from Doug Perry, download the free book here – The Big Picture Book
In the late 2000s, I remember watching the European Union and the Secretary General and High Representative Javier Solana (roughly: “savior of light”) as a possible fulfillment of a bunch of different Bible prophecy. He was an unelected man of piece that had power over the Western E.U. and the regular E.U., would be the commander in chief of their combined militaries in the event of an emergency – and he had authority to declare an emergency. I remember seeing them struggle to get momentum on getting all of Europe to agree to their constitution and treaties. Solana, was pretty frustrated when he couldn’t get everybody to do what he wanted. Then he abruptly quit in 2008 and the Lord said there was a delay in the timeline.
Some time around 2006 I heard God tell me to pray against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Essentially that we needed to reverse entropy. Well, now, that’s just goofy! Any scientist anywhere would tell you that it’s not some conjecture or theory (like the Big Bang or Evolution), it’s just an observance of how physics works and an undeniable quality of reality. You don’t pray against that. And if you did, WHY?!
In case you don’t understand, let’s get into the specifics.
The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred or transformed from one form to another. The total energy of an isolated (closed) system remains constant over time. This principle is commonly known as the law of conservation of energy.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a physical law based on universal empirical observation concerning heat and energy interconversions. A simple statement of the law is that heat always flows spontaneously from hotter to colder regions of matter (or ‘downhill’ in terms of the temperature gradient).
Entropy is a thermodynamic quantity that measures the degree of energy dispersal, randomness, or the number of possible microscopic arrangements of a system. In thermodynamics, entropy is used to describe the amount of energy in a system that is unavailable for performing useful work. The entropy of an isolated system tends to increase over time, as stated by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Entropy is central to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. As a result, isolated systems evolve toward thermodynamic equilibrium, where the entropy is highest. “High” entropy means that energy is more disordered or dispersed, while “low” entropy means that energy is more ordered or concentrated. A consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics is that certain processes are irreversible.
Yeah, that’s just smart guy talk. Let me boil it down. If you plug in a refrigerator, the power coming in will convert to cooling and that cooling will get all the molecules in the water to line up in a highly ordered, concentrated way. We call that “ice.” If you unplug the refrigerator and have no more power coming in, then it will begin to break down to equilibrium – that is, the ice will reach whatever temperature the unplugged fridge can sustain without power coming into the closed system.
Or we can go the other way. If you set a glass of cold water on the counter, it’s going to eventually drop down to whatever room temperature (ambient) might be. If you want to create steam out of the water (inversely ordered to ice) then you’re going to need to add power. So you start a fire and boil it, or you in some other way apply the necessary power to the system to get it to boil (laser, radiation, etc.).
If I park a brand new car out in a field without any effort to protect it, eventually it will decay and rust and there will be nothing left but dirt. It requires energy to stop that – build a garage, cover it, wax it, oil it, put it on blocks so the tires don’t rot, control humidity, protect from storms – and even then, some things will succumb to time (rubber, vinyl, fluids, etc.). I’m well aware of entropy on my own body as I get older and how much more energy is required to keep it in check or try to reverse it. Leaving a car outside will generate more entropy (faster decay) than less entropy inside a garage (slower decay).
From God’s perspective, the whole universe is a closed system. It’s all just a big refrigerator – and He is The Power Source. Entropy says that all of the universe is decaying. It’s all prone to move toward the least ordered state, unless we can apply the necessary force to keep it from decay. Romans 8:21-22 says that all of creation is subject to decay because of original sin. That creation is groaning, anticipating the manifestation of the sons of God. Why? Because when they show up, something is about to change and creation has been BEGGING for it!
When I played sports in high school and college, I know that I tested the patience of my coaches because I pretty much refused to do stuff just because they said so. I needed to know WHY they were telling me to do that. Why do we hit the ball that way? Why do we train this way? What’s the strategy behind that move? Later on, it made me a much better coach.
