Natural Disasters: Creation Under The Curse Of Human Evil

Welcome to the next chapter of Randy Alcorn’s book “If God Is Good.” Chapter 10, Natural Disasters: Creation Under The Curse Of Human Evil is the final chapter in Section Two. If you have missed any of the previous chapters, the links are listed under the heading Bible Studies in the menu above. Unless otherwise noted, I will be using Scriptures from the NKJV.

Bolded Statements of Chapter Ten

As I did in chapter 9 we will start by listing Randy Alcorn’s statements from the chapter which are in bold type as an overview. We will look at the below statements more closely as we go through the chapter.

1. The moral evil of Earth’s stewards caused God to curse Earth with natural disasters.
2. Natural disasters are not inherently evil, but they can produce secondary evils by thwarting the good of human, animal, and environmental welfare.
3. God is sovereign over all nature.
4. Sometimes God uses natural disasters to punish evil.
5. Natural disasters ordinarily are general results of the curse, not specifically linked to the sins of individuals who perish or suffer in them.
6. Scripture does not distance God from disasters and secondary evils the way his children often do.
7. Even when Satan is behind natural disasters and diseases God hasn’t relinquished his world-governing power.
8. Some disasters fall on the blameless.
9. Disasters can initiate self-examination.
10. Disasters can bring out the best in people.
11. Disasters can lead to spiritual transformation.
12. A world without personal tragedy or natural disasters would produce no heroes.

Creation Under The Curse – the 2004 Asian Tsunami

The author begins this chapter with the December 2004 Asian tsunami that killed more than 1/4 million people in 11 countries. Huge waves tossed human beings like rag dolls making hurricane Katrina’s devastation seem small by comparison.

Following the tsunami, a commentator in Scotland’s Herald (Glasgow) wrote:

God, if there is a God, should be ashamed of himself the sheer enormity of the Asian tsunami disaster, the death, destruction, and havoc it reaped, the scale of misery it has caused, must surely test the faith of even the firmest believer… I hope I am right that there is no God. For if there were, then he’d have to shoulder the blame. In my book, he would be as guilty as sin, and I’d want nothing to do with him.

Alan Laing, “Wave That Beggared My Belief,” Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), January 4, 2005

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In the Progressive article titled “God Owes Us an Apology,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote,

The Christian-style “God of love” should be particularly vulnerable to post-tsunami doubts. What kind of “love” inspired Him to wrest babies from their parent’s arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us that He gave his only son, etc., why couldn’t he have held those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were off the beach?…

If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be too, and I would propose post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral deity—at least until an apology is ensured…

If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all powerful; And if he is all powerful, then clearly, he doesn’t give a damn.

Barbara Ehrenreich, “God owes us an apology,” Progressive, March 2005, WWW.commondreams.org/views05/0216-25.htm.

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God’s and Humanity’s Roles in Natural Disasters

The moral evil of Earth’s stewards caused God to curse Earth with natural diseases.

Many people blame God for natural disasters. “How could he allow this?” they ask.

But what if, the author asks, the Architect and Builder crafted a beautiful and perfect home for earth’s inhabitants, who despite his warnings carelessly cracked its foundation, punched holes in the walls, and trashed the house? Why blame the builder when the occupants took a sledgehammer to their own home?

Fatalities caused by natural disasters multiply because of morally evil human actions.

• People frequently cause forest fires and other large-scale disasters.
• They build houses in areas long proven vulnerable to floods, landslides, fires, tornadoes, and earthquakes.
• When refusing warnings to vacate their homes, some parish.
• Humans misuse land resulting in disastrous mudslides.
• Polluted rivers cause deaths and physical deformities.
• More people may suffer losses from looting following a hurricane than in the hurricane itself.
• National leaders may hoard aid sent to help their dying people.
• People may fail to generously share their God-given resources to rescue the needy.

Natural diseases become most disastrous when they take human life—but they never did so until after humans committed moral evil against God.

God placed a curse on the earth due to Adam’s sin (see Genesis 3:17). That curse extends to everything in the natural world and makes it harder for people to live productively.

Paul says that “the creation was subjected to frustration” by God’s curse, until that day when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage, to decay” (Romans 8:20-21 NIV).

The next verse says, “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22 NIV).

Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis reflect the frustration, bondage, and decay of an earth, groaning under sin’s curse.

Natural Disasters Produce Secondary Evils

Natural disasters are not inherently evil, but they can produce secondary evils by thwarting the good of human, animal, and environmental welfare.

