So things do not just work out somehow if we let nature take its course. God causes this synergism to happen. He is the One who stirs the mix! This is why disaster cannot defeat God or derail His plans and purposes. All nature is under His control: all things work together. The One who controls nature holds us in His hands.
Donald Grey Barnhouse explains that the “we know” part of Romans 8:28 is a superb antidote to the fear of disaster:
It is possible here and now for us to know that all things work together for our good. To lay hold of that fact is to calm the turbulence of life and to bring quiet and confidence into the whole of life. Nothing can touch me unless it passes through the will of God. God has a plan for my life. God is working according to a fixed, eternal purpose.[7]
In the following poem, Annie Johnson Flint uses the intricate workings of factory machinery to give us a creative picture of God’s complete control of “all things”:
In a factory building, there are wheels and gearings,
There are cranks, pulleys, belts either tight or slack—
Some are whirling swiftly, some are turning slowly,
Some are thrusting forward, some are pulling back;
Some are smooth and silent, some are rough and noisy,
Pounding, rattling, clanking, moving with a jerk;
In a wild confusion in a seeming chaos,
Lifting, pushing, driving—but they do their work.
From the mightiest lever to the smallest cog or gear,
All things move together for the purpose planned;
And behind the working is a mind controlling,
And a force directing, and a guiding hand.
So all things are working for the Lord’s beloved;
Some things might be hurtful if alone they stood;
Some might seem to hinder; some might draw us backward;
But they work together, and they work for good,
All the thwarted longings, all the stern denials,
All the contradictions, hard to understand.
And the force that holds them, speeds them and retards them,
Stops and starts and guides them—is our Father’s hand.[8]
Several years ago my wife and I were reminded of an inspiring example of one couple who trusted God’s control over all things. While we were visiting Jerusalem, some friends took us to lunch at the American Colony Hotel. As we sat down to eat, we were handed a small brochure that told the story of the hotel and its restaurant.
I was shocked to discover that the hotel belonged to the family of Horatio Spafford, the man who wrote the words to my favorite Gospel hymn, “It Is Well with My Soul.” I have often recounted the tragic circumstances that surrounded the writing of that song, but the brochure included facts I hadn’t known. Here is that story:
In 1871, Horatio Spafford lived in the Lake View suburb of Chicago. He was a young lawyer with a wife, Anna, and four little girls. In October of that year, the whole center of the city was devastated by fire. No one is certain how the fire started, but it killed hundreds of people and destroyed whole sections of the city.
All across town, people were wandering homeless and hungry. The Spaffords were deeply involved in doing what they could to help families in distress. But it was no short-term ministry. Two years later, exhausted from their work, they planned a trip to Europe for rest. But at the last minute, business kept Horatio in town. Anna and the four girls boarded a ship and left the harbor.
Late one night during the voyage, another ship rammed the steamer, which sank within twenty minutes. One of only forty-seven who were rescued, Anna was pulled from the water, unconscious and floating on a piece of debris. But the four Spafford girls perished. Anna sent a telegram from Paris to her husband: “Saved alone. What shall I do?” She remarked to another passenger that God had given her four daughters and taken them away and that perhaps someday she would understand why.
Horatio boarded a ship to find his wife and bring her home. When the ship’s path crossed the very point where his daughters had been lost, the captain called him to his cabin and told him so. Horatio, deeply moved, found a piece of paper from the hotel in which he had stayed before the voyage. He jotted down the words to “It Is Well with My Soul,” now one of the world’s favorite hymns.
Back in Chicago, the couple tried to start over again. A son was born to them, and then another daughter. Maybe the worst was over. But then, another tragedy: the boy died of scarlet fever at four years old.
Inexplicably, the family’s church took the view that these tragedies were surely the punishment of a wrathful God for some unspecified sin on the part of the Spaffords. An elder in a church he had helped build, Horatio was asked to leave rather than being taken in and comforted by a healing community.
In 1881, the little family left the United States to begin a new life in Jerusalem. They rented a house in the Old City section, with the goal of imitating the lives of the first-century Christians as closely as possible. Soon the family was widely known for their love and service to the needy, as well as for their devotion to the Scriptures. Even today, the Spafford Children’s Center serves Jerusalem and the West Bank by providing health care and educational support to as many as thirty thousand children annually under the leadership of the Spaffords’ descendants.[9]
Anna and Horatio Spafford suffered severe testings of their faith, but they did not blame God for their suffering. They knew He was in control of all things, and because He could not be defeated, neither could they. Their faith allowed them to learn through their testings and to use their pain to bless others and further the Gospel.
I hope this section has helped lift the fog that obscures our understanding of God’s connection with disaster. When our pain leads us to see Him as uninvolved in calamity, powerless to control it, or defeated by it, we saw off the limb that supports us, and we plunge into fear. This leaves us without hope, for an all-powerful God is our only solace in tragic times.
