The Sydney Morning Herald last month published this article about whether the recent tsunami in the Solomon Island’s represents God’s punishment for “straying from Christian ways”. Similar accusations have been made concerning many natural disasters – our present drought, Hurricane Katrina, the Sri Lankan tsunami etc.

I don’t believe that this is the case however. Those who work regularly with children will tell you that discipline is only effective if the child knows what they are being disciplined for. Throughout the Bible, where God has used natural disaster as a means of judgment, he has accompanied it with prophetic explanation of the reasons for it – which hasn’t (so far as I know) occurred in this instance. See, for example, the book of Joel, where Joel announces the Lord’s judgment through the recent plagues of locusts. Further, that judgment was on the basis of the people having transgressed the laws that were given them through Moses, and God was enacting the punishment dictated in those laws – see Deuteronomy 28.

This disaster, to me, is another instance of a world in trouble, “groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Rom 8:22). A world where such things happen and lead to death is a world gone wrong, a world far astray from the perfect creation God had planned for us. So whilst the tsunami is not a specific judgment upon the people of the Solomons, it is in many ways an ongoing judgment upon humanity in general.

I also believe that God uses the forces of nature to remind us that he is ever present, to cause us to lift our eyes to him even if only to cry out, “Will not the Judge of all the Earth do right?” (Gen 18:25), or, “Oh that I had someone to hear me!” (Job 31:35). I was talking tonight to a friend who was in India when the tsunami hit India, Thailand and Sri Lanka in 2004, and he was telling me of the numerous conversations about God started by that event. He spent 3 hours talking to one guy who wanted to understand how God could allow such a thing, and why. I, like my friend, don’t know the answers for sure, and probably won’t this side of heaven. But maybe, just maybe, it was so that that conversation (and perhaps many more just like it) would take place.