Did God have a bad week?
If you have been watching the news lately (and persevered through endless analysis of the latest budget) you would have noticed that it hasn’t been the greatest week for people living in Burma or China. 100,000 people dead or missing in Burma following Cyclone Nargis, with a government seemingly apathetic to the plight of its people, and 20,000 people confirmed dead in China following an earthquake. I’m sure these numbers have grown since the time of writing.
When things like this happen, we often feel a bit uncomfortable and hope that no one asks us too many questions. What could you say? Maybe some non-committal answer about God’s ways being beyond our understanding? Insisting that he really is loving even though it doesn’t seem so at times?
But I honestly think that we struggle with these issues because we haven’t come to grips with the God whom the bible describes. Let me throw a few stories at you: Genesis 7: God wipes out the entire world – bar eight – with a flood. Genesis 19: God rains fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah, totally destroying everyone. Exodus 32:27 “thus says the Lord God of Israel, ‘Put your sword on your side… and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbour’” (and 3000 people died). Deuteronomy 7:2,16: God commands the complete destruction of everyone living in Canaan. Joshua 10:11 “the Lord threw down large stones from heaven on them… There were more who died because of the hailstones than the sons of Israel killed with the sword”. 2 Samuel 24:15: David takes a census of the people and God punishes him by sending a plague that kills 70,000 men. Isaiah 37:36 “And the angel of the Lord went out and struck down 185,000 in the camp of the Assyrians. And when people arose in the morning, behold these were all dead bodies”.
How do these stories make you feel? A bit uncomfortable? How do you respond to God killing 185,000 people in one night? Does it fit with your understanding of God’s character? Because it needs to. This is the same God that we call ‘Father’, and we are not free to invent or define Him however we like. The bible shows us his character, we must believe it, or we will simply have a god of our own imagination along with the rest of the world.
So what do we learn about God from all these stories? One main thing I think: that God is free to take life whenever and however he chooses; “There is no God beside me; I kill and make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand” Deuteronomy 32:39. All of us deserve death, and we must rid ourselves of this idea that God needs to have some justification for taking life – he can do it because he is God.
To be honest I hadn’t really thought much about this before, and I think that my perception of God was probably similar to many Australians around me – that God is a friendly, loving, obliging, ‘tame’ sort of guy who wouldn’t harm a fly. And it was these two recent disasters which got me wondering whether the bible led us to a different understanding of God.
Actually I think that this is the purpose of natural disasters. They confront us with God, and the reality that he isn’t ‘tame’ and wimpy. His judgement is coming, it is inevitable and we must repent.
That is exactly what Jesus has to say about natural disasters (and genocide) in Luke 13. After hearing the story of some Jews who had been killed by the Romans, Jesus commented, “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish”. Is Burma an especially sinful country? Or China? No – Jesus bangs that idea on the head straight away. They are no better or worse than anyone else. But we will meet the same God one day, and unless we repent of our sin against him, we will likewise perish.
So the message of a natural disaster is not primarily that God’s ways are beyond our comprehension, or that he is loving (although these are both true), but rather that a sinful world needs to repent. And it seems to me that most of the world misses the point – these disasters strike and no-one hears anything about repentance. Perhaps it is our job to tell the world about the coming judgement of God, and about Jesus who drank every last drop of His father’s anger against sin.
From pulpits to news programs, from the New York Times to the Wall Street Journal, the message of the tsunami was missed. It is a double grief when lives are lost and lessons are not learned. Every deadly calamity is a merciful call from God for the living to repent. “Weep with those who weep,” the Bible says. Yes, but let us also weep for our own rebellion against the living God. Lesson one: weep for the dead. Lesson two: weep for yourselves. – John Piper
Peter Reeve
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