The best answer to the question “why would God create a world with natural disasters?” is that He didn’t.

Many experts believe the world’s atmosphere originally acted like an umbrella, protecting its inhabitants from harm. But now the umbrella has holes in it.

While Barbara Ehrenreich blames God for death and disaster, Scripture blames human evil for the cataclysmic Fall and consequent distortion of a once-perfect world (see Romans 8:18-22).

People who have suffered disasters often say they understand on a far deeper level the biblical truth that this world as it now is—under the Curse—is not our home.

God Is Sovereign Over All of Nature

Good weather and bad both come at God’s discretion. The meteorologist may explain wind speeds by differences in air pressure, but Scripture says of God, “He makes his wind blow” (Psalm 147:18 ESV). Blowing winds would seem to include hurricanes and tornadoes

God… “brings the clouds to punish people, or to water his earth and show his love.” (Job 37:13 NIV).

Israel’s grumbling angered God:

“Now the people complained about their hardships in the hearing of the Lord, and when he heard them his anger was aroused. Then fire from the Lord burned among them and consumed some of the outskirts of the camp.” (Numbers 11:1 NIV)

See also Job 37:3, Job 37:6; Psalm 29:5, Psalm 29:7; Psalm 147:16-18; Jeremiah 14:22).

Jesus said of God, “He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45)

Note that He did not say “God created natural laws and lets the course of nature go its own way.”

Those who argue that God has given the operation of the world over to Satan contradict these passages.

The Bible never speaks of nature as an impersonal mechanism.

Nature does not govern the universe, God does!

This doesn’t mean that Satan, called “ruler of this world” (John 12.31) and “Prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), doesn’t have power over the weather. Even when Christ calmed the sea of Galilee, it may speak of His primary power over the secondary power of pagan demon gods.

As a side note, have you ever thought about the synonym for natural disasters is “an act of God”? However, interestingly no one says that the beautiful weather outside is also “an act of God”.

In other words, beautiful weather isn’t widely referred to “as an act of God”. Why not?

Sometimes God Uses Natural Diseases To Punish Evil

God brought the great flood upon humanity as a judgment for sin (see Genesis 6-8). He also opened the earth to swallow Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, because they had treated him “with contempt” (Numbers 16:30).

God exercised judgment by orchestrating:

• plagues (Exodus chapters 7-12,  Numbers 11:33,  1 Samuel 5:6-9)
• sending hordes of locusts (Joel 2:25) and
• releasing swarms of snakes (Numbers 21:4-6)

When the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:24), he told Abraham and Lot that he had destroyed the cities because of their sin (see Genesis 18:20-21; Genesis 19:12-13).

Jonah’s disobedience prompted God to send to storm to rock the ship that carried Jonah (see Jonah 1:12).

God said…

• “I gave you empty stomachs in every city and lack of bread in every town…”
• “I also withheld rain from you…I sent rain on one town, but withheld it from another…”
• “Many times, I struck your gardens and vineyards, destroying them with blight and mildew.
• Locusts devoured your fig and olive trees…” (Amos 4:6-7, 9 NIV)

Likewise, after saying He would bless his people with rain to help grow crops He warned his people that if they disobey, it would bring down curses including droughts (see Deuteronomy 28:15-68).

Natural Disasters Ordinarily are General Results of the Curse

Natural disasters ordinarily are general results of the curse, not specifically linked to the sins of individuals who perish or suffer in them.

Unless God clearly reveals it, we should never assume that a natural disaster or moral atrocity comes upon this earth as God’s specific judgment on specific people.

Scripture does not distance God from disasters and secondary evils as his children often do.

God makes an unapologetic statement about himself: “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the Lord, do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7 NIV)

Ra

As we saw in Jeremiah 11:17 and Jeremiah 32:23, in Isaiah 45 God brings ra, disastrous consequences to deal with peoples ra, moral evil. God righteously brings terrible judgment upon human evil.

Amos 3:6 says… “If a trumpet is blown in a city, will not the people be afraid? If there is calamity in a city, will not the Lord have done it?

A description of natural disasters follows in Amos 4:6-12 where God says He brought hunger, drought, blight, mildew, locust, pestilence, and the death of men and horses, “yet you have not returned to me” (verse 11).

God intended these disasters not only as punishment but as discipline designed to draw His people back to himself.

God Has Not Relinquished His Power

Even when Satan is behind natural disasters and diseases, God hasn’t relinquished his world-governing power.

