Time & Chance – Pt. 2
October 27, 2008
Dear Friends,
Before we delve too deeply into the specifics of “time and chance”, let’s step back for a moment and see if we can’t comprehend the big picture.
There are two wills at play in the world today – God’s will and man’s will. Man has “free will” or the ability to make decisions within the parameters given to him but man does not have “free rein.” Man exercises his free will within the very limited parameters God has set up. As some have expressed it, God deals the cards and we play the hand we are dealt. Some believe there is a third category called “time and chance” in which neither God’s will or man’s will is at play, but simply randomness or luck. This is the issue at hand.
Using an example of building a house, let’s see how this might work. Brother Jack decides he is going to build a house acting as his own contractor. He buys the land and hires some helpers. Along the way, he runs into some “bad luck.” First, his main helper gets the opportunity of the lifetime for a new job and leaves him. Next, they have unusually heavy rains such that they can’t break ground. Finally, Jack himself becomes ill with pneumonia and can’t work.
With this little story as a model, let’s see how the confluence of God’s will and man’s will work together. Jack deciding to build a house was an exercise in free will. What we don’t know is how God’s providence influenced this decision to build a house. Was Jack’s motivation to build a house godly or carnal? Did God put people and circumstances in Jack’s life to encourage him toward that decision or to persuade him against that decision? Was the building of a house (bigger barns?) a test of Jack’s faith which he failed?
Jack has three things happen which the world at large would tend to chalk up to “bad luck.” The first problem, his helper getting a new job, seems like it is a mixture of man’s will and God’s will. The latter two problems of weather and illness are either God’s intervention or “time and chance” depending on your perspective.
Now let’s look at a few ways that people take this information and process it in a non-biblical way. If they believe that God is involved,
- They assume this means that Jack sinned and this is retribution by God. This is the same mistake Job’s three friends made. Conversely, they assume that other people who have built houses successfully were blessed.
- They assume that Jack is necessarily the person who is supposed to learn from this. The truth is that someone else might be the beneficiary of Jack’s tribulation.
- They assume that what has happened is bad. By putting our own value judgment on what has happened, we dismiss God’s promise that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” (Rom. 8:28)
In order to complete the big picture, we need to bring in attitude. If Jack has an attitude that “all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28) then he can take comfort in all that he has experienced thus far. He may not see what the good was, but if he trusts God, he knows it was for his good. He might speculate what the good was, but he may never know. He may see that he wasn’t supposed to build a house. He may find in a few months that he gets a great job opportunity which he wouldn’t be able to take if he had built this new house. He may see that if he was in the middle of building the house when he contracted the pneumonia, he might have lost everything and the rain delays saved him.
Joseph is a classic Biblical example of not only the proper attitude, but of moving on while not knowing what God has in store. Joseph could have chalked his brother’s selling him and Potipher’s wife betraying him as “bad luck” and copped a bad attitude. Instead, Joseph continued to live by faith seeming to understand that God was with him and therefore did the right thing. It was only later in life that all of his life’s circumstances came into perspective.
The world cannot answer questions of theodicy because their minds have been clouded by false assumptions. We should guard against the same. Theodicy is the answer to the question of “if God is all good and all loving, how does evil exist?” We should not be led down the false path of Job’s three friends (which is co-opted by Christianity’s “prosperity theology” today) whose answer to this question was “good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.” Sometimes “bad” things happen to us in which we are not even the intended beneficiary. The Bible also attests that God tries those He loves. We should not be lead astray by paganism’s idea of luck or chance which is universally condemned in the Bible. See the TFTW – Luck and the Believer. We should not be lead astray by the false notion of another deity beside God (the devil or Satan) which rules this world. “The earth is the LORD’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein.” (Ps. 24:1)
Next week, Lord willing, we will tackle directly the phrase “time and chance” in Ecclesiastes 3.
Have a great week,
