“Where is God when…?”
(Leia este post em português.)
It is a question that is asked every time tragedy strikes, no matter what the scale. It is asked when thousands die, or when one baby fails to take its first breath. It can be accompanied by the other common questions, “Why, God?” or “How can a loving God allow…?” It is a heart-cry, a desperate plea for something that might give us our bearings in the confusion of our grief. To some it is an honest, God-seeking question, and ends in the comfort of God through an understanding of His Word. To many, unfortunately, it is an accusing, God-hating question, and ends in the despair that comes from turning from the only One that can make any part of our existence make sense.
In the wake of yet another world tragedy, people are asking this question, and the others like it. And there is an answer–a biblical answer–to these questions. But before getting to it, consider how bad the situation truly is:
Statistically, in the days since March 11, 2011, more people have died worldwide than the highest estimated number of deaths resulting from the earthquake that hit Japan. How many more? According to the CIA World Factbook, on average, roughly 150,000 people die worldwide each day. That’s almost 2 people each second. At the time of this writing, the highest estimates of deaths resulting from Japan’s quake and tsunami were around 10,000. Take the number of days since the quake on March 11 and multiply them by 150,000, and then compare. The numbers are staggering.
Please do not misunderstand. The point here is not to downplay the tragedy in Japan, but to get a clearer picture of the global tragedy that occurs daily. In my lifetime there have been numbers of tragedies, with relatively low numbers dying in airplane crashes and similar accidents, to the higher numbers of deaths resulting from terrorist attacks, to the insanely high numbers brought on by natural disasters. And yet even the highest numbers rarely touch the average daily death rate of 150,000.
The connection between these grim statistics and the original question, where is God when all this is going on, is this: we tend to ask about God’s whereabouts when an inexplicably large number of people’s lives are taken in one event and its aftermath. The truth is, if we understand the horribly fatal condition we call life, we should be asking about Him all the time.
God is not afraid of the question. In fact, He expects it. And He has already answered it, too.
So where was God when the earthquake hit Japan?
The short answer is: where He has always been.
I know the answer is simple, and perhaps simplistic, but I will explain.
First, we should understand a little about why bad things happen in the first place, before we will look at what the Bible says about God’s involvement in all of it. The first two chapters of Job give us an excellent summary of the bad things that can happen to people. In one chain of events, Job lost:
- five hundred yoke of oxen and five hundred donkeys, that were stolen by Sabeans, who also killed his servants (1:14-15);
- seven thousand sheep and more servants, that were all consumed by “fire of God” from heaven (v. 16);
- three thousand camels, that were stolen by Chaldeans, who also killed his servants (v. 17);
- all his ten of his children by a “great wind” that destroyed the house they were in (vv. 18-19);
- his health (2:7-8);
- and his wife’s support (vv. 9-10).
Job’s life was changed in a series of disastrous events which covered most of what I have come to consider the “bad things that can happen to me” list:
Things that happen as a result of man’s sinful actions. Since we are all sinners, we do sinful things (Rom. 3:10, 23). From petty annoyances to brutal violence, we are capable of inflicting massive amounts of grief on one another. Things that fall in this category: neglect, abuse, any manner of violence (which includes terrorist acts), bullying, browbeating, backbiting, and so on. Sabeans and Chaldeans stealing your stuff falls under this, as does a wife that tells you to “curse God and die.”
Things that happen as a result of sin’s curse on the natural world. When Adam sinned, it wasn’t just mankind that suffered for it. All of nature was placed under a curse (Gen. 3). Our chaotic weather and natural world is a result of this. Further chaos was added when our world experience the cataclysmic, worldwide Flood as a punishment for great sinful acts of the first category in Noah’s day (Gen. 6ff). Romans 8:18-24 even explains how creation both suffers (Paul compares it to birth pains) because of sin’s curse, and looks hopefully toward the day that it will be delivered from the corruption. This category would include all the natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and the like, but also sickness and birth defects which demonstrate sin’s curse on the natural order of things. In Job’s story we see the great wind (and possibly the “fire of God,” depending on what it was, exactly) and Job’s illness as this sort of thing.
