“The Tsunami and the Gospel”

Job 38:1-18

John T. Mabray, Pastor

Rivermont Evangelical Presbyterian Church

Lynchburg, Virginia

January 16, 2005

8:30 and 11:00 A.M.

THE PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION

Almighty, everlasting, and unchanging God, the Creator and Sovereign Ruler of heaven and earth: send forth Your Spirit to illumine our minds and to enlighten the eyes of our hearts and to humble our souls before You, so that we might receive Your holy word in true faith, with spiritual understanding; that with humility and gratitude, we might respond in the obedience of faith; through the grace and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

          Although I rarely preach sermons directly related to “current events,” it seems to me that the tsunami which hit Southeast Asia on December 26 is an event which warrants pastoral instruction from the pulpit. Certainly, a catastrophe of this magnitude – we might say, of Biblical proportions – immediately raises all kinds of theological questions among people of various religions and even among agnostics. Of course, there are some questions to which we do not have the final, absolute answer because the final, absolute answers to some of our specific questions have not been revealed in God’s written word. “The secret things belong to the lord” (Deuteronomy 29:29); and,

How unsearchable his judgments,

and his paths beyond tracing out!

Who has known the mind of the lord,

or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:33b-34).

          We would also do well to remember that with regard to the calamities which Job suffered, God did not answer all of the questions which Job and his theological counselors had been struggling to figure out. God’s “answer” was quite different from the one which Job had been seeking.  

The LORD did not respond with an explanation to justify His ways to Job. He answered Job’s questions with questions – questions intended to lead Job to the answer that he really needed: the sovereign wisdom and power of God beyond all human understanding. Although these questions may contain a rebuke to Job, the LORD asked these questions in order to reveal Himself more fully to Job and to restore Job to a relationship of deeper faith, submission, and worship.

Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation (the tectonic plates)? …

Who marked off its dimensions? …

Who stretched a measuring line across it?

On what were its footings set,

or who laid its cornerstone …?

Who shut up the sea behind the doors

when it burst forth from the womb,

When I made the clouds its garment

and wrapped it in thick darkness,

When I fixed the limits for it

and set its doors and bars in place,

When I said, “this far you may come and no farther;

here is where your proud waves halt”? (Job 38:4-11).

          With these questions, the LORD was calling Job, and is calling us, to trust in Him, the Sovereign Creator and Ruler of heaven and earth; the LORD was calling Job, and is calling us whenever we suffer in whatever way, to bow ourselves before the LORD in humility, to put our hands over our mouths and to repent of all our accusations and complaints against Him. The LORD was calling Job, and is calling us, to acknowledge Him and to submit ourselves to Him as the Sovereign Holy One. All of this is to say that when we consider a catastrophe such as the tsunami, seeking to gain some theological interpretation of it, we must do so with humility and with a willingness to entrust into God’s infinite goodness, wisdom, and justice, all the things which we cannot comprehend or understand with our finite minds.

          So, then, how are we as Christians to respond to the tsunami? First of all: with compassion for the suffering. We must respond with an outpouring of tangible, physical, material, financial compassion and mercy to relieve the suffering and to help restore lives and rebuild human communities. Very simply: we must love our neighbors as ourselves. In this age of instant telecommunications, and worldwide travel in a matter of hours, we do, indeed, live in a “global village,” and our neighbor lives on the other side of the world. When a disaster such as this takes place, it jars us into the realization of our common humanity – our common humanity – with all people everywhere.

          This does not deny the very real differences between nations and cultures, nor does it deny the distinction between the Church – the Body of Christ, God’s covenant people on the earth – and the unbelieving, pagan world. No, this does not deny those differences and distinctions at all; but rather it ought to show us Christians that now, more than ever before in the history of the world, we have been positioned by God’s providence to be “the light of the world” and “the salt of the earth.”

