The God of Order

I don’t think God is autistic or neurotypical. He is God, which means he is different from all of us. But we are all fallen from being in the image of God in different ways, and that means that autistic people reflect his image better in some ways than neurotypical people do. Of course, there are some ways neurotypical people reflect it better, but I find these ones encouraging…

One of the most interesting areas where we see God having characteristically autistic preferences is the question of order versus chaos. We’re told in 1 Corinthians 14:33 that he is not a God of disorder, but a God of peace. But it’s in the Old Testament a lot before that.

We see it in the creation account in Genesis 1. In the first three days, God separates light from darkness, land from sea, and so on. In each case, God acts to create order; the more ordered domain is described as “good” and the less ordered one is not. In each case, the less ordered domain is later used as a picture for the domain of evil, and the inhabitants of that domain are treated as morally ambiguous at best. And in each case, the less-ordered domain is absent in Revelation 21-22. Adam and Eve are also commanded to expand the order into the realms of disorder and to classify the animals. Human work before the Fall seems to consist of bringing order and classifying stuff. It’s the sort of work autistic people typically like.

Or take Ezekiel’s vision of the restored land after the Exile in Ezekiel 48. When the real land was allocated to the tribes in Joshua 13-21, the tribal boundaries followed natural geographic features like mountain ridges and rivers, and several tribes decided to settle outside the Promised Land. The result was complex and messy. But in Ezekiel’s vision of the future, the tribal allocations are liberated from actual geography and history and the land is laid out in exact equal stripes. Why? Because everything being autistically wellordered seems to represent God’s ideal, as shown to Ezekiel. In Revelation 7, why is the same number of people chosen from each of the twelve tribes, when some tribes had been long exterminated, and others had prospered?

There are loads of interesting consequences, but it’s worth noting the Bible consistently shows God is a God of peace and order, not of disorder (1 Cor 14.33). The tendency of autistic folk to value order so highly, which is itself a consequence of brokenness, seems to reflect a bit of God’s image better than the neurotypical version.