The Gospel Coalition

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word “luck” this way: “the chance happening of fortunate or adverse events.” At first glance this concise definition may seem helpful and harmless. But, in reality, it is neither. In fact, if someone would have told my wife on February 4, 1999 that her father’s untimely death was nothing more and nothing less then a “chance happening of an adverse event”, she would have felt both un-helped and harmed. She would not have been comforted or consoled in the slightest. To really believe that her dad’s passing was simply a stroke of “bad luck” would have been debilitating to her. In that moment, what she needed to know with complete certainty was that there was something, Someone, above and beyond “chance”, guiding and directing this heartbreaking event toward some ultimately good end. She needed to know that, even though this painful episode was impossible to understand or explain, there was purpose and meaning behind it. Luck, by definition, can provide neither.

Both the Old Testament and the New Testament make it very clear that there is no such thing as “chance” or “luck.” These are simply words that many attach to circumstances they cannot understand; circumstances that they know lie outside of their control. To say that someone “got lucky” or experienced “bad luck” simply means that something good or bad happened to this person that we cannot understand or explicate. Thankfully, the Bible gives us much more than this. It reveals a personal God who has always been and will always be in full control of all he has made. He is the King of creation who exercises power over all things. The Bible discloses a God who is both absolutely sovereign and absolutely good. He does not always explain his actions (he is under no obligation to do so), but he does make it clear that he has a perfect plan and he will work out every detail of that plan to completion. We have to remember that because we are both finite and sinful, we cannot fully understand or rightly interpret all of God’s ways. God’s ways are higher than our ways and his thoughts higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). God has his secret purposes (Deut. 29:29) that we are never great enough to see, but the Judge of all the earth always does right (Genesis 18:25). This is our only source of hope and calm in times of crisis.

Amidst her pain, pain she had never felt this deeply before, my wife found intense comfort in the fact that, behind the tragedy of her father’s death, there was a trustworthy God who is always in complete control. Furthermore, she was reassured that, for all those who have found forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ, nothing is ever in the grip of blind forces (chance, luck, fate), but always in the hands of a loving heavenly Father. To this day, the truth that gets her through is the truth spelled out beautifully in William Cowper’s hymn, “God Moves in Mysterious Ways”: “Judge not the Lord by feeble sense, but trust him for his grace; behind a frowning providence God hides a smiling face.” Amen.