    He has told you, O man, what is good;

        and what does the Lord require of you

    but to do justice, and to love kindness,

        and to walk humbly with your God? Micah 6:8 (ESV) 

          I trust that many of you have given generously according to your ability, but I would urge us all to remember that Christian compassion is not a matter of mere emotion but also of commitment. There are going to be a lot of needs for a long time – for a long time after the tsunami is no longer “the news.” So, let us not be Americans with short memories, but Christians with continuing commitments of compassion. And as a word of encouragement, let me say how thankful I am that we have good and faithful mission partners who are well-known to us (they are family!) – WorldHelp and New Directions International. They are strategically positioned with partners in local churches in the affected areas, so that we can be assured that the financial support we give actually gets to the people who need it, and is administered by people who know best how to meet the needs. And our partners, WorldHelp and New Directions, do this on the front lines, in the face of anti-Christian opposition and persecution, and they need our prayers. Likewise, our denomination, the EPC, channels its financial resources through WorldRelief, a missions agency of the National Association of Evangelicals. All of these organizations maintain the highest levels of financial accountability, and they are our human link to our brothers and sisters in Christ who are ministering to all those who suffer in those regions. They put hands and feet on our dollars, so that Christian compassion may be put into action, enabling us to love our neighbor on the other side of the world – and that must be our first response.

          Secondly: Whenever calamity strikes, human beings search for meaning; having been created in the image of God, we instinctively seek to bring order out of the chaos. It is at this point that we must turn to the Bible for answers, but we must do so with humility, fear, and trembling – not with cold, arrogant, know-it-all rationalism. God is not a philosophical abstraction: He is the Holy One, with whom we have to do. The Bible teaches us that the true and living God, the Creator of heaven and earth, rules and governs all creation, and works all things according to the counsel of His will. The Bible says that

In his hand are the depths of the earth (the tectonic plates), (and) ...The sea is his, for he made it” (Psalm 95:4-5).

Psalm 135:6 says,

Whatever the Lord pleases, he does,

in heaven and on earth,

in the seas and all deeps.

The LORD himself declared through the prophet Isaiah,

I form light and create darkness,

I make well-being and create calamity,

I am the Lord, who does all these things (Isaiah 45:7 ESV). 

          The Scriptures, then, teach us that God ordained, decreed, directed, and acted in and through the catastrophe of the tsunami, in accordance with the counsel of His own inscrutable will and for the sake of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy. To affirm that does not mean that we understand everything, but it is to affirm that the Sovereign God rules in righteousness over all His creation. God is not removed or detached from this world; and He was not asleep, He was not taken by surprise, and He was not too weak to prevent it from happening.

But at this point, what we ought to do (indeed, must do!) is not simply get that abstract truth in our heads and affirm the sovereignty of God as correct doctrinal data, and pat ourselves on the back for knowing the “right answer,” but rather, we must get a visual image of that wall of water and the devastation it wrought, and lay our own faces in the dust in speechless awe, with fear and trembling, before the power of the Almighty and the freedom He has to do whatsoever He wills with His creation. Psalm 66:5 says,

Come and see what God has done:

     he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.

That word “awesome” really means terrifying – worthy of “reverential awe,” yes, and worthy of fearful trembling, yes. The good and holy God of love does terrifying things. Psalm 48:6 says,

Come and see the works of the lord,

the desolations he has brought on the earth.

Psalm 47:2 says,

For the Lord, the Most High, is to be feared,

a great king over all the earth;

and, therefore, we must never forget who He is, nor forget that in comparison to His power, we are as nothing before Him. And when we humble ourselves in awe, fear, and trembling beneath God the Omnipotent, then we can also more genuinely affirm our common humanity – our common humanity and frailty – with those who now suffer the devastation of the tsunami, and see ourselves in them, and more sincerely pour out our prayers for mercy upon them, even as we would pray for mercy for ourselves and our loved ones.

          But in affirming the sovereignty God, we may wonder also about questions of God’s judgment and justice. The Bible does teach us that God acts in history, often through wars or natural disasters, to bring His judgment against His covenant people or the pagan nations. Of course, the most familiar example is that of the great flood of Noah’s day. God “poured out” His righteous judgment upon human wickedness, and untold numbers perished, including children. And just as we do not question God’s justice in the great flood, so we ought not to question God’s justice in the case of the tsunami or in the other great convulsions and calamities in history (and there have been many). But when, by faith, we affirm the justice of God in the midst of a disaster, we are not thereby presuming to pronounce God’s judgment upon victims as though we ourselves were not worthy of the same judgment. We had best leave the judgment of God to God alone, and repent of our own sins lest we perish in them (Luke 13:1-5).

