Years ago, I sat on a civil court jury. A fellow had incurred a fatal injury and his family was looking for monetary redress from a panoply of defendants.
The duty assigned to me and to my fellow jurors was first to assess the evidence and determine if, in fact, there was any blame to be allocated. But the job was a great deal subtler than that. If we determined that something or someone was to blame for this man’s regrettable demise, our second task was to allocate responsibility between the guilty parties, using a number for each culprit less than and totaling 100 (say, for example, 50% to the victim, 25% to his employer and 25% to the company that leased the equipment on which he died).
Apparently, basic math was a prerequisite for jury duty. Who knew?
Everything Happens for a Reason
So it is with most events in this world. There is a reason for everything that happens, but it may not be one reason only. In all the events of our lives there may be multiple agencies at work in a complex web of causation. Any other view is going to be overly simplistic. Those of us who embrace such faux-simplicity will probably find ourselves carrying grudges we shouldn’t, and ascribing praise or blame to parties undeserving of it.
We’ve addressed the question of why things happen — good and bad — on more than one occasion in this space, so I won’t revisit all the possible sources of good and grief that scripture and logic suggest may exist and influence any given turn of events. The word of God confirms there may at times be multiple reasons for the same set of circumstances occurring.
A Thorn in the Flesh
We can probably all think of famous Bible stories in which causation could legitimately be attributed to more than one party. Job’s suffering comes to mind, or David’s numbering of the fighting men of Israel. There is Joseph, who ended up in Egypt because his brothers wanted him out of their lives, but God meant it for good. So let’s look at a New Testament example instead. Consider Paul’s thorn in the flesh:
“To keep me from becoming conceited because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me.”
At least two agencies are demonstrably at work, and perhaps even more.
First, “a thorn was given me”. Paul is clearly ascribing the thorn to God, or at very least to the powers of heaven, since it was given “to keep me from becoming conceited”. A benevolent and fatherly care was exercised on behalf of a child in need of it, unquestionably for his good. (Satan is not the least bit concerned about a child of God becoming conceited, except to the extent he’d love to see more of it.)
Second, the thorn was “a messenger of Satan to harass me”. To Paul, agent and motive are right there in plain sight. Satan was interested in doing as much damage as possible to the servant of God as he struggled to carry out the will of God in the world.
Thirdly, though we don’t know the nature of Paul’s thorn or the details of its origin story, we must consider the possibility that if the thorn was a physical injury, it may well have come upon the apostle as a direct result of circumstances into which he inserted himself. We all know about Paul’s famous commitment to go to Jerusalem when the Spirit of God repeatedly testified bad things would happen to him as a result. And of course there was the time Paul tried to go into the theater at Ephesus but was fortuitously restrained by his friends. Lots of bad things happened to Paul, and not all of them needed to.
Fourthly, again, because we don’t know the nature of the thorn, we cannot rule out any possible explanation, but since it was “a messenger of Satan”, the likeliest source of any injury to Paul would have been the fists, stones or cudgels of angry Jews. Satan works most frequently through human agents. Unless these folks were demon possessed at the time (and, frankly, even if they were), they bore some responsibility for the choices they made even in a fit of passion, though Satan undoubtedly influenced them.
Assessing Responsibility
Okay, so you’re on a jury and your job is to assess the responsibility for Paul’s thorn in the flesh, and to divide up the blame (or praise, as you see fit) between the various parties. Because God is one of the responsible parties, you will find several members the jury opting to make him 100% responsible because nothing in the universe happens without at least his passive approval.
Others will argue that while this may indeed be the case in an abstract sense, for all practical purposes, God holds men and women responsible for the consequences of our actions, and he could not do so justly if we had no ability to choose one thing over another, or act independently of his preferences. God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. Therefore, they might say, we should be assigning blame the way God would: to the various parties involved, with God himself excluded.
You can see the problem though. Any proportion of blame on which the members of our hypothetical jury could bring themselves to agree would almost surely be a compromise verdict made largely in ignorance of all the relevant causal factors in play and dependent on the theological predispositions of each juror.
To the Court of Appeal
This was very much my own jury experience. We argued for hours, could not agree about much of anything, our compromise verdict satisfied neither side, and the case was appealed.
So it is with each of us as we enter the coming year. While it is tempting to each of us to single out causes and assign blame for the events in our lives that trouble us, we are almost never in a position to do so intelligently, fairly or with finality. And yet how easily we place blame and carry grudges — sometimes for years on end — in blissful ignorance of all the factors and parties that may have contributed to our distress, which most often includes ourselves. It is not without wisdom that Paul urges the Corinthians not to “pronounce judgment before the time”, either on ourselves or others.
There is simply too much we don’t know, and which we are ill equipped to assess.
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