Disclaimer: I ask that you not approach this post believing that I have disregarded or dismissed Paul’s admonishment easily found in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 where he advises all believers to, one, rejoice always; two, pray without ceasing; and three, give thanks (to God) in all circumstances. This post is a challenge to the Christian who wants to see every good thing as the direct and miraculous work of God in their lives. Living with such a mindset is disingenuous and draining to the life of the believer. Superstition abounds when everything becomes a spiritual matter.
God tends to catch a lot of hate for all the evil that happens in the world. The whole process of theodicy is an indication that human beings have struggled with the existence of an all-powerful benevolent Creator and the ever-present, seemingly (also) all-too-powerful virulence of evil in creation. There is no doubt that we all struggle with the gravity of pain and suffering evident in the world. You needn’t go far to find it either. Open Instagram, Facebook, (avoid TikTok), or X/Threads and you can search for a recent event, a particular city, or a current or past military skirmish happening nearby or on the other side of the planet and you’ll have infinite content from which to pull, study, and weep over. From displacement to abuse, from annihilation to bombardments, from famine to acts of cruelty, all caught on tape (video) in high definition. (In 4K in some instances, military combatants have begun recording their firefights and the ensuing massacres with GoPro cameras.)
Circumstances dictate that if you believe in God, in light of these issues, you will allow yourself to live within the mental and spiritual framework that although God is in control of all things and also Sovereign, namely, all-powerful, and all-knowing, omnipotent and omniscient, He, through time, allows human beings to make decisions that contradict His benevolent will for mankind. This freedom of choice, no matter how bad of a choice, is called free will.
If you are a non-believer, theodicy is your strongest point of contention with the mention of God or gods, as the presence and face of evil are irrefutable evidence of God’s non-existence or God’s impotence in the face of evil.
All in all, believers refuse to indict God for any wrong in the world while non-believers deny God any good that has happened, whilst denying He exists at all. Therefore, one ends up wrongly accusing God of being the source of everything good thing in life, albeit this accusation happens subconsciously, and the other, ends up denying God of the good He has done, quite consciously so.
In the end, God is responsible for good He did not intentionally set out to do and at the same time responsible for evil He did not do.
God, ends up the biggest winner and loser in the world, depending on the audience in question.
Therefore, my challenge here is less so for the unbeliever, the atheist or agnostic, and more so for the believer who lives a Manichean (gnostic and dualistic 3rd century AD religion that taught that everything could be broken down into good and evil, black and white) way of life. This believer claims to follow the varied delicacies of the gospel of Christ, namely, that she lives under grace through faith, but, in her daily actions, this believer lives a superstitious reality so foreign from the narratives presented by Jesus in the gospels that to challenge her erroneous perception of Christianity is to challenge Christ Himself.
I’ll share some examples to clarify what I mean. They’re lengthy, yes, but context is context.
Lotto
Sandra, a faithful follower of Christ, walks out of her local supermarket with a lotto ticket in hand. That night she checks the numbers and discovers, to her surprise, that the numbers on her ticket match those on the TV. She checks and rechecks the numbers and calls on her kids to help her double-check the numbers. Once all doubt is removed that she is the sole lottery winner she plans her trip to the state/province capital to collect her winnings. Sandra thanked God for giving her the winning ticket. Now that Sandra is 50 million dollars wealthier her life, as does her perception of God, takes one of two routes:
Scenario 1: Sandra is content with her wealth, celebrates it with her family and friends, blesses those in need, starts businesses, and employs her closest friends, helping them establish middle-class status and potential financial stability for their immediate and future family members. Without this ticket, she doesn’t know just how she would have been able to bless so many, for generations to come. Sandra thanks God for giving her this winning lotto ticket.
