In the bible, the connection is pretty tight. A flood comes? God was involved. A famine ensues? You guessed it, God was holding the rain up in the clouds. A mighty wind? God was behind it. And in most cases where the weather was destructive the message was simple. God was punishing the wicked or disciplining his own. And the appropriate response in either case was repentance.
So where are the calls to repentance in Greensburg? Where are the cries of remorse in the path of the wildfires in the southeast? Where are sackcloth and ashes in the flooded plains?
Is God still in charge of the weather? Does he still use it to grab the attention of the wicked and of his straying sheep? Or did the weather become random at some point in history? Or still yet, was it always generally random and the scriptures just draw our attention to the few times when it was not?
Now God is only the one who saves the family huddling in the shelter from the tornadic winds. He is the one who gives strength to those who are rebuilding. He is the one who saves the homes filled with irreplaceable photographs. Or so we assert through our comments.
We talk about counting our blessings when the storm misses, but not about recognizing our curses when the house is leveled.
How is God to get our attention anymore? Does he only work through his Word to convict now? I see no Scriptures that lean that way. God uses every tool at his disposal to call the erring back to his gracious arms. Let us Lutheran not forget that God called Luther towards his vocation through a violent storm.
To push the point to an extreme, we Christians usually run in quickly to remove the sting of destruction caused by weather. Is there ever a case in which the appropriate response as Christians is to let the suffering linger in order that God might get the attention of those suffering?
Older prayer books and hymnals always encouraged prayers of corporate repentance in time of natural disaster. Now we pray that God would help those destroyed by weather, as if he is only able to respond to and no longer control it. Perhaps we pray with misunderstanding. Perhaps we are not hearing when God is speaking.
Phil,
Your extreme suggestion that we let those who suffer linger in their suffering is quite frankly disgusting. I suspect that you state this to get a rise out of people and make them think, but I cannot see how someone with your knowledge of the Scriptures and pastoral heart could even suggest that Christians take such a stand.
To echo Matt Harrison of LCMS World Relief – sin has consequences, but those consequences don’t kill mercy. Thank God Jesus did not think that way about me or you. I have no doubt that God uses suffering to get our attention and call the erring to repentance, but that does not relieve us of the responsibility to love your neighbor as yourself.
Jeff-
Did God send Elijah in to help Ahab and Israel when it did not rain? Should not he have returned to show mercy? I am pushing the extreme, but give me one biblical example where God’s punishment was immediately soothed by God’s people coming to show mercy in the way that we find so common. I cannot think of one.
Are you seroiusly suggesting that in times of punishment there is no place for mercy? What rubbish!!!
You are dealing with an example in Scripture where we have a clear word from God that x happens because of y. So did the fall of Samaria and the fall of Jerusalem. But even then did God hold the Assyrians and Babylonians as guiltless? No! Today, we have no such clear word that says a Hurricane came in response to my sin, a leaders sin, or a nation’s sin. When you have no clear word, be silent and weep with those who weep! Lead them to the cross. Remind them that when Jesus looked upon the grave of Lazarus and Jerusalem doomed to destruction, He wept. Was mercy to be abandoned then? What about a pagan Roman centurion who begs Jesus for the life of his servant? Jesus cares about our suffering in this fallen world and mercy through His people is His response.
Incidently, there were acts of mercy that took place under Elijah – the raising of the widow’s son at Zarepath. Also, during this time of punishment, 7,000 who had not bowed the knee to Baal were preserved in Israel – how did that happen? If we believe that God works through means, and I know you do, it totally fair to say that God worked through acts of mercy.
I am not suggesting that in totality. Are you suggesting that in our day God only allows the world to be crappy in general to show us the overall sinfulness of the world and never brings a specific bout of suffering for a specific reason? If so, Marcion was right. The God of the OT is not the God of th NT. This whole idea of the random effects of sin hitting random people seems at best marginally scriptural. And yet it is the primary way we talk.
Also the examples of mercy in the Elijah story are to the faithful not to those needing a wake-up call.
Back to the main point: is our response to natural disasters in our day only mercy or also the proclamation of God’s displeasure with sin?
Phil,
Interesting post. It is good to see you posting again!! I wonder, however, if “random effects of sin hitting random people” is the best way to phrase what a lot of people might say today. I, like you, believe that we live in a fallen, sinful, broken world and that things are allowed to happen simply because the world is not operating the way it was designed too. I do believe that God can use things (in this case weather) to grab our attention for a specific reason, yet, how do we determine what that specific reason (sin) may be? For example, Hurricane Katrina. Why did she come? What specific reason could we cite (like we could cite in scriptural passages when God directly used the weather)? Or might she have devasted N.O. because we live in a sinful, broken world in general in which even the weather patterns don’t reflect the original creation? It seems to me that, perhaps, the burden may be on you to interpret, when weather destroys, for what specific reason it destroyed. You could have your own show on the weather channel! You could be the weather prophet, standing right next to Jim Cantore (sp?) during a hurricane…he could describe it, you could just be telling him that he is going to die! 🙂 Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for a great post!
