Freedom and order:  the grand challenge that all of us face.  How do we balance our individual freedom with our desire for corporate order?  Tilt the balance too far toward freedom, and we descend into anarchy and lawlessness.  Push it too far toward order, and we welcome dictatorship and authoritarianism.  Freedom and order is not a black and white issue.  It's highly complex, replete with many, many shades and hues of gray.
     God understands this well.  From the first page of scripture to its last, we see God wrestling with the balance between the effects of the choice making capacities he granted to human beings and his innate omnipotence and sovereignty.  Though we cannot pretend to know exactly how God manages this, we can at least come to appreciate, in ourselves, the difficulty of balancing two things that are both true but when put together create an essentially unresolvable tension.  We live in a world of gray.
     This is not to say that certain things will not always be true.  It is to say that saying that one thing is true means that its opposite is not.  Really?  If freedom is true, is order false? No.  It simply means that, as finite beings, we must resign ourselves to never knowing, in full and with exact precision, almost anything.  For instance, if we believe in God, we understand that we do so by faith.  We will never understand our belief completely.  Conversely, if we do not believe in God, we should know that we do so with incomplete understanding, too.
     Isn't being finite fun?  We're free, but we're not; ordered, but not.  But really, would we want it any other way?  Being human is immensely challenging.  Perhaps the apostle John can help us here.  In the fourth chapter of his first letter, he remarks that, "God is love."  No more, no less.  If this is indeed true (which I believe it is), then everything else, even if we cannot see it do so, falls into place.