Now we will look at ways in which the experience of disaster can actually bless us.
Natural Disasters and the Responsibilities of Man
In the midst of pain and grief, it’s hard to realize that disasters can bring vital benefits. Just as destructive forest fires clean out the underbrush that would eventually stifle the trees, disasters in our lives can cause us to see our blind spots and address them with clearer vision.
Disasters Teach Us to Repent of Our Sin
Earlier in this chapter we discussed an occasion from Luke 13 in which Jesus refers to two contemporary tragedies. Did the victims die because they were more sinful than the survivors? No, He replies; we all perish unless we repent. In other words, the greatest natural disaster of all happened in the Garden of Eden; the rest is collateral damage. The Fall makes us all victims unless we allow Jesus Christ to handle the problem of our sin.
When you read about people losing their lives in fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and tsunamis, do you ever wonder how many of them were prepared to meet their God? Does the question cause you to examine your own readiness (2 Corinthians 13:5)? Our readiness to meet God greatly reduces our fear of disaster.
Many factors are at work in the scope of a disaster, but one of them is surely the work of God drawing our attention to Himself. In truth, we are surrounded by unrecognized tragedies and disasters: a dark, sex-obsessed, violent culture; the rapid decline of morality; the deterioration of Christian influence in our world. How many more are victims to these man-made poisons than to the forces of wind and weather? Sometimes it requires the dramatic power of a hurricane or some other force in nature to capture our attention and turn our minds to matters of eternity.
God uses disasters and tragedies to accomplish His perfect will in us and through us—and sometimes to bring us to Himself in the first place. In the church I pastor, almost all who give testimony to their faith at their baptism have one thing in common: they are brought to Christ through some difficult experience. Often it is the loss of a
loved one or a divorce or the loss of employment. God uses difficulty and disaster to get the attention of those He is pursuing.
How does this work? Erwin Lutzer tells us,
Disasters might drive some people away from God, but for others it has the opposite effect, driving them into the arms of Jesus. The destruction of nature has helped them distinguish the temporary from the permanent. Disasters remind the living that tomorrow is uncertain, so we must prepare for eternity today. Today is the accepted time; today is the day of salvation.
When disasters come, God is not on trial, we are.[10]
Disasters Teach Us to Reflect on God’s Goodness
When I watch reports of natural disasters as they are instantaneously delivered to us through the media, my first thoughts are for the lives lost and the families torn apart. I also experience a sense of gratitude that my family and people I know were not touched by these events.
I used to feel guilty about this in the same way I felt guilty about people who got cancer at the same time I did but did not survive. But I have since come to understand that it is proper to be grateful that I have been saved even while I mourn for those who have been lost.
Mark Mittelberg writes,
It’s common in the middle of a drought . . . to forget that rain is the norm. Or in the middle of a flood to forget that floods rarely happen. Or when bad news comes from the doctor to forget that, for most of us, this comes after many years of relatively good health.[11]
God’s blessings abound; they are the norm, and it’s proper to be grateful for them at all times, regardless of surrounding circumstances.
Disasters Teach Us to Respond to the Hurting
The Southern California wildfires of 2003 and 2007 destroyed the homes of several of our church families and decimated a community in the mountains above our place of worship. I had never experienced anything that touched our church so directly.
To this day, people still talk about the ways they were changed for the better from an event that couldn’t have seemed any worse. When the devil sends a wildfire, God sends the holy fire of Spirit-filled followers of Christ. When the devil sends a flood, God sends the refreshment of living water.
During those tragic events, many of our people did exactly what Job’s friends did at first: they sat with hurting people. Sometimes silent presence is the most powerful ministry. When folks are grieving, for example, spiritual rationalizations and the wholesale quoting of Scripture verses can fall flat. People don’t need our answers—they simply need our shoulders to cry on, our company in the darkness. These are the moments when the church of Jesus Christ is at its very best. And when someone finally turns to us and asks why, we can say, “I’d love to sit down with you over coffee and work on those questions together soon. But right now, I’m here to serve you. What can I do?”
In 1940, C. S. Lewis published his first popular book on Christian doctrine, The Problem of Pain. It was an intellectual attack on the view that suffering and evil rule out the existence of God. It was a book for the mind—and a good one. But it didn’t really touch the heart; that came twenty-one years later, when Lewis found himself writing a very different kind of book.
In A Grief Observed, Lewis’s aching sadness and even anger radiated from every page. He had lost his beloved wife to bone cancer, and he was overwhelmed with sorrow. He was no longer interested in debating points; now his heart was broken. This new book held more questions than answers. It read as a journey of mourning that somehow arrived at a safe harbor for faith.
