On Sunday morning, the day after Christmas 2004, one of the biggest earthquakes in history struck from the ocean floor over 150 miles off the coast of Sumatra. This created an effect known as a tsunami, a tidal wave that poured over holiday beach goers and villages becoming one of the worst natural disasters in history. Some 227,000 people died. It is the kind of event that makes many people, especially people of faith, ask “Why did God let this happen?”
Some give less than helpful answers. Needing everything in life to make sense (meaning what we can make sense of!), they look for reasons God would have wanted to strike down people from poor villagers to expensive resort visitors. But the Bible makes it clear that not all destruction and death is the result of human sin.
Perhaps nature holds some of the answer. Geologists explain that earthquakes like this one are a natural occurrence that is part of the design of creation, not a design flaw. Intense heat comes from the earth’s core. This heat as it moves toward the outer layers of the earth builds incredible pressure. Without some ability to release this pressure the earth would explode. But occasionally tectonic plates within the earth’s layers shift allowing this pressure to release. This releasing often results in earthquakes. When they happen below the ocean, such things as tsunamis can occur.
The simple point of this is to understand that within good is the possibility of bad. This doesn’t explain all evil, and really, it doesn’t explain evil at all. We could still raise the question as to why an all-powerful God capable of creating such an earth could not make it less threatening to the fragile life God created to fill the earth. But the fact remains, at least as far as we can understand, that removing the possibility of bad could mean the removal of everything good.
Perhaps some evil is not to be understood completely, but rather should cause us to ask where God is in the midst of evil happenings? This is no easy topic and our preachers will help us further this Sunday. So I hope you have it in you to handle one more tough question and consider what it means to be faithful even when it feels like God isn’t!