Forty-five seconds. That was the amount of time it took seven days ago for life to be permanently altered or even taken away for the citizens of Joplin, Missouri. That is how long it took for the most deadly tornado in National Weather Service records, a F5 twister ¾ of a mile wide and packing 200-mph winds to pass from one area to the next as it sliced through the heart of the town known as the “Crossroads of America.” It destroyed over 300 businesses, over 8,000 structures, and rendered a 9-story hospital unusable. The estimated cost of the devastation is between one and three billion dollars. Even more tragic is the cost of human suffering: at least 139 people were killed in the storm, 105 are still missing, and nearly a thousand people injured.
Survivors who pulled themselves out of shelters, basements, and crawlspaces were greeted with a surreal landscape. At the hospital, patients were rushing out the doors, crying, limping, bleeding, pieces of glass and other debris still stuck in them. People were still alive outside but in hopeless situations, crushed underneath cars, bleeding out from fatal injuries. People were already dead, impaled by street signs, torn apart like rag dolls. Survivors unable to rescue loved ones trapped under collapsed houses. Trees stripped of leaves, limbs, and bark, many uprooted. Homes flattened, semi-trucks flipped over, fires from broken gas lines breaking out. It was as close to hell as a person would ever care to be.
There is a certain feeling of helplessness that comes when people you know and love are in danger and you are hundreds of miles away. We were on our way back from Orlando, Florida, when text messages and phone calls began coming in from Michelle’s two sisters who live in the Joplin area. “Tornado warning, taking cover, please pray.” We kept watch via Facebook statuses on our phones, but had no idea of the extent of the devastation until we checked into a Clarksville, TN hotel later that night. Even then, the images we saw on the news that night failed to give an accurate picture. All we knew was that Michelle’s family was safe, and that many others had not been so fortunate.
When we finally got back home on Monday afternoon, we were busy with getting donations organized to help the survivors. It wasn’t until later that evening that we saw just how much of Joplin had been utterly destroyed.
It was at this time that my son Robby asked a very deep theological question: “So why does God create things like tornadoes, anyway?”
It is a question that many of us have but are afraid to voice. Maybe the question crossed your mind a month ago when over 200 tornadoes ripped across three states, killing over 300 people in the South. Or perhaps you wondered about it a couple of months before that when an earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan. Maybe it’s the reality of floods, famine, and drought. Maybe it’s not the existence of climactic tragedy that plagues us. Maybe it’s the existence of cancer, or Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s, or Downs Syndrome, or Cerebral Palsy. We try not to think about the terrible realities of the world. In all honesty, I don’t blame us. But when these destructive forces come up to our doorstep and start knocking, we are forced to deal with them. Even then we dare not put voice to the questions burning in our hearts because we are afraid of the answers. The answers might be faith-killers. The answers might turn God into a capricious or vindictive monster. The answers might prove to us that we’ve wasted a whole lot of time and effort on this Christianity thing. So the fire that these questions create within us burns with no relief. Better the pain of ignorance than experiencing the possibly greater pain of knowledge.
It takes the innocence and trust of a seven-year old to put such a question out on the table. But I’m glad Robby was around to ask it, because it needs to be asked, and it needs to be answered.
There is no single text in Scripture that adequately deals with the question. I cannot simply point you to book, chapter, and verse and give you comfort on the issue. But I believe that the whole counsel of God does indeed offer us comfort. So what I propose to do this morning is work through a series of Scriptures that touch on the subject and direct us to the most biblical answer to this kind of suffering.
I am not going to deal with atheistic, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic, or Animistic worldviews this morning. My assumption is that you came here today to hear a Judeo-Christian perspective on the world. I’d be glad to talk with you some other time about these other systems of thought, but I want to focus on what the Bible has to say on the matter right now.
First, let me define our terms. We are going to divide evil into two categories, moral evil and natural evil. Moral evil does not take much of an explanation; it is what results when a moral agent decides to go against the will of God. Wars, genocide, murder, theft, deceit, gossip, greed—these are examples of moral evil; someone had a choice, someone choice poorly, and evil happened as a result. We really do not need to spend too much time trying to figure out where this evil came from—it is the result of man’s rebellion against God.
Natural evil, on the other hand, appears to be independent of any moral decision. Tornadoes, floods, hurricanes, famine, drought, cancer, Parkinson’s, ALS—there seems no moral agent behind these tragedies, and yet we cannot deny the amount of human suffering they cause. And so we cannot label them as good or neutral; there is something unmistakably evil about them.
So how do we deal with the problem of natural evil? How can we, as followers of a omnipotent, loving God, reconcile his character with the often harsh and violent world around us? Let’s take a look, shall we?
The most common perspective on natural evil among churchgoers is that everything happens for a reason. Therefore, when someone dies a tragic or untimely death, you hear people say, “Well, God decided to take them,” or "God had a reason." Or when disaster strikes a region, you have people like the fanatics of Westboro Baptist Church dancing on the graves of the dead, claiming that the destruction was God’s wrath being poured out on sinners. It’s nothing new; this perspective has been around for a long, long time.
You see this worldview portrayed in M. Night Shyamalan’s movie Signs. In this movie a minister’s wife is in a terrible car accident; she is pinned to a tree by the car of a veterinarian who fell asleep at the wheel. She is still alive, but the moment the car is pulled away from the tree, she will bleed out and die. Her last words to her husband are to tell his brother Merrill to “swing away.” Left alone in his pain to raise two young children, the minister loses his faith after the tragic and senseless death of his wife. But when an alien invasion takes place (I know, it sounds kooky, but hey, it’s a M. Night movie), it all makes sense—the message to “swing away” saves the lives of the rest of the family. Everything happens for a reason. God’s got a plan. The minister regains his faith and everyone lives happily ever after.
If the movie’s plot leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you’re not alone. Why would God choose to devastate a family by taking a loving wife and mother away from them simply in order to deliver a two-word message? Couldn’t God have found a much less devastating manner in which to pass this information along? Has he not heard of the U.S. Postal Service? How about a text message or voicemail?
In the same way, when I hear people tell those who have lost a loved one to cancer or a boating accident that, “God wanted to take them,” or “God has a reason for everything,” it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And when I see people like the hate-mongering Westboro Baptist Church people picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers and tornado victims, it makes me sick to my stomach.
I don’t believe that the Bible teaches this perspective on natural evil. I think God can work for the good of those who love him in every situation, but I do not think he is the author or source of every tragedy. Let’s look at what the Bible has to say. In order to do so, we will have to look at passages that deal with the Creation, the Fall, and God’s moral agents, both human and angelic.
In Genesis 1 we see that God created the world, and that at the end of every day of creation, he saw what he had made and that it was good. Genesis 1:29-30 indicates that there wasn’t even any animal suffering, that humans and all animals were herbivores in the beginning. In my understanding, even death was not present in the beginning. God created man in his own image in order that he might share himself with something outside of himself. He created us to love him back, but he knew that in order for love to really be love, we must have a choice. We must have freewill. That made us moral agents; entities able to make choices.
But it wasn’t just mankind that had the ability to make choices. Angelic beings, spiritual creations of God, were also given the ability to make choices. The highest of these celestial moral agents, an angel named Lucifer, decided not to love God, but to rebel against him and committed himself to a hostile takeover of the cosmos. He and his followers were defeated in heaven, and cast down to earth.
And so it came to be that Lucifer, also known as Satan, or the Devil, devised a plan to lead mankind, God’s other moral agents astray. Taking the guise of a serpent, he planted the same desire in the hearts of Eve and Adam that he himself originally had—to be on equal footing with God. Eve and Adam had the ability to choose, and they chose to doubt and disobey God in order to be his equal.
As a consequence of this, all hell broke loose on earth. God handed out curses in Genesis 3—a curse on the serpent, a curse on the woman, a curse on the man, and a curse on the earth. And in Genesis 3:21 we see the immediate consequences of human rebellion: animal suffering. God made garments out of skins to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness. Something suffered and died because sin had to be dealt with.
The Fall was much more than just the fall of Man. It was the fall of all creation. It was the separation of man from God, the separation of man from man, and the separation of man from the world around him—the world he was originally given to protect and nurture was now turned against him. Paul later tells us in Romans 8:18-22 that all of creation was subjected to futility, corruption, and suffering because of man’s rebellion against God. Animals began to prey on other animals. Weeds began to sprout up in gardens and fields. And, especially after the cataclysmic flood a few generations later, weather patterns took on a more unpredictable and sometimes devastating nature.
If we were to stop at Genesis 6, where God wipes out everyone and everything save for Noah and those on his ark, we might conclude that all natural evil is a result of human sin, and intended as a punishment for mankind’s rebellion. We might conclude, as the Westboro Baptist Church people do, that the citizens of Joplin deserved what they got, that their level of sin had reached full measure, and that God decided to finally do something about it.
But if we do that, then we have to extrapolate that conclusion to other matters of tragedy, sickness and death. People stricken with cancer, boaters who die in severe weather, children born with birth defects—did they also get what they deserved?
Now there is no doubt that bad things can happen because people do bad things. In John 5:14, Jesus tells the lame man that he healed at Solomon’s Portico to “Sin no more, that nothing worse may happen to you.” In fact, it was the prevailing opinion of the Jewish people in Jesus’ day that people suffered because of their own personal sin.
But we need to understand that more often than not, natural evil strikes in an arbitrary rather than in a “Hand of God” manner. Jesus corrects the idea that suffering only hits those who deserve it on at least two occasions. One takes place later in John’s Gospel. In John 9:1-3, Jesus and his disciples encounter a man born blind. The disciples, holding to the popular notion of the day, ask Jesus whose sin had caused this defect, the man’s or his parents. Jesus replies by saying, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him.” Jesus goes on to say that while there is time, he and his disciples must do the Father’s work in the world, and he heals the man.
Another occasion is recorded in Luke 13:1-4. Jesus is teaching, and some folks want to point out that a number of Galileans had been killed by Pontius Pilate. So Jesus asks them, “Do you think these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” He then points out another tragedy: 18 people who were killed when a tower fell on them. They weren’t any worse sinners than anyone else, either. But unless Jesus’ audience repents, they, too, will perish.
The fact of the matter is that if natural evil worked on the basis of deserves, all of us would be subject to suffering under its sway.
So we cannot look at the victims of tornadoes, or tsunamis, or famines, or cancer, and say that they were worse sinners than anyone else, that they got what they deserved. In these instances, natural evil and the suffering and pain that come with it are, in the words of C.S. Lewis, God’s megaphone to a deaf world. Disasters and diseases are telling us that something is terribly wrong in the created order, and the pain associated with it pushes us to find a solution. And it is then that we realize that the solution is beyond us--we must seek someone more powerful than we.
We must also be careful to note that it is not just the general fallen nature of man and the consequent curse of the earth that has loosed disaster and disease upon the world. None of us would deny the harmful effects that mankind can cause on nature through our abuse of it. How much more influence can Satan and his minions exert on the created order? We have evidence from the Scriptures that demons possessed people and animals with the intent of destroying them. We also have testimony that Satan is the prince of the power of the air, that he and his demons are the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. Three times in John’s Gospel Jesus refers to Satan as the ruler of this world. If these celestial moral agents, bent on evil, have some control over the world and the laws that govern it, can they not use the world as a weapon against us?
That’s definitely the case in Job 1. There, Satan is given permission to test Job. He does so through the evil of man—raiders and plunderers devastate Job’s assets. But Satan also uses natural evil--a meteor storm destroys his flocks of sheep and their shepherds, and a mighty wind, perhaps a tornado, flattening his oldest son’s house, killing all his children and their spouses. There’s no doubt that the Devil and his minions have even more power than we do to negatively affect the world around us. And when they do, they affect it so that it will harm and destroy us. In fact, I am of the conviction that when Jesus rebukes winds, waves, and fevers, he is rebuking the demonic activity behind those phenomena. Rebuking something that has no ability to understand a rebuke makes no sense.
So there are several factors to consider when we contemplate the origin and cause of natural evil.
(1) God created the world and everything in it; when he did, he called it good.
(2) God is in control, but in his sovereignty he allowed us and the heavenly beings free will, making us moral agents. He wants our love, and for love to be love, we must have the ability to to decide. Our decisions affect the world around us.
(3) Sin entered the world, and as a result, all of creation fell under a curse. Suffering and death came into existence, including moral and natural evil.
(4) Natural evil can and is used by God to punish people for their sin, but more often natural evil is arbitrary in who it strikes. It is God’s megaphone to a deaf world, a warning that all is not as it should be.
(5) Satan and his demons, fallen celestial moral agents, can and do exert influence over the world to do us harm.
(6) All of creation longs for the day when it will be made new, and good, once more.
(7) Until that day comes, when God allows natural evil to strike, the church has an opportunity to give people a glimpse of the world as it should be.
I say this last in light of John 9:1-3, where Jesus and his disciples encounter a man born blind. Like Jesus, we must work while it is day. Night is coming, when we will not be able to work. Until that time, as long as we are in the world, we must work to be the light of the world.
Natural disasters—really, that’s a bad way to put it, for tornadoes are not part of the world as it should be—Unnatural disasters not only tell us that something is terribly wrong, but they also provide us the opportunity to show the world how things ought to be.
We’ve seen many examples of light shining from Joplin. Two medical students lost their home in the storm, but spent the next six hours helping to treat some of the 900 injured people who flooded Freeman Hospital. Three-month old Grayson Chaligoj was sitting in his car seat, waiting to get his picture taken at the 15th St. Wal-Mart when the tornado struck. A complete stranger covered the child with his body. The man was badly bruised by falling debris, but the baby was unharmed. Don and Bethany didn’t have time to take cover in their crawlspace; they grabbed pillows and got into their bathtub. When the house around them ripped apart, Bethany’s pillows were sucked out her arms. Don threw himself over her to protect her from the flying debris. He saved Bethany, but was killed in the process. Chris Lucas, the manager of the 15th St. Pizza Hut rushed five employees and 15 customers into the restaurant’s walk-in freezer. When the door began to buckle, he wrapped a bungee cord around himself and the door handle. When the tornado had finally passed, the door and Chris were gone, but other lives were saved.
Tragedies like this also give the church the opportunity to be the church. Southeast Christian Church showed up with 20 new generators and $20,000 in cash. We aren’t a 20,000-member congregation like Southeast, but our little church of 40 scraped up two and half van-loads of supplies and over $1,000 in cash. I’m very proud of you and this community.
The work is not done. It will take months, if not years, for the people of Joplin to recover. We here at Edinburg Christian Church can have a larger role to play. In the midst of human suffering, in the face of evil, the church shines bright. We long for the day when Christ will restore the created order to its original goodness. Jesus suffered and died in order to make all things new. One day he will return and put an end to all human suffering. That’s part of the Gospel message. Until he does return, we serve as his ambassadors, as his representatives, and it is up to us to give people as big a glimpse of the way things ought to be as we can. Therefore, let us do what we can to restore that which was lost, to ease the suffering of others, to meet felt needs. And when we do, let us do so in the name of Jesus.
