The Christ child came into a world he had personally created and laid under stars He had fashioned himself. The river of stars called the Milky Way, the billions of lights rolling above His head. All His. All grounded in and flowing from him. All the product of the energy and love of His soul.

His mission was of infinite and cosmic significance, so grand that we can scarcely comprehend it, but we try. It is just that it is beyond us, delving into the law that twines together and holds the very universe together.   

Jesus makes a radical promise. “Behold I make all things new.”1 “Behold, I will do a new thing.”2 He will create “new heavens and a new earth.”3 “If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature, old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.4”

The Lord talks of his mission to Ezekiel, “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.”5

What is clear in these verses is that God has not come to fix us, nor reform us, nor repaint our peeling souls with a quick, slapdash coat. His work is not to improve us or merely remodel, nor to refine the old resolutions or to keep us more satisfied in our small place. God is not preserving our old nature with a few upgrades.

Though He listens with love to us, He is not here merely for therapy. He does not just forgive sin, or comfort suffering, or explain existence—though each of these things is huge for us and binds us to Him eternally.

Christmas is about cosmic renewal that includes utterly making us new creatures that we can’t now comprehend or even approach in our minds. C.S. Lewis said it this way in Mere Christianity, “Christianity is not about making bad people good, but about making dead people alive.” Or this from him in The Weight of Glory, “He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature.”

Caught in the Grip of Entropy

The extent of this work of utter transformation and renewal, which springs across the entire creation and delves right into our own, personal souls, is something only Jesus Christ can do. It becomes clear why, when we study a universal law of physics called the Second Law of Thermodynamics or entropy, the condition that holds every human being in its grip. You’ll recognize it, even if you are not familiar with the term, because it bears down upon your existence and your outlook every second of your life.

In its simplest sense, entropy is the tendency of all things to run down. Like the cup of hot chocolate you are holding in your hand that quickly grows cold, energy dissipates. Order becomes disorder. Decay is universal. Chaos mounts. It is the principle that order requires energy to maintain, while disorder comes naturally and relentlessly. Astrophysicist Arthur Eddington says this law holds “the supreme position among the laws of nature.” He says it is the most unavoidable law in science.

We already know that. Our shiny, new car in 20 years will be a pile of rust in a wrecking yard. Old houses begin to slant. Ancient barns collapse. We tear down corroded old buildings. Unless we order the room, it is a heap of junk. It never reorders itself.

Stephen Hawking said, “You may see a cup of tea fall off a table and break into pieces on the floor… But you will never see the cup gather itself back together and jump back on the table. The increase of disorder, or entropy, is what distinguishes the past from the future, giving a direction to time.”

Machines wear out. Plants decompose. Forests overgrow or burn. It’s not just that lightbulbs wear out, it’s that stars die, too. Worlds come and go.

You don’t see a deck of cards shuffle itself into suits in ascending order.

Entropy is at work everywhere, and as Anton Chekov said, “Only entropy comes easy.”

Why Entropy Feels So Personal

It makes us tired.

On a personal level, your body wears and falters. Unused muscles dissipate. Time allows you to feel the full force of everything that depletes. Your immune system is weakened. Your joints ache. Your parts need replacement.

Entropy affects us not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually too. Relationships drift if they are not nourished. Skills dull without practice. Faith itself can thin—not because it has been disproven, but because it has not been actively lived.

On a civilizational level, societies and systems run down. Cultures exhaust themselves. Cities produce waste and depletion. Infrastructure erodes. Economies burn low. Natural resources become used up.

It is easy to feel hopeless, cynical, and tired. We may feel that we are running, running against the effects of entropy in our lives—hoping to lend our energy to stand against a world that insists on running down. We work tirelessly at the edges of chaos, hoping to bring order.

We succeed somewhat at that, but everything human requires endless rescue from decay. We lend our energy and motivation to create things. We burn calories to create order, and we boldly seek the good. But, in the end, we have to shake our heads and acknowledge that it is not enough when we are living in a universe that has got the law of entropy at its core. It is a lawlike tendency embedded in reality. It is not malicious or an enemy. It is just a law. Closed systems drift toward disorder and exhaustion.

Man cannot save himself permanently. Man cannot sustain the world indefinitely. Man cannot create ultimate order.

No amount of intelligence, morality, or effort can make entropy stop increasing globally. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a challenge to be overcome; it is a boundary condition of existence.

Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle said, “The universe is ordered in such a way that chaos is the natural state unless something intervenes.”

But God does intervene.

So, What are We to Do?

The good news of Christmas and the reason the angels brought us “Good tidings of great joy” is that we are not stuck fighting against the law of entropy forever. The joy is not just “feel good” or sentimental. It strikes as the very foundation of existence. God enters entropy. Eternity enters decay. From above and beyond the closed system where entropy holds, Christ comes bearing light, the very source of energy for all of existence.

We could not transform our state. It is only Christ who can. He comes willing and ready. He sustains us now, and ultimately, his atonement lifts us above the old constraints as he gives us new life and makes us a new being. Entropy is behind us. Atonement, powered by the light and love of the Savior, is a higher law.

Hugh Nibley said it this way: “In its sweep and scope, atonement takes on the aspect of one of the grand constants in nature—omnipresent, unalterable, such as gravity or the speed of light. Like them, it is always there, easily ignored, hard to explain, and hard to believe in without an explanation. Also, we are constantly exposed to its effects, whether we are aware of them or not.

“Like gravity, though we are rarely aware of it, it is at work every moment of our lives… It is waiting at our disposal to draw us on…

“Reversing the laws of entropy requires knowledge that we do not possess; it is out of our league. But as many scientists have reminded us, whatever put us here is capable of doing the impossible.”

That is Jesus Christ’s great gift to us. Christ is the only true counter to entropy. He did not come merely as a moral teacher to slow down entropy. He is the source of renewal itself.

Christ takes our old thinking and replaces it with new minds. He takes our old tendencies and replaces them with new hearts. He takes our old bodies and resurrects them so that “corruption puts on incorruption.”6 The old earth is renewed and puts on paradisaical glory.

Yes, even death, that victory of entropy which is the ultimate running down of our physical bodies, is transformed by resurrection, a gift only Christ can give.

Preserving Us Day by Day

We know what it is to slog our way through a world where entropy is at work, and this knowledge makes us rejoice that the Lord’s gift raises us to a different sphere. His gift sustains us now and will raise us to be new creatures later. We are completely, utterly dependent on him. No wonder King Benjamin reminds us that it is God who is “preserving you from day to day, by lending you breath, that ye may live and move and do according to your own will, and even supporting you from one moment to another.”7

The Lord says, “I am the vine, ye are the branches.’ He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me  ye can do nothing.”8 That is nothing.  He makes no apology here. Nothing is what we can do without Him.

The energy we exercise now over entropy and the new lives we will have are His love and atonement at work. If things fall apart with entropy, His at-one-ment brings them back together again.

Our helplessness before entropy should ignite our endless, relentlessly rejoicing gratitude for the lifeforce that is the atonement and power of Christ.

As one observed, “Our hope in Christ does not deny entropy. It looks squarely at decay, death, and disorder and says:

“Left to ourselves, this ends badly.

“And then it adds:

“But we are not left to ourselves..

“Entropy says:

“Nothing lasts.

“Christ says:

“I do.

“Entropy says:

“All things run down.

“Christ says:

“I make all things new.”

The Astonishing Accuracy of Restoration Scripture

Joseph Smith received Section 88 of the Doctrine and Covenants long before entropy was discovered or understood, yet it explains with astonishing precision where entropy ends. It answers a deeper question. “What sustains order and why does anything continue to exist?”

The answer is clear. “The light which shineth, which giveth you light is through him who enlighteneth your eyes, which is the same light that quickeneth your understandings. Which light proceedeth forth from the presence of God to fill the immensity of space

“The light which is in all things, which giveth life to all things, which is the law by which all things are governed, even the power of God.”9

We may be living in a system where the effects of entropy are all too closely upon us, but creation is not a closed system. Instead, quickening, light, hope, energy, and power are not self-generated. They are bestowed upon us. They are the gifts of an infinite atonement and the light which comes from the bosom of God to fill the entire universe.

From God, light flows into all things. Life is sustained. Life is renewed. Creation is ongoing. Your own restoration is not complete, but in glorious process. Love is strong enough to hold the universe together—and remake it. All things can become new.

Endnotes

  1. Revelation 21:5
  2. Isaiah 43:18–1
  3. Isaiah 65:17
  4. 2 Corinthians 5: 17
  5. Ezekiel 36:26
  6. See 2 Nephi 9:7
  7. Mosiah 2:22
  8. John 5:15
  9. Doctrine and Covenants 88-11013