vegetable oil is in everything, and everything it's in contains these lipid hydroperoxides, capable of causing almost any disease.

At the highest section of the river we run into the lipid hydroperoxide rapids. Here we must navigate around huge boulders of donuts, bags and boxes of potato chips, candies, store-bought cookies and other oil-laden desserts. This section has brought many down before us, and the shores are littered with dying diabetics, men clutching their chests in spasms of pain and the bodies of the dead.

At last. . . the source. The air is thick with intoxicating fumes. As Dr. America flings one foot overboard to step upon the poisoned land, she hopes she will prove strong enough to face whatever food awaits. Remind yourself that if you obey your hunger here, you will find neither satisfaction nor satiety, only an empty yearning for more and more and more.

As the dusk settles, fluorescent lighting brings the landscape into harsh focus. Everything you see tells you that the world has gone insane. It is a tile-and-chrome jungle of fast food joints. Linoleum counters crop up in clusters everywhere, and there are no lines.

We make out a path among the natives, the uniformed servers who offer their services with the detached indifference that only foreigners can have for each other. They stand obediently in front of their wares, which sit in suspended decomposition under the rows of heat lamps behind them.

We need to find someone who can help us with the last and most dangerous portion of this journey, introducing us to the most despicable mass murderer the world has known. We need an ally, a guide, someone trusted by our enemy and familiar with the terrain. Suddenly, the Apple Pie Dessert scurries up to our small party.

"You smell that? Do you smell that? Cyclized hydrocarbon. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of cyclized hydrocarbon in the morning."

"Who's in charge here?"we ask the Pie. "In charge? I don't know, ma'am, I'm just doing what I'm told. I'm just a working girl."

Suddenly we are surrounded by a group of food prep workers. We expect them to take us to the grill where they cook the hamburgers. Instead, they grab us and carry us to the Deep Fryer. It looks like hell in there. It's the end of the river all right, but the source of lipid hydroperoxides isn't the grilled hamburgers, it's the French fries cooked in reused vegetable oil.

A voice bubbles up from the depths. "Where are you from, Dr. America?"

"I'm from central Pennsylvania, sir."

"Are you a cardiologist?"

Suddenly Colonel French ascends to the surface to face us. He splashes scalding oil over his yellowish bald head, and passes it on to his companions.

"I'm a family practice doctor," Dr. America replies.

"You're neither. You're a conspiracy theorist. And a quack. I've seen horrors. . . horrors that you've seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have no right to judge me."

Dr. America could see that he was suffering. Everyone could. He had been heated and reused too often. Changing once a week, by law, was nowhere near enough. And this day, at the end of the week, he smelled like slow death, arteriolar sludge, nightmares.

In a flash, this reporter realizes that, whether country cut or curly, the fast food French fry is mankind's mortal enemy--one that will only become more insidious as its relative the trans fat is banned. In one super-sized serving there is enough lipid hydroperoxide to bring a grown man to his knees, lips moving in soundless desperation.

Standing now in the presence of so much danger, I feel as though I am about to fall into a great abyss, all the weeks of protocol and training offer no consolation, no guidance. I realize that the much-maligned burger is not nearly so much the enemy as the French fry. When it comes to burgers, only the bun and the artificial cheese contain lipid hydroperoxide, not the meat itself. Hanging onto this concrete bit of trivia, focusing on it, I regain control. I know what I must now do: warn the world of the true nature of the fast food French fry. Standing over the bubbling cauldron, I reach forward, ever so gently, and pull the plug out of the wall. The sizzling stops. As the French fry goes limp, his lips move and we hear a whisper,

"The horror. . . the horror. . . "

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Sidebars

Potent Toxins

Lipid hydroperoxides are contaminants that form from natural fatty acids when polyunsaturated fats are heated excessively, which happens in processing and when these oils are heated for cooking and frying. Lipid hydroperoxides poison our body's systems just as trans fats do; in fact, they may even be worse than trans fats because of their propensity to react with oxygen and iron, thereby forming free radicals.

These distortion reactions occur in the factory, the frying pan, and in our bloodstreams. When we eat foods with lipid hydroperoxides, they incite free radical cascades in addition to deactivating enzymes, as trans fats do. This makes lipid hydroperoxides potent toxins, capable of causing tissue inflammation resulting in skin rashes, heartburn, liver problems, arterial spasm and blood clots--even cancer.

The Horrors of HNE

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have identified a highly toxic compound, 4-hydroxy-trans-2-noneal (HNE), which forms in vegetable oils when they are heated to frying temperature (365 degrees) and then concentrate in the fried foods themselves. "HNE is a well known, highly toxic compound that is easily absorbed from the diet," said A. Saari Csallany, professor of food chemistry and nutritional biochemistry at the 96th annual meeting of the American Oil Chemists Society. "The toxicity arises because the compound is highly reactive with proteins, nucleic acids--DNA and RNA--and other biomolecules. HNE is formed from the oxidation of linoleic acid, and reports have related it to several diseases, including atherosclerosis, stroke, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Huntington's and liver diseases."

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Catey Shanahan, MD

About the Author

Catey Shanahan is a Family Medicine physician in private practice on Kauai. She has noticed that getting people to reduce polyunsaturated vegetable oil consumption improves a wide range of clinical problems.