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Chicken Salad
By Jeff Reed
I was making chicken salad this morning and noticed something interesting in the process. It was made using a mixture of celery, pecans, grapes, apples, mayonnaise, and of course chicken. I placed each of the ingredients into the mixing bowl, one at a time, and began to mix them together with a spatula. Then I noticed something I already knew. Actually, it is a common sense thing that everyone knows. The more I mixed the ingredients in the bowl, the more uniformly distributed the ingredients became. For some reason this fascinated me. I know that might make me sound like a simpleton. But please, let me explain.
If I didn’t mix the ingredients in the bowl, the chicken salad wouldn’t be all that good. Imagine if I made a sandwich with that. I would use a spoon to reach into the bowl and pull out a huge glob of mayonnaise and place it between two slices of bread. Maybe a chunk of chicken or two would hang out the side and a random celery or pecan piece would cling to the mayonnaise membrane. There wouldn’t be any apples or grapes on my sandwich, because they would still be in the bottom of the bowl. If I mixed it just a little bit, it might turn out a little better. But there still would be a good chance of getting too much of some ingredients and not enough of the others. Fortunately, I’m a very good chicken salad maker. I put a lot of effort into mixing it and it was quite tasty.
It started out as a chaotic mess of ingredients. With applied effort it became an ordered system of delicious chicken salad. That is when I realized that basically the entire universe God created is like the chicken salad. God created things with a certain amount of disorder so that man could rely on God’s natural laws to put them in order. A forest of trees is a beautiful thing. But man, with applied effort can create houses, pianos, furniture, baseball bats, and numerous other things with those trees. Microchips don’t spontaneously generate. By applying God’s natural laws man makes billions of them. God told man in Genesis 1:28 to, “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”
But more importantly, this concept applies socially. Romans 13:1 states, “Let every soul be subject to the higher authorities. For there is no authority but of God; the authorities that exist are ordained by God.” The authorities of this world “ordained” by God serve an important purpose. Governments create order out of chaos. They provide their citizens with laws and create a stable environment for families to function. This is why it is important for us to be obedient to laws of our native countries. It can be argued that the worst dictatorship is better for society than anarchy. A world without government would be a world in utter chaos.
This authority from God extends to the family. “Children, obey your parents in all things, for this is well-pleasing to the Lord” (Colossians 3:20). The authority given by God to parents over their children is absolute as witnessed by scripture, “If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father and mother and will not listen to them when they discipline him, his father and mother shall take hold of him and bring him to the elders at the gate of his town. They shall say to the elders, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a profligate and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his town shall stone him to death. You must purge the evil from among you. All Israel will hear of it and be afraid” (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). This punishment may seem unreasonable to a modern reader of the Bible. It is actually a last resort for an adult child who had become an extreme danger to that society. It shows that God places the ultimate authority of children with the parents. It is not authority to be abused, but to be used by parents to train their children in God’s Law. Just as it takes work to mix good chicken salad, it takes applied effort for parents to raise good children. They have the opportunity to create order in their lives.
If parents don’t do their jobs, their children will have chaotic lives. An extreme example of this can be witnessed in the documented cases of feral children we have in history. In rare cases, very young children have been lost or abandoned by their parents and raised in the wild by dogs, wolves, or even monkeys. When found by society it is almost impossible for these children to adapt. They have incredible trouble learning language, walking upright, or even using simple tools. They have little or no interest in the humans around them. In essence they behave like the animals that raised them.
God did not create mankind to live like animals. He put the authorities in place of government and family so we could have the opportunity to be like Him. If children are raised to respect their parent’s authority, it will be natural for them to realize the importance of their Heavenly Father’s authority over their live because God’s goal for man is to make us into something more than flesh and blood. He has designed within each of us the opportunity to be just like Him. i
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