Why does God send disasters?

By Aussiegirl

It seems that everyone is asking this question: why does God allow terrible things like tsunamis to happen? Does this not make you doubt the existence of God? Or make you angry that he is an unjust or cruel God?

Michael Novak makes some wonderful points in a column that I found on Timothy Birdnow's wonderful blog, called Birdblog -- read it at:

http://tbirdblog.blogspot.com/

Somehow I have never had any trouble with asking "What kind of God would do this?" sort of question -- it seems absurd to me. We live in a world of unimaginable forces, indeed it's a miracle that life managed to emerge at all and cling to this fragile ball hurtling through a universe filled with nightmarish explosions of violent fire and ice.

Yet somehow in all this, mankind has found a little floating refuge of relative safety. Only in an age so safely cosseted from the ravages of nature as ours can people who purport to be wise ask such foolish questions.

God does not visit hurricanes and earthquakes and tidal waves on humanity, nature does it. The nature which has been set into motion by the Creator and where we have a precarious toe-hold for some, as yet unknown to us reason. Why do we even exist? What went wrong that the world doesn't seem to be quite the Eden that it once was?

Like Michael Novak, I find my answer on the Cross at Calvary -- where God became man, and decided to experience everything that it means to be a human. To experience all the best and the worst that man can experience, first the love and devotion of parents and friends and followers, and then rejection, betrayal, condemnation, humiliation, and finally the cruelest form of physical suffering and death.

And to me, oddly enough, the most comforting words in the New Testament are the words with which Jesus cries out in despair -- when he asks that this cup be take from his lips, when he shrinks from what is to come, or when in his final moments even he cries out "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?".

For here we see that God is no longer a distant God who launched the world into being, set up the rules, and then sits back and lets us suffer without compassion or understanding. It took me years to come to my own understanding of the Trinity -- as it seemed like such an unnecessarily difficult concept. Why not just God -- plain and simple? Isn't that enough? But in the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, God becomes a man, and enters the universe and world -- the physical world which he has created ex nihilo at the moment of the Big Bang. And in entering it he experiences it as a fully human and frail man. And he too learns compassion towards his creation by experiencing it as a man.

So how can man fail to be comforted by these cries, by this suffering, which says to us, no matter how weak you are, no matter how you fail, no matter how you suffer, no matter how short you fall, no matter how you are rejected or hurt, no matter how much you suffer and doubt -- and even feel anger at God -- you are forgiven for all -- because God - as Jesus Christ - has himself experienced these same things, and even he was weak. And yet, even as he was, so shall we be saved.

This gives us the greatest strength to endure that we can possess. And that's why I simply look to the Cross -- and know -- that God created the world, that he entered the world and intruded himself into it in the body of Christ, and that he is still among us, working every day in the form of the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps I've strayed far from why God sends natural disasters, because really, that is not the question. The question is one of suffering and seeming unfairness. We are born with a sense of seeking the fair. Children say -- "But that's not fair." But justice is not of this world, as even Christ's story teaches us. Yet all is overcome in the end, in ways which we do not yet even comprehend.

Now we see as through a glass darkly, but then, face to face.