Scott Garber Books

Is Life Cheap to God?
(A sermon in response to the tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004)

by

Scott Garber

The Jan. 10 issue of TIME magazine offers us a snapshot of the grim reality along the shores of the Indian Ocean:

"In Banda Aceh, death is inescapable. On the road that connects the airport to the city, cars are diverted away from a 400-yd. stretch where a backhoe is carving out gooey scoops of soil for a mass grave. A newly excavated pile of glistening earth nearby is mute testament to the 3,500 bodies that have already been interred. Trucks carrying the dead careen down the road toward the site with grim regularity, masked and gloved volunteers clinging to the cab or the sides–anywhere to be away from the bodies."

As of this week more than 225,000 were confirmed dead. This includes 163,000 in Indonesia alone. 38,000 in Sri Lanka. 16,000 in India. And over 5,000 in Thailand. As desperate families continue to search for loved ones, many are still unaccounted for. We’ll probably never know the true scope of the disaster, as it is unclear how many people were in these locations before the tsunami.

As is typically the case, when human explanations fail, we begin to think about God. And many are wondering if there could be a God who would let something so sinister occur. Or if there is a God, what was he thinking? Was he otherwise occupied? Was this a modern-day version of biblical judgment? Was God trying to make a point?

Disparate voices have weighed in on these questions, including some unexpected ones. Larry King spent a good portion of one of his programs asking former Presidents Clinton and Bush, Sr. about the impact of such natural disasters on their faith and ours. William Safire, writing in the New York Times, offered an exposition of the book of Job. Michael Novak, in the January issue of National Review, writes:

"What are we to say about a human condition in which "Nature red in tooth and claw" rears up on its massive hindquarters, and hurls a 30-foot wall of water against the lowlands of eleven of the poorest and most populous nations on earth?...

Truly, the continuing presence of evil in the world… is a great scandal to loving, believing Christians. It is truly hard for them to understand how a kind and gracious Providence can allow such terrible things to happen to human beings. To so many scores of thousands of human beings. On such a vast scale."

I received an e-mail the other day from someone who recently began attending our church, and he gave me permission to share it with you:

"Many of the responses I have heard on TV to why God would allow the Asian tsunami sound a bit dissatisfying and even unconvincing. Most theologians and pastors that I have heard (Franklin Graham, Rick Warren of Purpose-Driven Life, others) have essentially just said, ‘We don’t know why. There are many things we don’t understand. We should just remember that God loves us.’

Although this is true… if that were all, or even most of it, wouldn’t the Bible be much shorter? Over many pages, it tries instead to tell us not only that we should trust God but why we should.”

I agree. While it’s true that God’s ways are beyond our own, and it’s true that God loves us notwithstanding the fact that bad things happen—and it’s true that pleading ignorance communicates a humility which is undoubtedly appropriate to such discussions—there is a certain escapist feel to some of these responses. A reticence to struggle with prickly issues. A pious satisfaction with our own ignorance. And even a sense that faith in the self-contradictory is to be worn like a badge of authenticity.

Can’t we at least question the relevance of the questions? Aren’t there any Scriptural precedents to suggest answers for today? Isn’t there any explanation that, while it may not resolve every tension, could give us confidence that belief in God is more than just a psychological teddy bear in a cruel universe?

I believe there are answers, or at least helpful perspectives that we can offer in response to some of the questions which naturally arise in the face of such terrible mega-tragedies. And, since many of the same questions are applicable to the situations we all go through in life on a much smaller scale, it’s worth our time to ask them and answer them.

So, let’s consider four FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) showing up on God’s web site these days and see what light we can shed on them from his perspective.


1. Did God cause the tsunami and its fatal devastation?

Sometimes there are questions within a question. And sometimes those are the real questions. When we ask whether or not God sent this tsunami, we might be wondering whether God is really in control of the world or if just sits by wringing his hands.
The answer to this question is that, yes, God is ultimately in control of a world in which terrible things happen. He could have stopped the tsunami. He chose not to. We can’t remove God from the equation by pleading impotence and still do justice to the Jehovah of Scripture.