When I was younger I would get into Grandma’s attic and find old radios and toasters and take them apart and fix them. It’s not enough that toast pops out, I want to know how it works. And I was really good at fixing them!
My Dad says that if there was a giant boulder in the middle of a field and you asked 100 people to describe it, some would write a poem, some would paint it or take pictures, some would sculpt a replica, some would take technical measurements – but I’m the ONE guy that would dig under it to see what everyone else was missing. So it’s not enough that God tells me to pray against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, I want to know why. And I’m willing to shut up and listen until I get an answer. (Much of this book is because of that tendency, I suppose. I praise God for making me this way. It’s been a great adventure!)
So, after I made sure it was Him that I was hearing tell me to do something crazy, I asked the Lord, “WHAT?! Why?” And He said, “Everything is breaking down, rusting, corrupting, tearing into pieces. And it’s just getting worse all the time. You need to pray for entropy to stop or they’ll never build their one world order and get this ride over with. And we’ll never restore the Church either – because the infighting and tendency to be unable to build something together will just get worse and worse.” We’re breaking down into smaller and smaller chunks – from families to religion to government to nations.
Well, since I’m all for getting this ride over with, I started praying (and have been ever since) that God would reverse the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics so that the Illuminati-Satanists-Masons-Rockefellers-Whoever can get their act together and build an evil global empire! It’s not like what’s coming is just one One World Government. There are two growing at the same time – theirs and ours. (And we know who wins.) But that entropy has the same effect on The Bride, too, so that now she’s over 50,000 denominations and no ideas or inclination from them to reverse it. Even the people inside her seem to be getting more and more crusty and inflexible. And the 2nd Law says there’s no hope. Good reason to pray.
While that was some of the answer, it didn’t stop there. I said, “But, Lord, I thought it was just a constant of the universe?” He said, “No, it wasn’t like that in the Garden. There was no decay. There was no death. Nobody was eating each other. It was perfect and highly ordered because I was powering the system. When sin came in, it got unplugged, and has been subject to decay ever since.” Wow. And it wasn’t a slow process. The instant it unplugged, the spiritual decay started.
From God’s perspective, the entire universe is just a closed system, a refrigerator to be plugged into Him or not. There is no other energy than what we have. It can change forms – nuclear reactions on the Sun turn into heat and sun burns here, create clouds and wind effects and make the paint on my car fade. But it’s still a fixed quantity – and it all tends toward decay and lukewarm and rot, one way or another. Sooner or later the sun will burn out.
Because I’m curious I kept asking questions. Well, it turns out that HE is the ultimate source of power and when we reject Him, it’s just an automatic that we’re rejecting the Power Source of All. When sin came in, Spiritual Entropy started. People were still living for hundreds of years, but everything was a vegetarian. (The Book of Jubilees says that when Adam and Eve left the Garden, the animals couldn’t talk to them anymore.) They start having kids and pretty much right away the spiritual entropy is bad enough that a brother is killing his brother (I mean, who else did he have to kill really?). And it was over Religion – whose sacrifice to God was best. (Or which little denomination was more orthodox!)
Stop and chew on that for a moment. The first murder EVER was over religion. ….. OK, now go on.
One night we had a core group of radical Jesus lovers praying at my furniture store and God told us that we needed to repent for Adam and Eve. Huh? He said, “Yeah, he blamed her, she blamed the snake, and nobody said they were sorry.” Well, how do WE qualify to pray for that?! At the time we were the core of a city church with a lampstand. The first one in America in decades. But He said, “If I tell you to pray for something, then you have authority.” So we wept for the Fall and repented for her listening to the snake and for him listening to her.
A few weeks later a sister, Jen, started hearing people speaking in some other language, but she understood it perfectly. She could even watch Univision in Spanish and she would hear it in this other thing, but she knew what they were saying. She talked to her mother on the phone, but heard this, but understood it perfectly. We were talking about it one day and another sister was taking a seminary class studying Hebrew and listening to a cassette tape on a boom box, practicing pronunciation. Jen said, “That’s it! It sounded kind of like that.” Here we go again. “Lord, what is she hearing?” He says, “She’s hearing the Adamic language, a sort of super early proto-Hebrew.” The WHAT?!
