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Setting Things in Order
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For this cause left I thee in Crete, that
thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders
in every city, as I had appointed thee: Titus 1:5
Our God is a God of order. Everything He has made is very
finely organized and arranged. The heavens are so orderly that man has not
yet been able to even make a clock that can keep perfect time with them. Who
can look at a flower and not recognize the intricate organization of its
different parts? How could anyone observe the animals and not be impressed
with the way their lives are carried on with such a definite order? The
birds fly south at a certain time and they fly north at a certain time. You
can actually set your calendar by some of them! There is no chaos with God,
but all of creation is perfectly organized and arranged. The human body is
an absolute miracle of order and organization. The new knowledge of DNA has
caused many agnostics and atheists to at least become believers in a Supreme
Being because it is so obviously of intelligent design that it can’t be
denied. These people are overwhelmed with the fact that such orderliness and
organization could not have possibly just “happened.” There is endless
evidence to show the extreme organization and orderliness of God. In fact,
everything in the creation is so amazingly set in order that it goes beyond
our comprehension. The heavens declare the glory of God because of their
vastness, but also because of the perfect order they display. Eternity will
also be orderly – everything in its place and doing what it’s supposed to.
God was very thorough in the creation of all things to place them in a
definite order. He arranged things the way He wanted them and in the way
that they would work the best. You cannot look at anything in God’s creation
that doesn’t have a place to be and a purpose to fulfill. If you remove it
from the place God appointed or change the purpose God designed it for, you
will begin a chain reaction that breaks down everything else. God arranged
his creation so that one thing depends upon another. When any part of the
creation gets out of order it upsets the whole thing. Just as a finely tuned
machine runs very smoothly until one cog jumps out of place, then everything
is thrown out of sync and the whole thing can be wrecked and ruined.
God created everything in order for a reason. A big part of that reason was
so that men would be without excuse for not knowing, believing, and trusting
God. God is reflected in everything in the creation. He says in Romans 1
that we may know “even his eternal power and Godhead” from simply observing
the creation, because they are “clearly seen.” When men disregard God’s
divine order for things and try to do it their own way they are obscuring
the signature of God and causing others to be blinded. The thing mentioned
in Genesis 6, when God was about to destroy the world with a flood, was that
“all flesh had corrupted his way on the earth.” As a result the earth was
corrupt and “filled with violence” or injustice. Men were far from treating
each other the way God intended for them to, let alone the fact that they
were dishonoring God himself. The reason it became that way was because men
had corrupted his “way.” They had no regard for God’s order. In fact, they
did everything they could to do things contrary to the way God meant them to
be. And God looked upon the earth,
and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the
earth. – Gen 6:12
Man is the crown
of God’s creation and you can rest assured that God has a divine order for
men and women to live their lives and interact with each other. There is an
order for the home, which includes the order for the husband, wife, and
children. God has a place and a purpose for each one. Things will run
smoothly and work well when each one is in their place in God’s divine
order. Let one step out of order and the whole thing is in danger of
disaster. All anyone has to do is look at history to see that this is a
fact. It is when God’s order is challenged and defied that society is
disrupted and falls into moral decay and ruin. When God’s order for society
is followed the blessing of God is upon that people. When men are submitted
to God, and women are submitted to their husbands, and the children are
under the care, guidance, and discipline of their parents all of that
society is prosperous and peaceful.
God created man in order and sin is basically man disregarding God’s divine
order. Sin is basically, “Not God’s way but MY way.” All things that are out
of order are the result of man’s sin. God destroyed the world with a flood
in Noah’s day because “all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth.”
(Gen. 6:12) Jesus said, “And as it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be
also in the days of the Son of man.” (Luke 17:26) Therefore, since we are
living in the last days it is no surprise that God’s order is being ignored
and corrupted – that is what was happening just before God judged the world
in Noah’s day.
If we want to succeed and be happy we must seek God’s way and not our own
way. The family must operate as God planned for it to or it will be a
miserable experience for everyone involved. Christ is to be the center of
the home. Man is the head – but he is to be under the Lordship of Christ. (1
Cor 11:3; Eph 5:23) Woman is the helper, or the completer, and in subjection
to her husband. (Eph 5:24) While man is the head, the woman is the heart of
the home. Children are to be loved, cherished, desired, disciplined, and
trained. This is God’s order and it will produce an environment of love,
happiness, and peace – just like a little heaven on earth. Violate God’s
order and home will be a miserable place full of hatred and strife, and the
fruit of that home will be bad.
How does it start? Satan is God’s number one enemy and he knows how and
where to attack to cause the most damage. His tactics never change. They
have been the same since the Garden of Eden, and his first priority is to
upset God’s order for man. First, he tells man (or woman) that they can be
as wise as God. He tells them they can make up their own mind about what is
right and what is wrong. He plants seeds of doubt in their minds about what
God has said plainly in his Word. This is exactly what he did in the Garden.
