Can Christians Be Lucky?

It’s probably fair to say most Christians dislike the word “luck”. I remember being discouraged from using it as a child and being asked to substitute “blessing” or some such. My parents and Sunday School teachers were (not unreasonably) concerned that I learn to discern the hand of God at work in the world. They also wanted me to not talk like a pagan.

There is wisdom in teaching God’s sovereignty and in speaking of his hand in our daily lives as a matter of course. A child who grows up reckoning without the possibility of God’s personal intervention at any moment as he makes his way in the world is dangerously disconnected from reality. The same default worldview that keeps him from superstitious fearfulness also inoculates him from reverent awe toward his Maker. Atheism is a bad way to go, but it persists. So then, the thought is that people who refer to “luck” and “fortune” are in every instance reckoning without God.

But is that true?

Rich Foolery

The Lord Jesus taught the importance of God-consciousness in the ordinary circumstances of life. His parable of the rich fool in Luke reminds us God has the final word on every plan men make. To speak with rash confidence of the future without reference to the Lord’s sovereign hand is great foolishness. So yes, God has the final veto on the outcome of every event in the universe no matter how great or miniscule; most Christians would concede that.

My question is whether he always exercises it. Can Christians be lucky or unlucky? Do some events “just happen”?

Luck and Fortune in Scripture

The words “luck” and “fortune” are absent from most translations of the Bible, but the concept of random chance or coincidence 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 that were divinely ordained and those events they believed occurred at random or by virtue of the ordinary operation of the laws of nature. Roll a dice enough times and eventually you get your number.

While we might say these folks were more superstitious than moderns, they were not omni-determinists. They believed God or gods acted directly and personally in their lives at times. They also believed some things just happened.

God or Coincidence?

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 gathered to discuss whether the Hebrew God YHWH was afflicting them or whether they were just having a run of bad luck. To discover the truth, they proposed to send the recently-captured Ark of the Covenant home to Israel in a cart pulled by two milk cows along with a gift to placate YHWH just in case. 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.”

So then, Philistines at very least distinguished between randomness and acts of God. But those were ignorant idolators, right?

Sure, but the account is given to us by an Israelite in the language of Israel, which strongly implies that the concept of attributing circumstances to something other than divine providence was familiar to the Hebrew writer who gave us the story. He had the vocabulary with which to describe randomness, and to do so in a way that would be commonly understood. My ESV translates the alternative to the hand of God as “coincidence”. Other translations go with “chance”, a “natural event” or “bad luck”.

Time and Chance

Speaking of vocabulary, the Hebrew word qārā' refers to a meeting, an event that may occur without prior contemplation on anyone’s part. Some English versions render it “chance” in this verse or that. I don’t think the translators were out to lunch. We have the same concept in English when we refer to something “happening”, a word related to “hap” and “happiness”. A pleasing occurrence we did not plan is cause for happiness, where so often events we seek to control do not end up working out precisely the way we anticipated or desired. The Christian knows there is a good chance the Lord may be behind such things, especially if he has been in prayer about the events of the day beforehand, and the question for him is not whether the Lord could choose to intervene in his experience, but whether he actually did.

Likewise, Solomon wrote that “time and chance happen to all”. Omni-determinists might argue that he did so in Ecclesiastes, a book in which the king approaches the search for meaning and purpose from the perspective of a man “under the sun”, leaving out any arguments to be made from divine revelation.

To Correct or Not to Correct?

So did Solomon get it wrong? I’m uncomfortable with that assumption, and I suspect many Christians would be.

Personally, I don’t think we do our children a great disservice when we permit them to use words like “luck”, “chance”, “random” or “coincidence” without constant correction. Unless we are going to insist that the Lord personally micromanages every event down to the atomic level and beyond, we need some way of referring to the positive and negative outcomes flowing from the operation of natural mechanisms God set in place to govern the environment in which we live.

Scripture gives us that language, and I don’t see any problem making use of it provided we are very clear with our children that it is always the Lord who has the last word.