Articles
Who Is Responsible?
Jay Bruce recently retired from Major League Baseball, ending a 14-year career. Writer Tom Verducci had an article in Sports Illustrated which blamed the demise of Bruce’s career on shifting defensive alignments. For several years now, teams have been repositioning defensive players in more extreme ways to better defend against hitters who mostly hit the ball to only one side of the field. The “shifts” are working well enough to be impacting the game. They are reducing offense, the very thing they are intended to do.
I don’t know or care whether more or less offense is better for baseball. My interest in professional sports has gone out the door in the last few years. What I find interesting here is the notion that shifting alignments are to blame for ruining a player’s career. Why isn’t that player responsible? He is the one who can only hit in one direction. He is the one who cannot or will not adjust to a different strategy, one that is within the rules of the game. You might as well argue that allowing pitchers to throw curveballs ruins the careers of batters who can only hit fastballs!
Individual responsibility seems to waning. If I can’t pass a test, there must be a problem with the test; we need to do away with testing. If I am struggling to pay back my loans, the bank or the government should just forgive them. I may not have reacted well, but you put me in that position. History, education, culture, community, capitalism—it’s all on them.
Blaming others for our own problems or failures is, of course, nothing new. When God confronted the first man about his sin, Adam replied, “The woman who You gave to be with me, she gave me from the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). It was Eve’s fault, or perhaps God’s fault for giving him Eve, but it was not Adam’s!
The prophet Ezekiel lived in the era when God’s people were captives in Babylon. It was a most difficult time. The people consoled themselves by adopting a proverb: “The fathers eat the sour grapes, but the children’s teeth are set on edge.” In other words, what we are suffering is not our fault. God’s response was stern: “‘As I live,’ declares the Lord, ‘you are surely not going to use this proverb in Israel anymore’” (Ezekiel 18:3). In the verses that follow, God made two vital points about our standing before Him.
First, His judgment is based on an individual’s conduct. “The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity. The righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself” (v. 20).
Second, if an individual changes his conduct, God will change His judgment. If a wicked man turns from his sins, God will forgive and let him live (vv. 21-23). If a righteous man turns from his righteousness, God will condemn him and he will die (v. 24). But God has no pleasure in that, therefore the chapter concludes, “Repent and live.”