Who is to say that the widow didn’t need a wake-up call? Did she not say, “what do you have against me, man of God? Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” (I Kings 17:18)
Last time I checked, sin doesn’t randomly hit anyone, but effects us all. Certainly, there are times when the results of our sin results in terrible consequences that God can use to bring us to our knees. But consequences of sin DO NOT KILL MERCY. To say that we should not bring mercy to the hurting is an impossible response for a Christian, Phil. It is not marginally Biblical, it is pure Gospel and how Marcion got into your answer appalls me. Is mercy purely a NT idea then? There is no idea of grace in the OT? Who is the real Marcionite then?
Try taking this approach next time you walk into a hospital room and talk to a young couple who just lost a baby for the 3rd time. Try telling them it is because they sinned! Maybe it is, but you don’t know that!!!
Act with mercy otherwise you become a theological butcher.
With this discussion, I find it interesting that no one yet has mentioned Job, either because it is the proverbial white elephant in the room which needs no call to attention or because it is too convenient to mention.
I have to agree somewhat with ohiorevjeff that God’s mercy seems to have been left to the side. The balancing act of realizing how much we are condemned by our own sinfulness and yet trusting that “neither enormity of sin can surpass our Lord and God’s mercy and forgiveness unto us” (St. Symeon the New Theologian) is a difficult one to realize especially when considering human life and death.
But we must be especially on guard and vigilant to realize that God’s mercy is in such suffering and death. Death itself is a mercy so that humanity would not persist in its sinfulness, but there would be respite until the last judgment.
For the Orthodox, this past Sunday, the last Sunday of Pascha was the Sunday of the Blind Man. Echoing the Gospel Reading, in our hymnography for the day, we reiterate the question of the disciples of who sinned that this man was blind. Christ responds that he was blind so that God and His work can be manifested in him. The mercy of our Lord and God and Saviour transcends the effects we immediately feel after “perceived” disasters. As humans burdened by sin, we do not realize that “His Mercy endures forever.” Job did well to realize that and still said “Glory to God for all things.” We are best to realize that God has revealed Himself in so many ways, good and bad, as a mercy to us.
I often ask my students, when reading Sophocles’ tragedies like Oedipus Rex and Antigone or Euripides’ Bacchae if ever God or the gods can be moral. In our sight, never, because we expect them to play by our rules on a level and fair playing field.
Yet when we start to look at “natural disasters” as God giving us a wake-up call, then theodicy has reared its ugly head. How can we ever then perceive God to be merciful, even though that is not the case?
My $.02.
Chris-
The mercy in God acts of judgment are not that they are good for us in the end in some sort of hindsight is 20/20 way (like the cancer made me appreciate each day), but that they call us out of sin that leads to death and back into his gracious fold.
If the answer to theodicy is to remove the possibility of God bringing disaster, we have chosen a scripturally inconsistent answer to the problem, for the scriptures are clear that he does bring such calamity. The answer to theodicy is that God in bringing temporal calamity restores us to eternal salvation. He does not bring calamity to bring suffering, but to call us to repentance.
But to all my detractors, answer the simple question, does God still control the weather or does he not? Does he still choose where tornadoes hit and where it misses or it all just cold fronts and warm most air meeting randomly? Don’t believe everything you see on the news.
Someone proof text this “all bad stuff is random” for me in the scriptures. All of you believe it, but have not told me why scripturally.
No one has ever said “bad stuff is random” in this whole discussion – that is your incorrect conclusion. The whole thing that started this rant of mine is is what do you do with the aftermath?
Unless have a clear word of God that says Kansas tornado “A” was caused by God’s displeasure at sin “B”, then you need to be silent about the cause and help pick up the pieces and offer people some comfort. Otherwise, you do nothing more than grind people under the heel of theodicy and drive them further from the kingdom of God.
Mercy, Phil. It is a concept you might want to think about. Otherwise sharpen your knife for a theological bloodletting.
Or maybe you could just say like Job’s wife, “curse God and die”.
Phil,
I absolutely believe that God controls the weather and allows and doesn’t allow certain things to happen. He knows when and where things will strike. He allows good and bad things to happen to ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people alike.