When he finished writing, Lewis understood that the world had never seen him this raw and emotional. He decided to publish A Grief Observed under the pen name N. W. Clerk. Yet soon an army of loving friends were bringing him “Clerk’s” book, saying, “Here, perhaps this little volume will help you.” Lewis had to come out from behind his pseudonym and admit that he was the book’s author and the owner of the pain it displayed. It was the book born out of pain, even more than the book with the intellectual answers, that ministered to others who were suffering.[12]
Disasters perform a painful surgery in our inmost parts, but the Physician’s hand is tender and sure. He wants to make us better, stronger, more capable of ministry in a world of broken hearts. As we minister to our own pain and the pain of others, we take on a growing resemblance to the Savior who healed pain everywhere He encountered it.
Disasters Teach Us to Remember God’s Promise
God has given us a spectacular, all-encompassing promise that provides the ultimate cure for our fear of disaster. Revelation 21:3-4 says, “I heard a loud voice from heaven saying, ‘Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God. And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away.’”
Disasters remind us that God doesn’t intend for this fallen earth, with its death, disaster, and corruption, to be our permanent home. As the old spiritual says, “This world is not my home; I’m just a passin’ through.” The calamities we experience here are only temporary phenomena. Each disaster reminds us that a disaster-free eternity awaits us and inspires our hearts to hope for it.
Paul affirms this longing: “The earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God. . . . For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now” (Romans 8:19, 22).
Disasters Teach Us to Rely on God’s Presence and His Power
We began this chapter by looking into the terrible experience of a man named Job. It’s fitting that we return to his life again to discover how the tragic events of his life fully played themselves out.
Job experiences severe depression as he struggles to deal with his losses. But soon he finds within himself a powerful hope, a trusting commitment to God. “Though He slay me,” Job resolves, “yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
By the grace of God, Job manages to maintain his strong faith and reliance on God, certain that something better is in store for him:
I know that my Redeemer lives,
And He shall stand at last on the earth;
And after my skin is destroyed, this I know,
That in my flesh I shall see God,
Whom I shall see for myself,
And my eyes shall behold, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!
JOB 19:25-27
Finally God speaks to Job and his friends. But instead of explaining His ways, He proclaims His almighty power and puts to shame their bumbling attempts to explain suffering. On hearing the voice of God, Job humbles himself and repents of his questioning of God:
I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
Therefore I abhor myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.
JOB 42:5-6
But that wasn’t the end of Job’s story. In the last chapter of his book we are told that “the LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning,” giving him a superabundance of livestock and ten more children (Job 42:12-15). Thus Job was amply rewarded for his patience, his faith, and his complete trust in God’s power.
We should not take this to mean that all who suffer disaster will have everything restored in this life. The promise is that no matter what those who love God suffer here, a time is coming when God’s blessings will cause us to forget every pain we ever endured.
Famed devotional author Hannah Whitall Smith was plagued with terrible pain and unanswered questions. It seemed to her, just as it seems to you and me, that no one could possibly understand what she was experiencing. She didn’t know where to turn for help until she was told of a deeply spiritual Christian woman living nearby:
I summoned up my courage, therefore, one afternoon, and went to see her, and poured out my troubles; expecting that of course she would t
ake a deep interest in me, and would be at great pains to do all she could to help me. . . . When I had finished my story, and had paused, expecting sympathy and consideration, she simply said, “Yes, all you say may be very true, but then in spite of it all, there is God.”
I waited a few minutes for something more, but nothing came, and my friend and teacher had the air of having said all that was necessary. “But,” I continued, “surely you did not understand how very serious and perplexing my difficulties are.”
“Oh, yes, I did,” replied my friend, “but then, as I tell you, there is God.” And I could not induce her to make any other answer. It seemed to me most disappointing and unsatisfactory. I felt that my peculiar and really harrowing experiences could not be met by anything so simple as merely the statement, “Yes, but there is God.” . . .
At last . . . I came gradually to believing, that, being my Creator and Redeemer, He must be enough; and at last a conviction burst upon me that He really was enough, and my eyes were opened to the fact of the absolute and utter all-sufficiency of God.[13]
God is enough. Do these words of guidance seem to you as they did at first to Hannah—a trite oversimplification? They could be viewed that way until, like Hannah, we think a little more deeply. The fact is, God must be enough, for if He isn’t, where do we go for plan B? If the God of heaven and earth—who is mightier than all the world’s armies, who can cause the earth to melt into the sea—is not Lord of your crisis, you’re in deep trouble. And so am I.
God is sufficient. He is in control. He holds the destiny of the galaxies in His hands, all the while knowing the precise number of hairs on your head. Above all else, He loves you and chose to pour that love out, not in words, but in blood.
Hope Page 12