Scenario 2: Sandra is content with her wealth, and celebrates it with her family and friends, who, are discontent with the “meager” portions of cash they’re handed. She has family and friends that come out of the woodworks, out of the boondocks, dumpsters, and extended relatives from Africa whom she has never met, show up asking for money. Sandra relents and blesses all who come to her door asking for help. She starts businesses and employs family and friends. Her businesses suffer the effects of a bubble market that soon after crashes, leaving her and her staff financially strapped for cash. She declares bankruptcy to protect her assets as everyone she loves is after her wealth. Her taxes weren’t filed properly by a tax filing agent and now Sandra owes the tax revenue department millions of dollars and owes her lawyers hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sandra’s future, as it relates to her financial well-being, is uncertain. Sandra curses God for giving her the winning lotto ticket. Without this lotto ticket, Sandra’s life could have been mediocre, at best, but it would have been devoid of such calamity and disaster brought upon by a single lotto ticket.
Marriage
Lucius, a handsome young man and a devout follower of Christ, marries Mary, the woman of his dreams. After years of failed and faulty relationships, heartbreaks, financial mistakes, and investing in the wrong romantic partners who lived across seas or across the country, Lucius has finally found the perfect partner who, all this time, lived two streets away. Now that he has settled down, Lucius and Mary plan on starting a family. His dreams come true, and Lucius gives thanks to God for this woman in his life.
Scenario 1: Lucius and Mary welcome a healthy and hearty little baby girl into the world. Her name is Clara. The three of them travel up the coast of the American Pacific Northwest together, camping and “glamping” for years as the little baby grows. Mary buys Lucius gifts and Lucius repays her with lovely gifts as well. They discover the world together, learn new languages, face new challenges, and learn to communicate through difficult times. Lucius and Mary welcome a second child, Lucky, to the family. Lucky is a thriving baby boy who Lucius will teach to play American football. He has the woman of his dreams, a princess for a daughter, a champ for a son, and soon, they’ll get a dog, perhaps a golden retriever as icing on this cake of life. Lucius looks to the heavens and thanks God for his wife and this life.
Scenario 2: Lucius and Mary welcome a sickly little Clara into the world. She suffers from a condition where she was born with her heart on the outside of her body. The first two years of little Clara’s life are spent inside a hospital’s NICU department as she struggles from one surgery to the next as doctors try their best to provide her with a semblance of a normal life. Eventually, Clara is cleared to go home. Lucius and Mary ache to travel but hospital bills have drained their savings accounts and both Lucius and Mary work multiple jobs just to dig themselves out of debt to repay Clara’s mountains of medical bills. They seldom leave the house except to go to church, which itself is a tax on their budget because they need the gas they spend on Sunday’s drive to church for other days of the week to get to work. Lucius and Mary find themselves easily frustrated at their current predicament, they argue often, lash out at one another often, at times, sadly, in front of Clara, who seems to be the only reason they smile at the end of each day. Lucius and Mary seldom communicate their worries, their intimate life becomes nonexistent except for the occasional anniversary or birthday. An unplanned pregnancy burdens the family. Birth control wasn’t as effective because Mary couldn’t afford her pills and abortion was out of the question for this devout family. Soon enough they welcome Lucky, they call him, who grows into a menace, so they believe. A little boy who doesn’t sleep at night wrecks the house, starts fires in the kitchen, pours bleach on mom’s dresses, and pees into dad’s shoes. They take him to a pediatric specialist to see if he suffers from some sort of early-onset schizophrenia but the specialist tells them the boy just wants attention. Something neither of them has the emotional capacity to give. Eventually Lucky begins to wet his bed, every night, and they soon discover he has a predilection for hurting animals. Lucius, bereft of intimate affection from his wife, finds it with a colleague at his university job. Mary, bereft of emotional affection from her husband, starts her affair with a partner at her law firm. Lucius and Mary have finalized their divorce. Lucky lives with his dad, who is seldom home. Clara lives with her mother, who seldom has the patience and time for her. Lucky plans to harm his fellow schoolmates. Clara has taken a liking to swallowing three, at times four of her mother’s sleeping pills before bed to dull her emotional pain. Lucius lays in bed, heavily sedated by alcohol. He also consumes copious amounts of opiates his psychiatrist prescribed for his depression and rage. He is aware of the misery he has brought into the world and the suffering he has caused his wife and children. His head is heavy on his pillow. He looks up to heaven once more and curses God for the life he has and then he descends into a deep and fruitless sleep that’ll last no more than four hours.
