Hedging Your Bets

One

Elijah’s Challenge

One of the most exciting scenes in the Old Testament is the showdown between Elijah, the true prophet of the Lord, and the 450 false prophets of Baal. It’s like a game show, “Last Prophet Standing,” except that the stakes are permanent. Whoever loses this contest, dies. And, of course, like any other big, high-stakes contest, the showdown between Elijah and the false prophets drew a big crowd of spectators. But before the show got underway, before the contest began, Elijah turned and addressed the crowd asking, “How long will you straddle the issue?”

And that’s the question for this meditation. How long will we keep trying to hedge our bets?

Two

Why We Hedge Our Bets

Hedging our bets is the basic human strategy for managing uncertainty. 

If we’re betting on a horserace, and we’re uncertain about which horse will win, maybe we’ll hedge our bets by putting money on one of them to win, another to place, and a third one to show. This is the same reason we diversify our investments. We put money in different places, not knowing which will rise and which will fall, and hoping that if one falls, the other will rise enough so that we come out ahead. 

Hedge fund managers do this professionally. That’s why they call it a hedge fund. But again, the point is that we hedge our bets when we’re not certain enough to go all in. And this is what we do with God.

We’re not really one hundred percent sure that God’s a solid bet. So we invest a bit in our faith, in the sacraments, in trying to keep the commandments, maybe some prayer here and there. But then we also invest enough in the goods of this world so that, you know, just in case the whole God thing turns out to be a washout, we can still recoup our losses by having lived a fun, full, respectable, successful life.

We never go all in on God.

Three

Relationships aren’t like Financial Investments

So the thing with hedging your bets is that it can maybe work in financial arrangements but that doesn’t work in relationships. If there are two women who are both willing to date or marry you, guess what, hedging your bets won’t work. That’s how you lose both of them. Or if there are two companies offering you full-time employment and you try to hedge your bets so you don’t sign on the dotted line with either of them. then both companies will just give their jobs to someone else.

It’s the same with God. You need to pick. If God is the true God, then put Him absolutely above everything else. Order your whole life around Him, design your entire life so that you can get closer to Him. But if something else is God, if something else is the ultimate value, the ultimate source of all happiness, then serve that.

Just be honest about it. Say that your whole life is geared around your job, your prestige, your entertainment, your income, or your looks.

Elijah said to the people, “How long will you keep hedging your bets? If the Lord is the true God, worship Him. If Baal is the true god, then worship him. But don’t pretend you can worship both.” 

There can only be one most important thing in your life. By definition, you can’t hedge your bets about the one most important thing. So which is it going to be?

Four

How Do You Know? 

After Elijah had challenged the people, they were silent.

They understood that they had to choose – that they couldn’t have it both ways.

But they were still uncertain. How could they decide which was the real God? How could they know which one to go all-in on?

And so Elijah helped them. He said, “Here, we’ll make it easy. We both set up sacrifices on our altars, one altar to Baal, and one to the Lord. And whichever sends fire down from heaven: that’s the real God.”

And, of course, the real God, the Lord, sent fire down from heaven. So the people know He was the real God, the God to go all-in on.

So here’s the question: what’s our fire coming down from the sky? What’s our sign that we can hang onto, by which we know that the Lord is the true God, that He is the priority we can organize our lives around. 

That He’s the one we can invest everything on

Five

So Many Signs

God gave the Israelites the sign of fire in Elijah’s time. But of course, He’d given countless other signs to the chosen people over the course of salvation history. He gave them the parting of the Red Sea, and the plagues of Egypt, the manna from heaven and the falling of Jericho’s walls at a trumpet blast. He gave them the disasters wreaked on the Philistines when they stole the ark of the covenant, the strength of Samson, the signs of Gideon. Later he would give them the destruction of Sennacherib’s army, and the curing of Naaman – and on and on and on.

He gives us so many signs. The witness of Christ, who cannot be a liar or a lunatic, so He must be the Divine Lord He claimed to be. The miracle of the resurrection, which shines all the more clearly when the suggestions of a hoax, a hallucination, or a myth have been exposed in all their sheer implausibility. The witness of the Church, which stands today like a fortress for practically everything sane and healthy against the wilderness of perversion and self-destruction. The Incomparable Beauty of Our Lady reflected not only in art throughout the world but in all the beauty of Her Daughter, the Church. The miracles of the saints, of Lourdes, of Fatima, of Guadalupe.

Do you see? We can’t hedge our bets. We have to trust God enough to bet everything on Him. We don’t have any excuse, anymore, to be uncertain. This is the truth. Christ is the truth. His Church is the truth. It’s time to bet it all.