God and calamity (1)
So what’ll we say about this tsunami calamity? Say it
was just "bad luck" for those who suffered in it. Say the Devil did it
because he hates the human family and likes to torment it (remember what
he did to Job?). Say we learn a lot from it, say that it tests and
strengthens our faith, say that it brings out the generosity of millions
who pity the sufferers. Say God "allowed" it though he had nothing to
do with bringing it about—say anything but whatever you do don’t say God did it!
And why should we deny that God did it? Because only a monster would do such a thing!
I
can understand non-believers saying things like that but for the life
of me I can’t understand a believer with a Bible in his or her hand
talking such nonsense. But many do!
They read about a God who
sent a flood in Noah’s day, some kind of volcanic destruction on Sodom
and Gomorrah, military invasion on this nation or that or his sending
drought and famine and pestilence on, say, Israel as Amos 4 tells us.
They read all that and do they speak of "bad luck"? Never! They read all
that and do they say it was the Devil? Never! But when they talk to the
public or write their pieces for public consumption they waffle all
over the place and say that anyone who would do such a thing is a
monster? Was he a monster when he did these things the Bible speaks about?
What’s
wrong with us? We tell the world that a God who’d send calamity is a
monster and then we want the world to worship and serve a God who insists that he sends calamities?
An
immoral monster isn’t fit to be worshipped even if he is omnipotent! He
might be able to beat us into submission and we might grovel and crawl,
but praise him, worship him, adore him and seek his presence? To hell with him!
Why
don’t we have the guts just to dump the Bible because make no mistake
about it, the Bible doesn’t waltz around on this issue. It presents God
himself as coming at the head of invading armies and the innocent
children and the righteous get it in the neck as well as the criminally
treacherous and oppressive.
If it’s monstrous to send calamities then God is self-condemned! And he doesn’t have to do it over and over and over again. If it’s monstrous to do it then it’s monstrous to do it even once!
Don’t let believers off the hook!
Make them stand by their Bible. Don’t let them horse you around. Don’t
let them give you these "wise" and "sympathetic" pieces that duck and
dive and weave because in the end you aren’t meeting the God of
scripture and that’s the only one worth meeting! They like to tell you
how compassionate he is and how he delivered Israel but they don’t like
to tell you that he buried Egypt! The sweet, kind and caring God got
Israel out of there after he ruined Egypt with a series of calamities!
I won’t multiply texts but I’m telling you if the Bible doesn’t repeatedly, again and again and again tell us that God does send calamity and that he does
bring about awful human loss then may he strike me with paralysis while
I’m writing this thing. We may not like it, may rather not believe it,
may not want to teach it but it’s God himself (as mediated to us in
scripture) that says he is responsible!
Listen to this text in
Deuteronomy 32:23-27. God is the speaker in the text. "I will heap
calamities upon them and spend my arrows against them. I will send
wasting famine against them, consuming pestilence and deadly plague...In
the street the sword will make them childless; in their homes terror
will reign...Young men and young women will perish, infants and
gray-haired men. I said I would scatter them and blot out their memory
from mankind, but I dreaded the taunt of the enemy, lest the adversary
misunderstand and say, ‘Our hand has triumphed; the Lord has not done
all this." (If you think this is an isolated text of this kind, you’re
wrong!)
Now who said this? If you listened to the religious
babblers you’d say it was a "monster" but what does Moses call him
(32:3-4)? "A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he."
But
note especially 32:27. God portrays himself as musing over obliterating
them completely and says he might have done it only there was something
that was stopping him. And what was that? Listen! He didn’t want
Israel’s enemies to think they had accomplished Israel’s judgement. He didn’t want the enemy to say, "The Lord has not done all this."
Now get this, we’re worried in case people think God did it and what does he worry about? He’s worried in case people think he did not do it!
Sometimes
believers (especially the speakers among us) are shifty. A God who’d
send calamities embarrasses us, don't you see. We don’t want to have to
defend a God like that (though in our worship services we admit he says
these things and does them). It’s tempting to think that it isn’t God’s back we’re guarding, it’s our own!
We
don’t call a paramedic a monster when he rips a child's throat open or
saws off a leg with the nearest blunt tool or breaks ribs. Is it
possible that the God who sends calamities is the human family’s best
and (maybe) only friend? More later (God enabling).