Word of Life


June 14th 2010



Why Does God Allow Disasters?  part 1

“To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat of it”, Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.’”
Genesis 3:17 (NIV)
 
First of all, I’m sure the first heart to break over disasters is God’s. But I think one answer to the question why God allows these disasters can be found in Genesis 3:17. God says here that the ground is now cursed. If man had not sinned we would still be in the Garden of Eden. And if we were still in the Garden of Eden there would be no earthquakes, tsunamis or nine-elevens.

In Romans 8:19-22, God tells us that the very creation is waiting for liberation: “The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”

So if we want somebody to blame for disasters, we need only look in a mirror because we are all sinners (Romans 3:23).

If any wonder why certain people suffer and others don’t, so did many in the Bible. Ecclesiastes 9:11-12 says, “I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favour to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. Moreover, no man knows when his hour will come: As fish are caught in a cruel net, or birds are taken in a snare, so men are trapped by evil times that fall unexpectedly upon them.”

Prayer
Father in heaven, help us to realise that until we again turn back to you and willingly live according to your will, the human race and our planet is heading for destruction. Help us to realise how helpless we are without your spirit dwelling within us.
Amen

Study by Bill Croall