Someone wrote to the newspaper recently, and suggested that God sent the tsunami floods on Myanmar as a punishment on the people there for their idolatry. As to the fact that the people of that region were into idolatry in a big way, well there certainly was no lack of visual evidence. News footage showed multitudes of shrines in amongst the rubble and ruins after the waves retreated.
No doubt some Christians would nod their heads in agreement at the idea that God sends floods on idolaters, while others may even lick their lips like hungry wolves enjoying the thought of all those idolatrous sinners being destroyed. I say this with shame. As for me, I recoil from making any statement which places me in such a seat of supposed wisdom as to be able to clearly read what God and floods have to do with each other. The world is a deeper and more mysterious thing than a simple cause and effect chalk drawing on a blackboard.
But the question remains. Was the flood, which swept suddenly in from the sea and dragged thousands of people away, a judgement from God, or was it just a chance act of Nature – the natural world doing what it has always done? To answer this we need to think about the natural world.
What is Nature?
It is the cosmos, or environment in which we live. It is neither for us or against us. It is always entirely neutral. We may shape it into guns and bullets, or model it into art and poetry. It is the elemental ‘other’ which surrounds us, and of which we are made, the clay, or basic material, which God has used in His creation, consistent to all the parts, and as unbiased as it could possibly be. There is no such thing as a ‘cruel’ sea, or a ‘malevolent’ storm. They are just quantities of water in different volumes and states. We interpret them in human-based ways. A fire will burn the best of saints just as easily as the worst of sinners. A pond will drown a Hitler and a Billy Graham without the slightest trace of malevolence.
But we have to acknowledge the role of Nature. If one builds a house near to an ocean which has been known in the past to suddenly inundate its shores, then one must be responsible for one’s choice of habitation if one decides to live on that shore, and if one builds in that location, and a flood comes, (as it always, inevitably, eventually does) then why should God be blamed for something which was not directly or deliberately His doing?
Once we start to blame God for a flood in Myanmar, we ought to blame Him also for floods anywhere in the world, and then by logical extension, blame Him for tornadoes, hurricanes, lightning, earthquakes, hail storms and anything else which we may consider a nuisance or a disaster to us.
It is quite enough to select Nature as the ‘culprit’, and humans as the rather unfortunate victims, but Nature is not interested in the shores it covers, or the people who may drown in its waters. Perhaps we need to step back from this view and try another angle. Perhaps God is not to blame for what Nature does, because there is another interpretation which is just as dangerous.
If God is blamed for disasters, is it not just as logical to ‘blame’ Him for blessings? Every day when we have warm, sunny weather, or rain just when we need it, or a good catch of fish, or a wind just strong enough to dry the washing, should we not ‘blame’ God for these things too? Oddly enough, the people who are so keen to blame God for disasters, are very very quiet about thanking God, or ‘blaming’ Him for blessings!
But keeping to the original point, we could say the same thing if we switched to people who build on fault lines, or on the sides of active volcanoes, or in riverbeds. Is it not rather rash to blame God for a disaster that was going to happen whether people were there or not? If God is truly in charge of the tsunamis and other catastrophic ‘natural’ events, why is He so clumsy with them? His waters sweep everyone away, His tornadoes destroy Christians and idolaters with equal force, His earthquakes crush babies and missionaries, satanists and tourist. Surely God is not so inaccurate as to bash away at people like this so indiscriminantly? If He is to blame for the disaster, why is He so inaccurate? Surely, if He is truly God, He ought to sort out ONLY the idolaters and leave the Christians? But this view shows up the weakness of the accusation, because the God of the Bible is not like this at all.
Nature, neutral and blind to what it does, is a collection of matter and forces. At times, without a doubt, it is at the bidding of God, but so rarely as to be an extreme exception. What we call a miracle, like the Red Sea parting, or the waves holding Jesus up as He walked to His friends.
And think also of the thousands of disasters that have occurred in places where people have not been. Natural dams have broken, holes have opened in the earth, lava has spewed, and all sorts of storms, tidal waves, lightning bolts and tornadoes have ripped through parts of the world where no human was harmed, and no human ever lived – are we to say that these were judgements of God also, but He was off the mark? Were they practise runs, so He could keep His disaster on target when human settlements finally did live in that area? Why is a tsunami that sweeps an empty shore not a judgement of God, but a tsunami that sweeps across Myanmar is a judgement of God? This sort of arbitrary, subjective interpretation is faulty reasoning.
We cannot, without direct Divine guidance, say that a flood that destroys idolaters is a judgement of God. It is a subjective view, to decide that God has sent a flood, when the flood could have come a hundred years before anyone lived there, or a hundred years after they left. Just because humans were harmed, does this make it a judgement of God? We are in dangerous territory when we follow this line.
This line of reasoning, that says a judgement of God is only obvious when people are hurt or killed, leads to a view that everything that happens to people is the direct result of cause and effect. If people gossip, (a dreadful sin) they catch a cold (judgement by bacteria or virus). If people give money to a charity (a good thing to do), their vegetables grow well (God’s direct reward). If a politician does the right thing, he lives to 98 and is hardly ever sick. If a tradesman cheats you, he receives a bad case of shingles. You see, it cannot follow that our view of good and bad, cause and effect, obedience and reward, sin and judgement are so directly related. We know, just from observing life around us that this is not so. The laws of cause and effect, the natural laws, always operate, but our interpretative views are extremely unreliable and faulty. There are plenty of people who drink, smoke, swear and live in immorality, who are also reasonably healthy, with good jobs and who live a quite happy life. It just doesn’t follow that sin automatically brings judgement, in this life.
If the tsunami was a direct response by God to idolatry, then there should be a lot more tsunamis.
Another important point to consider is the very question as to whether God does actually JUDGE? To this we have to respond with a very emphatic “yes”. Now we take a different line of thought, which is supported not by our faulty subjective opinions, but by the mighty Word of God.
The Bible is a record of God’s many interventions into human history, and in many case God names who He intends to judge, and describes the ‘tools’ He will use, and even details the process and the end result in some cases. These are unmistakable judgements of the Lord, and we can be clear about them.
The only trouble is, we must not extrapolate outwards from these Biblically defined judgements, and press the understanding we have of them on to other events, which the Bible does not mention, or allow us to do.
We may make inferences, and point out familiar patterns, but at best all we have is conjecture and theory. The wisdom of God is deep, and the threads of His workings are vast and intricate. We cannot hope to understand Him in His judgements.
Judgments by God are easy to find. In the first book Adam and Eve are judged. Their judgement is described and the reason for it given. Because of sin all humans are judged, through the agency of ageing, sickness, debilitation and death. These are part of what we call the ‘disasters of Nature’. The fall of Man and the fall of the World are normal to this age. What we call the forces of Nature, or the random events of our natural world, are part and parcel of God’s judgement on Man and the world. Included in this judgement are the floods that swept across Myanmar, as well as the tornadoes that sweep America every year, and the landslips in China that form natural dams and break to destroy whole villages.
But returning to the Bible, we next read of Cain, and his exile because of murder. This was a direct, clear, specific judgement of God on one man.
After that we come to Noah, and the wicked generation he lived amongst. By now we have travelled through about 1300 years of human history and a sort of moral limit has been reached. God has warned the humans for 120 years, but only 8 are saved from the terrifying judgement of water, which sweeps the planet clean and lays down enormous sedimentary deposits. The fossils embedded in these rocks testify to the judgement of God.
New civilisations spring up, and each one develops its own culture, and each also revolts against the true God and incurs judgement. But the Bible is silent about this so we may only infer rather than know what God did with each. Or theorise. We know that the world is dotted with the ruins of once great civilizations. Some details of their fall have been geaned. One may still visit the ruins, either buried in sand, or grown over by trees. Many cities lie under the sea as well, abandoned as the oceans rose after the global flood.
The Bible names five cities, two of which are named as Sodom and Gomorrah and they are destroyed, along with the three other cities, because of their immorality. There is no mistaking this judgement. Fire and brimstone fell on the people and they were burned alive. If we were able to write a letter to the editor in those days we could say, with absolute certainty, that the fire and brimstone fell because the people of those cities were wicked, but we could not say the same for Pompey, because God does not mention it by name.