Therefore…
What shall we say? Was God equally responsible for Sandra and Lucius’s many blessings? For their many curses? Does God enter into a wager for every single Christian believer’s life the same way He did with Job’s? Was Job’s story a one-off, a life lesson about a man’s character in light of all circumstances or was Job’s story a prescription, a step-by-step manual of how God handles every single life on Earth? Each person has to decide, daily, whether or not God has bet on them and while the devil has bet against them.
Living this way must be exhausting. Truly. Believing that God, the Supreme Creator, Ruler of the Universe, is intricately invested in whether or not you were late for work. Whether the coffee stain on your white shirt, just before that important interview for the job of your dreams, was in fact, a malignant plan of the devil to prevent you from getting the job.
I believe we can make a superstitious nightmare of the very faith that has promised to deliver us from such fear-filled living standards. Meaning, we can use God as an amulet against imagined evils and as a celebratory totem pole whenever we ace a quiz, make it past a yellow light before it turns red, or get an extra chicken tender from Popeyes without having to pay for it. (Popeyes > KFC, by the way.)
The ubiquitous use of “thank God” has taken on a different meaning. Instead of thanking God for that which we know He has done, miraculously so, without an ounce of doubt about His participating in the situation, we have, instead, begun to thank God for natural, random chance events that are at times within or without our control. God, too, allows for the world to operate naturally, as He has devised it to. We don’t need to thank God for every single breath we take because that would be, one, exhausting, and two, incomplete as we would have to sleep, eventually. All those breaths that went unthanked in the night could be seen as a sign of ungratefulness.
In the same vein, consider the people who feel as if their food will be cursed or poisoned if they fail or refuse to give thanks or say grace before a meal. They are more worried about a performative action in the name of God than they are at peace with the fact that all food is good to eat, independent of our giving God thanks for it or not. He made the food in the first place, our attitude toward it does not change the chemical and molecular structure and nature of the food.
God is not offended if we fail to say grace before a meal. Nor is He offended when you forget to say thanks for getting a new car or buying a new house. In fact, God is pleased by you because you are His, in Christ, not because you pray for your meals, three times a day, 365 days a year.
Conclusion
Circumstantial Christianity is superstition with a cross stamped on it. It makes you a slave of a performative faith and your faith as dull as the many actions you can boast about to your fellow man.
God, can, of course, be responsible for helping you drive fast enough to cross that intersection to make it to an important interview to get the job of your dreams, which will then allow you to afford the house of your dreams, in the neighborhood of your dreams, to raise the children of your dreams with the spouse of your dreams.
He can. He has. He will. For many.
But that does not mean that every time it does happen, God miraculously intervened in creation to change the physics of the world, the atomic structure of reality, to help you drive a little faster, avoid speeding tickets, break a couple of laws, just to make some extra money.
So please, in light of 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18, allow your faith to flourish in the liberty Christ has given you, using that freedom not to sin or revert to a superstitious way of living. Be grateful, yes. But also, be wise.
New car? Thank God. Car accident? Curse God. Insurance payout? Thank God. Lost your job? Curse God. Got married? Thank God. Wrong partner? Curse God. Have kids? Thank God. Didn’t want them? Curse God.
God is responsible for a lot. Believe me. But if He’s responsible for EVERY good thing that happens in your life, then, as the catalyst for every action on Earth, He must also be responsible for your failures, the hurt you’ve endured, the evil you have suffered, and the evil to which you will suffer still.
Walk away from this circumstantial, Manichean, superstitious version of the Christian faith and find freedom from fear in Christ Jesus.
Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. – Proverbs 31:8 NLT
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