Time And Chance

'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.'

Ecclesiastes 9:11

TIme and chance happen to us all - what does that even mean?

As Christians we talk A LOT about the two words that are translated as time chronos and kairos, for the purpose of this, let’s say, time = chronos and chance = kairos.

Chronos is the normal passing of time, the fact that no matter who you are, rich or poor, old or young, believer or unbeliever we all have twenty-four hours in our day, time happens to us all!

Chance are the moments of time that carry divine opportunities if they are used wisely, that is kairos, critical moments, and believe it or not chance happens to us all! The only problem is we haven’t all learned how to see the difference between chronos and kairos moments. What Ecclesiastes 9:11 is saying isn’t that it doesn’t matter if your fast, strong, wise, understanding or skillful, but that if you are and you can’t spot the chance moments in your life you’ll lose out to the slow, weak, foolish and ‘dumb’ person who can.

My real question here is, if time and chance happen to us all, how do I become a consistent beneficiary of chance?

The word translated chance is actually the Hebrew word pega, which comes from the root word paga.

Paga means to strike (as in war) and is often translated as ‘to make intercession’. Prayer attracts opportunities that men will call chance, but was cultivated through intentionality. When someone has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, it moves from being chance to favour.

In Genesis 12 & 13, Abram, having left his father and his mother’s home, builds an altar in a place called Luz. On different occasions, the bible recalls Abram “calling on the name of the Lord” in this place. He has established a culture of making intercession.

Decades later, in Genesis 28, his grandson, Jacob, tired and weary in the middle of his journey takes a stone to use as a pillow, goes to sleep and has a dream, he sees angels ascending and descending. When Jacob wakes up he says “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it. ” And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!”' (Genesis 28:16-17) The bible says he named the place Bethel, it was formely called Luz.

Abraham had through a culture of making intercession built a portal or a gate to heaven, that generations later his grandson will be a beneficiary of his life of prayer.

If you want to be a beneficiary of time and hance, build a portal in the place of prayer. We no longer live in the days where God can be confined to a location, where the portal was built in Bethel, or for Moses in Hebron “The Mountain of God”, you can be the portal and the gateway for divine opportunities if you would make your life a living sacrifice unto the Lord through a lifestyle of prayer.