To wrap up this series, at least for now, I want to review three decision-making “tools” that are seen in scripture and see how they apply to our decision-making process. These three tools are “open doors”, “fleeces”, and “casting lots”.
Open DoorsI’ve often heard Christians cite the “open door” policy when making decisions. What I mean is they say something like, “God opened a door, so I decided to go that direction.” It seems that many times, open doors are considered direct signs from God to be followed. Are open doors always a sign that God is leading us in a given direction? Do they short circuit the decision-making process? Let’s first look at the apostle Paul and how he handled “open doors”.
In
1 Corinthians 16, Paul finds an open door for ministry and decides to stay on at Ephesus to take advantage of that open door. Note, however, that the open door Paul recognized was not free of obstacles. To the contrary, Paul says there are many who oppose him. Paul seems to define an open door differently than many do today. Nevertheless, Paul did use this open door in his decision-making process. In
2 Corinthians 2 we see Paul recognizing another open door for ministry at Troas. This time, however, Paul ignores the open door and moves on to Macedonia without taking advantage of the open door. His concern for Titus overrode the open door. Paul recognized the open door, but included other criteria in his evaluation and ultimately decided to ignore the open door. Paul clearly didn’t believe an open door overrode the decision-making process. It was just another piece of information he used in the process.
Open doors are perfect examples of circumstantial evidence, a term that is used commonly in the justice system. In the justice system, police officers use circumstantial evidence to guide their investigation of a case. They use it to help them find hard evidence. Once that case goes to trial, however, the prosecutors are not able to use circumstantial evidence to prove the case. In the same way, we should use circumstantial evidence to guide our decision-making, but it should not be the deciding factor in our decision-making. An “open door” does not relieve us of our responsibility to make a carefully determined wise decision. God certainly does open doors for us, but an open door in and of itself is not sufficient evidence to make a wise decision.
Fleeces The story of Gideon in
Judges 6 has inspired many Christians to lay their own “fleeces” before the Lord as a decision-making tool. I admit that as a young man I used this technique myself…with mixed results. Something along the lines of “if the phone only rings two times before she picks it up, then I should ask her out for a date.” Yes, that sounds really silly…and it is. Yet many Christians use similar techniques to make decisions.
Let’s analyze the idea of fleeces using Gideon’s story as a model. First of all, we must recognize that Gideon’s fleeces were miraculous. That is, there was no way that the result Gideon asked for could have happened without God’s intervention. There was no natural explanation for the ground being wet and the fleece dry, or the other way around. If we are to truly follow Gideon’s model, then our fleeces must be built the same way. We must ask God to give us a sign that cannot possibly happen naturally. Otherwise, the fleece is invalid.
Yet we must still ask the question, are fleeces a valid tool for making decisions? We must recognize that Gideon is portrayed as a man of very weak faith, constantly questioning God. Even before the fleeces, God had given Gideon a miraculous sign (
Judges 6:22), yet Gideon asked for more. In addition, Jesus tended to reject and requests for a miraculous sign (See
Matthew 12:38-39). Finally, it’s never advisable to build a doctrine based on a single passage of scripture, and we have no other explicit example of a “fleece” being used by anyone else in scripture. I’m not going to say that God cannot guide through fleeces. He certainly can. I just don’t believe the story of Gideon is meant to be a model for us.
Casting LotsUnlike fleeces, casting lots was used many times in scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments, to make decisions. You can find examples in
Joshua 18,
1 Chronicles 24, and
Acts 1.
Proverbs 18:18 even explicitly recommends casting lots. This may seem strange, since casting lots is the ancient equivalent of drawing straws or flipping a coin. How can this be a valid decision-making tool? The answer is found in
Proverbs 16:33, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”
This seems to invalidate everything I’ve discussed in this series. If flipping a coin is valid, why shouldn’t we just use that to make every decision? The answer is found in the scriptural examples themselves. Casting lots was only used when there was no other way to make a decision. In
Acts 1, the apostles had set up criteria for choosing a replacement for Judas, but found two candidates that fit the criteria equally well. In effect, they needed a way to break the tie. Only then did they resort to casting lots. In the same way, we cannot use the flip of a coin to avoid using the decision-making tools God has given us. We are responsible for making a wise decision. Casting lots is available to us only as a last resort when we have exhausted all other means of making a decision.
I pray this series has been helpful. It’s been helpful for me to revisit this subject in preparing this series. I don’t have another series planned at this point so the blog will return to being more "reactive" in nature, at least for the time being. In other words…we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.