I don’t think I have hinted that bad stuff happens randomly, rather bad things happen, overall, in general (rather than for pinpoint, specific reasons – though this is possible) because of the broken, fallen world in which we find ourselves living. I don’t have to do something specifically, personally evil to get cancer (though, I believe that this is something that we all must, at least briefly, consider and reflect on) rather cancer comes, tornadoes happen, hurricanes devestate because we live in a broken, sinful world in general. Is it random? No. Does God allow these things (and not allow them)? Yes. I do agree with ohiorevjeff when he states that when we don’t know the cause and effect relationship it is better to keep silent and allow God to use us in any way He deems appropriate.
To me, after Gen. 3, we see the world and the rest of the biblical narrative demonstrating that bad things happen in general because of the general sinfulness we live in against God.
I would ask a couple of questions myself to you. You have said the rest of us believe something but have not provided scripturally why. Yet, re-reading your posts you have not demonstrated scripturally your position. Listing a few examples and then claiming that is the biblical norm or overall theological way to understand something is not making an airtight argument for your case.
Second, in John 9, was it the man or his parent’s sin that made him blind? May seem kind of a “random” question, but I believe relevant to our discussion.
Plus, have you given any thought to the weather channel idea. You would get paid a lot more money!! Plus, you would only be right 50% of the time and your people would trust you completely as compared to being a pastor teaching God’s Word where you are wrong, according to your people, most of the time! 🙂
Speaking of a bloodletting…holy cow. Okay I have pushed the envelope, let me respond and then get to my real point perhaps farther away from the edge I have been playing on.
As far as biblically, I can list every time a flood, famine, etc is tied to a specific reason in you want, but that would be an exhaustive. I trust that you know that especially in the OT that is the norm of described events. No one has come up with an exception with the possible exception of the blind man where his illness is not random at all, but rather purposed for the display on God’s glory and Job where once again it is revealed that Job was chosen, not a random victim.
Perhaps the more random events do not get described or expounded upon.
And Jeff, your words are harsh. I am offended that you suggest my position is from a lack of thought. I am not saying curse God and die. I am saying thank God he calls sinner to repentance so they may live.
And here is the point, I realize that in general we generally don’t know the exact cause “a” for effect “b.” We wouldn’t listen to a prophet even if God sent one. I will even allow that at times there is not such a correlation in our messed up world. But I have no doubt that in biblical times, if an entire city was wiped off the map, the residents would have asked, “Why did this happen?” even without a prophetic utterance and that was probably a good meditation. Why do we always just say, “We don’t know and who cares. Grab a trash bag.” I contend that we do this because we find ourselves too sophisticated to actually attribute the effects of weather to God like the ancients did.
Perhaps we should not delay mercy, but I am not convinced silence is faithful either. Let us lead people to a meditative examination of their lives and confession of their sins to God. Let us be the means through which God calls them to himself.
Phil,
Thanks for your grace-ful response. I would agree that in the OT we seem to see a pattern in which God causes something because he is directly trying to make a point and tells us (through various people) such. Yet we don’t always find that same pattern in the NT (or even exhaustively in the OT). I, too, agree that any tragedy has the opportunity to lead people back into the relationship they were designed for. And like I commented any tragedy is an occassion for us to examine ourselves (which you have stated earlier and I do agree with)…but there may not be a direct connection between a tornado sweeping through a town and a specific sin.
And the blind man, as you have rightly said, was to display God’s glory. Jesus never commented on and never made any connection whatsoever between his blindness and any personal or family sin. And so there must be room for the idea that things happen simply because we live in a fallen world and not because of any personal or even national sin but because we live in rebellion against God in a general way.
And yet, both you and I would agree that any situation (whether directly tied to sin or not) has the great potential to not only lead someone to the relationship God wants with them but also in the process if we do not extend grace, mercy, love, compassion, “grabbing the trash bag to help clean up” we have done damage to how we are to live our lives in the world in general as Christ-followers and have damaged opportunities to show people that relationship with God that they have been rebellioning against.
Guys, I hope you travel back to this post. This was an article in our local paper this week by a local pastor. Read and learn: Satan in in the storms. Jesus is saving us from them…or at least he conjectures:
An Ancient Twist on Suffering
A river of ink devoted to the problem of suffering and evil flows from the presses every time a calamity like the Greensburg tornado strikes. Few people seem to move very far beyond the man who said, following the Katrina hurricane, “The Almighty whooped up on us real good this time.†But the Bible tells us of a God who put on human flesh and blood to show humanity what He is really like, His name is Jesus (John 1:18). Now, if God in the flesh was constantly fighting poverty, disease, hunger and even life-threatening storms, isn’t it illogical to assume that God unseen is behind such things?
