Things That Make You Wonder

"Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know."

~ Job 42:3

Last August Pastor John Piper of Bethlehem Baptist made waves around the Twin Cities by saying the mini tornado that yanked the cross off the steeple of the Central Lutheran Church here in downtown Minneapolis may well have been a gentle, but ominous warning from God.  Inside that church at that very moment, ELCA denominational leaders were meeting to discuss the issue of homosexual clergy.  They were moving and have now fully moved in a direction many people (myself included) feel unbiblical and spiritually worrisome. 

Pastor Greg Boyd of Woodland Hills Church across town, unsurprisingly, took Piper to task for his comments. Since hundreds of tornadoes strike all over the country every year, Boyd felt it unwise to make pronouncements about God's intent behind any particular one of them.  He also questioned why God would send such a warning and not send warnings in so many other situations.  And does God use natural disasters to send messages?  Wouldn't there be a better way to get a message across?

While I almost completely agree with Greg Boyd's questions and arguments, while I too question the wisdom of making spiritually sweeping pronouncements about natural disasters and weather reports - I must confess to some hesitation.  Maybe I'm loopy, but if I were sitting in that church building that afternoon, discussing what they were discussing and some strange winds came along and snapped just the cross off our steeple, I must admit it would give me serious cause to ponder.   I doubt I would say anything out loud about it - but I would be lying if I didn't admit to some curiosity.  Sometimes God does speak in mysterious ways.

In the aftermath of last week's horrific Haitian earthquake, Pat Robertson said Haiti had been horribly cursed ever since its leadership made a deal with the devil at the time of its revolution against the French many years ago.  I don't know exactly what deal with the devil Robertson is talking about, or what Haitian leaders would have the authority to make such a deal and doom an entire nation  - but in any event, Robertson ignited a firestorm.  While Robertson never specifically implied God sent the earthquake or that the Haitian people somehow particularly deserved it, his remarks could and certainly were interpreted that way.  Putting his incendiary remarks in the hands of a culture already hungry for any evidence of Christian hate-mongering wasn't a good thing.  At best, even if his comments were completely correct (which I sincerely doubt), they were very, very poorly timed. 

When I was in Haiti for a couple months in 1978 building an orphanage school, we went to bed each night to the sound of voodoo drums in the mountains above our heads.  Near the end of our summer there, we discovered a voodoo sacrificed dog floating in our water supply - somebody actually tried to poison us!  The missionaries told many stories of spiritual opposition and evil.  Years later, during my military service, as Baby Doc Duvalier fell from power and the country descended even further into chaos, I was privy to some pretty creepy, classified information about things regularly taking place in the country.  There was, and I fully suspect, still are some truly evil things going on in that very impoverished nation.  I have no doubt in my mind there are indeed people in Haiti who have sold their soul to the devil in one way or another.

But that is true everywhere.  So how can we make sweeping, conclusive spiritual pronouncements about what is or is not happening in the spiritual/physical battles taking place in countries around the world?  The short answer is - we can't.  While Almighty God indeed shook down the walls of Jericho, rained down fire on Sodom and Gomorrah, while the armies of God wiped out 100,000 Assyrians in one night and while the book of Revelation does not appear to be "peace and safety" for many lost people at the end of time, we don't know very much about how, when and why God chooses to punish or spare nations.  While I do wonder what is going on behind the scenes in Haiti spiritually, this stuff is way above my pay grade!  Almighty God has not surrendered to us the authority to definitively declare the ultimate cause or causes of Haiti's earthquake or almost any other disaster taking place.  Is God punishing that nation or did He have anything at all to do with this tragedy?  Is our enemy Satan simply devouring people, as he so enjoys doing?  Have the people of Haiti so aligned themselves with the devil, they are now simply receiving the due penalty for their sin?  Or is the nation of Haiti simply unfortunate geographically - is this simply a case of a little nation sitting in a bad spot both for hurricanes and earthquakes?  Who knows?

When Jesus was approached by people in need of love and healing, he didn't stop to analyze who or what  was the ultimate cause of their problem.  Typically, he resisted thinking in those directions.  The lepers simply got healed, the cripples walked and the bleeding woman got well.  Interestingly, even the twisted demoniacs didn't merit much of a "how'd you get this way" lecture! 

We can and will play our cruel speculating games at awful earthquake moments like this (we just can't seem to help ourselves), but at the end of the day, it is simply not ours to answer these deep questions.  We are not qualified.  We are but Job's friends in this situation - we do well to simply shut our mouths, sit down in the dirt beside people and love/serve our hurting friends however we possibly can.

May God help us all be the hands and feet of Jesus we are called to be!

Amen.