Proper 24

Natural disasters don’t just cause physical and emotional problems. For many, they cause spiritual problems and raise deep theological questions. When the weather is great and the seas are calm and the sun shines or the rain is gentle, God doesn’t get any credit. As soon as a natural disaster hits, they are called “acts of God.” Whenever these natural disasters hit, you can always count on four questions being asked:

Where was God when this happened?

Why did God let it happen?

What kind of a God would allow this to happen?

When are religious people going to quit believing in God at all?

For those of us who do believe in God, it is a formidable question. We can at least deal with murder, rape, and torture, because we can always say, “This is what people do. It is not what God does.” But people have nothing to do with hurricanes. The only place you can look is God. Consequently, there are a lot of Christians who might not lose their faith because of human evil, but they find it much more difficult to explain natural disasters. Just as there are aftershocks after earthquakes, there are spiritual and religious aftershocks after natural disasters that challenge the faith of us who believe in God and fire-up the cynicism of skeptics and critics.

The good news is there is both a Creator God and a Word from this Creator God. There is an explanation of what is wrong with this world. This world is out of joint, but God intends to make it right.

If we go all the way back to the beginning when God first spoke this world into existence you find exactly what you would expect to find – a perfect world. Six different times in the first chapter of Genesis we read these words, “And God saw that it was good.” (Genesis 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, NIV)

You have to understand that good in God’s eyes is perfect in our eyes. Good does not mean there was room for improvement. This world was absolutely perfect.

Then to top it off, God puts into this world Adam and Eve. Initially, they had a perfect marriage. You realize Adam never had to hear Eve say, “I could have married someone else?” She never had to hear him say, “Why can’t you cook like my mother?”

The world was at perfect peace. There was no need to cage animals, for they were neither a danger to humans nor to each other. Dogs played with cats, lions would lay down with lambs, and since it was a perfect world there were no gators (of any kind)! Adam and Eve were given dominion over the animal kingdom. The birds of the air and the fish of the sea would obey any command that Adam and Eve gave them.

In other words, this world was a paradise! It was utopia. It was literally heaven on earth. Of course, that raises the big question, “What happened?”

We’re all familiar with the story about how Adam and Eve sinned. They disobeyed the one command that God gave them. They crossed over the one line God warned them not to and that is when everything went haywire.

The apostle Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope.” (Romans 8:18-20)

Not only do we have to suffer the consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin, but so does this earth. You may ask, “Why was the world also cursed?” The worst thing that could have happened to Adam and Eve and all of us who followed them would be to live as imperfect people in a perfect world. Do you know why? People without God in a perfect world would never see a need for God. To use a medical analogy, sin is like an infection where natural disasters are like a fever. Just as hurricanes tell us something is not right with this world.

Nature is cursed because man is cursed. Natural evil is just a reflection of moral evil. Think about it this way. Nature is not as bad as it could be. We’ve got rain, but we also have sunshine. We have hurricanes, but we also have calm. We have earthquakes, but most of the time the earth is still. Likewise, every human being is sinful, and every human being can be evil, but we are a mixture. We are not as evil as we could be, but we are definitely not as good as we could be. Nature is just a mirror of our own hearts.

When Adam and Eve sinned, they dragged all of creation down with them. What we have now is what Paul describes in Romans 8:21.

“That the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay.” (Romans 8:21)

This world is a prisoner of our sin. This world is held by the chains of death, disease, disaster and decay. It is literally under a curse. Listen to what happened in Genesis 3.

“To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you’, ‘You must not eat of it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.” (Genesis 3:17-18, NIV)

A man bought a piece of property that was overrun with weeds and swamps. With hard backbreaking labor, he cleared that land, turned the swamp into a pond, cleared the weeds and planted flowers and also planted some beautiful trees. He built a house right in the middle of it.

A friend from out of state came in for a visit and said, “So this is the place you bought?” He said, “Yep.” The friend said, “It is just unbelievable what God has given you: a pond to fish in, a beautiful garden, and a lovely house. Isn’t God good?” The man looked at him and said, “Yes, God is good, but you ought to see what this place looked like when God had it all by Himself!” There is a truth in that. Ever since Adam and Eve fell, we have had to battle with this earth. We have to constantly tend the garden, because every part of this world has been affected.

Go back to Genesis 3 and you will find the animal kingdom was corrupted. What we call “survival of the fittest” is really the animal world under a curse.

