The Law of Order
Order as a cosmic, divine law refers to the observance of laws; to regular, sequential and periodic arrangements of things and events. Assigned the “law of arrangement” in the dictionary, order is also defined as systems and methods subject to rules and laws.
The 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope wrote, “Order is heaven’s first law,” an often-quoted line that Mary Baker Eddy refers to as “so eternally true, so axiomatic, that it has become a truism; and its wisdom is as obvious in religion and scholarship as in astronomy or mathematics”
Divine order implies that Spirits perfectly created and properly arranged eternal patterns are upheld by divine principles and procedures. Therefore, it is incumbent upon all sentient beings to become aware of and to follow divine laws and methods which uphold Spirits original order.
In terms of physical existence and worldly dealings, the law of order is ubiquitous. Everything having to do with systems, patterns, models, regularity, periodicity, frequency, series, lists, matrices, and cycles has order as its ruling principle. Various systems that support business, management, communications, economics, education, and scientific investigation, to name a few, reflect the powerful impact the divine law of order exerts on modern civilization.
Order in the natural world can be observed in magnificent diversity: the procession of daily and seasonal cycles of sun, moon, stars, and tides; life cycles; biochemical cycles; the rhythm of breathing and heartbeat; skeletal, nervous, circulatory and other physiological systems; electromagnetic energy oscillation; the periodic table of the elements; the orderly internal arrangement of atoms in minerals; time scales; color scales; musical scales, and the energy spectrum. The list is endless.
Since time immemorial, man’s response to natural order has been to emulate this principle in his laws, religious rites, belief systems, scientific methods and philosophic approaches.
Rehabilitation should be the top priority of every legal system on this planet today. Since man’s fall from grace, Spirit in essence has been rehabilitating us back into our true, inherent spiritual being. Eternal punishment or damnation is a false, man-made concept. God heals infractions of divine law, departures from the cosmic order, by love. Every person is an integral part of the cosmos.
Divine Law
Each ones God given, unique contribution of love and service is required to uphold the order of the universe. As long as even one member of the family of man is unable to give that love, there cannot be perfect order.
All true order—on earth as in heaven—from the macrocosm of the cosmos to the microcosm of one individual’s daily life, with all of its practical demands for order, is the outcome and evidence of God’s intelligent law in operation.
The fact is that because God’s law fills all space, order fills all space, since law and its effect—order—are inseparable. But material sense, having no link to eternal Mind, cannot discern the distinct, original order that Mind is revealing. Because the divine order can only be discerned by spiritual sense, human consciousness has to turn from the illusion of a so-called material man governed by material laws, and yield to the fact of our present spiritual origin, identity, and continuity.
This is the man—this is the creation—coming naturally under the government of God’s law of order. Through the ministrations of this multifaceted law, divine Love governs and controls each of its ideas individually, and all ideas collectively—right here and now, on earth as in heaven.
Order in Time and Space
The ordering of time involves the beautiful and logical order in which ideas make their appearance. With this aspect of order, all elements aren’t seen or heard at once. For example, all the notes in a concerto, all the ideas in a discussion, aren’t heard at the same time. All the movements in a ballet aren’t seen simultaneously.
