Coincidence, Miracle, or the Providential Hand of God

Last week I told some of the story Joni Eareckson who while diving into the Chesapeake Bay became a paraplegic. She and her sister were swimming, playing on a raft. While her sister headed in for the beach to dry off and sun Joni dove into the sandbar. The headfirst collision fractured her spine leaving her unable to move at the bottom of the bay.

Joni also tells how the night before the accident on a whim she decided to color her hair beach blonde. Her natural color was, in her words, a mousy brown.

As her sister was leaving the water, with her back to the raft, unaware of the accident her sister had just suffered and unable to know that she would drown within a minute or two stepped onto the beach and her tow was pinched by a crab. She wheeled around to warn her sister that the crabs were out only to see her sister’s recently blonde hair shining from the bottom of the bay. She swam back out, dove down and saved her sister’s life.

Dark Questions Haunt Rumors of a God of Love

Eric Metaxas who interviews her on his radio show calls this a miracle in his book on Miracles. Some might call it a fortunate coincidence, others an unfortunate coincidence because Joni would be saved only to live bound to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. I think traditional theology would likely categorize it as the providential hand of God.

Also as we talked about last week this adds complexity to the story. If we imagine that God is involved either by acting in an extraordinary way that violates the normal operations of this world or by simply arranging the timing of a whim to color her hair and ordering a crab to pinch the toe of a young swimmer we certainly could wonder if he couldn’t have also simply helped Joni notice the sandbar and avoid the accident all together.

These questions haunt us not because we are so smart to realize them but because we live in a space where when we say “God” we imagine a being of infinite power and goodness who cares for each one of us and once such an idea comes into our imagination AND we see the horror of this young woman’s vibrant body destroyed by the simple blind physics of impact we doubt that such a God is in fact running the universe.

This doubt is not new. Read Homer as Odysseus through strength and craft tries to get what he wants out of a chaotic universe working to outmaneuver capricious and petty gods.

Shakespeare knows the story.

In King Lear, Gloucester famously says: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods. / They kill us for their sport.” That is the pagan view of “the gods,” who certainly don’t exist, and who, if they did exist, obviously would not love us mortals. From what we know of them, they treat us indifferently and often downright cruelly, just as a “wanton boy” would pull the wings off a fly.

Metaxas, Eric (2014-10-28). Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (p. 60). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The God of the Bible is Hardly Deduced From Mature

CS Lewis in his introduction to The Problem of Pain like few others can put sharply into focus what our scientific tools continue to reveal about the world. Life, in the cold vastness of time and space is miraculously rare, miraculously brief, and absolutely destined to pain and destruction. This is not the mystery. The mystery is how, humanity, who has known that life is short, hard and painful in ages long before the inventions of modern medicine or the modern state with its food security and social safety net could imagine that God is good?

There was one question which I never dreamed of raising. I never noticed that the very strength and facility of the pessimists’ case at once poses us a problem. If the universe is so bad, or even half so bad, how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? Men are fools, perhaps; but hardly so foolish as that. The direct inference from black to white, from evil flower to virtuous root, from senseless work to a workman infinitely wise, staggers belief. The spectacle of the universe as revealed by experience can never have been the ground of religion: it must always have been something in spite of which religion, acquired from a different source, was held.

Lewis, C. S. (2001). The Problem of Pain (pp. 3–4). New York: HarperOne.

Bitter and Angry

I know that many today find their anger and the logic behind it to be a revelation to them. Some authors have sold many books declaring things like “God is not Good!” or “God is a moral monster!” If they did a bit more reading, even reading in the Bible they might find that they are certainly not alone in their sentiments.

One of the most famous people to share their feelings was the wife of the man Job in the story named after him in the Old Testament. Job was a man of wealth, power, influence and reputation to such a degree that God pointed him out as an example to his adversary. The accuser suggested that Job’s morality was self-centered and that once it didn’t pay he would abandon it. God agreed to the wager and the accuser proceeded to strip Job of his wealth, his status, his reputation, and the lives of his children. In this Job refused to curse God, as we saw Naomi do last week, and his wife took offense. “Curse God and die!” she demanded, but Job continued to suffer.

Naomi is an Image of Hell

So last week we left Naomi standing before her friends and relatives of Bethlehem angry with God.

Ruth 1:19–21 (NIV)

¹⁹ So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi?” ²⁰ “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. ²¹ I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me.”

She knew who to blame. The God who could “come to the aid of his people” (Ruth 1:6) had not done so in time and she had lost her husband and sons and was now facing not only humiliation but hunger and want.

What Naomi can’t see in that moment, blinded by her righteous indignation against God was the woman standing next to her. She has just finished saying “I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty.” and standing beside her, or perhaps behind her was Ruth.

Ruth makes no protest. She has just be called a nothing. It is clear that in the mind of Naomi she is a nothing or perhaps even a liability.

