Ecclesiastes 9.11.
“Time and chance” is how the King James Version renders
Ecclesiastes 9.11 NKJV - I returned and saw under the sun that—
- The race is not to the swift,
- Nor the battle to the strong,
- Nor bread to the wise,
- Nor riches to men of understanding,
- Nor favor to men of skill;
- But time and chance happen to them all.
Yeah, our culture teaches otherwise. And no I’m not talking about our wider secular culture; I’m talking about popular Christian culture. Loads of Christians insist nothing happens outside
They absolutely hate when I point ’em to Ecclesiastes. ’Cause it’s part of
Ecclesiastes 1.1-3 NKJV - 1 The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem.
- 2 “Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher;
- “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
- 3 What profit has a man from all his labor
- In which he toils under the sun?
I’ve actually had people try to explain Ecclesiastes away, as if the book’s “pessimism” no longer applies or matters in the Christian era. The author’s a descendant of David who called himself
That’s just how dead set certain Christians are in demanding their
But the reason the Spirit inspired this book, and the reason we kept it in the bible, is ’cause Qohelét’s right. He makes it clear God isn’t behind every fumble, every failure, every accident, every coincidence. God’s behind a whole lot of things!—but certainly not all. Some things aren’t him. Evil isn’t him, and claiming God causes evil to happen is pure slander. Common slander, but still.
To Qohelét, some things are just
Does anything happen for a reason? According to Qohelét, anything God does happens for a reason. But everything else? The vapor of vapors.
The false dilemma of sovereignty over everything… or nothing.
Here’s the problem: People are terrified of the idea things might be meaningless.
They hate the idea of random chance, dumb luck, accidents, flukes, or coincidences in the universe. They prefer to think—and are pretty sure they can find
To their minds, if God permits any randomness into his universe, it’d mean he’s not sovereign. Permitting other things to defy his will? Absolutely not. They can’t abide this.
They much prefer a God in absolute control… and yes, even if this God occasionally kills entire villages of innocent people. They’d much rather have a wrathful God than a weak one.
They don’t allow for any reasonable third option. Like God endowing his creatures with free will, then turning us loose to function on our own, with input and guidance from him. Like maybe, instead of programming us with right thinking by instinct,
Nope. To determinists, a supervisory God simply isn’t good enough. It’s as if God quit his job and handed us the reins: Chaos. Disaster. The very world they don’t want, and don’t even want to imagine.
Yet in the scriptures, that’s what we have.
God is behind many things. Way more than we realize. A lot of the events we might consider coincidence, actually aren’t; God was working ’em out. Sometimes God is behind the wind.
How do we know whether he is or isn’t? He’ll tell us so. He informs his prophets he’s up to something, before the fact.
God permits accidents, coincidences, random events, chance, and luck. And reserves the right to interfere with them. He has free will too, y’know. Some “coincidences” are the result of Providence: “God-incidences,” as some Christians call ’em. (And no, stop calling them that. It’s stupid.) But the rest of them: Dumb luck. Not God.
Trying to find meaning where there is none.
The human brain is designed to figure things out. It recognizes patterns, makes connections, and comes to conclusions based on these connections.
In most people the brain does a fine job. In many, it works overtime: It recognizes patterns where there aren’t any, and makes connections where none exist. A few years ago Google, experimenting with pattern recognition software, showed off “Deep Dream,” a representation of the patterns the software “sees” in photos.
New York, filtered through Google’s Deep Dream. The Telegraph
We think it’s amusing (or creepy), but our brains do the very same thing all the time. It’s why clouds and rock formations remind us of other things. It’s why conspiracy theorists connect the dots. It’s why people believe in junk science and folk wisdom. We trust our thinking far more often than we ought.
So when Christians insist every coincidence has God behind it, these same Christians will foolishly try to interpret these coincidences. They’ll figure they “saw God winking at me,” as certain Christians put it, and try to deduce what the “wink” means. How’d God speak through the coincidence? What revelation did he give?
You see the fairly obvious problem: Christians will
Say I’m searching for a job. And the very minute I tell God, “I need a job; can you help?” I stumble across a help-wanted ad. Wow, what a coincidence!—must be God behind it. Right? Even those who do believe in coincidences will jump to the conclusion God is somehow involved.
Now, say the job is working in a bar. And say I’m a raging alcoholic. But I’m convinced all coincidences are God, so I’m gonna come up with some half-baked explanation for why God maybe wants me there: “True, I’m this close to falling off the wagon every day. But maybe God thinks I’m tough enough to beat this thing!”
Say I’m trying to figure out whether to marry a particular woman. And I find out, coincidentally, she wants to have five kids, and has already picked out their names, and she’s picked the same names I have! (Which at least means we’re suited to live in the same looney bin, anyway.) Again, if I’m convinced all coincidences are God, I might plunge forward into marriage—even though she’s divorced her last four husbands after only six months of marriage, and they all have restraining orders against her, ’cause she’s a bit stabby. But maybe I’ll be the exception!
Say I’m trying to figure out whether to assassinate an annoying politician. And I find out, of all places, he’s gonna be at my workplace during a campaign stop!
And I’ll stop there. People can’t see the problems of this half-baked reasoning till I throw outrageous examples like these at ’em. But it’s true in general: Coincidence is a lousy way to deduce God’s will. As conspiracy theorists regularly demonstrate, you can find coincidences anywhere. Just look hard enough. When you really want something to be true, you can find plenty of fake revelations to justify your nutty belief.
God doesn’t want us to deduce his will, but hear it. He’s given us bible. He’s given us prophets. He’ll even talk to us personally. We don’t need coincidences.
A corrective for foolish platitudes.
Assuming Christians bother to read the Old Testament, Ecclesiastes tends to polarize ’em. It contradicts all their favorite platitudes.
- “Don’t be sad”? But there’s a time to be sad.
Ec 3.4 - “Why can’t things be the way they used to be?” Qohelét says that’s a stupid question.
Ec 7.10 - “Cheaters never prosper.” Sure they do.
Ec 4.1, 7.15
And so on. For all the optimistic advice in Proverbs, you can find a lot of it countered in Ecclesiastes. (And interestingly enough, if Qohelét is Solomon, both books were largely written by the very same guy.)
Pessimists love Ecclesiastes because it’s so unrepentantly down. “Everything is vapor? Then what good is anything we do? Don’t waste your time.” Trouble is, pessimists will use it (and anything else they can get) to naysay and criticize everything, including good deeds. And Ecclesiastes isn’t entirely pessimistic. Qohelét finds value in enjoying life,
And the rest of the scriptures teach us nothing lasts: One day, centuries after
Ecclesiastes is the corrective for that thinking: Nothing has meaning. All of it is minor, dumb stuff. “Don’t sweat the small stuff—and it’s all small stuff” is entirely biblical. “Everything happens for a reason” is absolutely not. Yet Christians skip the first saying and over-teach the second.
So let’s correct that thinking. Memorize “All is vanity.”