Sometimes behind such a question such as this there lies the additional question, would God ever bring about disaster? For if he never would, then he obviously didn’t do so this time.

But the answer to this question is also, yes. Yes, God can and does provoke human tragedy under certain circumstances. To argue otherwise requires either a gross ignorance or a radical reconstruction of the biblical record.
Isaiah 45:7: "I form the light and create darkness,
I bring prosperity and create disaster;
I, the LORD, do all these things."

The question before us, then, is not whether or not God could do such a thing or would do such a thing. After all it appears that he’s going to wreak considerably more havoc than a tsunami at his Second Coming. The question is whether or not this event was something God did.

And the short answer to that critical question is, “No, God did not cause this disaster.”

“But isn’t God sovereign?” you might ask. “I mean, either he is or he isn’t, right?”

The problem is that answering this question would not answer the question. Because this is the wrong question. We’re not talking here about sovereignty but about agency. Yes, God is sovereign, but he is not the agent of everything that happens in this world. Note that the verse we just read from Isaiah merely affirms that God does send disaster, not that he always does so nor that his agency is the only way it could come about.

God’s governance of the world is a little bit like that of a king, an absolute monarch, who allows his subjects to act freely. He has the right and the power to control their behavior, but he doesn’t always do so.

Remember the last time you sinned? God could have stopped you. He didn’t. Does that make him morally responsible for your action? No, because he was not the agent of that sinful action. He didn’t cause it to occur.

God has created a world in which he is the First Cause. But he has also created secondary causes which are real and independently functioning agents. By “independent” I don’t mean that they are completely autonomous, just that God has given them inherent properties that allow them to act without God’s immediate assistance.

God has created two kinds of independently functioning agents—personal and physical. Independently functioning personal agents can display their love and submission to God or assert their autonomy and distance themselves from him. Of course, God nowhere promises that human freedom is absolute. As sovereign, he retains the right to intervene in the process of human free will, hardening Pharaoh’s heart, changing the mind of the king, and inclining sinners to hear His Word and accept His grace.

Yet, God’s standard operating procedure is to allow us to act with a large measure of freedom. And because we are independently functioning moral agents, we are responsible for our actions. If we were mere robots, God would be responsible for our programming and its consequences.

In the same way, God has created independently functioning physical agents. He doesn’t push up every blade of grass or “whisper every flower into bloom,” poetic license aside. God has created water so that at 212 degrees Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius it turns to steam. He doesn’t have to supernaturally turn water to steam every time anywhere in the world, somebody’s teapot reached the boiling point. He has created the natural world with incredibly clever properties which regulate its function.

God has designed the geological world in such a way that tectonic plates float on an ocean of magma. The shifting of those plates generates earthquakes, a perfectly natural phenomenon. And when those earthquakes take place underwater, they have an impact on the seas. In the case of the recent tsunamis the seismic cataclysm was so strong that it spawned a killer tidal wave. The point is that all of this can be explained very straightforwardly as a natural occurrence without any direct supernatural involvement.

Could God have supernaturally stopped it? Certainly, just as he could stop you from sinning. But the point is that just because a phenomenon occurs doesn’t mean that God is actively causing it to occur. He has created independently functioning physical agents, and these causes are perfectly capable on their own of creating a given effect.

So, we don’t need to blame this situation on God because it requires a supernatural explanation or because his sovereignty demands it. But people are asking another related question on God’s web site these days.


2. Was the tsunami a judgment of God?

While certain Christian leaders have suggested or even affirmed this idea, it strikes me as an unwarranted and callous cheap shot designed to enhance their (pseudo-)prophetic bona fides. I believe that a review of how God typically carries out his judgments in Scripture supports this conclusion. When God uses events as judgment:


He typically issues warnings.

Nehemiah 9:29: "You warned them to return to your law, but they became arrogant and disobeyed your commands… Stubbornly they turned their backs on you, became stiff-necked and refused to listen. 30 For many years you were patient with them. By your Spirit you admonished them through your prophets. Yet they paid no attention, so you handed them over to the neighboring peoples."