Some authors emphasize that Satan, not God, brings natural disasters, inflicts diseases, orchestrates tragedies, and takes lives. Moreover, some passages appear to support that view, including those in the gospels that ascribe demon affliction to certain diseased people.

We see in the book of Job 1:6-12 that Satan had to get God’s permission to attack Job and his family.

Satan did not waste any time in his attack. We see the destruction he caused in Job 1:13-19:

1. Satan incited the Sabaeans to murder Job’s servants and steal his oxen and donkeys.
2. Next, Chaldean raiding parties stole camels and murdered more servants.
3. And finally, while Job’s sons and daughters feasted in the oldest brother’s house, suddenly a mighty wind swept in from the desert and struck the house and it collapsed on them and they died.

Therefore, we must ask two questions:

1. Were the Sabaeans and Chaldeans responsible for committing the murders and theft? Yes, they were.
2. Was Satan responsible for inciting them? Yes, he was.

Satan also brought about two natural disasters of severe lightning and gale-force winds. So, Satan may bring about a natural disaster, but the book of Job clarifies that God continues to reign, while selectively allowing Satan to do evil things.

Satan knew he did not have the authority to incite humans to do evil, to bring down lightning to cause fires, or to send the wind to blow down a building and take lives without God’s explicit permission. We should know this too.

Some Disasters Fall on the Blameless

Since God identified Job as the most righteous of men…

“There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil.” (Job 1:1) See also Job 1:8 and Job 2:3.

…the book of Job forever refutes the notion that every tragedy that befalls people is a judgment of their sins.

While no one is sinless and bad things do not happen to morally perfect people (because there are no morally perfect people), they can and sometimes do happen to the best of people.

God is free in our lives, as He was in Jobs, to permit personal or natural disasters for His own sovereign purposes without ever being an evildoer.

Transformation in Tragedies Aftermath

Disasters Can Initiate Self-Examination

All of us live only by God’s mercy. Jesus treated disasters as object lessons to warn people of the far greater eternal disaster of Hell: “unless you repent, you too will all perish.” (Luke 13:5)

Jesus encouraged people to examine their hearts, repent, and turn to God. Why? So, they might be ready to face death when it comes and live forever with God in Heaven rather than perish in Hell.

Disasters Can Bring Out the Best in People

Many people remarked that they’d never seen such kindness and sacrificial love as was manifested by tens of thousands of people, many of them Christians, coming to help the citizens of New Orleans and other areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

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Consider the following story after two 1988 Armenian earthquakes killed 60,000 people.

In the aftermath and chaos, one man made his way to his son’s school, only to find nothing but rubble. Other parents stumbled around dazed and weeping, calling out their children’s names but this father ran to the back corner of the building where his son’s classroom once was, and began digging.

To everyone else, it seemed hopeless. How could his son have survived? But this father had promised he would always be there for his boy, so he heaved rocks and dug, calling for his son by name: Armand!

Well-meaning parents and bystanders tried to pull him out of the rubble, telling the father that it was too late. They’re dead there’s nothing you can do.

The Fire Chief tried to pull him away saying fires and explosions are happening everywhere you’re in danger, go home.

Finally, the police came and said you’re in shock you’re endangering others. Go home. We’ll handle it!

But the man continued to dig hour after hour and finally in the 38th hour of digging, a day and a half after everyone told him to give up hope, he called his son’s name again, pulled back a big rock, and heard his son’s voice.

From under the rocks came the words “Dad? I told him! I told the other kids that if you were still alive, you’d save me!”

The father helped his son, and 13 other children climb out of the rubble. When the building collapsed, the children survived in a tentlike pocket. The father lovingly carried his son home to his mother. When the townspeople praised Armand’s father for saving the children, he simply explained “I promised my son, ‘no matter what, I’ll be there for you!’”

Scott Hahn, A Father Who Keeps His Promises (Cincinnati: St. Anthony Messenger Press, 1998), 13-14. 

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Disasters Can Lead to Spiritual Transformation

Randy Alcorn states that he has spoken at many memorial services and was always struck by how hearts are much more responsive to the gospel.

Death has the floor. People often listen to God in a way they wouldn’t have before tragedy struck. Through suffering and neediness in the aftermath of disasters, many people become receptive to the gospel. Time after time throughout history, God has used both man-made and natural disasters to draw people to himself.

