Now with Irma shredding through Caribbean islands and barreling down on Florida, we seem poised to be dealt another heavy blow from weather conditions not under our control. Only time will tell the scale of the damage there. Almost certainly there will be many billions of dollars of damage, countless lives disrupted, and a few ended. For Christians, not only in America but in all the world, we do believe there is One who has power over the weather, a God without whose permission nothing can occur, blessings or tragedies alike. So why does He allow these things to occur?
No Humansplaining
It is always ill-advised and futile to attempt to give narrowly specific reasons that large-scale natural disasters occur. Was Houston being judged for its sins like many claimed or implied New Orleans was in Katrina? Were the 16,000+ killed in the Tohoku earthquake/tsunami disaster more sinful than the rest of Japan or the rest of East Asia? Were the people whose blood Pilate mingled with their sacrifices or who were crushed by a falling tower in Siloam more guilty than the rest of Jerusalem? (Luke 13:1-5, Hint: Jesus says "No!")In the whatever'th-wave of the feminist movement we're in now, "man-splaining" is criticized as men offering unnecessary or patronizing explanations to which they expect women to listen respectfully. Or something like that. These things tend to be flexibly defined by those who wish to claim victim status, whether they have a legitimate cause for complaint or not. (They might as well lock up all the INTPs now, we love to explain things to anyone willing to listen to that much excited detail.)
But there is another kind of mansplaining, or humansplaining, which I would love to see end, and that is when people with positions of spiritual authority start trying to explain things they don't understand because they feel people expect them to have an explanation. Like the occasional situation in Chinese culture where courtesy demands a response to tourist inquiries of how to get to a place even if the local being asked has no idea, it's not so much about knowing, as feeling that you are in a position where giving an answer is expected and so you come up with a good-sounding one.
As a missionary with a seminary degree, I am sometimes put in this position. While I am not a very worthy example, at least I do try to always say when I don't know something off the top of my head but will go research it and have a better answer later, or else that the Bible doesn't actually give us an answer, so I neither have one nor should you trust anyone who says they do. It may be less satisfying than a pithy response you can copy and paste onto a picture and pass around social media, but I don't dare put words in the Bible's mouth. (If you feel I have done so with this post, feel free to let me know)
When a pastor or prominent Christian or anyone else stands up and says that a disaster happened for positive or negative reasons--as judgment for sin, or to bring everyone together--they are choosing from various possibilities, hopefully biblical-based ones, but they have no possible way of knowing the real reason or combinations. We are not privy to an explanation from God, and be very cautious about anyone claiming that they are.
But if we can't known the specific reason, then on a more basic level, why would a good God allow disasters like Katrina, like the Tohoku Quake, like the flooding in Houston, like the crises which you didn't even know were claiming lives every day in less-reported areas of the world, to happen? And can we answer that question without "humansplaining" or adding purely speculative ideas to scripture?
I think we can, and this is my attempt to do so.
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| A hurricane season that will be long remembered... |
Why God Lets Hurricanes Strike Major Cities
I. Because when ocean water reaches a certain temperature, and seasonal wind patterns...
We know this reason, or at least learned it in high school or saw it on the weather channel at some point. This is what people call the scientific reason, and what atheists tiresomely pretend makes God unnecessary until you bring up that this is not the Why at all, but the How. Personally I find it fascinating, how the unbelievable amount of energy representing in a raging hurricane is all the result of a positive feedback loop that can emerge from the tranquil, sun-warmed ocean when conditions are right. But that's wandering from the thrust of our topic.
As I have blogged previously, the ancient Greeks spent some time thinking about why things happen, and came up with the brilliant idea that every event had multiple causes, as seen from different perspectives.
For a simple example, a crystal goblet dropped on a stone floor shatters into scintillating shards. Why? Well, 1) because someone dropped it. But also 2) because it's crystal. If it was rubber or wood, it mostly likely would have survived the fall. Also 3) because the floor is stone. If it had been thick shag carpet, the goblet probably also would have been fine, though my allergies might not. Also 4) because in some humanly incomprehensible way, the shattered goblet fits into the vast and mysterious unfolding of all things, under God's authority and obeying His will. When we ask "why did this happen" we are usually speaking more to the that last category. What was the ultimate purpose?
