“Do you believe in luck?”
No, there is only the sovereign providence of the living and personal God.
How often do you here people attribute the source of averted accidents, healing, blessing, or other prosperous occurrences to luck? On the flip side how often do you hear “bad things” attributed to being unlucky? Perhaps even as a professing Christian you may say things like, “Man, he is lucky” or “It is not my lucky day”.
Is this thinking biblical?
The Bible presents a God who is absolutely sovereign over all of the affairs of the world (Ps. 115.3). He is in complete control and he has ordained all things to come to pass. There is absolutely nothing that escapes his notice. He is not only sovereign over your salvation (Eph. 1) but he also is sovereign bird feeder (Matt. 6.26). He is sovereign over the weather, whether ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (Matt. 5.45; Job 38). For we even learn in Scripture that God is sovereign over the outcome of a role of the dice (Prov. 16.33). There is nothing that comes to pass by chance, but rather all things come to pass through the sovereign providence of God.
I am not trying to be nit-picky here. But I do want to challenge you if you talk like a pagan and deny God of his glory through providence. Think about it. How ugly is it for you receive the blessed artwork of divine providence, which God works together for his glory, and then you turn around and smudge out God’s name from the authorship only to inscribe the nebulous, impersonal and fictional name “luck” at the bottom right corner of the artwork? Since God does all things for his glory and causes all things to work together for good for those who love him (Rom. 8.28) how dare we insult God through our careless speech?!
Let’s use this as an exhortation to recognize and ascribe the personal hand of God to our understanding of the universe and all things in it. Let’s delete the words fate, luck, happenstance, and the like from our vocabulary and use words that reflect truth such as providence, sovereignty and God. In this understanding and application of the doctrine of divine providence we will no doubt become keenly attuned to the work of God in and around our lives and more inclined to give him praise for his good providence.
cc: IrishCalvinist
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