If Ruth had had a contemporary life coach or a group of friends who would help her with her self esteem we might imagine Ruth protesting.

“Are you calling me a nothing? I am somebody! I came along to help you and this is the thanks I get? You don’t even introduce me to your so called friends? I’m finished with you you bitter old hag. I’m heading back to Moab!”

No speech. Nothing. No ego. No standing up for herself. No declarations of self-value or self-importance. No contradicting Naomi. Just silence.

Even if Ruth had “eh hem”ed Naomi couldn’t get it. She was blinded by her self-pity and her bitterness. Standing besides Naomi is a woman who has sacrificed her future for her, pledged to be completely committed to Naomi’s presence and welfare but Naomi values it not.

In this moment Naomi is an image of hell. The door of her heart is locked from the inside and there next to her is an immense gift that Naomi can’t see or appreciate, but the story has only begun and we will see how God can open locked doors.

The God We Often Only Look For in the Gaps

Ruth 2:1–3 (NIV)

¹ Now Naomi had a relative on her husband’s side, a man of standing from the clan of Elimelek, whose name was Boaz. ² And Ruth the Moabite said to Naomi, “Let me go to the fields and pick up the leftover grain behind anyone in whose eyes I find favor.” Naomi said to her, “Go ahead, my daughter.” ³ So she went out, entered a field and began to glean behind the harvesters. As it turned out, she was working in a field belonging to Boaz, who was from the clan of Elimelek.

Almost all English translations will insert a common English idiom in verse 3 to the effect of “as it so happens” meaning that there was no human planning in these events. Ruth simply picked this one particular field and it happened to be the field of Boaz.

We see here the crab on the beach or the sandbar by the raft. This is the space humanity continues to try to eradicate, the space outside of our control.

This may lead us to wonder if we are working a “god of the gaps” argument that we always use “God” to fill in the spaces of what is out of our control, but we should note that Joni’s desire to bleach her hair blonde, undoubtedly moved by social pressure, hair color bias or market stereotyping was not part of the gaps just as Ruth’s decision that probably looked foolish at the time to bind herself to Naomi.

What we have is not a shrinking God of the gaps who recedes as our power controls but rather a God who is so large he fills not just the gaps beyond our power and knowing but also as well as the spaces in which we imagine we act independently of him. This God does not flee our power or agency but fills the universe in such a way to use it as part of the story he is writing.

If we see God in the gaps it is likely because that is the only place we are looking for him, just as Naomi couldn’t see him standing next to her in the shape of this young Moabite widow, who by the way, had also lost her husband.

Ruth’s Humble Industry bound to Naomi’s Bitter Indolence

When we imagine God is moving in the spaces outside of our control we are often tempted to passivity and sloth. Ruth is not there. We see Naomi and Ruth together but only one of the widows seems to be energetic enough to actually go out and do something about their poverty and hunger. Ruth does not wait around to look for a divine bail out or a miracle to save her, she simply and selflessly gets to work along side the rest of the poor, struggling or landless of the village.

While Naomi was possibly too old to have more children she was clearly able bodied enough to walk back to Bethlehem from Moab. Why doesn’t she glean? Why does she sit at home while Ruth goes out to put food on the table?

As chapter 2 unfolds we find Ruth not just the beneficiary of the generosity and power of Boaz, but one who draws attention to herself by not drawing attention to herself. She is the paradigmatic humble, poor, but industrious alien who forgets herself and her losses and gets busy to do what simply needs to be done.

Gratitude in the Midst of Loss

The options of how to respond to this God who gives and takes away is exemplified by Ruth and Naomi. Both have lost husbands. Both know what it is to be a stranger, driven to a foreign people away from your familial safety net in search of basic survival, but their states of mind couldn’t be more different.

My father was a pastor and I remember him once commenting to me about one of his many conversations with people wrestling with God and these issues. This person was objecting to the seemingly inconsistent Christian position that we thank God when things are good but we don’t blame him when things are hard. He told my father that this position was irrational and exposed Christianity as being an illogical and foolish way of trying to have things both ways with our imaginary God.

Metaxas in his book on Miracles  steps into this conundrum.

A good friend has often remarked that athletes publicly thanking God annoys him, because it follows logically that if they thank God for their successes they should also blame him for their failures, and why don’t they? This is a very good question. We have all witnessed this phenomenon. I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with thanking God publicly in that way. In fact, I think it’s appropriate and right to do so, since it was God who gave us whatever we needed to accomplish what we accomplished. But to be fair to athletes who express their faith publicly, I have also heard a number of them say that even though they want to win, they are grateful to God no matter the outcome.