Things that happen as a result of supernatural action. We are not alone in this world. There is a whole spiritual realm that can, in a very real way, affect our daily existence. God Himself chooses, at times, to act in the world He created. He is seen in Scripture to act miraculously, which is when He alters the natural order of what He created, i.e. works contrary to the laws that He established. Picture the plagues in Egypt (Ex. 7-12). He can act providentially, in which case He operates within the natural laws He established, but shapes events to result in something purposeful. My favorite example of this is the way He worked through many generations of men so that at the appointed time Jesus would be born to the fulfillment of all the prophecies told about Him. God can do this to both benefit mankind, or to judge sin. In addition to God, there are the angels: powerful, spiritual beings that God created, that capable of altering natural law to perform amazing feats (ex. the one angel that killed 70,000 Israelites with a pestilence in 2 Sam. 24). Satan and his host of demons are angels who work against God and His people (the story of Job). Neither Satan nor His angels are God’s equals, for they are created as well, but when allowed to act, they demonstrate all the power God has granted angels. In Job’s story, we see where the first two categories can be manipulated by a supernatural being. God allowed Satan to act, using the actions of sinful men and the events of the natural world to inflict harm on Job. (Technically, this means that they weren’t in the first two categories, but were a subset of this third category, but I think you get the idea.)
Things that happen as a consequence of individual sin. This is what Job’s friends said Job was going through. They interpreted all the events of chapters one and two as acts of God against sin in Job’s life, not knowing that it was precisely because of Job’s righteousness that he was undergoing those problems. While it wasn’t Job’s case, individual sin has its consequences. When we sin, we set off a chain of events that will have consequences. Some are pretty dire. When the consequences come, we shouldn’t ask ourselves, “Why does God allow this to happen to me?”, since clearly we did it to ourselves. I am not even talking about judgment from God. That’s category three. For example, let’s say you sin against man by driving under with a blood alcohol level that exceeds the legal limit, as well as breaking the speed limit. In doing so, you are also sinning against God by a) surrendering control of your body to a substance (Eph. 5:18); and b) by failing to obey the civil authority God placed in your life (Rom. 13:1-6). Consequences from this could range from fines and jail time, a wreck that hurt or killed you, a wreck that hurt or killed others, and so on. Consequences of individual sin can be short-lived, or life-altering.
The reason it is important to make these distinctions is not necessarily to find out why something happened, but more so to understand how our sin-cursed world functions. The danger is to see individual sin as the cause of anything bad, i.e., God is judging these people with a natural disaster; the 9/11 attacks were a judgement against sin in America; I can’t walk today because I was sinning against God and He crippled me; etc. We must distinguish between consequences of individual sin and repercussions from man’s original sin and its curse of the natural order of creation. It is important to learn is that we won’t always know why something happened, and that’s okay. The important part is to respond biblically to our circumstances. Job didn’t get all the background story, at least not to our knowledge. He still responded biblically (for most of the story).
We could use Japan’s earthquake as an example, or, not so long ago, Haiti’s. Why did it happen? I don’t know. What possible explanations do we have?
It was either
God judging some national sin (which, unless He reveals this as a reason, we won’t know),
or
God allowing Satan to inflict destruction using natural disasters (for reasons He only knows),
or
God allowing a natural disaster resulting from the disorder at work in a sin-cursed natural world (the most likely option),
or
some other option I haven’t considered.
The bottom line is, we don’t know. What do we know? We know that God is still in control (that’s why He is involved in some way in each option), and that He loves us (John 3:16), and wants to us to be reconciled with Him (2 Pet. 3:9). We know that all His children involved in that disaster will see Him working through their circumstances to bring about His plan and ultimately good for them (Rom. 8:28). We know that we should love the Japanese (and the Haitians), and pray for them, and help them materially as we are able. We know that tomorrow, or the next day, another disaster will hit somewhere, or another bomb will go off, or another war will start (things in Libya started while I was working on this post), and people will once again ask, “Where is God?”
And as an average of 150,000 of us die each day, I pray that more and more people ask, in a soul-wrenching, heart cry, “Where is God!?”
And in response, God’s children need to be ready with the answer, and in love, we need to tell them what God is saying in His Word, ”I am right where I have always been. I haven’t changed… Here is my Son, who died to bring you back to Me. You’ve been away long enough. Come back to me.”
(As I was finishing this post, my wife told me that just about an hour ago Japan was hit with a 7.1 earthquake, which only goes to prove what I was saying about “another disaster” hitting somewhere. Any doubts about where God is? Read this post again.)
