Randomness and good luck
The dictionary says that "luck" is loss or benefit
brought about by chance. We say "bad" luck when we see the result as
loss or disappointment and "good" when we judge it to be benefit.
There’s no mystery there—that makes sense.
Ask serious believers if they believe in "good luck" and you’d only
find a handful in a million that’d say they do. Why is that? Because
they’re used to attributing all the good things in their lives to God.
They thank him for everything and they seem to remember something like
"every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights."
In their tens of thousands they’ll tell you interesting stories about
"remarkable coincidences" that they know aren’t really "coincidences".
Food and money arrives from unexpected places in the nick of time,
strangers that were heading elsewhere got lost and turned up precisely
where they were needed to be, to save a life and a job turned up the
very day the family was going to be evicted. It doesn’t matter that we
say to them that these could be explained as chance events so that there’s no way to prove
God brought it about. They know that but they insist that it was God
that worked it out. They pray "give us this day our daily bread," go out
and work for it and still say that God provided their food or rent or
clothes or whatever money was needed to take care of these things. Try
telling them that these things happen to others that don’t pray and the
believers will still thank God for providing. A church gathers
and prays for needed rain for their threatened crops and it arrives, a
good crop is harvested and the people gather to thank God. Try telling
them that it was all chance, that prayers in no way affect the
atmosphere, that the wind and sun and other things just happened to
combine at the right place at the right time. Tell them that and they’ll
quote you texts and go back to thanking God for the rain he sent when
they needed it.
There are as many random elements involved in the production of what believers will call a "blessing" from God as in the production of a tragedy.
Ask serious believers if they believe in "bad" luck and they may
hem and haw a bit, unsure of themselves. Why is that? Well, part of the
reason is that they don’t want to attribute pain, loss and tragedy to
God because some of them think that God only has a hand in bringing
about "good" things. They’re afraid that if they say God brings tragedy
as well as blessing they lead people to hate God (and some preachers
muzzle them by telling them that’s exactly what they’ll do). And,
besides, there are all those difficult questions that poor hurting souls
ask and that they can’t answer for them. Questions like, "Why my little girl?" or "How could God be good and do such a thing to my Grandmother?" or "How can you make sense of a tidal wave?"
They can’t answer these questions and it bothers them tremendously.
But they can’t answer the difficult questions about "good luck"
(answered prayer) either. It’s just that questions about the tragic have
a different emotional content and it’s almost always the case that they
have profoundly deeper passion connected with them.
God answers prayer! Jesus said he did and urged us to pray. And he
himself prayed believing that prayer avails. It’s important to recognise
that "request" prayers are only one of a score of different kinds of
prayers that include confession, praise, communion and others. But we
are called to bring petitions and requests to God. The Lord’s Prayer
demonstrates that, so we aren’t to apologise for making requests.
Fundamentally we insist that God answers prayer not because we think we can prove
it by our personal experiences—experiences that people not unreasonably
attempt to explain as good luck or natural law or an occasional
remarkable coincidence—but because he says he does. We insist that God
answers prayer because we have come to believe in the God of the
Hebrew-Christian scriptures and in Jesus Christ. In that light we
understandably and gladly interpret events in our lives as blessings
provided by God and we thank him.
We’re well aware of natural laws and the fixed sequences in nature
but we still believe that God provides blessings to us. We’re not
committed to the view that every answer to every prayer has to be a
self-evidencing miracle. We believe that God is the Lord of harmony and
chaos, of nature’s laws and choosing beings. We believe that as sure as a
sailor can use the wind to gain his ends without obliterating or
warping nature so God can use his mindless forces and free-willed
creatures to gain his ends.
If our prayers of need, uttered only today, are met through a network
of truth and kindness and generosity that God established in the world
years before we came along, we’ll thank him for his answer to today’s
prayers. We won’t call it good luck. If our prayers for rain this very
day are met by showers that are driven in by winds that none of us can
control or predict we’ll still thank God for giving us the rain in
answer to that prayer. And if we can’t find or demonstrate the links by
which he brought about the response we needed from him, if we can’t
catch a glimpse of his hand just before it goes behind the veil again
we’ll still thank him for it. And if today our heart is
desperately hungry for the uplifting and sustaining word and it comes by
way of some old utterance we won’t say, "It wasn’t God that lifted me
up."
One of these days, perhaps, we’re going to believe that the
calamities that befall the human family are the work of the God that
adores the human family and that they are just as surely the grace of
God as his blessings. Maybe one of these days we’ll offer poor souls
more than, "Terribly bad luck!" Maybe one of these days we’ll see that
to celebrate the wrath of God is to celebrate his presence in the form
of his righteousness and lovingkindness.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.