I am not here suggesting the Greek causal categories are comprehensive or even correct. But their reminder to us that there is not merely one reason for things to occur is important.
So for our damaging hurricane, we could come up with a similar set of explanations. "Why did a massive hurricane strike a populated area with lethal results?":
1) Because of a set of natural phenomenon which to some extent can be traced back in chains of cause and effect to the beginning of the universe. Energy was transferred and the earth went around the sun and the ocean sloshed around for millennia and the hurricane was always going to happen at that time, unless you want to go really deep into arguments about human free will and chaos theory, and suggest the sinking of some Carthaginian trireme during the Punic Wars was just enough energy disruption to butterfly effect the hurricane into being thousands of years later. Perhaps so, but even that can be described precisely by physics, if we had access to the data.
2) Because people decided to build a city there. Actually there are lots of big coastal cities, and hurricanes have a very wide track. Sooner or later every city near the coast will be hit, it's just a matter of time. If we didn't build any major cities within 50 miles of the coast, hurricanes would rarely ever threaten them seriously.
3) Because people build communities out of materials which can be affected by storms. I live in Taiwan, where cities are dense and built mostly out of concrete and steel. Here in the capital metro area, even supertyphoons are mostly just a day of missed work or school, while eating instant noodles you bought at 7-11 before the storm got too intense to carry an umbrella, and listening to the wind howling past the windows. People who live in the mountains are at greater risk of mudslides and flash flooding, however, because of the nature of their environment. Our choice of living space and way of life does render us more or less vulnerable to nature's occasional fury, and like New Orleans, deciding to live in low-lying coastal areas is simply accepting the risk that sooner or later there will be tragedy.
4) Because God did not prevent it. I say it in this way, because when people ask the question in other way (If God is good, why does He send hurricanes) they are implying that a hurricane wasn't going to happen, and God "incited" it. But it was, as we explained above. Given scientific superpowers, we could trace the unbroken chain of cause and effect and energy transfer and weather patterns all the way back to the Creation event. This is important. God's creation is real. It is broken by sin, but it still functions according to knowable and consistent physical laws. Now the Bible certainly does speak of God causing disasters specifically as punishment for sin, but it also certainly does not say that every natural phenomenon which humans are caught up in and suffer is a punishment from God.
So we live in the kind of world where hurricanes happen, we have built cities in their path, and we haven't built those cities to be hurricane-resistant. Yet knowing all this, God doesn't stop them. Why? This brings us to the second part of what we mean when we ask why a disaster occurred:
II. Because God did not interfere in the Natural Order on this occasion
We spoke of the unbroken chain of cause and effect which proceeds forth from the creation event: God can and does interfere with this when He decides to, but this is a specific and special event, what we call a miracle. Even in the Bible, which being concerned with God's salvation plan for humanity and interactions with us mentions miracles and direct acts of God very frequently, we still read of a natural world that is God's creation and functions more or less as it was designed to, a world where the sun is a light-emitting object that God placed in the high heavens for the benefit of earth (a different kind of geocentrism -- the sun doesn't revolve around us, but it's there for us and not we for it), yet not a world where the sun is a little god in a chariot that rides around the sky every day but might choose not to do so tomorrow, or might be caught by a hungry sky wolf instead. The very existence and persistence of creation is itself a miracle, to be sure, but to speak as though every single thing that happens each moment is an arbitrary supernatural intervention risks ignoring a default reality the Bible itself assumes, the blessing of being able to take reality for granted, a core component of a scriptural worldview that all modern science is based on and to which it testifies.
So science is true and godly in the sense that it measures this physical world God established to function according to the laws of physics, neither arbitrary nor pantheistic. Yet if we believed only in this, we would be deists and not followers of Christ. As Christians we understand additionally that the One who set those parameters is present and active, and can always make the call to intervene directly, and does so both unprompted for His own reasons and in answer to our prayers.
So then under what conditions does God intervene? The Bible gives us some general categories:
1) Salvation history - God's interactions with the Patriarchs, miracles on behalf of Israel, through His prophets, in the person of Jesus Christ, etc. The Bible is mostly about this--God's special interactions with individuals and nations in His eternal plan for our redemption, and what happened in history as a result.