God is not obligated to warn people, but he regularly does. He even did so in the case of Nineveh, the capital of pagan Assyria. In the case of the Asian tsunami there doesn’t appear to be any specific and widespread sin issue common to all those devastated by the disaster—or at least I don’t see any that would differentiate them from those who were not affected. Nor, as far as I know, did God sound any particular note of prior moral warning to the people affected by the disaster.


He typically spares his own.

We see this kind of protection in the Exodus story. We see it in prophecies concerning Christ’s Second Coming. And in Luke 21 Jesus warned his disciples to flee when they saw judgment coming, and when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D. many Christians indeed fled to Pella and were saved. As Peter explains this principle in 2 Peter 2:5-7:

"If he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man … if this is so, then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to hold the unrighteous for the day of judgment…"

So, when the effect is indiscriminate, as it was with this tsunami, it’s not likely that judgment was the primary motivation. And though most of the affected areas are not heavily Christianized, there were certainly significant pockets of believers affected.


He typically targets his judgment on specific offenders.

When God judged the Egyptians, he didn’t go after the Amorites and the Moabites at the same time. When he judged the Babylonians, he didn’t zap the Medes and Persians. Their time would come.

For the judgment to work as a piece of revelation there must be a linkage between the offense and God’s activity. Otherwise it looks like a terrible coincidence, and people don’t get it. He judges those targeted for judgment, so that it will be obvious who did it and why.

In the case of this tsunami, the affected group seems too broad to be a target of God’s judgment. What was the offense common to all of these people, Christians included, that would have upset God so much? God doesn’t unleash judgments cavalierly. He wouldn’t need to eliminate a quarter million people to send a message to 5,000 of them. That sort of collateral damage is not God’s MO.

As far as I can tell there’s no sign that all the tsunami victims had anything more in common than living along the Indian Ocean. So, based on what we’ve seen about the characteristics of divine judgment, assertions that this tsunami was a divine judgment strike me as baseless and pharisaical. It would be far better to err on the side of mercy than to be caught gloating over a tragedy that God grieves over.

Still… if the tsunami were a divine judgment, it might be easier to reconcile God’s omnipotence with his character. Then it would be God using his power to underline his holiness. But if God thinks this is a terrible tragedy, and he could have stopped it, why didn’t he? And doesn’t his inaction make him morally culpable? That leads us to our next Frequently Asked Question.


3. How can we reconcile God’s omnipotence with his goodness?

The problem here is what I call the Superman Syndrome. In the face of an impending global catastrophe, we might forgive mere mortals for standing around and wringing their hands. But not Superman. Superman has to intervene. Why? Because he can.

We feel that same Superman Syndrome, that same kind of moral obligation operating in the case of God. If he can fix what’s wrong, it seems as if he must. So, how do we square God’s omnipotence with his goodness? Is he required to right every wrong or to avoid all pain and suffering simply because he can?

Recognize that God’s primary responsibility is to himself and to his own righteousness—to be who he is. He, not we, is the highest good in the universe. That’s why his sacrifice for us is so incredible. Secondarily, he is obligated to his Word—to do what he said he will do. But he is not obligated to his creatures as if we deserved something. (In fact, we do deserve something, but it’s not something we want.)

There is no Magna Carta, no Bill of Rights, between the sovereign God and humankind. That doesn’t mean that God gets his jollies by beating up on humanity or that he vicariously delights in seeing other personal or physical agents torture us, as if bad people and tragic events were God’s goons that carry out his will while shielding him from blame.

But isn’t God love? And doesn’t that obligate him to love us? And doesn’t love mean protecting us from the terrible parts of life? This is the attitude is behind questions that begin with “How can a loving God…?” And lots of these questions have been asked recently.

Yes, God is by nature loving. That much is true. But love must be given freely or it’s not love but, rather, slavish devotion. There are conditions under which God’s love is expressed. Sometimes it has to do with us, sometimes with the counsel of his own will, which we cannot fathom. Keep in mind, however, that he is a loving God, not a loving machine that must spit out benevolence when the right buttons are pushed.

