What do you believe?
Good Luck!

How many times have you heard it? You are about to embark on an important endeavor and someone says to you, “Good luck.” I have often wondered, “What has luck got to do with it.” After all, I believe God is sovereign over all events and circumstances.

These folks are well meaning, of course, and do not deserve a lecture on the provision and care of God’s people by God Himself. But, the truth is we must not forget that the Christian is redeemed from luck.

Was it “bad luck” that Joseph was thrown by his brothers into a pit and carted off to Egypt? Was it bad luck that Jesus chose the traitor Judas Iscariot to be one of His disciples? In Acts 12 was James the recipient of “bad luck” and Peter “good luck”? The former dying a violent death at the hands of Herod and the latter being miraculously released from the same tyrant’s jail.

No. God’s providential hand guides all that happens to His people. And, so it is with Christians and non-Christians alike. While we may not understand why, we certainly do not relegate what happens to fate or luck. Those redeemed by a personal God, Who loved them and gave His life for them, must never turn their lives over to impersonal, natural forces.

That is worldly thinking. The Christian believes that all things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose (Rom. 8:28). That is, all events and circumstances in our lives –even pain and suffering as well as disappointment and failure, are orchestrated by God for our temporal and eternal benefit. RC Sproul says there is not one maverick molecule in the universe. If there were, what certainty of hope would we have? That molecule may provoke an event over which God has no control.

Dark days and trouble are within the providence of God. The Lion of Princeton, B.B. Warfield, puts it this way:
To suggest that it [trouble] does not come from His hands is to take away all our comfort.
William Cowper, who lived through dark days of mental and emotional imbalance, explains the good and bad of providence thusly:
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense;
But trust Him for His grace.
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.

So, the next time you come across one who is about to embark on a major task, wish them not “good luck”. Rather, ask for them “God’s blessings”. For it is not the assistance of blind, impersonal forces one needs, but the blessings of Him Who holds all things together by His power (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3). The God in Whom we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28) and Who rules all things for His glorious purposes. In those purposes, there is no luck involved.

Celtic Proverbs
Trifling is each person when compared to God.

Many will say that it is the other way around, that the often irreconcilable differences between Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Jew are proof that He is our reflection in a treacherously deceptive mirror. Implicit in this argument is the assumption that because God cannot exist in separate and perhaps contradictory forms, then He cannot exist at all. But the universe is a vast, unchartered wilderness itself laden with contradictions that defy human experience, and those who would tame it by stripping it of all intelligence but their own are themselves talking anthropomorphic nonsense, whoever or whatever their God may or may not happen to be.

R. Martin Helick, Travelers From an Ancient Land, Book XII, An Chros, (Regent Graphics: Swissvale, PA, 1993)