“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.
