day no. 16,329: swing and amiss

1 Samuel 20:20-22

Then I will shoot three arrows to the side, as though I shot at a target; and there I will send a lad, saying, ‘Go, find the arrows.’ If I expressly say to the lad, ‘Look, the arrows are on this side of you; get them and come’—then, as the Lord lives, there is safety for you and no harm. But if I say thus to the young man, ‘Look, the arrows are beyond you’—go your way, for the Lord has sent you away.

There is a way to miss that hits its target.

There is a kind of missing that communicates intention. There is missing because you meant to hit the target and failed to do so out of incompetence and there is a missing because you meant to miss the target and succeeded in doing so out of competence. In other words, there is a missing which says that something is amiss.

Jonathan was able to communicate a message by missing in a particular way. He was competent enough to miss in the way he wanted to, not in the way an incompetent archer does while attempting to hit the bulls-eye.

Having established this, let me apply the principle in a different direction: 2020 and 2021 have been spectacularly bad. So bad, in fact, that you couldn't concoct it by accident. It's too bad to have been by mistake. All that to say, incompetence could not, on its own, explain how bad things have gotten. Incompetence isn't that good at being bad.

There is a kind of bad that is so bad that it proves how good at being bad it is. In other words, you can't be that kind of bad by accident. That kind of bad can only be accomplished on purpose. It is not missing the mark because of a lack of competence, but because of an excess of arrogance.

If you look back at 2020 and 2021, you must conclude that one can’t miss that badly by accident. It is statistically impossible to be that bad. You can cheat on an exam by filching the right answers from someone else’s work or you can cheat on an exam by filling in the wrong answers intentionally. Mere guesses or random selection can only produce so much error. There are scores so low, however, that they imply someone tried hard to get the answer wrong. Which also tells you that they knew the right answers and deliberately chose the wrong ones. To know the wrong answer with that degree of certainty is to also know what is certainly right.  

All that to say, when you see something this bad, you know someone is aiming at evil. They know the good and intentionally choose the bad. They haven't made a mistake or a miscalculation. They have seen the good, rejected it, and pursued the bent.

But Someone is keeping score and knows how to grade the papers. Rest assured, where idiocy is an excuse, it will be accounted for; and where evil is inexcusable, it will be counted. It will either be reckoned to Christ or it will face a reckoning. Kiss the Son while you still can and wait upon Him knowing that the bad guys will soon have to kiss it all good-bye.