It is also very important to note that he came to Eve first without the
presence of her husband. The devil still does that. He has really done a
number in our day on the minds of the women. Have you ever wondered how many
women could be found that had the proper mindset and opinions when it comes
to God’s divine order for their lives? I can assure you that it would be
very few. We live in a time just like Noah’s time, when God’s order for men,
women, children, and society is considered to be something out of our past,
and not only that, but offensive to most people. The very idea of a woman
being submitted to her husband is grounds for a fight in the minds of most
people, even those who sit in fundamental Christian churches.
Where do people begin to disregard God’s divine order? We must acknowledge
that men are responsible for their homes and when God’s order is broken down
they will bear the responsibility come Judgement Day. Men are to be
submitted to God, first. When a man loves God and seeks God’s wisdom and
guidance for finding a wife, and then for guiding his home and his children,
his wife will be much less vulnerable to the wiles of the devil encouraging
her to get out of order. When men live their lives in a selfish, base, lewd
manner it will be much easier for the wife to get out of order. When she
loses respect for his authority she will be much more inclined to disregard
it. When a man has his own life in order and is what God made him to be, a
good wife will be satisfied with him. God made woman in such a way that her
greatest need is for a man just like that. She has protection, provision,
security, and love and that is what she needs. Just as a Christian can
depend upon Christ for all these things she can depend upon her husband and
be happy that way. Things are in order, the way God intended them to be, and
everyone is happy and blessed.
But it is not all dependent upon the man alone, as we can see very clearly
from what happened in the Garden of Eden. The woman can just get out of
order and wreck everything, too. She can resist and resent her husband’s
authority simply because of her own selfishness. She can be influenced, just
as Eve was, to believe the world’s lies and think she can be happier doing
things HER way instead of God’s way. When a woman begins to resent or resist
her place in God’s divine order it will almost always show up first in the
way she dresses. She will wear clothes that “pertain to a man” which is
strictly and plainly forbidden in the Bible. (Duet. 22:5) Our society used
to be close enough to God’s order that we understood very well the saying
about who ”wears the pants” at the house. It meant who was at the top of the
order of authority, and that is basically the reason that women want to wear
pants. They are making a statement about what they think of their husbands,
and what they think about God’s order. They are showing the world that they
reject their place in God’s divine order. They are casting off God’s way and
doing things their own way. For the very same reason women want to cut their
hair off like a man. Any man or woman on the face of the earth knows by
nature that a woman’s hair is her glory, just as the Bible says. (1 Cor
11:15) A woman says with the length of her hair how much she thinks of God’s
order and her husband’s authority over her. My great-grandmother was not
even a Christian, but lived to be over 100 years old and never had a pair of
scissors in her hair. The world used to be different – it used to be aware
of God’s order and had some regard for it. That is why we have been blessed
as a nation, and that is why we are about to be judged as a nation. You may
make light of these things and think they just don’t matter, but you are
dead wrong. They are the first outward symptoms of someone who is throwing
off God’s order for their life. We are not nit-picking about one verse out
of the Bible – we are talking about something very basic – God’s divine
order for his creation.
We have seen in our lifetime what the breakdown of a society is like because
it has happened before our very eyes. If you are at least 45 years old you
can remember a different world and a different society than we live in
today. You can remember a world where ladies were ladies and men were men.
Divorce was rare and “shacking-up” was scandalous. Then the women started
wearing pants, mini-skirts, and Twiggy came along. The breakdown between the
sexes started and now, 40 years later, we have a society that is saying men
can marry men and women can marry women. They aren’t even sure now what
marriage is, or what a family really is. God and our forefathers called
sodomy a sin worthy of death, but they call it “love.” We have a society
where evil is good and good is evil. Perverts are everywhere and no one is
safe from them, and according to our courts and the media, Bible-believers
are the biggest problem society has. It is wrong to kill a sea turtle, but
right to kill an unborn, or partially born, baby. It is a hate-crime to
stick a copy of the Koran in the toilet, but it is “freedom of speech” to
burn the U.S. flag. Do you think the world has gone insane? It has simply
left God’s ways and all has become confusion and chaos, and it all started
somewhere. It started when men and women began to leave their places in
God’s order – when men quit being men and women quit being women.
The submission of the wife to the husband is very much misunderstood and
misrepresented. She is to be submitted to her husband as the church is to be
submitted to Christ - in every thing. (Eph 5:24) That parallel is brought out in the Bible repeatedly.
True submission means that she is to depend upon him for all her needs. She
is to trust him to supply and meet her needs. He is her provider, her
protector, and the one she loves above everyone else in the world. He has
her best interest at heart and she knows that, so she is willing to obey
him. Isn’t that the way we are submitted to Christ? It is not a master-slave
relationship, but one based on love. This is what a man needs, also. God
constituted man so that he needs for his wife to submit to him that way.
