Theology Thursday: God and "Natural" Disasters

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's question:
Where is God in the LA wildfires?

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
As wildfires continue to rage across southern California, events that fall under the category of “natural disasters” can often prompt theological questions from Christians or others who are curious about God’s role and activity in the world.

If God created the world and said that it was “good” (Genesis 1:31), then why does even the “natural” (meaning: non-human) world regularly experience what seems to be a disruption and distortion of its purpose, or at least the normal state of things? Hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and other events wreak havoc on systems of nature and humanity as well.

There’s no denying the devastation. We can just take the recent and ongoing California fires as an example: Nearly 58,000 acres have been burned so far (that’s about twice the size of Bloomington and Normal, combined!). The fires have destroyed more than 16,000 structures and at least 28 people have lost their lives.

As tens of thousands of people work to recover from the loss of their homes and personal belongings  - and as the world observes them doing so - it’s normal to ask: where is God?

We (Bible-believing Christians, at least) don’t believe God causes natural disasters, just as we don’t believe he causes any of the evil and violence humans perpetrate on each other, but these events do certainly happen under his purview.

The lives of humans (including their interactions with each other and with weather events that may cause them harm) are not merely pieces on God’s cosmic chess board which he moves around as he sees fit. God created the world and granted it a degree of free will, and our choices contribute to ripple effects felt in our lifetimes and beyond. So God doesn’t cause bad things to happen, but he does use both the good and the bad of this life in order to fulfill his ultimate purposes (Romans 8:28).

This is perhaps more obvious to us and easy to come to terms with when it comes to human action. War, street violence, domestic abuse, etc. are all results of people’s inability to rightly order their lives in the way of Jesus; they are all the consequences of sin. But what about Hurricane Katrina? What about the tornado that tore through Washington, IL a few years back? What about the LA fires?

When we wrestle with the emotions surrounding these terrible events, we need to keep two things in mind:

First, the fall affected everything.

The account of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis chapter three results in a curse that includes “the ground” (vs. 17) which will produce “thorns and thistles” (vs. 18). Romans 8:22 confirms the tragic truth of earth’s condition: …the whole creation groans…

We don’t know exactly what nature would look like or how the animal and vegetation worlds would behave if sin weren’t a reality, but we do know that what it looks like now isn’t what God wanted for it. Our world is warped. Everything good about it comes from God, but even the good is less good, less often than it was to be and would be.

God created the world to be good; his creation was free of evil, free of spoil, free of disaster and devastation and groaning, from the biggest volcano to the smallest little plant and insect. And it was good. He created humans and we were too, until we chose not to be. That moment of rebellion severely distorted God’s good world and introduced the perversion of what was perfection.

I’ve argued before that what we inherit from Adam and Eve’s sin and the ensuing fall of creation is not spiritual death (we choose that when each of us sins individually, all on our own) but physical death; that their disobedience permanently ushered into the world what was not there before: sickness, the end of earthly life, strife, conflict, and discord, and that these deformations of God’s design are not limited to human action, but affect and infect all of creation as well.

This is one reason why the phrase “an act of God” we sometimes hear insurance companies or the media use to refer to an earthquake or hurricane or whatever is not just a misnomer, it’s actually exactly backwards.

When the seas crash into a harbor town, or fires scorch a residential community, or a tornado rips through farms and homes, these are not “acts of God” but acts of a creation that fights against its creator.

God sees these things happening, and he hates it. But he does not cause uncontained wildfires anymore than he caused the 9/11 terrorists to fly planes into the Twin Towers or Luigi Mangione to shoot Brian Thompson on the street in Manhattan. Our perfect God cannot cause or initiate evil. We did that; we do that.

But, second, God has intervened.

Why won’t God do something about this?

This is the question that is so tempting to ask. And for non-believers, it’s maybe even an understandable complaint. But Christians should know better than to ask this type of question, because we have an answer: he did.

God is not blind to the plight of his creation, and he expressed his love for it - and for us especially - by sending Jesus to remedy the situation.

Now, this remedy was/is not necessarily offered on the timeline we prefer. We want to be made whole now. We want the evil and destruction to be put down now. This is a good desire; our yearning for right-ness is of God. And in our limited human knowledge and limited human understanding of time and eternity, we’re desperate for an immediate solution to the pains of this life.

But we have to recognize and remember that God is not bound by time and place, and our ways - our thoughts, desires, and perceptions of how things should be - are not always his ways (Isaiah 55:8-9). Our attitude should not be one of blaming or challenging God to stop the bad, but of thankfulness and gratitude (and worship!) for, in his grace, offering us a solution to the problem.

Jesus - through his role as the perfect, sinless, sacrificial lamb - paid the price for the sin of Adam and Eve and for the sin of you and me. All of creation groans, but it won’t forever, because its labor pains (Romans 8:22) will soon birth the evil-free, goodness-enveloped “new heaven and new earth” (Revelation 21:1; Isaiah 65:17) that God has been planning all along.

As Martin Luther said, “When you look around and wonder whether God cares, you must always hurry to the cross and see Him there.”

Related Resource: 
For a more thorough look at biblical passages that speak to natural disasters, check out this article from The Gospel Coalition: Making Sense of God and Natural Disasters

To know God and to make Him known!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.