Ugh. Sorry for putting up two posts in one day. Sorry also to my sadly neglected fiction work for interrupting you to be distracted.
But a blog that I recently started following has this to say:
we need to be praying for God to use this tragedy for His purposes, for His glory. Could this “natural disaster” be yet another call for the people of the world to repent of our sins?
The Old Testament is filled with instances when God brought or allowed crises to bring peoples to their knees.
Oh, Christianity. Why do you do this? Do you not recall Hebrews 9? Because that passage is pretty clear. As I said over at that other blog:
’m sorry, but I just cannot accept that God uses natural disasters this day and age to communicate God’s plan for the world.
Nope.
Sure, that was commonplace in the Old Testament. But that was before the Christic Covenant and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Now that we have a direct line of communication with the Divine, God has no need to use those pre-propritiation methods of communicating God’s will.
Will there ever be a fire or flood or earthquake or eclipse or outbreak or other disaster that doesn’t have some of us rubbing our hands together gleefully delighting in the idea of a Smiting God?!?
Ya know, in Jewish scriptures the Divine is understood to have used disasters from time to time to punish people for their own sins. But not for anyone else’s. And Abraham argues even that sort of punishment down so it does not harm innocent neighbors. Unless your blogger is posting from Pakistan she may be misunderstanding.
I firmly believe that, when it’s not political grandstanding, the whole “God is punishing THEM” thing is a simple defense mechanism. Same reason that, following a rape, you often hear things such as “she shouldn’t have been walking alone in the dark…” Because if we can assign a REASON for why some terrible thing happened to somebody else, we can assure that it doesn’t happen to us (“I won’t walk alone in the dark so I can’t get raped” or “I’m a Christian so God won’t send me a flood”).
I completely agree with the blogger. She is not implying that He IS “smiting” them. She is only suggesting that this is another way He can bring glory to Himself. One of the purposes of tradegy in our lives is to bring us to our knees and humble us. Any time I hear of tragedy like this, I am humbled, grateful and repentant of my sin. Because after all, we all deserve to be flooded, raped, maimed, diseased, etc.
You have no idea why God ordained this flood, no one does. It might be discipline, it might not be. Either way the people of the world certainly need to be repenting of their sins.
I could go on and on, but I won’t. Just know that I agree with you. I think you are totally correct. I haven’t read the blog that you linked to, so I don’t know what he/she is talking about totally, but from this post and the point that you are making, I agree with you. I hate when I see my fellow christians be so un-christian like, in my opinion.
Hi, Katherine, thanks for linking to my post about the horrific flooding in Pakistan. I left a rather lengthy comment in response to what you wrote here and in the comments section at my blog. (I thought it might be helpful to know a little about the context from which I wrote the part you responded to here.)
This is how I began: Katherine, I knew I was opening myself up to be considered one of “those” Christians who thinks God is a “Smiting God,” as you put it on your blog (though I don’t think I said anything to make you think I am gleeful about this situation at all). Let me put my remarks in context.
Hope you can stop by A Christian Worldview of Fiction to read the rest of my answer.
Abby, thanks for stopping over to read the post. Your comment captures the heart of what I was trying to say.
Becky
are you crazy?
God is punishing the pakistan people for his GLORY????
God is not arrogant like some humans are who will do anything to make everyone think they are “great” (or worse)
No, we cannot understand the ways of g-d and why he did this. But this much I can say:
The world is a mess because people are mean and dishonest and kill and do everything they want with no fear of punishment.
That could be one of the reasons this is happening – but pakistan is not the only place. Every day we hear of another disaster in some part of the world. Stop lying.
don’t show off. Play with your kids (and throw out that stupid TV) Teach them manners. Teach them humility. Teach them modesty. Teach boys to respect women. and ; stop talking bad about other people. Then the world will be a better place.