Hurricane Irma: God and Natural Disasters
by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch:
With North America at least very much conscious of natural disasters at the moment, old questions tend to resurface. With a number of massive hurricanes bearing down on America’s southeast, and the biggest earthquake to recently pound Mexico, many people again start asking the bigger questions.
And those questions involve the place of God and his role in the world when all these disasters take place. Is God behind them? Is God trying to get our attention? Is he in fact judging us? These are all important questions to ask, and they have been asked often in the past.
Getting foolproof answers is a bit trickier however. When it comes to the Christian worldview, there are some things we can say about natural disasters with some degree of certainty. For example, here is what Christians can basically know for certain about such matters:
-God certainly can and does judge nations by means of natural disasters.
-When this happened repeatedly in the Old Testament, he made it clear through his prophets what was taking place and why.
-The West today, and the US in particular, are godless, immoral, wicked and evil places that certainly can be ripe for divine judgment now.
But there are some other things we simply cannot say so assuredly. Here is what Christians cannot and do not know for certain about such matters: