Many who come face-to-face with what scripture teaches will be confronted by the conclusion that God was ultimately decisive in the recent floods. People may have good intentions for supporting the notion that God could, or would, not bring calamity. However, refusing to accept that scripture teaches God is decisive in calamity is an error with potentially serious consequences.
Although it would require omniscience to say for certain, it is likely that this is a response which is characteristic of Christians in modern times. The tentacles of modern social tolerance and the inadvertent effects of our increasingly “comfortable life” seem to have skewed the degree to which we are able to accept the biblical realities of suffering and sovereignty.
By saying that God could or would not act to bring about a calamity, we take an anthropocentric view of God, presuming that He should act as we would act. We need to be on guard that our difficulty in accepting these truths is not undergirded by a feeling that people deserve better than this disaster. As Christians we know what we humans deserve, but there is a vast gulf between mediocre assent to this and the deep sorrow we should feel over our depravity. All of us are sinners. We deserve to perish. Every breath we take is an undeserved gift.
Most importantly, the very thing which we remove out of empathy for those who have lost so much in a well-intentioned attempt to create hope, is the very same thing they need most. If we deny God’s decisive sovereignty in calamity we lose our only hope. If He has no control over this, then He is not in control when we need Him to save us in the hour of our trial, and there is no hope.
Our hope is founded on the death of Jesus Christ to purchase our forgiveness and righteousness for us (Eph 1:7; 2 Cor 5:21) and God’s promise to use His sovereignty to keep us for the inheritance He has promised (Jer 32:40; Rom 8:29-30). We surrender this hope if we sacrifice His sovereignty.
All suffering, including that which comes from natural disasters, is the furnace by which the Lord makes our cold hard hearts malleable, so He can mould and shape us according to His good pleasure. So know that He brought this disaster, for His own wise purposes, and in this know that when you call out to Him, He will answer. Our flesh may not like His answer, but we know that His answer is designed for His glory and our joy – for those who love God, all things work together for good (Rom 8:28).
Further into Romans 8, Paul boldly proclaims God's Everlasting Love by asking “If God is for us, who can be against us?” in verse 31, and then again in verse 35 asking “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” We know he has our sufferings in this disaster in mind, because the list of things which Paul gives to finish verse 35 includes famine – a natural disaster in itself which Paul chooses to be sure we understand that this applies to our kind of suffering.
God’s final word to us in our sufferings comes in the last verses, when through the inspired author God declares that “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us… neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In giving Himself to you eternally, through the sacrifice of His precious Son, He has given you the greatest gift He could give, that your joy would be complete forever.
Let what you value most be in the next world, that the appeal of this one would diminish with each passing day...