But even if God loved everyone exactly the same and expressed that love in the same manner in every case, that doesn’t mean that he would guard us from every ill—or even the big and nasty ones. Otherwise, we would have to conclude that the Father didn’t love his own Son, who first suffered the ignominy of leaving heaven to live in an underdeveloped world and then the pain of rejection and torture at the hands of his own creatures.

God is not answerable to us, nor is our welfare the single overriding principle governing his decision-making. You don’t like it? Well, paraphrasing what God told Job, go create your own universe and then you can make the rules.

So, now, having affirmed that God did not cause the tsunami, that this terrible tragedy was apparently not a divine judgment, and that God’s capacity to act and his inclination to love do not diminish his freedom, we come to the Frequently Asked Question that is the title of this message.


4. Is life cheap to God?

It’s probable that more than a quarter of a million people perished in this tsunami. If it didn’t slip through God’s fingers and if it was not for the purpose of judgment, then why did God permit it? Didn’t he care about the lives being snuffed out, the families being devastated, whole villages being washed away?

God tells us in Ezekiel 33:11: “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked...” So, if God would have found no pleasure in the tsunami as judgment, he certainly finds no pleasure in such an event when it is a natural tragedy.

When God’s people suffered, we find that he empathized with them. Isaiah 63:9: “In all their distress he too was distressed, and the angel of his presence saved them.”

Note that he saved them out of their distress rather than keeping them from experiencing it. And some of the people who suffered that distress had already lived and died in it before others were spared.

Terrible events move us to seek God in ways we otherwise would not. They move us to ask big and difficult questions and look to a reason and a purpose beyond ourselves. That doesn’t explain why terrible things happen, but it does help us to understand the response God wants to elicit from us when they do.

Even when terrible things happen, God cares. He cares for the fallen and grieves with the bereaved. And he desperately wants them to turn to him, not because he is their tormenter but because he is their only hope.

How does God demonstrate his compassion for those who suffer? His primary means of expression is through us. We are his hands and feet, bringing help and kindness in the name of Christ. We must help to demonstrate that life is not cheap to God.

What did Jesus do when he saw the people of his time poor and hungry and sick and demonized? Did he write an essay berating his Father for allowing such conditions to exist? No. He healed and he fed and he delivered.

Is life cheap to God? Where was he on Dec. 26, when, as Job 27:20-23 says of man in a passage eerily reminiscent of this tsunami:

"Terrors overtake him like a flood;
a tempest snatches him away in the night.
The east wind carries him off, and he is gone;
it sweeps him out of his place.
It hurls itself against him without mercy
as he flees headlong from its power.
It claps its hands in derision
and hisses him out of his place."

Is life cheap to God? On one level the answer seems easy. God created life and a world that could sustain it. God structured human society to protect and value life. Jesus even wept at the death of a friend. Far from cheap, life is precious to God. But what, then, can we say about a disaster of such monumental proportions?

We have seen that God is not the perpetrator of this tragedy. The perp, in this case, is an independent physical agent. God could have stopped it, but he typically allows secondary causes to influence history according to their own nature. Yes, he occasionally intervenes to demonstrate his power, reveal himself, or to right the course of what otherwise would have been. But not always. And not this time.

God doesn’t right every wrong in this life; that awaits a coming kingdom. Rather, he gives us a big shoulder to cry on, helps us to handle the hurt, directs us to help others who are struggling, and promises us a brighter day. That is a radically different vision of reality than the one that assumes that God’s job is to maximize our enjoyment and minimize our discomfort. It is a vision of reality that leads to different questions at times like these. And different answers.

No, we don’t know the ultimate answers that lie within the heart of God as to all the reasons why he sometimes intervenes and sometimes does not. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything about this matter.

As President Clinton said recently, this latest reminder that we are not in control should undoubtedly make us humble. But our assurance that God is all-wise, all-good, and all-powerful is not just an article of faith levied against the weight of all the evidence. It is a conviction which overlays our finitude on a backdrop of transcendence, against which all the dots can be and one day will be connected.

May God give us the grace to believe the sure realities we cannot see, the grace to have God’s heart for the incongruities between the world of His will and the world of His willingness, and the grace to be the incarnation of that body of Christ that brings help and hope where they are so desperately needed.

© Copyright Scott Garber, 2020