Then He explains that at the Tower of Babel everybody understood each other. We’re talking something like 1700 years after Adam! Somewhere between 200 and 350 years after the Flood of Noah. And people are spread out geographically all over. Any linguist or sociologist will tell you that that is not possible. If we take a tribe in the Amazon, split it in half and move half of them 200 miles away, sooner or later they won’t be able to understand each other. Maybe as little as 200 years.
Latin turned into Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Romanian (and others like Galician, Occitan, Sardinian, Romansh, Friulian, Ladin, Aragonese, Asturian, Mirandese and even extinct ones like Dalmatian) within 500 or so years. Then there are the ones derivitive of or influenced by those heavily, like Tagalog, Chavacano, Haitian Creole, Louisiana Creole, Mauritian Creole, Papiamento, Cape Verdean Creole, and various pidgins like Lingua Franca. And all of that in about the same time as from the Garden of Eden to Babel. And that’s just Latin!
But that didn’t happen in the whole time from Adam to Babel! They all understood each other perfectly and there wasn’t anything they couldn’t accomplish. When they decide to use that gift from God to set themselves against God – He unplugged it. Maybe He took the language apart and handed different pieces to different tribes. Some got clicks and whistles. Some got tones. Some got rolled R’s and gutturals. Some got glottal pops and sounds that come from somewhere down around your spleen.
Or maybe He just unplugged the Adamic that’s in our core consciousness, hardwired in our circuitry, the thing that held all the languages together – and He left them to their own devices. Either way, Linguistic Entropy entered like a tidal wave. No slow roll out – like the life spans after Noah – instantly decayed. That requires a big energy input from somewhere, doesn’t it? Remember that car we parked? A bomb landing on it is going to decay it to dust REAL fast – garage, cover, wax or not. God bombed Babel.
By the way, I think there’s a chance that in Acts 2, when people from all these different nations are hearing their own language, it’s actually Adamic being hinted at or partially restored, but everyone understands it perfectly as if it’s their native tongue. It’s not clear if Peter preached to them in the common Koine Greek or Hebrew – or if he preached that sermon just once and they all heard it as if in their native tongue.
About the time I’m getting my head around this, the Lord says, “Somebody needs to repent for building the Tower of Babel.” The WHAT?! Nobody ever said they were sorry for that mess? How do we have authority for that? He says, “If I tell you to pray, then you have authority.” OK, so after confirmations and agreement, one night we’re together and the Lord launches us off into weeping and repenting for Man setting himself against God and using a beautiful, invaluable thing like a common language as a weapon against God.
Turns out, if we’re ever going to restore something, we have to repent for having broken it. Don’t pray for revival. Repent for being the kind of people that need reviving. Don’t ask for a fresh fire until you say you’re sorry for blowing out the last one! Revival isn’t for the world – they were never “vived.” Re-vival is for the church – for those that had life and truth and fire – and turned away from it! The world just needs salvation. The Church needs a good shock from a heavenly defibrillator to wake up its heart again.
Anyway, it would sure help us preach the Gospel to all nations if we had the Adamic language back! If somebody is going to ever “manifest their sonship” it probably ought to also include the ability to talk to anybody in the world. Please keep praying God would give it back – to somebody at least.