2) Judgment for Sin - Both the Old and New Testaments mention specific occasions not directly related to the progression of salvation history, which show God specifically acting to punish special sin. In the Old Testament we famously have Sodom and Gomorrah, but in the New Testament we also have Herod, receiving the crowds' adulation in a blasphemous way (Knowing who the LORD was, he still welcomed the crowds' praising him as divine) and being struck down for it. This is mentioned almost parenthetically as a direct punishment by God, and not as the Spirit-empowered act of any apostle, like the blindness of Elymas. We can assume if God punished both individuals and cities/nations directly, in both Old and New Testaments, for sins other than causing harm to Israel (as in the case of Egypt), then He may still do so today.
3) As an Answer to Prayer - Whether it is the healings and exorcisms performed by the disciples, or the miraculous answers to prayer the Church has seen from its inception until today, Christians know that God is sometimes willing to intervene dramatically. Testimonies to medical "mystery" cases where tumors vanish and doctors are confused by inexplicable recoveries are so common (even discounting the made-up, "share this post for a blessing" ones) that if modern scientists were as inquisitive as their forebearers we'd have whole fields of research trying to figure out by what means these things are occurring. (expect some kind of quantum energy/power of positive thinking explanations to crop up eventually as a way to get around a Biblical explanation if they haven't already, East Asia is way ahead of the West on that front)
Another specific example pertinent to our topic today: After a particularly severe typhoon here in Taiwan a few years ago, cleanup had just begun and rescue crews were still trying to get to people trapped in the mountains, when another typhoon headed for the island. Many people prayed earnestly, and the typhoon made an abrupt u-turn and headed straight back into the Pacific Ocean where it dissipated. I've heard similar stories in other places, and can't speak to their veracity, but at least I've witnessed it happen once myself in this case.
All this has prepared us to answer the central question: If a hurricane was going to hit a city through natural processes, yet God could directly intervene if He so desired, why didn't He do so?
Let's check our categories of Divine intervention mentioned above:
1) Is the hurricane part of salvation history? By definition, no.
2) Is the hurricane judgment for sin? Possibly. As I said above, it's foolish for us humans to pronounce this without knowing the mind of God (let alone start listing out which sins we guess God is punishing or why it was these people and not other people), but with Biblical precedent we also can't rule it out. I personally don't like this explanation because a hurricane is not really a "black swan" event; they happen every year, some are always more powerful than others, and it's only a matter of time before a large city is affected.
3) Did people earnestly pray in faith for God to send the hurricane somewhere else but He answered no? That's complicated, isn't it? Who would you pray for the storm to hit instead of you? As a Christian I fully believe that if many churches gathered together and prayed for God to make the storm do a 180 degree turn and head back out into the Atlantic, He could and might do that. I've seen a similar thing happen once, as I noted above. Obviously I have no way of knowing if those prayers occurred, though I think people tend to not pray with that kind of real urgency unless there's a special emergency. Sometimes we blame God for things we never really petitioned Him to change, but both scripture and the church's experience of great acts of God suggest that there is power in many people humbly petitioning God that a single person's earnest request does not have. To investigate how that works would both take a longer blog than this, but it can be said that prayer is never a means to manipulate God; we can never discover a formula by which to get consistent affirmative answers to our various requests, the Bible only touches on the topic of which prayers are pleasing to God, while telling us that there are some requests to which we will get consistent affirmative answers (Like James 1:5). (Note: This isn't a question of sovereignty--if God has ordained a thing, He has ordained the means, for example the prayers of many, by which it shall occur.)
III. Because Suffering and Pain is the Default of our World, not the Exception
Perhaps I was the only person who hadn't figured that out, but growing up this was not clear. Life wasn't perfect, but it was alright, and events like serious sickness or car accidents or job loss or natural disasters were tragic intrusions in how life ought to be. Much of the developed world seeks to make this perspective as much a reality as possible--that through use of resources and wise decision making, the suffering of this life may be minimized for as many people as possible. This is not a biblical perspective, but it's a natural human one, that leads to evils as well as good. (Trying to minimize suffering leads to acts of mercy and the alleviation of need, but also to abortion and euthanasia)
Scripture does not describe the world exactly in this way. Rather, a peaceful life free from tragic incidents or societal chaos is a blessing from God, a manifestation of Shalom, something to be sought after not because it is "normal" but because it's what people want and how the world was initially supposed to be. We are all longing after Eden, but sin has turned our quest for it into the welfare state, or even communist regimes.
