God Does Not Revert to the Mean

God Does Not Revert to the Mean

I marked Romans 3:3 as one of the critical questions of the Bible: “What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?” Let me point out a rather obvious point in this verse: there is a difference between “faithlessness” and “faithfulness.” The old hymn does not sing “Great is thy faithlessness,” but rather, “Great is Thy faithfulness.” It is a part of God’s character, to be faithful, and He never acts out of character.

Second, let me just mention the phrase the title, reversion to the mean, or, regression to the mean. I am not an expert in statistics, but I read that outliers will normally be followed by instances which are more in line with what is “normal” or “average.” Another way of stating this phrase is that there is a “reversion to mediocrity.” We can now put the title and the verse together. 

God is always faithful. There is no “mean” toward which He could revert, because perfect faithfulness and reliability is His rule. It is more than “normal.” It is an always, never-interrupted faithfulness.

So why would anyone every question God’s faithfulness? I believe it would be because we forget that God’s faithfulness is not like our faithfulness, which is often marked by faithlessness. We “revert to the mean” over and over again, against our best intentions, and we fall away from faithfulness. Further, when we find unfaithfulness in ourselves, we expect that God might respond in kind, as if God in heaven would say, “Well then, if you are going to be like that, then I just might be like that as well. What we are supposing of God is that He will respond in kind to us. Why? Because that is what we do toward others.

But God is not like us. He is not subject to this law of statistics, the reversion to the mean, because He has no mean. He simply is, and what He is is perfect, in all things, and in faithfulness.

But what about us? What does it say about us when our faithfulness looks a lot more like faithlessness? For one thing, it says that we are sinners. Even sinners saved by grace are still sinners, and when we commit a sin, our faithfulness is necessarily marred. Perhaps our standard over time becomes compromised, so that we have a few good days of faithfulness, and then many “normal” days when, well, we revert to mediocrity when it comes to faithfulness. Is this the way it should be? No.

We are saved by grace. Therefore we should be gracious. We are saved through the instrumentality of faith. Therefore we should be faithful. We serve the God of truth. Therefore we should not lie. We trust the promises of God. Therefore, we should not worry. But we do worry and we do lie and we are less than faithful and are often not very gracious. How can this be in those who are given refashioned hearts that are being crafted into conformity with the character of Christ? How can those who have been taken hold of by Christ be so unlike Him so often? There is not really a satisfactory answer. Sin in the life of a Christian is a real problem. It reveals that the child of God has trivialized the sacrifice of Christ which bought him out from under sin’s penalty and power, as though what Jesus did for us on the cross carries little weight in our behaviors and reactions.

The “excuse” that we have is that we live distant from Christ. We are not “abiding,” to use a good Bible word. We may have one “Christ” in our life, but many lords - one Lord Jesus Christ, but many others “lords” that we follow when it comes to resentment or anger or jealousy. We profess that we have “closed with Christ,” to use an old Puritan phrase, but we still seem very open to ungodly influences. We then “revert to the mean,” just like others, many of whom don’t even claim to know Christ or to have been set free by the Gospel.

Our reversion is not to be to the mean, but to Christ. As outliers in this world, we are not to become more like “normal” humanity, but rather to become more like Jesus, perfectly faithful Jesus, who will remain faithful to us even when we are not.