An Act of God?: Answers to Tough Questions about God's Role in Natural Disasters
By Erwin W. Lutzer and Franklin Graham
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About this ebook
Erwin W. Lutzer
Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer is Pastor Emeritus of The Moody Church, where he served as the senior pastor for 36 years. He is an award-winning author and the featured speaker on three radio programs that are heard on more than 750 national and international outlets. He and his wife, Rebecca, have three grown children and eight grandchildren and live in the Chicago area.
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Reviews for An Act of God?
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5He writes about what’s real and what hurts. He helps to make sense of what has eluded me for answers. I am grateful. Having survived one fire and one flood, two homes in six months, this echoes what my spirit knows well: Jesus knows fully just like the tapestry. He knows what’s on the front of this mess in the back.
Book preview
An Act of God? - Erwin W. Lutzer
Introduction
A Heart for the Hurting
He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds.
Psalm 147:3
Like you, I was overwhelmed by the images on my television screen of decimated villages and despairing people in Japan in the spring of 2011. Most of you vividly remember the horrifying news and the staggering before-and-after pictures in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami that hit the island nation on March 11, 2011. Entire villages disappeared. Boats, trains, and airplanes were tossed about like toys in the rush of ocean water. Weeping people searched for family and friends, even as they settled into shelters and tried to figure out where they would go next, since home was now—literally and completely—washed away.
Four months after the tragedy, the death toll in Japan had reached 15,605, with nearly 5,000 known people still missing, and at the time of this writing, there is still concern about crippled nuclear power plants. The number of the dead may never be completely known. Missing people were probably dragged out to sea. It is heartbreaking.
In 2006, when I decided to write the original version of this book titled Where Was God?, I had been watching news coverage of another disaster—a CNN special report on children who survived the deadly earthquake in India and Pakistan on October 8, 2005. My heart ached as I watched volunteers helping the frightened youngsters. Those children—most of them newly orphaned—were bandaged and bruised. Some had eyes swollen shut, while others sat silently, their vacant faces revealing the shock they had experienced. Volunteers were doing what they could to provide comfort and basic necessities to the survivors. But many people trapped in remote villages had no help whatsoever. Eighty thousand people died in that 2005 quake.
Sadly, such disasters are not all that unusual. The October 2005 earthquake in India and Pakistan hit less than a year after one of the largest natural disasters in modern history, the tsunami that swept through Sri Lanka, Thailand, India, and a number of other countries in December 2004. The death toll following that disaster was almost 230,000 people. Think of it! The average football stadium has about fifty thousand seats. We’re talking about almost five football stadiums full of people! The number is almost unfathomable—and many of those people were lost within minutes of that massive tsunami crashing into the coastlines of the countries in its path. A year after the tsunami, two million people were still homeless and many of them had hardly even begun to put their lives back together. Who can measure the number of tears wept because of disasters like this?
Those of us who live in the United States vividly remember Hurricane Katrina, which washed away much of the Gulf Coast in August 2005 and nearly destroyed the city of New Orleans. Pictures of the thousands of people gathering aimlessly around the Louisiana Superdome—set up as a temporary shelter for about twenty thousand survivors—are etched in our minds. Every survivor has his or her own horrifying story to tell: A mother screamed out to her child as he was swept away in the rising waters. A family huddled in their attic and waved frantically for rescuers. In all, more than a thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left behind to try to regain some kind of normalcy.
I cannot help but ask myself, What kind of a God allows such disasters to happen?
And they happen over and over. In all, the 2005 hurricane season was the most active in history: twenty-seven tropical storms (including fourteen hurricanes) were named. But the devastation in lesser-known disasters is just as terrible for individual families and children. Tragedies kill and destroy every day, though only the large-scale events make the news. In late April 2011, tornadoes ravaged the southern part of the United States, taking out entire cities—killing men, women, and children. And a month later, Joplin, Missouri, took a direct hit from a multiple-vortex EF5 tornado that claimed 160 lives, making it the country’s deadliest single tornado in more than six decades.