Philosophy professor Eleanor Stump wrote:

Natural evil, the pain of disease, the intermittent and unpredictable destruction of natural disasters, decay of old age, the imminence of death, takes away a person’s satisfaction with himself. It tends to humble him, show him his frailty, make him reflect on the transience of temporal goods, and turn his affections toward other-worldly things, away from things of this world. No amount of moral or natural evil, of course can guarantee that a man will [turn to God]… But evil of this sort is the best hope, I think, and maybe the only effective means, for bringing men to such a state.

Eleanor stump and Michael J Murray, philosophy of religion (Hoboken, NJ: Whiley-Blackwell, 1999), 233.

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When we face a natural disaster, disease, or financial hardship, we should ask God “what are you trying to tell us?”

My Thoughts on Natural Disasters

This concludes section two of Randy Alcorn’s book If God Is Good. I find it interesting that this past week a massive winter storm called a “bomb cyclone” swept across the country with snow and frigid temperatures unlike what has been seen for decades. I have included some of the headlines found on RaptureReady.com.

• Flight Cancellations Surpass 2,000 As “Once-In-A-Generation” Winter Storm Batters US
  A massive winter storm called is disrupting air travel across the country.  Flight tracking website FlightAware reports nearly 2,200 flights were canceled by 4 pm EST on Thursday, and delays of flights within, into, or out of the US were around 6,300.
• Cheyenne, Wyoming Breaks Record: Drops 40 Degrees in 30 Minutes
• Christmas is canceled: Almost 7,000 flights scrapped or delayed as bomb cyclone causes travel chaos
• New York Winter Storm – Calling it a “storm for the ages,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul has issued a statewide state of emergency as a powerful storm makes its way into Western New York this weekend.
• Immense winter storm places 60% of U.S. under winter weather warnings or advisories – one of the greatest extents ever recorded
• Buffalo hit with an extraordinary blizzard – white out, roads gridlocked, New York 
  This crazy blizzard video shows extreme blizzard conditions in Buffalo, New York on December 23, 2022, with cars stranded everywhere, no visibility, extreme wind, and heavy snow.
• Historic winter storm turns deadly, more than 1.1 million customers without power, U.S. 
• Deadly lake-effect blizzard buries Buffalo in nearly 4 feet of snow
• First Blizzard Reported at Cincinnati Airport in 44 Years – The winter storm sweeping the U.S. is making history, as Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is recording its first blizzard in over four decades.
• ‘Bomb cyclone’ storm hits US with Arctic winds, leaving Christmas travelers stranded
• Death toll rises, thousands without power as a winter storm brings blizzards, arctic freeze to the US – On Christmas day, Americans woke up to temperatures plunging below freezing and blizzard warnings in effect for the day as a frigid winter storm was sweeping across the country after killing at least 28 and knocking out power to millions of people.

The Bible is clear in Matthew 24 what happens at the end of this age. There will be unprecedented natural disasters.

^7 “For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places. ⁸ All these are the beginning of sorrows… ¹⁴ And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come.” (Matthew 24:7,8,14)

Jesus of Nazereth

I personally struggle with natural disasters because many nations have caused these natural disasters on purpose by geoengineering. Most people don’t want to acknowledge that this is happening. But it has been going on for many years in various countries.

I recommend the following website GeoEngineering Watch if you would like to look into the truthful facts of geoengineering and weather manipulation.

Hurricane Nicole

Was hurricane Nicole a random act of nature? Or is there much more to the story? What agendas and objectives might Hurricane Nicole have served for those in power? Can winter weather be engineered from what started out as a tropical storm? For how long after the initial event might the implications and consequences of engineered weather linger? This 4-minute video report provides insight and answers to the questions posed.

Weather warfare is not a conspiracy theory. It has been happening and will continue to happen. At this point in my life when I see these so-called unprecedented natural disasters, I understand two things.

• First, many of these “natural disasters” are man-made, some on purpose. Others happen because of our misuse of what God has blessed us with.
• Second, I have to keep in mind and remember as we read earlier that even though man is causing a lot of our natural disasters, God is allowing it for His own sovereign reasons.

Therefore, because I trust God and understand that He uses natural disasters for His own purposes, I will continue to trust Him and worship Him just as Job did. I pray you will too. For soon and very soon we will be with Jesus, and we’ll never have to deal with this fallen world again.

Join me next time as we look at Section Three dealing with the Problems for Non-Theists: Moral Standards, Goodness, and Extreme Evil.