          Whenever such natural disasters occur – whether mudslides in California, hurricanes in Florida, or the tsunami in
Asia – they bear witness to the fact that we live in a fallen world due to human sin (Genesis 3:17-19). And so these disasters bear witness to the fact that the human race is culpable under the judgment of God the Creator, because it is “our fault” that this world is not how God created it. In that sense, natural disasters are expressions of God’s judgment upon sin – the sin shared in common by all humanity: not only specific, actual sins committed by individuals, but the condition of original sin and guilt which has fallen upon the whole human race – humanity in common. We Christians are not exempt or necessarily protected physically from the devastation of such judgments upon the earth. And so, in common with all humanity, in common with all of Adam’s descendants, we share in the suffering of life in this fallen world.

           Therefore, in response to the tsunami, we must proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is precisely at this point that the power of the tsunami and the power of the gospel begin to come together in the same picture. The tsunami declared with overwhelming power that something is not right, that even the creation is out of kilter, the natural order is “out of order,” and it reminded us all once again that we, collectively, as the human race, live in a world in which the forces of nature can be hostile and devastating. Why is that? The Bible teaches us that Adam’s sin resulted not only in God’s judgment upon the whole human race but also the subjection of the whole creation under the power of sin, the bondage of decay (Romans 8:20-21). Just as sin brought death into the world for all humanity, so also sin brought death into the world for all creation, such that the power of death and decay has a hold on the created order. Adam’s sin threw the whole of creation into a cosmic convulsion, and the very good world which God had created became a world of thorns and thistles, earthquakes, hurricanes, mudslides, and tsunamis. And the Scripture says that the whole creation itself groans as in the pains of childbirth for that day when it will be set free from its bondage to decay, when the glory of God will be fully revealed in the New Creation (Romans 8:21). And so, in response to the tsunami and its power of death, we, the Church of Jesus Christ, can bear witness to the hope we have, the hope of glory, the hope of life eternal in God’s New Creation, because God has promised to redeem the whole creation out of the bondage of decay, and He has already begun to do that through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Over-against the power of the tsunami is the power of the gospel. Jesus submitted himself to death on a cross to satisfy the justice of God against sin – not only our personal sins we actually commit, but also the guilt of original sin, our sinful condition rooted in Adam’s sin: the sin and guilt we share in common with all humanity through Adam’s sin. By taking upon Himself a human nature, yet without sin, the Son of God united Himself with us in our common humanity and died for our sins to reverse the curse on us and all creation.

There on the cross, Jesus took upon Himself and into Himself the wrath of God upon sin, and therefore Jesus took upon Himself and into Himself all of the suffering and pain and brokenness of life in this fallen world, in order to swallow it up in His death so that He might bring forth a new creation. There on the cross, Christ, the Son of God, in his humanity in common with us and for us all, entered into, took upon Himself, and endured all of the pain and agony in this world caused by thorns and thistles, and the shifting and grinding of tectonic plates in the depths of the earth. There on the cross, Christ voluntarily submerged Himself in the depths of human suffering under the power sin; the groaning of the whole creation echoed in His heart; the shock waves of earthquakes shook His frame; the walls of the waters of death overwhelmed Him, the whirling winds of the hurricanes whipped their way through His soul, and He suffered as though suffering the devastation of every disaster that has ever taken place.

This is God’s love in the midst of the tsunami. Jesus Christ willingly placed himself under the wave of the tsunami, under the weight and pain of all that’s wrong in this world and with this world, and was buried under the mudslide of it all – for the sake of bringing into this world a new creation:

 A New Creation filled with people freed from the power of sin and restored to fellowship with God in a cosmos restored to peace, free from the power of death and decay, which no evil force can molest or disturb. This is the redemption wrought by Christ on the cross. This is the New Creation birthed by His resurrection from the dead. This is the Kingdom into which we are called by His grace; this is His Kingdom which we are commissioned to proclaim and to show forth to a suffering world. This is the Kingdom which Christ came to bring, is bringing, and shall bring to complete and all-glorious consummation. And so, as we love our neighbors as ourselves, we are bold to pray:  “Thy kingdom come … Thy kingdom come … on earth as it is in heaven.” To God be the glory. Amen.