The Role of the Die

You may be thinking my title contains a typo. That will probably happen one of these days, but this isn’t it. No, I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the way luck, chance or fortune factor into the Christian life.

Of course, how we view that depends on what we believe about events that to us appear random. To be consistent with their theology, Christian determinists are obliged to assign responsibility for every transaction in the universe — favorable or unfavorable — to God, right down to the atomic level. “All events whatsoever,” wrote John Calvin. Many of his followers take him literally.

My own conviction is that the God I read about in scripture is firmly committed to the principle of delegated authority. For delegation to be meaningful — rather than simply an empty gesture — necessitates that most of the time God allows things to carry on subject to the authorities he has established rather than getting personally involved.

This general pattern we observe throughout scripture, subject to the occasional delightful or horrifying exception. It is why genuine biblical miracles are, well, miraculous ... and exceedingly rare. Delegated authority is the principle on which God’s creation operates.

Delegated Authority in Action

Natural laws are a form of delegation. They do not require trillions of individual acts of God’s will; rather, the merest powerful word of his Son upholds them.

Thus, when I drop my pen I know that, all things being equal, it will fall down and not rise up. I know that absent a willful act from some created being, the things in my environment that are presently organized will tend toward disorganization over time, and not the other way round. I know that snow will be cold and water will be wet. Good thing too!

My own self-awareness is a form of delegation. I am conscious of a “me” that can choose X and reject Y, and thus I exercise a measure of delegated authority over my own body and mind, in theory the more the better.

Further, God has been granting power over other beings to certain select beings ever since he began creating. Heavenly authorities existed long before mankind was ever on the scene. Some theologians will disagree, but I believe these principalities and powers operated (and continue to operate) without God leaning over their shoulders 100% of the time.

Room for Randomness

Such a worldview leaves plenty of room for the role of the die in life. It leaves room for a pandemic that is not necessarily an act of judgment, room for a tumor to be a product of the fallen-ness of creation rather than a deliberate divine affliction, room for riches accumulated by hard work rather than rained on me from heaven in response to my personal loveliness, and room for bad men to make bad choices that impact me in unpleasant ways.

Room, in short, for randomness, luck or fortune, notwithstanding the resistance Christians traditionally have to using such words.

The words “luck” and “fortune” are absent from most translations of the Bible, but the concept is certainly there if we look for it. The ancients had a much greater tendency than we do to credit their gods for both positive and negative experiences in life, Israelites included. However, they still drew distinctions between circumstances divinely ordained and those events they believed occurred at random. They were not omni-determinists like some today. They believed God or gods acted directly and personally in their lives at times. They also believed that some things just happened.

For example, following a series of unlikely events including an outbreak of tumors and the desecration of their temples by unseen hands, the priests and diviners among the Philistines — who no doubt had more time than average to reflect on such things — gathered to discuss whether God was afflicting them or whether they were just having a run of bad luck. To discover the truth, they proposed to send the ark home to Israel in a cart pulled by two milk cows along with a gift to placate YHWH just in case.

The Ancients and Randomness

Here was their reasoning:

“If it [the cart] goes up on the way to its own land, to Beth-shemesh, then it is he who has done us this great harm, but if not, then we shall know that it is not his hand that struck us; it happened to us by coincidence.”

Philistines distinguished between randomness and acts of God. Moreover, the concept of attributing circumstances to something other than divine providence was clearly familiar to the Hebrew writer who gave us the story. My ESV translates the alternative to the hand of God as “coincidence”. Other translations go with “chance”, a “natural event” or “bad luck”. Amalekites too made this distinction, and expected Hebrews to understand it. The young man who claimed he had put the king of Israel to death to curry favor with David noted that he happened to be on Mount Gilboa “by chance” and came across a dying Saul leaning on his spear.

That “chance” turned out to be less fortunate than he thought, and his false testimony sealed his fate. Nevertheless, it’s clear he too was no determinist.

Israelites, who had more reason than any other nation to associate good and bad events with God’s direct involvement, still distinguished between randomness and God. Solomon later wrote that “time and chance happen to all”, acknowledging that sometimes stuff just happens.

Two Views, Many Inconsistencies in Application

When we lay them out like this, the main features of these two theories of causation are easily distinguishable. Most Christians will eventually choose one school of thought over another as they study the scriptures.

In practice, however, believers are rarely so consistent in assigning praise or blame for events that happen without an obvious cause. A mother who categorically rejects Calvinist theology when she hears it from the platform consoles herself when her son perishes by misadventure with the assertion that “It must have been the Lord’s will.” She cannot bring herself to believe an event she finds so painful might have occurred without a predetermined heavenly mandate. Possibly, she would rather have a God who actively took her loved one from this world for reasons she cannot yet fathom than one who sometimes allows poor choices to result in regrettable consequences.

Job did much the same thing, ascribing his great misfortune to God amidst a cloud of unknowing. “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive disaster?” he asked his wife rhetorically. In reality, God was only indirectly involved. The real agent of misfortune was the Adversary trying to prove a point. Job’s reaction was natural, as was the hypothetical mother’s in my anecdote. The need to grasp for the appearance of order in the middle of chaos is visceral, and rarely reflects well thought out theology.

I too have my inconsistencies. I am greatly reluctant to assume God is the author of suffering in my life, but quick to send a word of thanks heavenward at the least sign of what my neighbors would simply call good fortune: a raise, a new job, a windfall of some sort. If I am wrong about the source of my blessing, no matter. I’d rather live with the cognitive dissonance of attributing an act of apparent randomness to God than be guilty of ingratitude in the event I have been the object of grace.

Proactive Prayer

The fact remains that whether God is actively involved in any particular occurrence or whether some other agent (or simply chance) is responsible, we will not know the truth of the matter with 100% certainty until we see the Lord. In the face of apparent randomness, Christians try many different tactics: ascribing to God what he did or didn’t do and trying not to become bitter when it hurts, reserving judgment while waiting for the curtain to lift, stoicism, or just not thinking about it at all.

Lately I have been doing a lot of proactive praying. James was right: sometimes we do not have because we do not ask. If we charge into every new morning without first inviting the Lord into the day’s events in prayer, we are asking for uncertainty when things go wrong. I take great comfort when something unexpected happens in knowing the Father and I already considered this possibility together around 4:00 am. When I committed my cause to him as I left the house, I believe he heard me and I know he loves me and has my best interests at heart. So if something is not going the way I like, it’s time to ask myself, “What is my Father wanting to teach me in this moment?” I asked for fish, he will not give me a serpent. If it looks like a vicious biting thing to me, then I’ve got the wrong view of my situation; it may be a new pet.

Retroactive Prayer

Likewise, the grieving mother in my parable may not have known what her son was up to, and had no chance to pray a hedge around him as Job did with his own children, and for which he is commended. (Note that sometimes these hedges don’t appear to work as planned, but the Lord knows that too.) But even if the worst has already happened, the answer is always prayer, not rationalization or getting caught up in what might have been “if only”. Even if nobody has thought to bring the Lord into a situation before it occurs, we can always invite him in afterward, trusting him to take even the worst blows a fallen world can deliver and invert them for his glory and our ultimate benefit. Where proactive prayer has been neglected, retroactive prayer is the next best thing.

For the Christian, apparent randomness is always an invitation to a closer walk with the Lord.