Respected pastor and Bible nerd Manny Arango reveals how the gospel empowers us to establish peace in our disordered lives by embracing God''s design for us to be agents of order in a chaotic world. This book is a deeply biblical and fresh look at what is wrong with the world and what is wrong with us. It is a book about sin, but maybe not in the way you might think. Whatever monsters you face, <Crushing Chaos< reveals how followers of Christ can rewire their lives for peace and join Jesus in the work of bringing order to our lives and world.

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Manny Arango is a Bible nerd and founder of ARMA Courses—an online educational platform that helps Christians become biblically literate. The platform has grown to thousands of monthly subscribers since launching in 2020. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Arango and his wife, Tia, are the pastors at The Garden in the heart of Houston, Texas. He graduated from Northern Seminary in June 2024 with a doctorate in New Testament studies. Arango has been married to his beautiful wife for more than a decade, and they have a son named Theophilus.

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**ECPA BESTSELLER • Respected pastor and Bible nerd Manny Arango reveals how the gospel empowers us to establish peace in our disordered lives by embracing God’s design for us to be agents of order in a chaotic world.

“Manny Arango doesn’t pull punches in Crushing Chaos, and that’s exactly why you need it. You’ll laugh, you’ll grow, and you’ll be glad you picked this book up.”—Travis and Jackie Greene, lead pastors of Forward City Church, South Carolina**

There is chaos in your life, probably more than you bargained for. But rest assured that the God of the Bible is neither intimidated nor stumped by your chaos. He knows exactly how to conquer it and create order in your life. The story of the Bible centers on God’s work of bringing form and function to the messes we humans make. In fact, His solution for the Chaos found in Genesis wasn’t to automatically provide peace—it was to establish order. And for good reason.

In Crushing Chaos, pastor and self-proclaimed Bible nerd Manny Arango unfolds the ways that God faithfully, lovingly does just that, showing you how to conquer the chaos you’ve carried with you for far too long and restoring passion and purpose to your life. You’ll discover how a path of surrender and self-sacrifice can lead you from a place of turmoil and confusion to a place of hope and peace. The answer is in saying “yes” to a radically reordered life.

Amid the life and ministry, suffering and death, and triumphant resurrection of Jesus, we encounter the methods behind his mission (hint: they took pretty much everyone by surprise) to bring His people back to life in the Garden of New Creation, which we were originally intended—and are still destined—to call home.

The One who triumphed over chaos once and for all wants to bring you out of the confusion of this broken world and into a divinely ordered life. Embark on this journey you were always meant to take and have joy fill your heart and hope flourish in your soul.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Panic in the Lobby

Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

—­Genesis 1:2

The main emphasis [of creation] is not on a process from nothing to something, from nonexistence to existence, but on a process from confusion to distinction, from chaos to order.

—­James Barr, “Was Everything That God Created Really Good?,” emphasis added

Anxiety coiled itself around a young girl while she was standing in our church lobby on a Wednesday night. Minutes before our weekly worship service, she was fighting to breathe and relentlessly wiping tears from her face. I offered up prayers, seemingly in vain. My job was to protect and love these young people, but I felt powerless over the chaos of panic that had engulfed her.

Eventually her wave of anxiety subsided, but I never forgot this moment. I had preached dozens of messages about anxiety and panic. We had devoted prayer and ministry time specifically focusing on anxiety, but clearly, we hadn’t cracked the code on the path to peace. After months of reflecting on this moment, I remembered that the creation account in Genesis has a whole lot to say about Chaos and that it describes the original state of creation as a deep, wild, raging ocean of Chaos. The opening words of the Bible declare:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. (Genesis 1:1–­2)

God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was “formless and empty.” In Hebrew, those terms are tohu and va-­vohu, which translate into English as “wasteness . . . that which is wasted, laid waste . . . a desert . . . emptiness, vanity . . . nothing” and “emptiness, voidness,” respectively. Other translations are “place of chaos,” “wilderness,” and “barren.”5 And the Hebrew term tehom (“deep”) can be translated as “abyss.” (We’ll look at these terms in more detail in later chapters.)

Simply put, Scripture’s first words declare that creation was a chaotic, untamed mess and that the Spirit of the Lord God was brooding over the surface of this barren, unintelligible, chaotic ocean abyss. Pretty epic visual, if you ask me. However, God didn’t bring peace to this chaos. God began organizing the creation and moved the earth from chaos into order. God began to separate, pull apart, gather, and bring structure to the chaos of creation. Look at this description in Genesis 1:6–­7:

God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it.

What did God do? God separated.

Read this next description in verse 9:

God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.”

What did God do? God gathered.

The beginning of creation reveals a God who knows how to rearrange, organize, unclutter, clean, uncomplicate, simplify, and structure life. God’s solution for the Chaos found in Genesis wasn’t to bring peace; it was to establish Order. Ironically, peace is always a natural by-­product once Order takes root in the cosmos, and I have discovered that God’s strategy for responding to Chaos hasn’t changed.

Order was the missing key in our ministry approach, as anxiety was simply a result or by-product of chaos. I had spent all my time focused on the check engine light of anxiety instead of popping open the hood and actually checking the engine. Anxiety is just a symptom of the real, undiagnosed chaos living deep within us. I had been preaching about peace, essentially medicating pain and providing temporary quick fixes, instead of addressing the root of the problem. The good news is that there’s a cure for Chaos, and my discovery of that cure is what this book is all about. The cure for Chaos is Order.

There’s an Order to life that’s revealed in the Scriptures.

Take sex for example. The Bible’s vision: Sex goes after marriage, not before. Confusing this sequence will inevitably create chaos.

Unnecessary heartbreak.

Soul ties with multiple individuals.

Insecurity. Possessive behavior.

Children born outside of wedlock.

Baby-­mama drama. Child support.

This is absolute chaos.

And it creates abu…