"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son..." to die for every man, woman, and child who ever lived, that all might not die, like we knew we would when we disobeyed God, but be reunited with God and His eternity. Isn't that essentially how it goes? So why, after all of that effort can't God dig down a little deeper and come up with an addendum to that verse. A little amendment that might read something like, "God then loved the world enough not to send Hurricanes to wreck homes and Tsunamis to destroy lives all around the world, and everyone lived happily ever after. Amen." With an all powerful God out there loving us enough to send his Son to die, it really begs the question: What exactly is God's role in the natural disasters that periodically wreck the lives of our brothers and sisters around the globe? Is it His inevitable judgment on the evil and immoral of the world? Has he just had it up to here with all those heathens who keep shamelessly living in the Sin of un-American poverty and bondage to the powers and principalities of this world? I suspect that it is not.
I think in order to best understand how we can reconcile the notion of a loving God who can "number the hairs on our heads" and tells us that he values us above life itself, with the inarguable evidence that there are terrible things that happen in this world for which no human could ever be held responsible, we must start at the beginning. We must look at how humanity, indeed all of creation, got where it is today. And so, turn with me if you would to Genesis chapter 3. Christian or not, its likely you know this story. It speaks of the first man and first woman ever in the world, who were told by a God who loved them to stay away from something and it didn't take them long to decide they new better, and against all good judgment, took and ate. This one choice signifies for all of mankind an act of rebellion against their creator and sets off a chain of events that takes the rest of the Bible to resolve. And it happens in the first 5 or so pages (depending on the size of the print in your Bible, and whether you have those uber cute Sunday school lessons scattered throughout). From that point on it is traditionally understood that the actions of our first two fallen heroes resonated through all of creation and separated God, in his perfection, from his beloved and now sullied creation. Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, and Sin came into the world, giving birth to death in all of us. Romans 8 offers us a stirring image of the terrible effects Sin has had on all of creation. It says this starting with verse 19:
"The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time."
It is fairly clear from Paul's inspired words that our actions affect, have affected, and will continue to affect more than just ourselves and our eternal destinations. With this, we should really revisit our initial question. Who is to blame for natural disasters? Where does the buck stop? And it seems clear, according to scripture that we are to blame. And I don't mean "we" as in "them." Not we as in the parts of humanity that fail to keep the Ten Commandments posted on their lawns, fail to have sex only within the confines of marriage, and fail to pay their taxes accurately. I mean "we" as in every single one of us. God doesn't give us the option of separating out into teams of those who deserve destruction and those who don't. Because, the truth of the story of Adam and Eve doesn't hinge on its status as absolute fact or old wives tale. The truth is that whether you think Adam and Eve did it before you, we all have come to a crossroads where we knew what we should do, and chose to do the opposite. And we all do it repeatedly. That is the truth of Adam and Eve's story, regardless of where you stand with regards to its factuality. And the rest of the Old Testament tells the story of how God set about making things right. He didn't do it over night. And it wasn't always pretty. But scattered throughout is God's promise of a solution. An eventual end to all the death and destruction that began the day we rebelled. And that solution is Jesus.
When it all comes down to it then, our question should not be where to place the blame, for it’s clear it rests with us. Instead we should ask, if we claim to be under the banner of Christ, what our role in natural disasters should be. It certainly should not be to sit behind our pretty Macbooks and paint God as a murderous villain who has it out for all those fornicators, idolaters, and sinners who haven't bought a study Bible and a Jesus fish for their car. We are those murderous villains. It would be dangerous for our own spiritual well being to slip into the fantasy that somehow coming to believe that Jesus came to save us from sin somehow delivers us from its consequences on this earth. The fantasy that our special knowledge guarantees us health, wealth, and safety from the unsavory characters on the other side of the tracks. Jesus tells us in Matthew's gospel that "In this world we will have trouble." Job was righteous and disaster struck. And the God who loved the world enough to send his son is certainly as heartbroken over the shattered lives left in the wake of natural disasters as we ought to be.
And that’s really the crux of the matter. Scripturally speaking God isn’t often concerned with justifying why the world works the way it does. He says he loves us and if we ask him why he does things this way or that way, he simply responds as he did with Job, “where were you when I created the world?” The false comforters of Job should be evidence enough that God does what God does even to those who think they’re keeping to the rules. At no point does Jesus call his disciples to sit up on high horses and explain away the world’s tragedy as poetic justice for its transgressions. When the disciples ask Jesus who sinned to cause a man to be born blind in John 9 he does not tell them it was pay back for using the Lord’s name in vain or cussing out his next door neighbor, he says “this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” And then he heals him, setting a fantastic example for how we should answer the world when tragedy strikes. Not with sanctimony across oceans, borders, or wireless hotspots, but with a set of gloves to pick up, a shoulder to cry on, and a sympathetic ear that gives the voices of the victims a welcome home. Our call as Christians who believe in a loving God is to follow Christ’s example and bring light into darkness, life into death. And in so doing bring a bit of heaven into the hell of a fallen world. I for one will leave the judgment to a God who sees us for who we all truly are, and loves us all the same. And then believe that as my heart breaks along with my brothers who have had all they own wiped out, so is God’s heart breaking at how things are. He has allowed us to help make things right. We would be wise follow his lead. Anything else would end in folly.
