Why does God allow natural disasters?

Question 60105.

Natural disasters are the version of the problem of evil that is hardest to answer, and I want to say at the outset that I know it. Human wickedness can be laid at the door of human freedom. An earthquake cannot. Nobody chose the fault line under Port-au-Prince or the wave that came ashore on Boxing Day 2004.

So this question deserves care rather than a quick formula, and it deserves an answer that could be spoken aloud in a hospital corridor without doing damage. Here is how I understand it.

The Creation That Was and the Creation That Is

Scripture does not describe the world we live in as the world God originally made. Genesis 1 ends with a repeated verdict that what God had made was good, and very good. Genesis 3 records a fracture that reached beyond human beings into the ground itself.

Paul picks this up in the most important passage on the subject. Romans 8:20-22 says the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, and that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. The word groaning is doing serious work there.

That gives a framework for natural disasters that does not require us to say either that God is indifferent or that the world is functioning as designed. The world is a good creation in a damaged condition, and its convulsions are part of what Paul calls the groaning. I have written more at natural evil.

What This Does Not Mean

Two wrong turns are taken here constantly, and both cause real harm. The first is to treat every disaster as a targeted judgement on the people who suffered it. That is precisely what Jesus refused to do.

In Luke 13 He is told about Galileans killed by Pilate, and He raises the case Himself of eighteen people crushed when the tower in Siloam fell. Do you think they were worse offenders than everyone else in Jerusalem? He asks, and answers His own question: no, I tell you. Then He turns it round: but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

The second wrong turn is to say that natural disasters have no connection to the fall at all, that they are simply how physics works and God has nothing to do with any of it. That protects God’s reputation at the cost of His involvement, and Scripture will not let us have that either. He is not a spectator.

Natural Disasters and a World That Works

There is a further consideration worth putting on the table honestly. The same processes that produce disasters also produce a habitable planet. Plate tectonics recycles carbon, builds mountains, replenishes soil and drives the chemistry that keeps the atmosphere breathable. A geologically dead world would also be a lifeless one.

Rainfall that sustains crops in one season floods villages in another. The same solar activity that warms the earth produces the storms. You cannot straightforwardly have a world with weather and no bad weather, and any proposal to redesign it tends to unravel on inspection.

I offer that as a genuine consideration and not as a complete answer, because it does not touch the individual case. Telling a woman who has lost her children that tectonic activity is necessary for the carbon cycle is not theology; it is cruelty with a diagram. Hold the general point and put it away when you are with someone in grief.

Where God Is in the Disaster

The Bible’s answer to natural disasters is not finally an explanation. It is a presence. That may sound like an evasion, so let me press it.

Job asked for an explanation and did not get one. What he got was God, speaking out of the whirlwind, taking him on a tour of the wild and untamed parts of creation, and asking him seventy questions he could not answer. At the end Job says he had heard of God by the hearing of the ear but now his eye sees Him, and that is presented as sufficient.

Then there is the cross, which is the answer Christianity actually offers. Whatever else is true about suffering, God has not held Himself aloof from it. He entered the world He made and was broken by it, and the God who meets you in a disaster zone is a God with scars. See does God cause suffering or allow it.

What Scripture Does Say About God and Nature

I should be careful not to leave the impression that God is uninvolved in the natural order. Scripture says He sends rain on the just and the unjust, that He commands the storm, and that not a sparrow falls to the ground apart from the Father.

The Bible also records occasions when a natural event is explicitly an act of judgement, the flood being the clearest case, and prophetic passages where drought and famine are named as such. So I cannot say that natural disasters are never judgement.

What I can say is that we are in no position to identify which is which, and that Jesus in Luke 13 warned us off exactly that inference. Speculating from a pulpit about which nation’s sin caused which earthquake is presumption, and it has brought the gospel into disrepute more than once in my lifetime.

Where the Story Is Going

The Christian answer to natural disasters is incomplete without the ending, and the ending is not a return to Eden but something better. Romans 8 says the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.

Isaiah’s picture of the Millennium has the wolf dwelling with the lamb and nothing hurting or destroying in all God’s holy mountain. Revelation 21 has the sea, the ancient symbol of chaos, gone, and every tear wiped away, and death itself abolished.

That hope is not a distraction from present grief. It is the reason grief is legitimate. We mourn natural disasters because we know, at some level, that the world is not supposed to be like this, and Scripture agrees with us and promises that it will not always be. See the prophetic timeline from the Rapture to eternity.

How to Answer Without Doing Harm

If you are asked this at a funeral or in a newsroom, there are three things I would keep in mind. Do not offer a system when someone wants a hand. Do not defend God as though He needed your protection. And do not pretend to know what you do not know.

What you can say is true and short. This is not how the world was meant to be. God is not indifferent to it. He entered it Himself and bore the worst of it. And He has promised to put it right, and has given evidence in the resurrection that He can.

Then stop talking. The pastoral literature is unanimous on this and Job’s friends prove it. They sat with him in silence for seven days and were an enormous comfort. The trouble began when they opened their mouths. See how do we comfort those who suffer.

Jesus and the Tower of Siloam

I want to stay with Luke 13 a little longer, because it is the passage Jesus Himself chose to address disaster and almost nobody preaches it. He brings up the eighteen killed at Siloam without being asked, which suggests He knew people were already discussing it.

His first move is to shut down the search for a cause in the victims. His second is to turn the question on the questioners: unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. That is not a comfortable pastoral technique, and it is worth asking what He was doing.

I think He was refusing the safe distance that speculation gives us. Discussing why natural disasters happen to other people is a way of not thinking about our own mortality. Jesus takes the news item and points it at the person holding the newspaper. See Luke 13:4-5.

Common Grace in the Aftermath

Something worth noticing about natural disasters is what happens afterwards. People run towards the rubble. Strangers dig with their hands. Money moves across the world within hours from people who will never meet those they are helping.

Scripture calls this the work of a God who sends rain on the just and the unjust and who has written the work of the law on human hearts. The compassion that surfaces after a catastrophe is not an accident of evolution; it is the image of God in people who may not believe in Him at all.

That is a small light, and it does not answer the question. But when someone asks where God is in a disaster, one honest answer is that He is in the rescue teams, in the surgeons who have not slept, and in the neighbour carrying water. See Matthew 5:45.

So, now what?

If you are wrestling with natural disasters intellectually, read Romans 8 and Job 38 to 42 side by side and notice that Scripture gives you a framework and a Person rather than a formula. That is less satisfying and, I have found, more durable.

If you are wrestling with it because something has happened to you, then the argument can wait. Say to God what you actually feel, in the words of the Psalms if you have none of your own, and let other Christians carry some of the weight. And when the disaster is somebody else’s, the most useful theology you can offer is usually a chequebook and a pair of hands. What could you do this week for someone still living in the aftermath of one?

For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.

Romans 8:22 (ESV)