Where Is God When a Disaster Happens? – Part 1
John Ankerberg and Dillon Burroughs[1]
- 9/11
- The AIDS/HIV Epidemic
- Hurricane Katrina
- Cancer
- War
- Poverty
These and other issues often plague our minds with one probing question—How can God allow suffering and evil?
The problem of evil is one of the greatest challenges to the Christian faith made by skeptics today. Even for devoted followers of Christ, there is no greater test of faith than questions like, “If God really is all-powerful and loving, then why am I suffering this way?” “Why does a good God allow His children to suffer?” We see wars, hunger, violence, and natural disasters on television and question how God could really care about the predicament of those in need. Is God really there at all?
Some people blame fate or destiny, suggesting that evil has no rhyme or reason. Suffering is simply random. Others believe there is some evil force or spirits that wreak the havoc that causes today’s problems. Many times, God Himself is blamed for catastrophes. In the insurance world, natural disasters are even called “acts of God.”
Maybe you’ve heard a speaker mention that the problems we face in life are forms of testing, but does such a view cover every bad thing that happens in our lives? What about the miscarriage of a baby? How could that be considered a test from God? What about the loss of a parent, spouse, or child? Could God really be using such a tragedy to grow our faith?
These are tough questions, many of which the Bible tackles directly. In the Bible, “evil” is mentioned over 440 different times. God is familiar with the reality of evil and addresses it specifically. God is also intimately familiar with suffering. He addresses it 145 times in Scripture. One of the larger books of the Bible, the book of Job, is devoted primarily to this question. The books of Jeremiah and Habakkuk have much to say about it. About one third of the Psalms, the prayers of the Old Testament, are cries that arise out of doubt, disappointment, or pain. Even Jesus Christ experienced suffering and evil at the hands of others during His crucifixion.
Yet we still often feel that God doesn’t seem to be there when the times are tough. Dr. Erwin Lutzer writes, “We must be careful about what we say about tragedies. If we say too much, we may err, thinking we can read the fine print of God’s purposes. But if we say nothing, we give the impression that there is no message we can learn from calamities. I believe that God does speak through these events, but we must be cautious about thinking we know the details of his agenda.”[2] As we struggle with these difficult questions, take comfort that the Bible does provide reasonable answers for many of our longings.
Did God Create Evil?
If God created everything (and Christians say He has), and since evil exists (and we believe it does exist), then isn’t God the creator of evil? The answer is no.
Evil is real, but evil is not a thing. Evil is a lack of good things. For example, if you have a wound in your arm, the wound is not an additional thing; it is a lack of health and wholeness in your arm. If you rip the sleeve of your jacket, the tear is not something in addition to the jacket; it is a lack of wholeness for the jacket. Evil is a lack of what is good, similar to a bodily wound or tear in a garment. What exists is good, but the evil is the lack in the wholeness of what should be there.
How Did Evil Enter Our World?
To answer this question, we must travel back to the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve in Genesis 3. In verses 1-6, we find the progression of circumstances that led this couple from obedience to disobedience and the beginnings of evil.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
Eve did four things that marked this entry of sin into the human race: 1) Temptation: She saw that the fruit looked good; 2) Initiation: She took the fruit; 3) Execution: She ate the fruit; 4) Extension: She gave the fruit to Adam to eat.
In an interview I (John) conducted with theologian and professor Dr. Norman Geisler, I asked him how he answers the question, “Where did the evil come from that is in this world?”
His response was:
According to the Bible, God is absolutely good and He made an absolutely good world. Everything He made, He said it is good. Every creature of God is good.
One of the good things that He gave some of those good creatures was free will. It is good to be free. Hardly anyone would say freedom is bad… [but] freedom is the source of evil, because if you are really free to love God, you are also free not to love Him…. So evil arose from free will. Freedom is good. God created the good of freedom. Man performs the acts of evil by misusing his freedom.
Why Do Natural Disasters Occur?
It is important to realize we live in a fallen world as a result of our first ancestors, Adam and Eve, who chose to disobey God. This brought negative consequences, including:
- A broken relationship with God (Genesis 3:22-24).
- A curse on the natural world (Genesis 3:17-19).
- Increased pains in childbearing (Genesis 3:16).
As a result, even though we are free creatures, we live in a world affected by the wrong use of human choice. Further, we live in a world in which consistent natural processes allow us to predict with some certainty the outcome of our choices and actions.
We can notice something striking about the natural laws God has instituted. Gravity is a natural process without which we could not function. Yet if we fall out of a tree, or step off of a roof, this same good natural law could result in great harm.
While some cataclysmic events in nature may be direct, causal “acts of God,” others may be necessary byproducts of the creation of a world suitable for life. Plate tectonics, while resulting in earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes for instance, also play a role in the development of petroleum deposits.
The water cycle brings flash floods, hurricanes, mudslides, and tornadoes, but also distributes water to crops and cattle. In other words, sometimes evil is a byproduct of a good thing. It is good to have water to drink, to irrigate crops, or to use for swimming or fishing. But a byproduct of that good is that we could also drown in the same water. The assumption that God could have created a world free of natural catastrophes if truly benevolent requires a level of total knowledge that only God holds.
It is not only unnecessary, but also impossible, to completely understand why natural disasters occur and destroy property, animals, and human lives. It is important to understand that though we know God controls nature, sometimes God allows things to happen for reasons our finite minds cannot explain. Though we have God’s Word to guide us, we do not have the answers to all of life’s big questions, including the mysterious ways of our Creator. To connect particular natural disasters to the actions or problems of a particular group of people is speculation that only compounds already difficult situations.
Why Doesn’t God Do Something About Evil?
When life doesn’t seem fair, how does it make us feel? Angry? Discouraged? Disappointed? Often, we think God should have done something to change the situation. When He doesn’t, it can naturally cause us to doubt who He really is and possibly whether He is even there at all.
These feelings pull at our hearts even more deeply when the issues transition from everyday problems to life-altering tragedies. When a parent loses a young child, why doesn’t God do something about it? When a friend or loved one is afflicted with cancer, we wonder why this disease has afflicted a person we care about? When our own personal health comes under attack, we certainly have second thoughts about life. Late at night, when we are staring at the ceiling because of an injustice from earlier in the day, there are many times a common question emerges from deep within the recesses of our soul—Why doesn’t God do something about it?
One writer has even claimed, “There is a fundamental sense in which evil is not something that can be made sense of. The essence of evil is that it is something which is absurd, bizarre and irrational. It is the nature of evil to be inexplicable, an enigma and a stupidity.”[3]
Is God really there? And if He is, does He care about what is happening in our daily lives or not? If He is really all-powerful and loving, why couldn’t He end the AIDS crisis, stop a tsunami or hurricane from devastating lives, or heal our loved ones when they are sick? Couldn’t He at least cause that sports car that cuts us off to have a flat tire?
Why doesn’t God do something about suffering and evil?
(to be continued)
Go Deeper
- Exploring the Hope of Jesus in the Book of Revelation Collection
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- This article series includes excerpts from our book, “Why Does God Allow Evil and Suffering?” (Available as an ebook in our online store at jashow.org). ↑
- Erwin Lutzer, Where Was God? Answers to Tough Questions About God and Natural Disasters (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 2006), p. 6. ↑
- Nigel Wight, The Satan Syndrome (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1990), p. 66. ↑