Ladies need to understand that very important fact. He NEEDS for her to
depend upon him for all the things mentioned above. If she has her own
career and her own income, and her own friends and her own life apart from
his that wrecks the entire thing. He is made in the image and likeness of
God and that is a part of his character that is most like God. This is the
very type of submission that God desires of us as Christians. He wants us to
TRUST him and depend upon him for every need of our lives. We cannot love
God and the world, according to the Word of God, so neither can a wife love
her husband while giving herself to a career, or any other cause. Can you
imagine a Christian that would refuse to trust or obey God, and refuse to
seek his counsel or yield to his will? That would be totally out of order,
and it is no less out of order for the wife to treat her husband with such
disrespect and rebellion.
When the wife is not in subjection to her husband one of the
basic needs of his life is not met. He becomes frustrated, angry, and
dissatisfied and he can’t meet the needs of his wife, so the problem just
gets worse and worse. Since God’s way has been abandoned for selfish
interests and pleasure things are out of order, and instead of the happiness
they were seeking they only find misery.
When the parents are out of order you can be assured that the children are
going to grow up out of order, also, but it will magnified many times over.
They will abandon God’s ways in things their parents never thought of. Their
lives will be more miserable and hopeless than their parents’ were. Leaving
God’s ways creates problems that just snowball more and more.
Strength and courage are two of the most important traits that God instills
in a man. A man’s place in God’s divine order requires these character traits,
yet this type of man is on the world’s hate list in our day. A strong,
courageous, manly man is put down, ridiculed, and esteemed as the lowest and
most undesirable creature on God’s earth. At the same time a woman who is
assertive and aggressive is held high as a role model for all women. A women
who stays home with her children and takes care of her husband is considered
a lowly, mistreated, and somewhat ignorant person. After all, that is the
bottom of the barrel – to just be a mother and a wife. Don’t you see how
mankind rejects God’s divine order? Don’t you see the work of the devil
himself in the way the world has swallowed all his lies? Are we better off
now that women are “liberated” and men are weak, spineless, feminine little
creatures? Are homes happier and producing good children that are a blessing
to society? If the foundations be
destroyed, what can the righteous do? Psa. 11:3
The basic foundation we build everything on is God’s divine
order. When THAT is destroyed what can the righteous do? One of the first
things mentioned in Isaiah 3 describing God’s judgment that is about to come
upon these people is that He will take away the “mighty man, the man of war,
etc.” The strong, courageous men will disappear, as well as the judges, the
prophets, and the counselors. Then the children will behave themselves
proudly against the ancients, and will rule over them.
For, behold, the Lord, the LORD of hosts, doth take away
from Jerusalem and from Judah the stay and the staff, the whole stay of
bread, and the whole stay of water, The mighty man, and the man of war, the
judge, and the prophet, and the prudent, and the ancient, The captain of
fifty, and the honourable man, and the counsellor, and the cunning
artificer, and the eloquent orator. And I will give children to be their
princes, and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed,
every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave
himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.
Isa. 3:1-5 Then the women will rule
over them: As for my people,
children are their oppressors, and women rule over them. O my people, they
which lead thee cause thee to err, and destroy the way of thy paths. Isa.
3:12 Looks like right now we have a
good chance to have a woman for president after the next election. Where do
you think we are in the timetable of God’s judgment?
The mighty men of Babylon have forborn to fight, they have
remained in their holds: their might hath failed; they became as women: they
have burned her dwellingplaces; her bars are broken. Jer. 51:30
The men became as women – they lost their courage and
strength. After this men usually start acting and thinking like women. They
are soft and delicate and feminine in all their ways – and soon the women
and children are ruling. Things are out of order – and everybody is
miserable and everything is in chaos.
When the home is out of order, the church will be out of order. When a wife
will not submit to her husband she sure isn’t going to submit to a pastor, a
church, or anyone else. If she rules at home she will come to church and try
to do the same thing. Probably 95% of the conflicts in church would be
avoided if things were in order at home.
The bottom line is that men will answer to God for their home and their wife
and their children. God didn’t come to Eve and say, “Eve, where art thou?”
He came to Adam, and He still holds the man accountable. If men want to,
they can be the head of their home and they can set things in order. For
some it would be more difficult, but with God’s help it can be done. To have
God’s blessing we must do things God’s way. We are living in an apostate age
where this basic truth is not even taught or believed in most churches. The
very foundation has been cast aside for man’s own designs that never work.
The old ways were better, and there is nothing to be ashamed of when it
comes to being old-fashioned. This modern mixed-up world sure doesn’t have
much to boast of, and neither does this modern worldly church. We need to
get back to the old ways –God’s ways.
Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old
paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for
your souls. But they said, We will not walk therein. Jer. 6:16
Mike Miller
7/9/2005
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