When man fell, he dragged creation down with him. we have no idea if the world had hurricanes before the fall; although people do like to take one verse and run with it, on this question at least there is biblical evidence to suggest that before Noah's flood the climate didn't allow for that kind of thing. By the time of Noah's flood, not only had the fall taken place, but mankind was so wicked that God initiated a pan-disaster that dwarfs the most furious hurricane the world has ever known. To run the risk of the "humansplaining" I mentioned above, my understanding ("I, not the Lord") is that hurricanes and many other potentially lethal weather events began in the post-flood world as an inevitable result of changed climatic factors. (There is also some biblical evidence to suggest "climate change" in terms not of global warming, which an increasingly small number of people cling to in the face of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, but of the increasing instability of the climate is also an inevitable result of the fall, and will only get worse until the end.)
I have mentioned in a previous blog how, just as you cannot get the tin out of a bronze-alloy sword without destroying it, our post-fall world is alloyed with sin. God will remove it one day, but in doing so "the heavens will perish with fire" and the "earth shall melt like wax." He delays so that more will know Him, more will fill His tables at the feast and enter His dwellings, before the end comes and the door is closed.
Hurricanes are an inevitable phenomenon in our sin-alloyed world. God does not, except in special cases, intervene to prevent the natural consequences of sin. That is the reality of the messed-up world we inhabit. Yet through common grace, by wisdom and understanding the nature of creation (effective city planning and disaster preparation, science that understands the weather and also stronger building materials, etc), we are free to develop ways to mitigate the destructive power of natural phenomenon, and indeed we have done so to a large degree.
So pray for recovery in Houston, pray for mercy in Florida and the Caribbean, and indeed for western wildfires, violence in Syria and Yemen and Nigeria and Sudan and American inner cities and elsewhere, tensions on the Korean peninsula, and a whole host of situations. But if you are simply praying that God will make all the bad things and the hurting stop, that prayer may arise out of the heart's distress, but it does not correspond to biblical reality. The consequences of human sin will wreak havoc as they do, until the final judgment.
Then, what should we do?
God has entrusted the task of letting the world hear the gospel to us. While movements of the Spirit are bringing millions to His kingdom, they are doing so alongside and through the faithful service of brothers and sisters around the world. We are His witnesses, and that is our constant and joyful responsibility whether or not we see God specifically intervening to do miracles on His own. "He's not a tame lion," but we are no longer languishing in the endless winter of frozen Narnia--Christmas has come, and Aslan has died, defeated death, and opened the way.
Now should we sit and question God for letting nature take its course, a course we chose ourselves in Eden by deciding we had better options than trusting obedience? Not as believers. We are on this earth to proclaim Christ to a world that desperately needs hope beyond this world. We are called to love our neighbors as ourselves. When confronted with disaster, we have two necessary options:
1. Pray, but don't do it alone. God does listen to our requests made in faith. If He chooses to let nature take its course, that is not being mean or unjust, that is in fact exactly justice. He may rather choose to show special mercy in a specific situation, even in a miraculous way, but my experience at least is that He rarely does so when we are casual about asking. And I don't mean prayer memes on FB, but roomfuls of people on their knees.
2. Go. Help. If you are burdened by a disaster, demanding the government or somebody do something on your behalf earns you zero points. (maybe even negative points, by encouraging a culture of shifting Christian responsibility up the secular ladder) Also you can earnestly request, but are unable to demand God do anything. But you are quite capable of being the body of Christ and bringing love and joy to a broken world. If people need help, you go help them.
And some people already are, as we watched in Houston. But what if, like Paul and his race, the Church was excited and even competitive about this? What if the government complained that so many Christians were already responding that they couldn't get state and federal aid in there? (I'm not talking about interfering with professionals doing their jobs, I'm saying a) that's an excuse when there's so much that can be done, and b) Christians can get access to that training too, yeah?) What if we decided no one would outdo us in showing charitable love and being first on the scene to bring mercy and relief in times of disaster and hurting?
I guess, in that situation, the Church might even look like salt and light to a hungry and darkened world. Pray for Florida, pray for Houston, pray for God's mercy on those involved in these and other disasters nationally and globally. Then recognize that God might be prompting you to be one of those expressions of His mercy that you were praying for, and go help someone.
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