I believe God is real, and I love and trust my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But the question still plagues me, as I’m sure it does you if you have picked up this book: what kind of God allows such disasters to happen?
Dealing with the Big Questions
Some people think we should not even ask the question about what natural disasters say about God, that the question itself is too big, for it focuses on trying to explain a natural
event in spiritual terms. They believe that these disasters are of such gigantic proportions that there could not possibly be any hidden meaning in them, nor can anything positive or helpful be said about them.
I believe that we must ask the big questions—but I’m warning you now that there are no easy answers. In addition, I am well aware that little can be said to ease the pain of those who mourn the loss of loved ones. Parents will hardly be comforted when a Christian tells them that God has some hidden purpose in the loss of their child. A child who has just learned that his parents died in the collapsed house behind him would not be reassured with the words that God really does care and that He did this for some better end.
Such glib statements are not helpful and are, in fact, hurtful. Sometimes we just need to sit beside those who grieve, letting them know we care. In those moments of shock and grief, our silence along with our caring presence is far more soothing than us chattering about God’s promises and purposes. I’ve found that it’s often better to say nothing than to say something that appears to trivialize the horror. There is a grief that is too deep for words, too deep for explanations, and yes, even too deep for human comfort. Some suffering is so big and so deep that it seems impossible to believe that there is any kind of reason for it, that any kind of good can come from it, that any kind of loving God is behind it. In the end, it’s better to simply give no answer than to give an inadequate or trivial one.
I’d like you to keep in mind as you read this book that although I use the term natural evil, I am making a distinction between natural disasters (things that happen in creation—what I’ve been talking about so far) and the evil things people do to each other, which can be traced back to choices people make (such as murder, injustice, war, stealing, etc.). Both types of evil are tragedies, of course, but for the purposes of this book, I want to look at natural evil, natural disasters.
In addition, it’s important to remember that we only see something as a disaster,
as evil,
when it hurts us or our fellow human beings. A tsunami in the middle of an ocean that never reaches land or hurts anyone is not considered to be evil. We call it evil only when we see the devastation it brings and the people it hurts. It becomes evil because we regard suffering and death as evil.
So, what kind of a God allows such disasters to happen?
We wonder how horrific disasters are compatible with the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible. Natural disasters challenge the limits of our faith in a good and caring God. How can we watch the news coverage of orphaned children and have our faith remain intact?
Centuries ago, Asaph, who wrote many of the psalms in the Bible, found his faith slipping when he saw wicked people prosper over godly people. He begins with an optimistic statement and then reveals his doubts:
Truly God is good to Israel, to those whose hearts are pure. But as for me, I almost lost my footing. My feet were slipping, and I was almost gone. For I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness.
Psalm 73:1-3
Asaph’s problem was not a natural disaster, but even so, he found it difficult to reconcile the existence of a good, all-powerful God with the continuing injustice of the world. Who of us has not wondered at the seeming indifference of God toward this planet with its woes, its injustices, and its suffering? In the face of indescribable human grief, God’s silence is deafening.
One newsman, commenting on Hurricane Katrina, spoke for many when he said, If this world is the product of intelligent design, then the designer has some explaining to do.
Of course, many of us believe that the Designer does not owe us an explanation—yet if we believe He has revealed Himself through the Scriptures, we are permitted to have some insight into His ways and purposes in the world.
I have very little to say to those who have angrily made up their minds against the Almighty—except to make this point: when atheists ask why God would permit these evils, they are actually assuming the existence of God. If God does not exist, we can’t call anything evil—not the disasters occurring in nature or the criminal acts of human beings. In an impersonal, atheistic world, whatever is, just is. No moral judgments are possible. I’ll return to this point in chapter 4.
Ultimately, it comes around to a question of faith. Those who know God believe He has