“Luck” and the Believer – Part 2
February 18, 2008
Dear Friends,
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. (Ecc. 9:11)
The King James Version rendering of this passage has been the cornerstone of most beliefs concerning chance and randomness in the life of believers. To reach this conclusion, however, we have to rest our exposition entirely on this one passage and forget the rest of the Bible.
The Hebrew word here rendered “chance” is pega and occurs only one other time in the Bible in 1 Kings 5:4. Please notice the context of this passage.
But now the LORD my God has given me rest on every side, and there is no adversary or disaster (pega). (NIV)
Here, Solomon is clearly declaring that no disaster (or life occurrence) has over taken him BECAUSE OF GOD. It was not some lucky break or good fortune that saved him from disaster, it was God.
As we go back to Ecclesiastes, what is the writer trying to tell us? The writer has just given an exhortation to enjoy life in verses 4-7. We could summarize the message of these verses as “we are all going to die, so enjoy your life while you can.” He can’t just leave it there, though, because it doesn’t give us an accurate depiction of life, does it? Circumstances change in life no matter how much we plan, no matter how hard we try and no matter how much we intend to follow the advice to enjoy life. Living “under the sun” has its hazards.
Solomon, the author of Ecclesiastes, has already firmly established that he believes in God’s guiding hand.
- He has made everything beautiful in its time. (3:14)
- Then I saw all the work of God, that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun. (8:17)
To interject the idea of luck or randomness outside of God’s control in the narrative at this point is to do violence to the book. If we think that things happen by chance or luck, we are confessing our ignorance to the great Cause. It is true that the race is neither to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but the Cause of those “flukes” is known to those who can see God’s hand. David did not defeat Goliath by luck or even skill; he defeated Goliath because he knew the orchestrator of outcomes.
As we spoke about a few weeks ago, we believe there are two wills at work in the earth: man’s will and God’s will. Sometimes bad things happen to us because we made a poor decision in expressing our free will. As Peter explains, there is no glory in suffering for an ill-advised exercise of our free will. “For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently?” (1 Pet. 2:20) Yet sometimes we suffer for things which God has given us to make us better people. Sometimes we suffer to make other people better. These things all work for good (Rom. 8:28). There is, however, no place for luck, chance or randomness in any of this.
We will close with a quote from the late Bro. Harry Whittaker,
Whether God’s creatures, animal or human, fully understand or not, the emphatic Biblical witness abolishes the idea of any fluky ‘time and chance” and replaces it with the all-wise unerring decisions and actions of an omnipotent Creator whose power reaches always to the most ‘trivial’ and obscure corners of His world. (1)
Have a great week,
(1) Bible Studies, p. 356.
Comments»
A brother wrote in with the idea that perhaps we shouldn’t have insurance if God is involved in everything. Perhaps it was a lack of faith to get insurance.
If I recall correctly, Bro. Harry Whittaker, in his book Reformation, suggested that we should not have insurance. I must confess I still remain unconvinced. The issue seems to be does God bless us with opportunities to protect ourselves. We have the ability to exercise our free will to take advantage of that protective opportunity.
Two quick examples. Nehemiah could have come back into the land and said “we don’t need a wall. If God wants to protect us He will. If God wants us to be destroyed, no wall will stop it.” The logic is sound. Yet, Nehemiah built the wall. In a more modern example, Christian Scientists do not avail themselves of modern medicine because they feel that is a lack of faith. I, for one, am glad for the blessing of modern medicine and when sick to the point of needing a doctor, go to the doctor. Do I believe that God can heal me with or without the physicians? Yes. Do I think I need to do everything in my power also? Yes. We can even cite a verse that may lend itself to the Christian Science perspective concerning King Asa. “Yet in his disease he sought not to the LORD, but to the physicians.” I would say we seek the Lord AND the physicians. Not one to the exclusion of the other.
As far as insurance goes, I have life, health, home and auto insurance. To me that is a form of good stewardship. I am reminded of a brother who died with 5 children and no insurance. It was an hardship for both his family and his ecclesia as the story was told to me. I cannot condemn this poor deceased brother for acting on his conviction especially after the fact. However, it might be a lesson for us all.
If there is a maxim herein, I would say it is “do your best and leave the rest to God.” In this case, it would include insurance if it is affordable.
Kyle
Many of you may have heard the story of the man in a flood that provides another example of what I think you are getting at here Kyle.
The man climbs up onto his roof as the flood waters rise, and prays that God will save him. Rescuers come by in a boat, offering to take him to safety, but he refuses and waits for God to save him. The flood rises to his feet and engulfs his home. He continues to pray for God’s help, and another boat comes by, but he refuses to go with them, relying on his prayers. As the flood rises above his waist, a helicopter flies comes in a last ditch effort to save him. He refuses, and continues to pray. Finally, he is swept away in the flood and drowns. At the judgment he asks “Why didn’t you save me… I prayed and prayed and you never saved me?” The reply: “Well, I sent two boats and a helicopter, why didn’t you just get in!?”
I guess the point is that God will often protect us, but we must do our part too. Just throwing up our hands and asking God to do all the work probably isn’t what he expects from us. He has given us our “talents” and the free will to exercise them for His gain.
One of God’s great desires is to establish a society in which compassion and justice prevail. We see this in the provisions of the Mosaic law. We see this in fulminations of the prophets against those who oppress their neighbours. We see this in the sayings of Jesus, to remember the poor. And we see it in descriptions of the Kingdom age, where everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree, and no longer will people grow crops, only to have others eat them.
So God is not only interested in individual transformation, but in the transformation of society. But at the same time God never seems to be against capitalism per se, but only those who abuse it with greed and power. Capitalism is not evil in and of itself. We currently live in a society in which insurance companies have arisen which help people to share risk, pharmaceutical companies have arisen to provide miraculous medicines, etc. The fact that they make a profit in doing so is not wrong. They need to cover expenses, pay employees and make a bit of money for those who have invested in them, otherwise they have no incentive. Nothing is wrong with all this. Granted, some companies do engage in greedy or oppressive practises. But we also live a society where wrongdoing is often discovered and punished, not just big corporations, but also the common criminal who plagues us too often. Are all these things provided by God? Perhaps not directly, but their presence is part of a society which has developed institutions that provide in many cases what God desires in the transformation of society. That society has been heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian ethos and Protestant work-ethic, which do come directly from God.
The Kingdom society will obviously be superior to our current society. But it is important to remember that Judeo-Christian ethics have had a powerful effect on our current society. This might not seem obvious if you turn on the news, but if you begin to study other non-Western or non-Protestant cultures you begin to see the influence.
toss a coin 100x and predict the outcome – impossible – i KNOW that God knows if it’s going to be heads or tails. I enjoy games and sports, but God knows the outcome, yet to us humans these games are fun and exciting because the outcome is a “toss up”. I do not believe that God alters the laws of nature to ensure an outcome to these events, neither the coin toss, nor the outcome of a sports game. Why not then use the opportunities of His wonderful creation to teach us about his divine purpose? Did God specifically give Naaman leprosy, or was the unfolding of his wonderful story simply a man showing the faith that God is looking for in all peoples great and small. It was definitely the purpose of God to provide us with the story, it was to the Glory of God that Elisha performed such a miracle. But it was the laws of biology that God created along with the thorns and thistles that caused Nahman’s leprosy, to Naaman that was ‘unlucky’, to God, inevitable, to the rest of us, an opportunities to learn from his life. I find it extremely presumptuous when i hear told that Christians live in a specially altered reality where nothing happens by “chance” which is an unscientific way of expressing the laws of chaos which were hard coded into nature by God when he created all things.