The Language of God: Natural Disasters

By Elizabeth Prata

After a terrible natural disaster, people often wonder, “Where was God in all this?” Others wonder “Did God cause it? Did He allow it? Did Satan do it? Was it just the natural outcome of a fallen world?” And the biggest question, “Why?”

These questions have interested man since the beginning. Even in the Patriarchs age of Abraham and Jacob and Isaac, man wondered. The Covenant with the Hebrews that God instituted starting with Abraham, gave the People an attitude of specialness. They believed that they were protected by God from these things, and if these things happened, it must be because of sin. Deuteronomy 28 is entirely about what would happen if they obey (I will prosper you) and what will happen if they disobey (I will curse and punish you).

God promised “to send” everything against them: boils, military defeat, feverish heat, plagues, fever, mildew, enemies, famine, blight, tumors, rash, scabies, drought, oppression, robbers, insanity, blindness, confusion of mind, rapists, traffickers, military occupation, robbers, consumption, mistreatment.

You notice in that Deuteronomy 28 list there are individual bodily curses, general against-the-people curses, and natural disaster curses.

The People’s theology was based on reaping-and-sowing, disaster cause-and-effect right through to Jesus’ day. If you were bad, then bad things happened to you. If you were good, then good things happened to you. Eliphaz spent chapter after chapter pressing Job on this point. Eliphaz asked Job sarcastically in Job 22:4,

“Is it because of your reverence that He punishes you, That He enters into judgment against you?“

They brought that reaping-and-sowing direct judgment idea to the New testament. Remember the man born blind? The disciples asked Jesus who sinned, him or his parents? (John 9:2). Jesus said it was neither, but that the works of God might be shown in him. And the discussion about the Tower of Siloam- Jesus explained it fell not because the 18 who were killed were worse sinners than anyone else. (Luke 13:4).

And we do see personal, individual judgment in the Bible. Herod was struck down. Uzzah was struck down. Ananias and Sapphira were struck down.

And the destruction of Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, and Zeboiim, four of the five Cities of the Plain, were directly destroyed by God specifically as a judgment. And the Book of Revelation is full of ‘natural disasters’ that are specifically judgments sent by God.

So what are we in these times currently to think when a disaster like lightning, flood, hail, or drought happens? 1) Did God send it as a judgment? 2) Or is it the natural consequence man’s Fall? 3) Or as a consequence of man’s failure to keep the Garden and work it correctly, as in, landslide happened due to overbuilding on tenuous soil, or the tower fell because of sub-par materials…

Yes. All three.

In today’s time there are direct judgments and there are indirect judgments.

But, and here’s the caveat, we can’t know which disaster is a judgment and which is a natural outcome of something else, because we can’t know the mind of God in every specific case. Only the believers living during the time of the Revelation judgments will know for sure that certain natural disasters are judgments, because they are specifically prophesied to happen during that era and in certain ways. They will know the heat, drought, fire from heaven etc. are from God because Revelation records that they will be from God.

As for today, when Hurricane Katrina happens or the Japan tsunami or Joplin tornadoes…are they from God? Does He control the tornado to go here and not there? Does he form the hurricane and send it to Florida or Mexico? Does he create the earthquake as a magnitude 7.2 here but over there he makes it be a 4.6?

In a sense, all ‘natural disasters’ are a result of God’s judgment, because In Genesis 3:17 God told Adam that God will curse the ground becuase of what Adam did. Between the global curse and God’s sovereignty, yes, He controls the tragedies that occur.

“Well, of course God controls everything, directly or indirectly – I mean, that is to say, did God blow the wind? No, not immediately – but mediately, God controls everything. God is – God allows everything that occurs; there is nothing outside the purview of His will and His purpose. We know that clearly from Scripture. [But] Does God create the forces in the moment that they act? That’s another question.”

“I mean, did God all of a sudden say, “Okay, hurricane, you go there,” or is this the conflux of all those providential elements that God has placed into existence that effect perfectly His will, even to the exact and precise life and death in every individual case? Yes.” Source

As John MacArthur explained in a sermon called When God Abandons a Nation, he outlined different kids of wrath as seen in the Bible. There’s

–Eternal wrath– the judgment upon a non-believer after death,
–Consequential wrath– the reaping of what is sown, as in, be an alcoholic, you get cirrhosis of the liver; you’re promiscuous, you get venereal disease or AIDS; you’re a criminal, you might die in a shootout,
–Eschatological wrath– the prophesied wrath the Old Testament prophets warned of and Jesus earned of in the Olivet Discourse and the wrath seen in the book of Revelation,
–Wrath of Abandonment, promised in Romans 1 when God gives a people over to their sin, lifts His hand of restraint and lets them go their way,
–Cataclysmic wrath– tornadoes and tsunamis and hurricanes etc.

God is in control over all of it. He calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee. He sent fire and brimstone to Sodom. He is sovereign over satan, who sent a wind/whirlwind/tornado from all directions to destroy Job’s house.

Jerry Bridges recounted a terrible earthquake in Mexico that killed 6000 people. Bridges said that a friend had asked his daughter-

 “Do you know what caused the earthquake?” He planned to answer his question with a simple explanation of fault lines and shifting rocks in the earth’s crust. His seismology lesson quickly turned into a theological discussion, however, when his eight-year-old daughter replied, “I know why. God was judging those people.” Though my friend’s child had jumped to an unwarranted conclusion about God’s judgment, she was theologically correct in one sense. God was in control of that earthquake. Why He allowed it to happen is a question we cannot answer (and should not try to), but we can say, on the testimony of Scripture, that God did indeed allow it or cause it to happen. (Source)

Further, Bridges said,

Whenever we are affected by the weather—whether it is merely an inconvenience or a major disaster—we tend to regard it as nothing more than the impersonal expression of certain fixed meteorological or geological laws. … But God has not walked away from the day-to-day control of His creation. Certainly, He has established physical laws by which He governs the forces of nature, but those laws continuously operate according to His sovereign will. A Christian TV meteorologist has determined that there are over 1,400 references to weather terminology in the Bible. Many of these references attribute the outworking of weather directly to the hand of God. Most of these passages speak of God’s control over all weather, not just His divine intervention on specific occasions.

Though God sometimes uses the weather, and other expressions of nature, as an instrument of judgment (see Amos 4:7-9), He most often uses it as an expression of His gracious provision for His creation. Both saint and sinner alike benefit from God’s gracious provision of weather.

God’s sovereignty over nature does mean that, whatever we experience at the hand of the weather or other forces of nature (such as plant diseases or insect infestation of our crops), all circumstances are under the watchful eye and sovereign control of our God.

Excerpted from Trusting God by Jerry Bridges

This week I’ll take a look at the Bible and ‘the language of God’ when He had sent drought, earthquakes, lightning, fire & brimstone, and hail.

Further Reading

Ligonier – How Should We Pray when Natural Disasters Strike?

Ligonier – Responding to Disasters

Ligonier – Why Does God allow Disasters?

Jerry Bridges – God and Natural Disasters

MacArthur – When God Abandons a Nation