We are told the mineral kingdom was corrupted. Deserts, erosion, and wastelands scar what was once a perfectly beautiful face of God’s green earth. Pollution of either the sky or the water was never in God’s vocabulary.

We also find the vegetable kingdom was corrupted. Roses were never meant to have thorns and fields were never meant to have weeds.

Then, Paul says something fascinating in verse 22.

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now.” (Romans 8:22)

All of these natural disasters are groanings. They are birth pains if you will. It is the earth’s way of telling us it is sick, and she wants to be healed. In 1999, two Japanese engineers revealed the results of their study concerning a mysterious hum they discovered that is being emitted by the earth. They went through a mass of seismic data and discovered that our planet is producing 50 musical notes that are about 16 octaves below middle C. They said the earth has this low hum that sounds like an endless banging on a trash can. This planet is in bondage, just as we are in bondage. Where we are in bondage to sin and to death, this planet is in bondage to sorrow and disaster.

But there is good news. Those of us who know God, love God, and trust God will eventually live happily ever after and so will this planet. Listen to verse 19.

“For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God.” (Romans 8:19)

The Greek Word for that phrase “waits with eager longing” describes the attitude of a person who is scanning the horizon looking for the first glimpse of daybreak. It depicts somebody standing on their tiptoes looking as hard as they can out into the horizon to see the dawning of the day. Except in this case, creation is not looking for the s-u-n to come up, but it is looking for the S-o-n to come down!

Deep down we know that God is in control even of natural disasters. Even unbelievers, when faced with impending death due to a hurricane, instinctively cry out to God to help them. There is a difference between the immediate cause of a natural disaster and the ultimate cause. The immediate cause of a hurricane is when a large air mass is heated and fueled by the warmth of the ocean. The ultimate cause of all things is God.

The Bible makes that plain over and over and over. Who sent the plagues of Egypt and the hail and the darkness that drove a nation to its knees? Who caused the sun to stand still so that Joshua could win a battle? Who sealed the heavens during the time of Elijah and stopped the rain from falling? Who sent a storm to the ship containing a prophet named Jonah, so the crew would throw him overboard? The answer is: God.

How is that good news? The same God that controls this world’s past and this world’s present also controls this world’s future. The Bible makes it very plain that there is a better world coming. Verse 21 says, “The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8:21)

God is going to create a new heaven and a new earth. The desert is going to blossom like a rose. The lion will lie down with the lamb and the lamb will not be in the lion!

God made this world a good creation. Today, it is a groaning creation, but one day it will be a glorious creation. In the meantime, we live in a world corrupted by sin. We live in a world that is cruel in the way it treats the people who live in it. I know the big question still out there is, “Why? Why does God allow seemingly innocent people to die at the hands of seemingly random natural disasters?”

To be truthful, I really don’t know the answer to that question and neither does anyone else. But I do know that eternity has solutions to all of earth’s problems. I do believe there are some lessons we can learn from hurricanes.

Hurricanes remind us of how temporary things really are and how fragile life really is. It helps us to see what is truly valuable. Max Lucado commenting on Hurricane Katrina said this:

“As you’ve listened to evacuees and survivors have you noticed their words? No one laments a lost [big screen] television or a submerged SUV. No one runs through the streets yelling, ‘My cordless drill is missing’ or ‘My golf clubs have washed away.’ If they mourn, it is for people lost. If they rejoice, it is for people found.”

Hurricanes also remind us that judgment is coming, and that this world is going to end. And when it does, we had best be ready. We had better be thankful to God in the good times and we had better be trustful in God in the bad times. Job 2:10 says, “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?” (Job 2:10, NIV)

Finally, we need to see all disasters in light of the cross. Nothing compares to the evil that was done, the suffering that was incurred or the injustice that was experienced at the cross of Jesus Christ. The cross tells us that, above and beyond every hurricane, God is a loving God who works everything out together for our good, who can be trusted no matter what.

In 1912 a great man-made disaster occurred when the Titanic struck an iceberg. Over 1,500 people lost their lives. At the White Star Lines office in Liverpool, England, a huge board was set up. On one side was a cardboard sign and it had one word above it, “Saved.” On the other side was another cardboard sign with one word above it, “Lost.”

One of these days the ship of your life is going to go down. It may be from a hurricane. It may be from a physical disease. It may be from chronological decay. But when it does, the only two words that will matter to you are: “Saved” or “Lost.”