Something else that doesn’t make biblical sense is that Christians turn to the Old Testament figure Job, instead of Jesus, during their time of suffering. Jesus Christ, not Job, is the pinnacle of biblical revelation. Jesus said in no uncertain terms, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father!†(John 14:9) Jesus is “the exact representation†of the Father (Hebrews 1:1-3), so if you want to know God’s take on suffering, watch Jesus. Yet again and again I hear people quoting Job, “The LORD gives and the LORD takes away, blessed be the name of the LORD†(Job 1:21). These folks seem to be implying that God would just as soon smite you as bless you, afflict you as heal you, damn you as save you. But we know this can’t be true, because God revealed Himself clearly and definitively in the person of Jesus Christ. Students of Christian theology are familiar with a concept called “progressive revelation.†Simply put, this means that things tend to be a little bit hazy in the Old Testament (like in Job), but become much more clear in the New Testament. Both Testaments are equally inspired and without error, but the Old simply does not have the clarity of the New. Only in the New Testament, for example, do we get clarity on doctrines like the Trinity, the afterlife (heaven and hell), and Christ’s first and second advent.
Satan’s role in suffering is another reality that is pretty hazy in the Old Testament, but vividly revealed in New. To understand progressive revelation, think of it like the sunrise — you can see things more clearly at high noon that you can when the sun is just breaking over the horizon. In terms of God’s revelation, Jesus is God’s clearest word — the sun shining in its fullness. With respect to suffering and tragedy, this means that Old Testament folks like Job simply did not have New Testament clarity concerning the cause of their misery. Not to pick on Job, but we also need to remember that he is rebuked by God (for four chapters!) at the end of the book that bears his name. In the end he repents for his simplistic, secondhand religious views — “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees You, therefore I loath myself and I repent in dust and ashes†(Job 43:5-6).
In light of the all the evidence, Christians need to seriously rethink the wisdom of looking to Job in our times of distress. Instead we need to look to the Wonderful Counselor, Jesus. So what is Jesus’ take on human tragedies like Katrina, the Greensburg tornado or childhood cancer? Jesus (God in the flesh) opposed human suffering at every turn, and never directly caused it. Jesus and His apostles taught that disease was from Satan, not God (read Luke 13:16, Acts 10:38), and Jesus even rebuked the natural elements when they got out of hand (Matthew 9:23-27). From a New Testament perspective, destructive things in our world are evidence of a universe gone haywire because of rebellion and sin, and disaster, death and mayhem reveal the character of a malevolent spiritual power by the name of Satan. Now, I realize that belief in Satan is a stretch for western children of the Enlightenment (us), but the New Testament depicts Jesus vigorously battling Satan on a daily basis. If we believe in a benevolent personal force in the universe called God, it should not be so difficult to believe the Bible’s teaching on a malevolent personal force called Satan. Although Satan is not God’s equal in power (he’s not even close), according to the authors of the New Testament, Satan is the one who largely controls this earth and the vast majority of its inhabitants (I John 5:19). Jesus’ mission was to take them (us) back for His Father (Matthew 12:25-30).
The Satan factor puts a very different spin on calamities like the recent tornadoes. They do not point to the incomprehensible mysteries of God, but rather are evidence of a world untethered from God’s goodness, in desperate need of healing and redemption. Jesus reveals that God doesn’t cause pain, suffering, natural disaster and disease — Satan does. God brings healing, redemption, deliverance and comfort. So what difference will all this make in the life and worldview of a Christian? Do you recall the tsunami that hit Indonesia a few years ago? During that time I caught wind of the startling account of a Sri Lankan pastor who was attempting to flee the disaster. With 30 orphans and workers crammed into a small boat, he was confronted by a 20-foot wall of churning water. What he did next is enough to shake up any good westerner’s scientific worldview. He quoted Scripture at the ominous black wall of death and rebuked it in Jesus’ name … and it stood where it was until the boat could escape. A short time later, the wave confronted him again. He rebuked it a second time in Jesus’ name … and it stopped yet again. From this pastor’s perspective, Satan is the force that destroys, while God is the One who intervenes to save. There is much more that could be said about how, when, where and why God intervenes in such dramatic ways — God gives us rules and guidelines that need to be understood and obeyed before He moves in power. But that is a discussion for another time. The only point I am trying to get across is this, God has made it clear through Jesus Christ, the pinnacle of revelation, that He delights to save, deliver and heal. Satan is the one who kills, steals and destroys. Don’t get them confused!”