Therefore it actually does not follow that one should blame God for one’s failures if one is grateful to him for one’s successes. Rather, in a kind of Chestertonian inversion, it’s correct to say that we cannot truly thank him for the good things unless we also thank him for the bad things. That way seems madness, but actually it makes perfect sense. This is because if we trust the God we know from the Hebrew Bible— and not some indifferent Greco-Roman deity, for example— then we know that he means well toward us at all times and in every conceivable way, so it follows that we actually can trust him with everything, including our failures and our difficulties, as we have just said. So if he is actually the God who loves us beyond anything we can imagine, even the bad things can ultimately be a blessing. In fact, Gods wants us to know that, because our sufferings will be easier to bear if we know God is with us in the midst of them, leading us toward something ultimately redemptive and beautiful.

Metaxas, Eric (2014-10-28). Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (p. 64). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Now I know that this is dangerous stuff. It can fall into escapist sentimentality but he capturing something we see in Ruth.

At this point, as we begin to know Ruth better the qualities that Boaz sees are magnifying. She is a Moabite. Remember her ancestral father had Lot for his father AND grandfather. The Moabites were the wrong kinds of cousins for Israel. The sacrificed children on the altars to their fertility gods.

What we are seeing in Ruth is God working in someone that Israel might not expect God to work though. Ruth, although a person, becomes kind of a gap to Israel.

Over and over again in this chapter when we imagine Ruth would be, or even should be self-promoting, self-pitying, defensive, demanding she at every moment is humble, self-giving, grateful, meek.

When she returns to Naomi and we see indolent Naomi celebrating the hard work of Ruth we might be tempted to indulge in our own anger and bitterness against Naomi. Naomi does not deserve Ruth and we might cheer for Ruth to “come to her senses” and cast Naomi away as baggage, the way Naomi tried to push her away.

Ruth will not. She is humble through and through and has become a vessel through which God will work, not with Ruth as a gap, but with Ruth as a person, to not only rescue undeserving Naomi, but all of undeserving Israel as well.

Misery

We mentioned earlier that Naomi, standing next to Ruth declaring her emptiness was an image of hell. We mentioned how in her self-pity, self-centeredness in her anger against God had tried to lock him out. She blinded herself so as to miss the presence of God next to her in the widow of her dead son, Ruth.

While we naturally assume that God should prove himself faithful to us by gifts that we consider pleasant, pleasurable and welcome, the history of saints the Christian church suggest that it is by sending us misery, calamity and want that God often turns out hearts away from the treasures easily identified to the deepest treasure of far greater value, himself.

The author of the hymn “Amazing Grace,” John Newton, who once was a slave ship captain, and who became a Christian preacher and an enemy of the slave trade, once said: “I have reason to praise [God] for my trials, for, most probably, I should have been ruined without them.” The author of The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who suffered for twenty years in the hellish prison camps he describes in that book, wrote: “Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life. For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.” This does not mean that Newton would have chosen to go through his trials, or that Solzhenitsyn in any way enjoyed the terrible suffering of his imprisonment. But it means that in retrospect they can see that God used those difficulties to bless them in the long run.

Metaxas, Eric (2014-10-28). Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life (pp. 64-65). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Deliverance

The greatest argument for the idea that God brings trials for our good comes not from a throne excluded from pain and misery but from a cross submerged by them.

CS Lewis begins his book The Problem of Pain with a quote from George MacDonald.

The Son of God suffered unto the death,
not that men might not suffer, but that their
sufferings might be like His.
GEORGE MACDONALD,
Unspoken Sermons, First Series
Lewis, C. S. (2001). The Problem of Pain (p. vii). New York: HarperOne.

As we will continue to see in the book of Ruth the path to deliverance goes through suffering. It is Ruth’s faithful suffering in the midst of Naomi’s abdication by which God will rescue his people from the calamities of the time of the Judges.

Gratitude

This Moabite widow in many ways becomes the Old Testament poster-woman for Christian gratitude. From what we can see of life “under the sun” her path of self-renunciation in service to bitter Naomi seems ill advised and defective. What she does is pour herself out in industrious humility. Given her location in space and time, and the reputation of Israel’s God through Naomi’s family even with her Moabite upbringing how could she imagine that her service to undeserving Naomi would be so richly blessed? How could she contemplate that there might be a faithful Boaz out there who could redeemer her and restore not only the future of Naomi’s kin but now her own. This is God working, revealing himself not only in gaps but also through her.

So was it God working or Ruth? I think CS Lewis shines a light on this question better than most in his book Mere Christianity

The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one amazing sentence. The first half is, ‘Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling’—which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes on, ‘For it is God who work-eth in you’—which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that you could say, ‘He did this bit and I did that.’ But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt to express it different Churches say different things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on the importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that is as far as I can go.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-05-28). Mere Christianity (p. 149). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

In the end we are here, with the things we count as assets and the losses we fear will never be healed. What are we to do with our minds? Our emotions? Our lives? Surely after we “learn our lessons” then God doesn’t have to use hard measure any longer. Why doesn’t he relent?

The story will go on.