Causes and Effects

“When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord.”

When the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers eliminated the Pittsburgh Penguins from Stanley Cup contention in six games last week, fans of the Penguins complained online about an NHL rule that prevented their team from changing the color of its home jerseys mid-series. The thought was, apparently, that if only the Pens had been wearing their cool black jerseys instead of the repulsive yellow gear in which they took to the ice to start the series, their luck might have changed.

People are superstitious. I know that’s not exactly news. My own take was that scoring a few more goals might have been more effective for Pittsburgh than any mid-series jersey swap.

Very Superstitious

Notwithstanding the secularization of Western societies, I suspect people are every bit as superstitious today as men were centuries and millennia ago when nearly every twist and turn of their personal circumstances was reason to fear or placate the gods. Superstitions persist in matters small and large. On the trivial side, it’s the impact of jersey colors on win-loss records, which song playing over the casino loudspeakers will cause customers to start hitting the jackpot, or which numbers are “lucky” in a lottery where every ticket but one is a loser. On the more serious side, it’s the mystery of what causes a car accident, a stillbirth, a cancer diagnosis or a sudden, otherwise-inexplicable divorce.

In the former cases, the stakes are so trivial that any discussion of the reason you lost $20 in a hockey pool or flushed it down the toilet on a lottery ticket is fundamentally unserious, a form of amusement. In the latter instances, for every pragmatic soul like Yours Truly inclined to note that the unfortunate parties drove like madmen, had health issues, smoked too much or persistently courted women of bad character (or, alternatively, that sometimes bad stuff just happens to everyone), there are three or more observers who uncritically assume something supernatural and ominous lurks behind every sad outcome. God did it, they suggest, or more frequently these days, “It was karma.”

Just You. You and No One Else

Today’s proverb concerns a superstitious man who behaves unwisely and reaps the perfectly natural consequences of his actions. God didn’t punish him; he punished himself by opting to live in ignorance of the way the universe operates.

Proverbs are necessarily pithy, so we don’t get any specifics about the error he made or exactly what bad thing happened to him as a result. Perhaps a lifetime of substance abuse finally caught up with his liver or an out-of-control gambling habit bankrupted his family. The perils of such behaviors are well known. People engage in them notwithstanding that knowledge, not because they lack it. The point is that, like the narcissist in the old Radiohead song, the man in our proverb did it to himself. His folly brought his way to ruin, and rather than acknowledge the recklessness of his behavior and learn from it, he blames God for the misery he (and probably others) now have to endure because of it.

The ‘Woo Woo’ People

Where causes are concerned, from a scriptural perspective it’s not completely impossible that once in a blue moon the ‘Woo Woo’ people have hit the nail on the head. We have to concede that there are occasions described in scripture where God became personally active in a situation that ended very badly. The death of Ahab. Nadab and Abihu. Ananias and Sapphira. Likewise, there are people in scripture whom God blessed so exceptionally that it was impossible not to notice his involvement. Joseph comes to mind, as does Job, both pre- and post-crisis.

There’s no solid, biblical reason to assume the Lord no longer intervenes in situations that call for it. In their analysis of the most obvious cases, superstitious souls have the right of it; refusing to acknowledge God’s hand would be unbelief, the abject refusal to learn a lesson Heaven is determined to teach.

Too Much Woo

However, we cannot reasonably attribute every instance of suffering or blessing to the hand of God. That too would unbiblical. There’s good reason the secularists mock superstitious Christians.

In reality, I suspect few abrupt changes of circumstances in this life are divine retribution or reward. Jesus cited two examples of grave misfortune that were neither. Onlookers characterized the Jews who perished at the hands of Rome or under an avalanche of falling rocks as exceptionally wicked. They turned out to be flat-out wrong. God may well judge men through nature or through the violent actions of other men (as in the case of Ahab), but in the absence of divine revelation, we can have no confidence that any specific catastrophe was appropriate or deserved, let alone that God was behind it. In the absence of biblical evidence, we are prudent to keep our traps shut.

In this case, Solomon plainly tells us that entrenched folly produces ruin as a matter of course. It doesn’t require divine intervention to get bad results out of bad behavior. We can do that all on our own.

Blaming God to Avoid Blaming Me

A significant segment of the population acknowledges God’s existence while doubting his love and goodwill toward us. No small number of these take the name of Christ on their lips and attend church … er, religiously … every Sunday. However, the moment anything goes wrong in their lives, God becomes their chief suspect. In raging in their hearts against him, they tell us nothing much about the true character of God, but a great deal about their warped view of him. The God of their fevered imaginations is petty, over-scrupulous and occupied with doing injury to insects for his own twisted pleasure. It’s a sad and unbiblical picture fed by the sermonizers of certain denominations in the early part of the last century and perpetuated by the failure of their audience to examine the scriptures for themselves and prove them wrong.

The fact is that God is not the author of the vast majority of human misfortune. We all know people who are either stunningly un-self-aware or else brazen liars in insisting that nothing bad that happens to them is ever their fault. Yet find me a chronic gossip whose personal relationships are solid. Find me a liar who is able to trust. Find me a thief who is content, or a sexually incontinent person in a happy marriage. You can’t, because some behaviors by their very nature exclude good outcomes and make happiness impossible. Bad trees can’t produce good fruit, and bad character can’t produce joy or contentment.

Find me a man in the midst of misfortune whose heart rages against the Lord, and I’ll find you a man who in all probability is the sole author of his own misery.