Then we talked about how Physical Entropy entered after the Flood. The water canopies over the earth collapsed, water sprung up out of the deep, and people’s life spans went from 900+ to 120 on the very outside – mostly about 70, sometimes 80. Which is what the Bible said would happen. (Psalm 90:10)
God gives Noah the rainbow as a sign. All you need for a rainbow is water vapor and direct sunlight. But the world was wrapped with solid cloud cover and watered by the “mist of the earth” instead of rain (Genesis 2:5-6). Everything was protected from Gamma, X-rays, UV rays and all the stuff that kills us early (and fades the paint on my car – or makes Marvel superheroes). Everything lives longer in a hyper-oxygenated, high barometric pressure, radiation-shielded, environment. Cancers can’t survive. Wounds heal super fast. You can grow tomatoes the size of watermelons. After the Flood, God tells Noah to take the animals, that they will be “meat” – food – to him. (Genesis 9:3) Because they weren’t before, but there’s not enough protein after the Flood because things aren’t growing like they were. Everything was a vegetarian. Entropy came to nature.
(Reptiles never stop growing their whole life. Do we have any idea what a 600 year old Horned Toad might look like with abundant food and no predators? Or a 900 year old Iguana? Maybe all the things we have now are larval stages of what they would grow up to be in that environment! Dinosaurs are just big reptiles. Think about it.)
Today we are near the end of the process. The worst time the world has ever seen. Everything seems fractured and divided and breaking down. Our marriages are falling apart. Our families are falling apart. Our communities are falling apart. Our politicians turn on their own party. Our whole country pretends it’s a shiny new Cadillac, but it’s all rusted out underneath and running on three of the eight cylinders, if at all. I think the brakes stopped working awhile ago.
Revival takes things that are dead or dying and plugs them back into the Power Source of All and shocks them back to life. Just before the Second Great Awakening in 1802, Yale—founded to train ministers—had become so spiritually dead that some classes reportedly contained no professing Christians at all, and fewer than one student in ten professed faith in Christ. And the decay wasn’t localized.
Enlightenment theology, deism and the French Revolution disdain for clergy had spread all over. At the end of the eighteenth century (1790), many observers believed Christianity in America was in steep decline. Colleges founded to train ministers had become centers of skepticism. Churches were weak. Then, in the span of a few decades, a wave of revival swept colleges, towns, churches, and the frontier, reversing trends that many thought were irreversible.
God used men like Charles Finney (New England revivals), Timothy Dwight (President of Yale and grandson of Jonathan Edwards – from the 1st Great Awakening), Barton Stone (Cane Ridge Revival), James McGready, Peter Cartwright (Methodist Circuit rider), Francis Asbury (Methodist Circuit rider) to be conduits between The Power Source and a patient on life support. To be the doctors charging the paddles and holding them to the chest of a nation whose heart had stopped. And it wasn’t organized, delegated or planned – it was by the hand of God, organized all at once and powered by Him.
In His great mercy, God didn’t unplug completely. If He had, we wouldn’t have made it this far. He’s still involved, holding it all together JUST enough – and He’s still got lots of outlets we can plug into. He sent the Holy Spirit to charge the batteries up. Then demons taught us to say stupid things like, “You’ve got all the Holy Spirit you’re ever going to get.” And to believe ridiculous nonsense like that once you’re “Spirit-filled” that you stay just that full from then on. Or worse, that none of the Gifts are real anymore and you shouldn’t even ask – and you should despise and make fun of anyone that dared to believe and ask for more. (Thanks, John MacArthur.)
If you read my chapter on Spirals, then you know that I see all of the Bible as music. I look for repeating patterns. Themes and pre-themes and post-themes – and musical lines repeating and overlapping and building. Jesus used parables to tell a complex, beautiful story – the kingdom of God is like a widow’s mite, a pearl of great price, wheat and tares, a mustard seed, or hidden treasure in a field. All of these different voices/instruments/tones blend together like an orchestra to sing a complex, rich picture.
That was when Jesus was here speaking. But God the Father uses the whole of creation, the complete Bible, the lives of prophets and nations, to tell deep parables from different directions until you can construct the whole picture. I see so many times that this pattern of entropy is revealed in scripture.
