God Loves Harmony!

John 3:16 - "For God so loved the world..."  I've always been taught, or perhaps I've just always thought, that "world" meant the people on planet Earth, and of course, it does.  The "whoever" who needs to believe in God's Son definitely refers to a person, not some ethereal idea.  But today when I looked up the original meaning of the word "world," I find that it is the Greek word "kosmos".  The first definition listed is "orderly arrangement; an apt and harmonious arrangement in constitution, order, government".  Also listed further down in the definitions is "the world and all it's inhabitants".

Christ shed His blood for people, surely, but in a very real sense He died to restore the world back to the harmonious arrangement that it was when first created, that harmony that God loves, the harmony that was destroyed when man chose lies over Truth.

God loves harmony, in our personal beings and in all our relationships.  When we pray "Thy kingdom come," this is what we are asking for - the original harmony to be restored.  Ultimately, His kingdom will come, we will experience that beautiful, perfect harmony.  All creation "waits with eager longing" for that!  (Romans 8:19).  But here we are living life in the meantime.  How then should we live?

As I see it now, we have three "should dos" as we wait...we should keep longing for the order; we should keep praying, "Thy kingdom come"; and we should keep striving for the beautiful harmony that "God so loves"!  We need to work to bring every thought and every action under the umbrella of those three "shoulds" as we go about doing the daily stuff that makes up life in the meantime.

"Live in harmony with one another."  -Romans 12:16

"May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." -Romans 15:5

"And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony." -Colossians 3:14

God loves harmony.  So should we!