The truth is that God does not merely "allow" disasters, as if anything in creation has the power to initiate its own changes and motions. But according to our text, just as sinners "plan iniquity" and "plot evil on their beds," so God declares, "I am planning disaster against this people." Just as sinners actively rather than passively plan and perform evil, God actively plans and then causes disasters to arise against them.

Not only does he plan and work disasters against sinners, but he wants people to know that he is the one who performs all these things, and so he sends his prophets to announce judgment. Those who deny that God plans and works disasters against people, including those who have died in recent natural and "man-made" catastrophes, thus obscure the biblical teachings on God, man, sin, providence, judgment, and repentance. Accepting such a position, therefore, would deal a fatal blow to a proper and coherent understanding of biblical dogmatics. It blunts the sword of the Spirit, and diminishes the power and the urgency in the preaching of the gospel.

Besides compromising biblical dogmatics, and indeed because it compromises biblical dogmatics, this perspective that denies the very possibility that God would judge men in such a fashion – that is, with natural and "man-made" disasters – also threatens the effective practice of biblical apologetics. It speaks as if God either does not possess or does not exercise constant control over his own creation. Does nature run itself? But how? And by what power? Or, it is asserted that natural disasters happen because our sins have corrupted nature itself. This is true in a sense, but it does not answer the question. We cannot make even one hair white or black, and now our sins are causing earthquakes?

On the contrary, the biblical teaching gives a clear and certain sound, a coherent explanation, and a compelling call to faith and repentance. It is God who constantly sustains and controls all of creation, whether nature, animals, men, or angels. Our sins have indeed corrupted the creation, but this could happen only because God had decided that these changes in creation should happen in correspondence to our sins. He is the one who sustains and enforces this relationship.

Of course, God is the one who decreed our sins in the first place, but right now we are considering the relationship between our sins and nature. God said to Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field" (Genesis 3:17-18). It is not as if Adam cursed the ground himself, for he could not have produced thorns and thistles even if he tried. But Adam's sin affected the earth not because there was a necessary or inherent relationship between the two, but because God established such a relationship in his divine mind, and then he cursed the ground subsequent to Adam's sin. Sin is punished only because God punishes sin, but sin does not possess omnipotence – it cannot control nature, and still less can it create hell and send itself there.

(to be continued)

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