Life – Blessing – Complacency – Drift – Crisis/Near Destruction – God Intervenes – Revival/New Life
In the book of Judges you see it about every 50 years. Things are great, then the people drift more and more until they are getting pounded on, then God intervenes, squirts some power into the system (Gideon, Samson, Deborah, Jephthah, David, etc.) and it gets restored.
Then I see it in America. Since 1750, about every 50 years we require a revival again. So we go from the First Awakening around 1750 to the Second in 1800, to the Prayer Revival of 1857, to Charismatic Renewal in 1900-1906, to the big tent revivals of the 1950s, to lighting the Lampstands and the great migration away from the institutions in the 2000s.
I see the same pattern in me personally. Years of blessing, getting too conceited and jaded, drifting into sin, desperate for meaning and purpose, crisis, God intervenes – new life. You probably see it in your life as well. It turns out that the Christian walk isn’t about saying a little prayer or going to a building or a home group. It’s about staying plugged in to The Source – or falling into decay and rusting to pieces.
The higher ordered way (peace, patience, kindness, long-suffering, love…) requires inputs into the system of our lives. We can muster up some of it (room temperature), but we can’t get it all to line up just right (like the example Jesus set for us) without The Source. We have to learn to get our cup full and keep it that way moment by moment. How to drink from the River that flows from the Throne of God. And then how to pour it out on the people around us. And our cities. And our nations.
Or we just crumble back into the dust from which we came.
So, you see, it turns out that praying against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics isn’t so crazy after all. It’s about praying that the disorder doesn’t take over – on every spiral: personally, collectively, nationally, globally – and physically, spiritually, emotionally, mentally, financially, chronologically. Whatever. It’s all rusting, subject to perversion and decay and corruption. And He is the only hope.
And we unplugged Him.
And we really only try to plug in when there is a crisis or someone we love is in the hospital. And we pretty much do whatever we want, however we want. Whatever will grow what WE built in OUR power.
What a shame. That’s no kind of relationship with a Husband. We’re an awful Bride. Just awful.
So … as it turns out every preacher, every revivalist, every community activist, everybody that ever tries to resist disorder and chaos and the breakdown of a system or a personal life or a nation is actually fighting desperately against the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. Every time we take in a homeless person or adopt an orphan or send food to the starving, we’re trying to turn around the chaos of this world imposed by sin. Every time we do spiritual warfare by handing out food at a food pantry and hugging someone having a hard time, we’re doing deliverance against spirits of loneliness and despair and hunger – and we’re rebuking the prince of this world who wants chaos and destruction and death.
So maybe the “manifest sons of God” are when the people of God dedicate themselves to stop breaking into pieces and participating with entropy and instead commit themselves to only do things that resist the breakdown that we started in the Garden. I mean, after all, the first murder ever was over which denomination offered sacrifices that pleased God better.
Many times I’ve looked out at the landscape of “churchianity,” at the Mad Max wasteland of death and destruction and delusion, and thought that there was nothing on the horizon that looked like it would turn this around. Not purpose driven or seeker friendly or prosperity or gold dust or orthodox or strip mall church or 24/7 house of prayer or laser light singing Christmas tree pageants.
But I don’t say that anymore. I finally saw God do something that looks like it could fix it. Something that could get us back on the right foundation (city church), get people playing nice again, restore community, give back to our communities what the church has stolen – and maybe even get us ready for what’s coming.
It’s called www.CitySaver.org and it’s coming soon. And it’s coming from LIBERTY because where the Spirit of God is, there is Liberty – and we’re to preach LIBERTY to the captives. Liberty from dead religion, Liberty from entropy, Liberty from loneliness, Liberty from sin, Liberty from death.
The lonely, limping, beaten sheep of the Book of Micah, the flock of His inheritance, are about to come together. Just as everything looks hopeless. Praise God!
(Read Micah. It’s only seven little chapters for Pete’s sake! Then connect it to Psalm 51.)
MUSICAL INTERLUDE – “Where Are Those That Weep?” from “Come On Home – Jesus Blues” album
