Harrowing images assail us; newspaper reports tell of mega death, miraculous rescue, fragile hope. The peoples of earth offer assistance to nations devastated by earthquake and wave. No one asks how such a thing could happen in a world created by God.
We live with the uneasy assurance of science that unstable tectonic plates produced an earthquake eight times more powerful than the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. Yet what do we say about the Creator of the rolling spheres, and of the roiling deadly seas.
Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
Though its waters roar and foam,
Though the mountains tremble with its tumult. (Psalm 46:2 — 3)
In a frivolous editorial Daniel Henninger* tried to sound wise by saying that faith in the ‘old gods’ would once have explained the catastrophe. Then he the credited dumb, unfeeling Nature that registered 9.0 on the Richter scale. And it was a shame, he thought, that South Asia doesn’t have the early warning systems that would have saved thousands of lives. If such observations weren’t callous enough, he then wrote that liberal market economics and free elections would bring progress to those backward nations. Economics and elections will save you from natural catastrophe? Check with Floridians.
Why, in this hyper-religious nation where a majority of us believes that Jesus is the Son of God, are we so reluctant to speculate on God’s creative power and divine presence in the beautiful, deadly world of nature? The Bible on every page, after the expulsion from Eden, looks forward — not only to a renewed human community but also to nature restored. Only after (or in concert with) human restoration, does the lion lie down with the lamb. Before human shalom is established, the lamb is the lion’s breakfast, and the child will be the rattlesnake’s prey.
The New Testament envisions a new heaven and a new earth. The ones we have now will not do, and though they bring us danger and delight, they will give way to God’s final restoration, which will not be brought in by any human ingenuity or political order. Neither impeccable scientific instruments nor liberal market economics will save us from decay, entropy, and death. We place our hope in nothing that is bounded by creation, of which we are solidly a part. Our only hope is in the God who made us.
Finally, we remember the truth about our disobedience. We grasped at equality with God. We attempted to be like God, and that threw not only human life out of whack — but also the universe. Our disobedience made nature red as well as green; lambs once frolicking, now grown sheep, are led off to slaughter. In the sub-atomic particles and the tectonic plates there are structures that hold our creaturely existence together, as well as the earth on which we walk, the seas on which we sail, and the air through which we fly. In those same particles and plates are the seeds of death and destruction, planted by our disobedience and with us day and night, until by God’s grace and mercy, the kingdom comes. God’s love for the creation is everlasting.
The last question is not our why. It is God’s question back to Job: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? . . . Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . . Who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together?” (Job 38) Who made the winds, and the tectonic plates upon which rest the “foundations” of earth and sea? Who dares to claim power over life and death with nuclear weapons when you cannot make a bomb to equal an earthquake?
Who dares to explain the mystery of life and death, other than to observe, with Jesus our Lord, that the sun shines and tsunami destroys the just and the unjust? All people are heirs of the grace and the danger of human existence. Thanks be to God for our common humanity, and for God’s enduring love. We are not abandoned.
*The Richmond Times-Dispatch, 1/4/05