The book of Exodus described very clearly the stage by stage judgements on the land of Egypt. Moses warned the Pharaoh many times, but to no avail. Skeptics may sneer at the book of Exodus and say it was just a run of ‘natural’ disasters, which just happened to ocurr as Moses came and went, but the chance that all these events could happen by sheer chance, and also sychronise perfectly with the words of Moses defies all the odds. Moses was never wrong. Whatever he said was about to happen, did happen. He was right ten times out of ten. I challenge you to try pronouncing just one ‘natural disaster’ on your own town or city and see if it comes within the day.
And what are we to make of the pillar of fire, and smoke, and the parting and collapse of the Red Sea? These judgements are all clearly described in the Bible. The following judements in the wilderness wanderings, which fell on Israel, are all given as historical narrative. There is no poetic ‘feel’ about the books of Moses. In a very dry, matter of fact manner, we are told that a whole generation died in the wilderness, leaving the children to grow up in their place and therefore inherit the Promised Land, but Caleb was there, at 80 years old, so why was he the only one who survived out of several million? God may have judged the people by causing them to either simply die without an obvious cause, or to prematurely age and die long before they should have. Judgement by death is still with us today, and two obvious examples spring to mind, when Ananias and Sapphira dropped dead in front of Peter – for openly and publicly lying to God. We are not told how the Irsaelites died, but die they did, and we are told why.
However, Israelites who died after they entered the promised land did so for reasons we are not told. It would be presumptuous for us to try to second guess God in this.
We must not say that anyone who dies suddenly, or ages quickly, is being judged directly by God. We may infer it, but we have no Biblical grounds to say it with confidence. It could be the cruellest thing we could say. Instead of showing love and compassion to a dying victim of cancer, what sort of witness would a Christian bring who pronounced the cancer as ‘God’s judgement’ on a wicked sinner? This is how Christians sound who say the floods on Myanmar were God’s judgement on idolaters.
Moving through the Bible we see many more examples of God directly judging people. The prophets of God detailed many nations that were doomed. Jonah was sent to Nineveh, for example, and for a while his message was heeded, but eventually Nineveh was brought down by invasion.
But back-tracking a little, we see exactly the same thing in Israel. First God built it up, then He judged it. He split Israel into two kingdoms, sent the judgements He warned them about in Leviticus – famine, poor crops, unreliable weather, disease, and so on, and finally invasion and slavery. The Assyrians took the northern kingdom north, and the Babylonians took the southern kingdom east, and the land of Israel began to fill with people from other nations. God warned His people through the prophets. He detailed exactly what He was going to do and He did it. He was precise. He said which nation would invade, and He gave the length of captivity which His people would endure. It was unmistakeably clear that these were direct judgements for sin.
Through the Old Testament prophets, God declared judgement on Tyre, Sidon, Samaria, Gaza, Ashkelon, Moab, Ammon, Petra, Edom, Thebes, Memphis, Nineveh, Babylon, Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum and others.
Jesus declared, just prior to His crucifixion, that Jerusalem would be beseiged, destroyed, and all the Temple stones would be ripped apart, which all happened in 70AD and following.
Daniel chapter two sweeps through history, and declares judgements on the kingdoms of Babylon, Medo-Persia (with Elam though it is not mentioned here), Greece, Rome, and the European states that sprang from the remains of the Roman Empire. All these things have happened exactly as God said, and each kingdom, despite its self-confident claims to be established for a very long time, quickly crumbled and gave place to the next in line. These were broad, large-scale judgements, entirely void of details, so we should be very careful about interpreting the wisdom of God according to our ignorance.
We can conclude that, in the broadest sense, war, and other events may be part of the judgements of God, but that is where we ought to stop. God is wiser and deeper than any human can imagine. God uses all sorts of ‘machinery’ to accomplish His purposes – war, disasters, floods along shore lines, volcanoes, droughts, sickness, death – but He is in charge of the details, not us.
Finally, when we see the charge, that “God sent the floods because those people were idolaters’ we ought to examine ourselves. An idalter is anyone who loves themselves or something else MORE than they love God. By this definition who can say they have never been an idolater?
Perhaps all of us ought to stay away from the beach from now on?